EMACS
:EMACS: /ee'maks/ n. [from Editing MACroS] The ne plus ultra of hacker
editors, a programmable text editor with an entire LISP system inside
it. It was originally written by Richard Stallman in TECO
under
ITS
at the MIT AI lab; AI Memo 554 described it as "an advanced,
self-documenting, customizable, extensible real-time display editor". It
has since been reimplemented any number of times, by various hackers,
and versions exist that run under most major operating systems. Perhaps
the most widely used version, also written by Stallman and now called
" GNU
EMACS" or GNUMACS
runs principally under Unix. (Its close
relative XEmacs is the second most popular version.) It includes
facilities to run compilation subprocesses and send and receive mail or
news; many hackers spend up to 80% of their tube time
inside it. Other
variants include GOSMACS
CCA EMACS, UniPress EMACS, Montgomery EMACS,
jove, epsilon, and MicroEMACS. (Though we use the original all-caps
spelling here, it is nowadays very commonly `Emacs'.)
Some EMACS versions running under window managers iconify as an
overflowing kitchen sink, perhaps to suggest the one feature the editor
does not (yet) include. Indeed, some hackers find EMACS too
heavyweight
and baroque
for their taste, and expand the name as
`Escape Meta Alt Control Shift' to spoof its heavy reliance on
keystrokes decorated with bucky bits
Other spoof expansions include
`Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping' (from when that was a lot of
core
, `Eventually `malloc()'s All Computer Storage', and `EMACS Makes
A Computer Slow' (see recursive acronym
}). See also vi
Jargon File Version 4.3.1, 29 JUN 2001 =
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