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GNU Emacs

What is Emacs?
What's new in the current release?
- User Visible Changes in the latest release 21.3. Details the changes in existing major modes, as well as additions that affect the average user.
Supported Platforms
Why is it called Emacs?
Obtaining GNU Emacs
Getting help with GNU Emacs
Finding additional packages for Emacs
Further information
If you want to help with GNU Emacs

What is Emacs?

To quote the Emacs Manual:

Emacs is the extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time display editor.

If this seems to be a bit of a mouthful, an easier explanation is Emacs is a text editor and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp (``elisp'', for short), a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing. Some of the features of GNU Emacs include:

Content sensitive major modes for a wide variety of file types, from plain text to source code to HTML files.
Complete online documentation, including a tutorial for new users.
Highly extensible through the Emacs Lisp language.
Support for many languages and their scripts, including all the European ``Latin'' scripts, Russian, Greek, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Lao, Ethiopian, and some Indian scripts. (Sorry, Mayan hieroglyphs are not supported.)
A large number of extensions which add other functionality. The GNU Emacs distribution includes many extensions; many others are available separately--even a web browser

Features Coming Soon

The latest release supports variable width and variable height fonts, playing sounds, and the inclusion of images in a document, as well as tool bars, plus nicer menus and scroll bars.
Some Unicode support is available, and we are working on improving and expanding it.

Supported Platforms

Emacs 21 runs on these operating systems regardless of the machine type:

AIX 4.3.3 and higher
FreeBSD
GNU/Linux
Mac-OS X
MS DOS
MS Windows
NetBSD
OpenBSD
Solaris
SunOS
Ultrix

Here are other machines that GNU Emacs has code to support. These machines are old, and in many cases we don't know whether they still work. The definitive reference for this is the etc/MACHINES file distributed with GNU Emacs, which also lists special requirements for these systems if compiling GNU Emacs from source.

Acorn
Alliant
Alliant FX/2800
Alpha (DEC)
Altos 3068
Amdahl UTS
Apollo
AT&T 3b2, 3b5, 3b15, 3b20
AT&T 7300 or 3b1
Bull DPX/2 models 2nn or 3nn
Bull DPX/20
Bull sps7
CCI 5/32, 6/32
Celerity
Clipper
Convex
Cubix QBx/386
Cydra 5
Data General Aviion
DECstation
Motorola Delta 147, Delta 187
Dual running System V or Uniplus
Elxsi 6400
Encore
GEC 63
Gould Power Node
Gould NP1
Harris Night Hawk
Harris Power PC
Honeywell XPS100
Hewlet-Packard 9000 series 200, 300, 700, 800
High Level Hardware Orion, Orion 1/05
Hitachi SR2001/SR2201
IBM PS/2
IBM RS/6000
IBM RT/PC
Integrated Solutions 'Optimum V'
Intel x86
Masscomp
Megatest
Mips
National Semiconductor 32000
NCR Tower 32
NCR Intel system
NeXT
Nixdorf Targon 31
Nu (TI or LMI)
Paragon OSF/1
Plexus
Pmax (DEC Mips)
Prime EXL
Pyramid
Sequent Balance
Sequent Symmetry
SGI (most or all models)
Siemens Nixdorf RM600 and RM400
Sony News
Sony News 3000 series
Stardent i860
Stardent 1500 or 3000
Stride
Sun 3, Sun 4 (sparc), Sun 386
Tadpole 68K
Tahoe
Tandem Integrity S2
Tektronix XD88
Tektronix 16000 box
Tektronix 4300
Titan P2, P3
Ustation E30 (SS5E)
Vax
Whitechapel MG1
Wicat

Next, here is a table listing some additional operating systems which Emacs supports. We have listed an operating system here if it can run on more than one machine type, or if other operating systems can also run on the same machine type.

Many of the computer types listed above always or usually run one particular operating system developed by the computer manufacturer. (Often this is a variant of Unix.) We have not listed the names of those operating systems here.

Berkeley Unix (BSD) 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4
Esix
Microport
SCO Unix
System V rel 0, rel 2, rel 2.2, rel 3, rel 4.0.3, rel 4.0.4
Uniplus 5.2
Xenix

Why is it called Emacs?

The name ``Emacs'' was originally chosen as an abbreviation of Editor MACroS.

The original Emacs implemention was written for the Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS) as a collection of TECO macros for ITS TECO. There was a custom of giving such macro packages names ending in ``mac'' or ``macs''. A further reason for choosing this particular name was that the abbreviation ``e'' was unused at the time on ITS.

The Emacs FAQ contains a longer explanation, as well as a brief history of Emacs.

Obtaining GNU Emacs

GNU Emacs can be obtained from <http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/emacs/>, or from a local FTP mirror; see the list of mirrors here.

The GNU Emacs CVS repository is available for general access through savannah.gnu.org.

Getting Help with GNU Emacs

Information on getting help with GNU software in general is available at the Get Help with GNU Software page.

Manuals

The Free Software Foundation publishes three manuals about GNU Emacs. They are the Emacs Manual, the An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp, and the Emacs Lisp Reference Manual. You can order any of these manuals in printed form from the Free Software Foundation.

Also an online manual is available at http://www.gnu.org/manual/emacs/index.html

The source code for the Emacs Manual is included in the Emacs distribution itself. The Emacs Lisp Reference Manual is available as a separate distribution on ftp.gnu.org. The Emacs Reference Card (texinfo source) is also translated into Czech.

FAQ

The Emacs FAQ.
The Emacs FAQ for the Microsoft Windows port.

Mailing Lists

The mailing list <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> is specifically for asking for help with GNU Emacs. This is equivalent to the newsgroup <gnu.emacs.help>.

To subscribe, visit the <help-gnu-emacs web page>.

The Savannah page for Emacs mailing lists lists some more lists related to Emacs.

There are other GNU mailing lists and newsgroups, including several on GNU Emacs and its extensions.

Usenet

There is a newsgroup specifically for asking for help with GNU Emacs gnu.emacs.help. This newsgroup is gatewayed automatically to the mailing list <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>, so anything you post on one of them appears on the other as well.

Finding packages for GNU Emacs

If you are looking for ELisp packages, check out the following resources:

the Emacs Wiki (see below)
the Emacs FAQ, under the sections Finding/Getting Emacs and Related packages and Major Emacs Lisp Packages, Emacs Extensions, and Related Programs

Further Information

The Savannah Emacs page has additional information about Emacs, including CVS access to the Emacs development sources.

The Emacs Wiki is a community website which collects ELisp code, questions and answers related to ELisp code and style; introductions to ELisp packages and links to their sources; complete manuals or documentation fragments; comments on features, differences, and history of different Emacs versions, flavors, and ports; jokes; pointers to clones and Emacs look-alikes, as well as references to other Emacs related information on the Web.

If you haven't had any experience with Lisp, you can find some useful information at The Association of Lisp Users.

We also have a copy of the paper by Richard Stallman describing the design of the original Emacs and the lessons to be learned from it.

How to Help with GNU Emacs

To contact the maintainers of Emacs, either to report a bug or to contribute fixes or improvements, send mail to <bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>.

Return to GNU's home page.

Please send FSF & GNU inquiries & questions to gnu@gnu.org. There are also other ways to contact the FSF.

We thank Greg Harvey for writing this page.

Please send comments on these web pages to webmasters@www.gnu.org, send other questions to gnu@gnu.org.

Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.

Updated: $Date: 2003/05/29 19:56:30 $ $Author: opus $

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