Emacs Turns 50: The Editor That Launched the Free Software Movement
Emacs began in 1976 at MIT's AI Lab, where Richard Stallman built on Carl Mikkelsen's Control-R and Guy Steele's push for a standard command set. Stallman distributed it to anyone who sent a tape and a return envelope, asking only that they share their improvements—a commune that seeded the GNU Project and GNU/Linux. Apple shipped GNU Emacs with Mac OS X until 2019, and traces of its keybindings remain in macOS today.
My goal was not to construct a great new text editor. I was trying to address a social problem.
- jwr
I have been using Emacs for more than 30 years now. Other editors have come and gone, Emacs stayed. Parts of my configuration are more than 30 years old.
There were better and worse times in Emacs history. Recent times, however, are really good. Emacs is maintained and developed actively and there are many external packages which are impressive. Magit and ghostel are good examples of packages that I use on a daily basis to get my work done.
Recently, AI completely changed how I use Emacs, and in a very good way. I now treat AI as a fairy that can fulfill any wish. I describe how I want my editor to work, and boom! it works that way.
Examples: window and tab management, difftastic integration, markdown previews with beautifully rendered tables, markdown previews as PDFs, and many more.
What is most important, however, goes back to Stallman's original ideas. I am in control of my editor and my environment. I decide how it will look and behave. No corporation decides for me. No corporation builds in a new AI assistant. Nobody introduces ads or tracking. This is something I've learned to appreciate over the years.
- iLemming
50 years old and feels more modern than any of the crap folks try to sell you "as the editor of the future". Emacs is the true editor of the past, present and distant future.
Modal editing was supposed to pull users away - Evil mode made vimming better. LSPs were supposed to kill it - only made it better. Electron-based crap was supposed to make terminal-native editors look ancient with a built-in terminal, extensions, and a polished UI. Emacs got vterm, eat, and ghostel. GitKraken-like GUIs were supposed to make the git CLI unnecessary. Magit is widely considered better than any git client that exists, GUI or not. Tree-sitter was supposed to require a "real" language server architecture to get accurate parsing. Emacs 29 absorbed it natively, and font-lock, indentation, and structural navigation across major modes got noticeably better. Obsidian and Notion keep trying to overcome it - Org-mode just keeps getting better. AI was supposed to make it outdated - only enhanced it.
For half a century, humanity has been searching for an Emacs-killer. All the while, Emacs has been a killer app all along.
- osener
After a couple of years of detour I’m back to using Emacs since all the fancy lsp, debugger etc stuff in VSCode and Zed doesn’t matter as much for me anymore and I am just more productive with Emacs. But I am still using it like it is 2020. I hear people using coding agents to make crazy customizations to their emacs config and I can imagine Emacs is particularly suitable for this.
Curious what are the biggest things that have come out in the last year or two, and what emacs based personal software have others reading this made?
- paaloeye
Hats off to Stallman. It's absolutely crazy how it stays relevant for such a long time.
We should all learn from Emacs about software longevity.
- marttt
Is anybody here consciously trying to keep their Emacs configs/setup "lean", minimalist, as small as possible?
I'm not a coder, but I did use Emacs daily around 2010-2012, with brief returns later. I always gave up eventually because the complexity of addons, the org-mode-can-do-everything-so-I-should-do-everything-with-it etc just grew over my head. I've discovered that I like Plan9 Sam, Acme and, in general, the one-thing-well camp better. Each their own, I guess.
That said, I did often like how "immersive" using Emacs can actually be at times. I'm a trained journalist, and it made managing bits of information, including PDFs etc, really streamlined, almost like a wonder. And, I had my own little OS on a USB stick that way (though the minimalist in me always whined that "an editor" should not weigh 100+ megabytes).
Incredible that it has been around for 50 years, with no signs whatsoever of being a "paradigm of the past".
- PaulDavisThe1st
What a deeply strange article. It starts out deep in the details of Emacs' origins, then suddenly gives up, fast forwards and ends with a whimper.
ps. My first sight of the author was in a basement lab at the Weizmann Institute in 1986, sitting cross-legged on a chair working in front of the then-wondrous brand new Sun workstations - the so-called "3M standard" (1MB of RAM, 1MHz CPU, 1M pixels). Good times but old times!
- gumby
I started using Emacs at the AI lab in 1978. It's still my main development tool and probably still the program I spend most of my time in today.
- mickael-kerjean
emacs is really something apart, by far the best software I ever had the chance to interact with, the closest thing we ever got of a lisp machine, a completly hackable, self documenting programming environment where you can change anything without limits.
It's unfortunate its underlying ideas aren't more widely used in our industry, the very idea that you don't need to expose a separate API for people to create and extends things since code is the api is a idea that put emacs on a league of its own .... Thank you to anyone who has been involved in developing it.
Also I would love to hear Stallman view of labs using (A)GPL code and not contributing back to the world since this is completly against not only the ethos of free software but what Stallman teached to the world about the very purpose of its license