[ Thanks to Noel
for this link. ]
“Emacs is one of the most popular and powerful text editors
used on Linux (and Unix). It is second in popularity only to vi. It
is known for its huge feature set, ability to be easily customized,
and lack of bugs. It’s large feature set and ability to be
customized actually are the result of how Emacs was designed and
implemented. Without going into all the details, I’ll simply point
out that Emacs isn’t ‘just an editor’. It is an editor written
mostly in the programming language Lisp. At the core of Emacs is a
full-featured Lisp interpreter written in C. Only the most basic
and low-level pieces of Emacs are written in C. The majority of the
editor is actually written in Lisp. So, in a sense, Emacs has an
entire programming language ‘built in’ which you can use to
customize, extend, and change its behavior.”
“Emacs is also one of the oldest editors around. The fact that
is has been used by thousands of programmers over the past 20 (?)
years means that there are many add-on packages available. These
add-ons allow you to make Emacs do things that Stallman had
probably never dreamed possible when he first began work on
Emacs.”
“It’s worth pointing out that there are actually two different
Emacs editors: GNU Emacs and XEmacs. Both come from the same
heritage and share most of the same features. This document focuses
on GNU Emacs (version 20.3, specifically) but much of what you’ll
read here will apply just as well to XEmacs and earlier versions of
GNU Emacs. Throughout this document I will simply refer to
‘Emacs’.”