Last time we looked how to get Emacs. Before you get bogged down in information, open Emacs and type into the box. See how far you can get without reading anything.

Emacs and Emacsen

Versions of Emacs-type editors have been going around for over 30 years. In the 1970s, people like Richard Stallman invented concepts such as live interactive editing and inline help that are common in all programs now. The standard Emacs today is GNU Emacs. The second most common is XEmacs. There are a load of smaller versions, as well as some defunct versions, but these are the important ones. Why two main versions? For purely arbitrary historical reasons.

A little bed time story

By 1991, there had not been a new version of Emacs for a few years, and the FSF was extremely slow at bringing out version 19, and a company called Lucid tried to get GNU Emacs out of the door to satisfy its own customers (it sold a set of development tools). Lucid was willing to throw as many programmers and as much money at the problem as required, which turned out to be $200,000, which was a lot of money back then.

However, this was before Internet based collaboration facilities such as Sourceforge existed, so the large fast-moving team of people at Lucid had trouble getting the very small team at the Free Software Foundation to understand the code they were making, not least because the main FSF Emacs maintainer to this point now worked for Lucid, and the new fulltime maintainer at the FSF had not yet got familar with the Emacs codebase.

This was not the only problem, the FSF were not willing to use any externally produced code unless Richard Stallman had worked through and edited it himself, while Lucid had commercial pressures to get its development tools out of the door. This was not the last time in the open source world that there has been conflict between more academic computer scientists who want architectural perfection and commercial companies who need to make a release. This is just one of those things that happens in the real world.

Lucid went ahead and shipped the version of Emacs that it had, which it assumed would be very similar to the next GNU Emacs, and that everyone would all come back together around the same codebase. Over time it dawned that this was not going to happen, and then the FSF eventually came out with their own different version of Emacs 19, rejecting most of the Lucid improvements.

All the king's horses...

So for a while in the early 1990s, Lucid Emacs, was almost the main Emacs, and was far more feature complete than GNU Emacs, not least because it made it really easy for anyone to get involved and improve the editor. It still has 2-3 releases per year while GNU Emacs takes a couple of years to get one release out.

Lucid Emacs was soon renamed XEmacs as a condition for SUN providing full- time developers. X as in generic, e.g. 'brand X', rather than the trademarked 'Lucid'. (Nothing to do with X windows, at the point Lucid Emacs became XEmacs, still not that many people were using X Windows, especially among mainframe users and other hardcore Unix people - the key Emacs users).

So now we are in the mid-1990s and Lucid, which had been a major name in the Lisp era, never really made the transition into the C++ market which became dominated by Borland, Microsoft, etc, or the Java market which was just beginning. It disappeared from the scene before the Web and Apache would bring very high-level languages back in to fashion.

By the turn of the millennium, GNU Emacs had caught up with XEmacs, with open online development and so on, but too much water had passed under the bridge, and with the rise of lots of other programs, having more than one Emacs does not seem that strange. More strange than two word processors, as Emacs is a development platform and a Lisp interpreter as well as an editor, but there are so many more computer users now, and far more contributors.

For most users, the two versions are essentially the same, although each has its own strengths, for example, GNU Emacs has fantastic Unicode support, while XEmacs has some small performance gains. From here on in, the difference is irrelevant, I will just say 'Emacs' to cover them both.

Funnily enough, some of the hackers from the fork period would become famous elsewhere, Marc Andreessen who wrote another early Emacs fork (Epoch) would go on to write Mosaic, which would later be bought by Microsoft and rebranded as Internet Explorer, while Jamie Zawinski, one of the first major XEmacs hackers, wrote much of Netscape Navigator, and was also involved in the early Mozilla. He now runs his own nightclub in San Francisco (complete with public Linux terminals) and maintains XScreenSaver.