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/ee'maks/ (Editing MACroS, or Extensible MACroSystem, GNU Emacs) A popular screen editor for Unix andmost other operating systems.Emacs is distributed by the Free Software Foundation and wasRichard Stallman's first step in the GNU project. Emacsis extensible - it is easy to add new functions; customisable- you can rebind keys, and modify the behaviour of existingfunctions; self-documenting - there is extensive on-line,context-sensitive help; and has a real-time "what you see iswhat you get" display. Emacs is writen in C and the higherlevels are programmed in Emacs Lisp.Emacs has an entire Lisp system inside it. It wasoriginally written in TECO under ITS at the MIT AIlab. AI Memo 554 described it as "an advanced,self-documenting, customisable, extensible real-time displayeditor".It includes facilities to view directories, run compilationsubprocesses and send and receive electronic mail andUsenet news (GNUS). W3 is a web browser, theange-ftp package provides transparent access to files onremote FTP servers. Calc is a calculator and symbolicmathematics package. There are "modes" provided to assist inediting most well-known programming languages. Most of theseextra functions are configured to load automatically on firstuse, reducing start-up time and memory consumption. Manyhackers (including Denis Howe) spend more than 80% of theirtube time inside Emacs.GNU Emacs is available for Unix, VMS, GNU/Linux,FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, MS Windows, MS-DOS, andother systems. Emacs has been re-implemented more than 30times. Other variants include GOSMACS, CCA Emacs, UniPressEmacs, Montgomery Emacs, and XEmacs. Jove, epsilon, andMicroEmacs are limited look-alikes.Some Emacs versions running under window managers iconify asan overflowing kitchen sink, perhaps to suggest the onefeature the editor does not (yet) include. Indeed, somehackers find Emacs too heavyweight and baroque for theirtaste, and expand the name as "Escape Meta Alt Control Shift"to spoof its heavy reliance on keystrokes decorated withbucky bits. Other spoof expansions include "Eight MegabytesAnd Constantly Swapping", "Eventually "malloc ()'s All ComputerStorage", and "Emacs Makes A Computer Slow" (see recursiveacronym). See also vi.Latest version: 20.6, as of 2000-05-11. 21.1 (RSN) adds anew redisplay engine with support for proportional text,images, toolbars, tool tips, toolkit scroll bars, and amouse-sensitive mode line.FTP from your nearest GNU archive site.E-mail: (bug reports only) .Usenet newsgroups: news:gnu.emacs.help,news:gnu.emacs.bug, news:alt.religion.emacs,news:gnu.emacs.sources, news:gnu.emacs.announce.