Emacs at 50: How the ‘mother of editors’ grew from MIT’s AI lab

A history with several starting points

Emacs is short for “Editing MACroS,” a set of macros first developed for TECO, or “Text Editor and COrrector.” Dan Murphy wrote TECO in 1962; he died earlier this year at 83. Accounts place the start of Emacs at different times. Guy L. Steele Jr is credited with original work in 1975, while Richard Stallman said in a 1981 talk that he began developing EMACS in 1974 by improving TECO. The article says Stallman took over most of the development around late October 1976, after earlier work involving others.

A family of editors

Emacs is not one single application. Jamie Zawinski’s Emacs Timeline traces its development; he previously maintained a fork called Lucid Emacs, later renamed XEmacs. Other forks and re-implementations also exist.

Many changes made in XEmacs and SXEmacs later returned to GNU Emacs. GNU Emacs remains in active development, and version 31.1 appeared in August. Stallman is no longer its primary maintainer, The Register reported in 2008.

Power and complexity

Emacs has a reputation as a maximalist editor, in contrast with minimalist vi. Its 804-page manual reflects the breadth of its features, even though the program is focused on editing plain ASCII text.

Some of its terminology can confuse modern users. Emacs uses “frame” for what is now commonly called a window, and “window” for a pane; its historical “Meta” key generally corresponds to Alt or Option. KDE uses Meta for the Windows or Command key, while GNOME documentation calls that key Super.

Efforts to modernize Emacs

Various projects have tried to make Emacs feel more contemporary. Aquamacs offered a native macOS interface, but is no longer maintained. The article also points to pre-configured distributions such as Doom Emacs, reflecting how difficult configuration can be. The editor’s history and continued development have kept it a prominent example of software shaped by a long-running community.