page_title: Emacs
section_title: Various Emacs editors
hierarchical_section_title: Emacs / Implementations / Various Emacs editors
caption_attribution_description: English: uEmacs/Pk 4.0.15 running on Linux in Konsole with its Arch Linux PKGBUILD loaded
context_page_description: Emacs or EMACS is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, self-documenting, real-time display editor". Development of the first Emacs began in the mid-1970s, and work on its direct descendant, GNU Emacs, continues actively as of 2020.
  Emacs has over 10,000 built-in commands and its user interface allows the user to combine these commands into macros to automate work. Implementations of Emacs typically feature a dialect of the Lisp programming language that provides a deep extension capability, allowing users and developers to write new commands and applications for the editor. Extensions have been written to manage email, files, outlines, and RSS feeds, as well as clones of ELIZA, Pong, Conway's Life, Snake and Tetris.
  The original EMACS was written in 1976 by David A. Moon and Guy L. Steele Jr. as a set of Editor MACroS for the TECO editor. It was inspired by the ideas of the TECO-macro editors TECMAC and TMACS.
  The most popular, and most ported, version of Emacs is GNU Emacs, which was created by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project.
context_section_description: In the past, projects aimed at producing small versions of Emacs proliferated. GNU Emacs was initially targeted at computers with a 32-bit flat address space and at least 1 MiB of RAM.  Such computers were high end workstations and minicomputers in the 1980s, and this left a need for smaller reimplementations that would run on common personal computer hardware.  Today's computers have more than enough power and capacity to eliminate these restrictions, but small clones have more recently been designed to fit on software installation disks or for use on less capable hardware.
  Other projects aim to implement Emacs in a different dialect of Lisp or a different programming language altogether.  Although not all are still actively maintained, these clones include:
  MicroEMACS, which was originally written by Dave Conroy and further developed by Daniel Lawrence and which exists in many variations.
  mg, originally called MicroGNUEmacs and, later, mg2a, a public-domain offshoot of MicroEMACS intended to more closely resemble GNU Emacs. Now installed by default on OpenBSD.
  JOVE (Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs), Jonathan Payne's non-programmable Emacs implementation for UNIX-like systems.
  MINCE (MINCE Is Not Complete Emacs), a version for CP/M and later DOS, from Mark of the Unicorn. MINCE evolved into Final Word, which eventually became the Borland Sprint word processor.
  Perfect Writer, a CP/M implementation derived from MINCE that was included circa 1982 as the default word processor with the very earliest releases of the Kaypro II and Kaypro IV. It was later provided with the Kaypro 10 as an alternative to WordStar.
  Freemacs, a DOS version that uses an extension language based on text macro expansion and fits within the original 64 KiB flat memory limit.
  Zile. Zile was a recursive acronym for Zile Is Lossy Emacs, but the project was rewritten in Lua and now gives the expansion as Zile Implements Lua Editors. The new Zile still includes an implementation of Emacs in Lua called Zemacs. There is also an implementation of vi called Zi.
  Zmacs, for the MIT Lisp Machine and its descendants, implemented in ZetaLisp.
  Climacs, a Zmacs-influenced variant implemented in Common Lisp.
  Epsilon, an Emacs clone by Lugaru Software. Versions for DOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X and O/S 2 are bundled in the release. It uses a non-Lisp extension language with C syntax and used a very early concurrent command shell buffer implementation under the single-tasking MS-DOS.
  PceEmacs is the Emacs-based editor for SWI-Prolog.
  Amacs, an Apple II ProDOS version of Emacs implemented in 6502 assembly by Brian Fox.
  Hemlock, originally written in Spice Lisp, then Common Lisp. A part of CMU Common Lisp. Influenced by Zmacs. Later forked by Lucid Common Lisp (as Helix), LispWorks and Clozure CL projects. There is also a Portable Hemlock project, which aims to provide a Hemlock, which runs on several Common Lisp implementations.
  umacs, an implementation under OS-9
  edwin, an Emacs-like text editor included with MIT/GNU Scheme.
caption: uEmacs/Pk 4.0.15 on Linux
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