Emacs
From GTALUG
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Emacs
Emacs is the extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time display editor. See also Wikipedia:Emacs
At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing. These include:
- Content sensitive major modes for an enormous variety of file types
- Complete built-in documentation (which you'll need)
- A large number of extensions which add other functionality. Web browsers, mail browsers, news readers.
There are two main "flavours" of Emacs:
- GNU Emacs, which was one of the first things that became part of the GNU Project
- XEmacs (once known as Lucid Emacs)
Often, extension modules are written to be portable to both flavours, but they do differ. XEmacs discussion comparing it with GNU Emacs is a pretty lucid view of the differences, some of which are political, showing intransigence on the part of various developers of free software. Jamie Zawinski (ex of Lucid) has his own discussion on the matter.
