Emacs editor marks 50th anniversary

MIT Technology Review reported that the Emacs editor has turned 50 years old. The software was invented in MIT's AI lab. Guy L. Steele Jr is credited with the original work on Emacs in 1975. Richard Stallman is responsible for the names 'E' and 'EMACS'. Stallman took over the bulk of Emacs development around late October 1976. In a 1981 talk, Stallman stated that he began developing Emacs in 1974 with an improvement to TECO. The original editor for which the Emacs macros were developed was TECO, written by Dan Murphy in 1962. Dan Murphy died earlier this year at the age of 83.

Recent versions include XEmacs 21.5.37 'lettuce', released just last month relative to the article's publication. SXEmacs was last updated in 2020. GNU Emacs 31.1 appeared in August. The exhaustive manual for Emacs is 804 pages long. A modern replica of the Space Cadet Keyboard called Keymacs costs from €2,998 to €6,878. Bram Moolenaar maintained Vim until his death in 2023. Neovim is a fork of Vim used in Omarchy. Neal Stephenson published an essay called 'In the Beginning… Was the Command Line' in 1999.