GNU Emacs is a popular, open source text editor and computing environment. It runs on most operating systems and provides extensibility through an Emacs Lisp interpreter.
GNU Emacs is a powerful, customizable, open source text editor and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing. This extensibility allows Emacs to provide far more than your average text editor.
Beyond text editing, Emacs provides an environment for email, web browsing, debugging, file management, and more. Its intuitive keyboard shortcuts and extensibility have attracted a loyal following of programmers, writers, engineers, scientists, and others who want a highly customizable working environment.
Originally created in the 1970s, Emacs continues to be actively developed by an open source community coordinated by the GNU Project. It runs on Linux, Windows, and macOS systems and is released under the GNU General Public License.
Key features include syntax highlighting for a wide array of programming languages, flexible split-screen editing, a built-in Lisp interpreter and debugger, project planning tools, spell checking, full Unicode support, and remote file editing. An ecosystem of third-party packages expands Emacs' capabilities even further.
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