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