No lesser authority than the MIT Technology Review says that the Emacs editor has turned 50 years old. But then, it is biased — Emacs was invented in MIT’s AI lab. Simson Garfinkel’s article is simply called EMACS turns 50, but the sub-heading explains why it matters more:
"How the MIT AI Lab’s text editor gave birth to the free software movement." There are multiple timelines and accounts of the origins of Emacs, and it is not a single monolithic application. The name is an abbreviation for " E diting MAC ro S ", and the original editor for which this set of macros was developed was TECO – "Text Editor and COrrector," written by Dan Murphy in 1962. Murphy died earlier this year at the age of 83. The inimitable Jamie Zawinski has an encyclopedic Emacs Timeline – as he mentions at the start, his interest being that he long ago maintained a fork of GNU Emacs, originally called Lucid Emacs . It’s still around, under its later name XEmacs. There are a lot of forks and re-implementations of Emacs out there, and we are not going to go into all of them, or this article would become a book – one only interesting to programmer-archeologists (to use a term coined by the late great Vernor Vinge ). As for who originally wrote those Editing Macros, though, another history has quotations from several of the people involved: On the Origin of Emacs in 1976 . (Note – some of the quotes still contain the | symbols that marked quoted text.) This credits Lisp boffin Guy L. Steele Jr with the original work in 1975, but in it, Steele says:
"RMS is responsible for the names ‘E’ and ‘EMACS’. RMS still deserves 99% or 99. 9% or 99. 99% or 99. 999% of the credit for taking a package of TECO macros and turning it into the most powerful editor on the planet." RMS is of course Richard Stallman, and the page also quotes some emails from RMS on October 23 and 31, 1976. Mind you, just a few years after the event, in a 1981 talk now preserved on the GNU website, Stallman said, "I began the development of EMACS in 1974 with an improvement to TECO". Like all the best FOSS, even in its very early stages, it was a collaborative effort – but around late October 1976 is when RMS took over the bulk of the development. Of the many forks of Emacs over its half a century of development, some are still just about hanging on in there. When we looked up the link for XEmacs, we were surprised to see that there was a new release: XEmacs 21. 5. 37 "lettuce" appeared just last month. And even the forks have forks: in this case, SXEmacs , last updated in 2020. Most of the changes in XEmacs and SXEmacs eventually made their way back upstream to GNU Emacs, which is still in active development, although as The Register reported in 2008 , RMS is no longer the primary maintainer. GNU Emacs 31. 1 appeared in August. Cards on the metaphorical table: this vulture is not an Emacs user. We have tried. A major influence was one of the Reg FOSS desk’s favorite writers, Neal Stephenson, who in 1999 published an essay called In the Beginning… Was the Command Line . (It was later republished as a rather short book, but the text is still online .) In it, he says:
"In the GNU/Linux world there are two major text editing programs: the minimalist vi (known in some implementations as elvis ) and the maximalist emacs . I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. It was created by Richard Stallman; enough said. It is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful. It is colossal, and yet it only edits straight ASCII text files, which is to say, no fonts, no boldface, no underlining. In other words, the engineer-hours that, in the case of Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text. If you are a professional writer–i. e. , if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed–emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars." Emacs is 50-plus-year-old software, and it shows…