Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Emacs" in English language version.
GNU Emacs is the most popular and widespread of the Emacs family of editors.
Finally, if you find yourself frustrated, try describing your problems to the famous psychotherapist Eliza. Just do M-x doctor.
There were people in those days, in 1985, who had one-megabyte machines without virtual memory. They wanted to be able to use GNU Emacs. This meant I had to keep the program as small as possible.
In retrospect 24.3 should have been named 25.1 and 24.4 should have been named 26.1. The .N thingy should really be kept only for bug-fix releases and neither of 24.3, 24.4, nor the previously planned 24.5 are bug-fix releases.
Modern computers have more than enough resources to start and run a full Emacs in a fraction of a second, and Emacs is probably what you want. Zile is a small, fast, and powerful Emacs clone. It is useful for small footprint installations (e.g. on floppy disk), machines with little memory, or quick editing sessions, especially on remote machines or as a different user, e.g. root.
twenty-nine years of continuous development by no fewer than 579 people
"EMACS as such actually started out as a standards project," emails Guy Steele
I wrote the second Emacs ever: the Lisp machine implementation, whose spec was "do what Stallman's PDP-10 (original) Emacs does", and then progressed from there. There's just a whole LOT of it. It took me and Mike McMahon endless hours to implement so many commands to make ZWEI/Zmacs.
For an editor to be called "emacs" the main requirement is that it be fully extensible with a real programming language, not just a macro language.
A cocky novice once said to Stallman: 'I can guess why the editor is called Emacs, but why is the justifier called Bolio?'. Stallman replied forcefully, Names are but names, Emack & Bolio's is the name of a popular ice cream shop in Boston town. Neither of these men had anything to do with the software.' His question answered, yet unanswered, the novice turned to go, but Stallman called to him, 'Neither Emacs nor Bolio had anything to do with the ice cream shop, either.'
"EMACS as such actually started out as a standards project," emails Guy Steele
A cocky novice once said to Stallman: 'I can guess why the editor is called Emacs, but why is the justifier called Bolio?'. Stallman replied forcefully, Names are but names, Emack & Bolio's is the name of a popular ice cream shop in Boston town. Neither of these men had anything to do with the software.' His question answered, yet unanswered, the novice turned to go, but Stallman called to him, 'Neither Emacs nor Bolio had anything to do with the ice cream shop, either.'
