
The resulting system was called EMACS, which stood for Editing MACroS or, alternatively, E with MACroS. Steele and Stallman's finished implementation included facilities for extending and documenting the new macro set. Two years later, Guy Steele took on the project of unifying the overly diverse macros into a single set.
AQUAMACS EMACS LICENSE MAC
The new version of TECO quickly became popular at the AI Lab and soon accumulated a large collection of custom macros whose names often ended in MAC or MACS, which stood for macro. Almost all modern editors use this approach. Instead of adopting E's approach of structuring the file for page-random access on disk, Stallman modified TECO to handle large buffers more efficiently and changed its file-management method to read, edit, and write the entire file as a single buffer. TECO was a page-sequential editor that was designed for editing paper tape on the PDP-1 and typically allowed editing on only one page at a time, in the order of the pages in the file. Į had another feature that TECO lacked: random-access editing. Stallman reimplemented this mode to run efficiently and then added a macro feature to the TECO display-editing mode that allowed the user to redefine any keystroke to run a TECO program. He returned to MIT where Carl Mikkelsen, a hacker at the AI Lab, had added to TECO a combined display/editing mode called Control-R that allowed the screen display to be updated each time the user entered a keystroke. He was impressed by the editor's intuitive WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) behavior, which has since become the default behavior of most modern text editors. Richard Stallman visited the Stanford AI Lab in 1972 or 1974 and saw the lab's E editor, written by Fred Wright. (A similar technique was used to allow overtyping.) This behavior is similar to that of the program ed. One could not place characters directly into a document by typing them into TECO, but would instead enter a character ('i') in the TECO command language telling it to switch to input mode, enter the required characters, during which time the edited text was not displayed on the screen, and finally enter a character () to switch the editor back to command mode. Unlike most modern text editors, TECO used separate modes in which the user would either add text, edit existing text, or display the document.
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Both are among the oldest application programs still in use.Įditing and compiling C++ code from GNU EmacsĮmacs development began during the 1970s at the MIT AI Lab, whose PDP-6 and PDP-10 computers used the Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS) operating system that featured a default line editor known as Tape Editor and Corrector (TECO). Both GNU Emacs and XEmacs use Emacs Lisp and are for the most part compatible with each other.Įmacs is, along with vi, one of the two main contenders in the traditional editor wars of Unix culture. XEmacs is a variant that branched from GNU Emacs in 1991. The most popular, and most ported, version of Emacs is GNU Emacs, which was created by Stallman for the GNU Project. It was inspired by the ideas of the TECO-macro editors TECMAC and TMACS. as a set of Editor MACroS for the TECO editor. The original EMACS was written in 1976 by Richard Stallman and Guy L. Some users find they can do almost all their work from within Emacs, not just editing text. Extensions have been written to manage email, files, outlines, and RSS feeds. Emacs Lisp provides a deep extension capability allowing users and developers to write new commands using a dialect of the Lisp programming language. Įmacs has over 2,000 built-in commands and allows the user to combine these commands into macros to automate work. Development of the first Emacs began in the mid-1970s and continues actively as of 2016.
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The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, self-documenting, real-time display editor". Editing multiple Dired buffers in GNU EmacsĮmacs / ˈ iː m æ k s/ and its derivatives are a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility.
