3 ms·

Emacs is a class of editor these days, not a specific editor.

by cjsuk 9y ago

na85 9y ago
Emacs has been that way for many many years. Until recently, GNU Emacs has always had competition for users from xemacs at the least.
- kbp 9y ago
  GNU Emacs wasn't the original Emacs, either (that was rms' PDP-10 editor built on top of TECO rather than Lisp), or even the original Lisp-based Emacs (that was Daniel Weinreb's EINE (EINE Is Not Emacs) which also had a successor ZWEI (ZWEI Was EINE Initially)). By the time GNU Emacs came out, Emacs was already a family of editors. GNU Emacs was made as a free software alternative to the first Emacs for Unix, Gosling Emacs (made by James Gosling, who later went on to design Java). In a 1986 speech, rms discussed the beginnings of GNU Emacs: "GNU Emacs is the main distributed portion of the GNU system. It's an extensible text editor a lot like the original emacs which I developed ten years ago, except that this one uses actual LISP as its extension language. [...] Gosling originally had set up his Emacs and distributed it free and gotten many people to help develop it, under the expectation based on Gosling's own words in his own manual that he was going to follow the same spirit that I started with the original Emacs. Then he stabbed everyone in the back by putting copyrights on it, making people promise not to redistribute it and then selling it to a software-house. My later dealings with him personally showed that he was every bit as cowardly and despicable as you would expect from that history. "But in any case, my friend gave me this program, and my intention was to change the editing commands at the top level to make them compatible with the original Emacs that I was used to. But after a little bit of this, I discovered that the extension language of that editor, which is called MOCKLISP, was not sufficient for the task. I found that that I had to replace it immediately in order to do what I was planning to do. Before I had had the idea of someday perhaps replacing MOCKLISP with real LISP, but what I found out was that it had do be done first." The full speech is really interesting: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-kth.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-kth.en.html

Emacs is a class of editor these days, not a specific editor.

by cjsuk 9y ago

Emacs is a class of editor these days, not a specific editor.

na85 9y ago

Emacs has been that way for many many years. Until recently, GNU Emacs has always had competition for users from xemacs at the least.

kbp 9y ago
GNU Emacs wasn't the original Emacs, either (that was rms' PDP-10 editor built on top of TECO rather than Lisp), or even the original Lisp-based Emacs (that was Daniel Weinreb's EINE (EINE Is Not Emacs) which also had a successor ZWEI (ZWEI Was EINE Initially)). By the time GNU Emacs came out, Emacs was already a family of editors. GNU Emacs was made as a free software alternative to the first Emacs for Unix, Gosling Emacs (made by James Gosling, who later went on to design Java). In a 1986 speech, rms discussed the beginnings of GNU Emacs: "GNU Emacs is the main distributed portion of the GNU system. It's an extensible text editor a lot like the original emacs which I developed ten years ago, except that this one uses actual LISP as its extension language. [...] Gosling originally had set up his Emacs and distributed it free and gotten many people to help develop it, under the expectation based on Gosling's own words in his own manual that he was going to follow the same spirit that I started with the original Emacs. Then he stabbed everyone in the back by putting copyrights on it, making people promise not to redistribute it and then selling it to a software-house. My later dealings with him personally showed that he was every bit as cowardly and despicable as you would expect from that history. "But in any case, my friend gave me this program, and my intention was to change the editing commands at the top level to make them compatible with the original Emacs that I was used to. But after a little bit of this, I discovered that the extension language of that editor, which is called MOCKLISP, was not sufficient for the task. I found that that I had to replace it immediately in order to do what I was planning to do. Before I had had the idea of someday perhaps replacing MOCKLISP with real LISP, but what I found out was that it had do be done first." The full speech is really interesting: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-kth.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-kth.en.html