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Concept
GNU Emacs
Summary
GNU Emacs is a free software text editor. It was created by GNU Project founder Richard Stallman, based on the Emacs editor developed for Unix operating systems. GNU Emacs has been a central component of the GNU project and a flagship project of the free software movement. Its tag line is "the extensible self-documenting text editor."
In 1976, Stallman wrote the first Emacs (“Editor MACroS”), and in 1984, began work on GNU Emacs, to produce a free software alternative to the proprietary Gosling Emacs. GNU Emacs was initially based on Gosling Emacs, but Stallman's replacement of its Mocklisp interpreter with a true Lisp interpreter required that nearly all of its code be rewritten. This became the first program released by the nascent GNU Project. GNU Emacs is written in C and provides Emacs Lisp, also implemented in C, as an extension language. Version 13, the first public release, was made on March 20, 1985. The first widely distributed version of GNU Emacs was version 15.34, released later in 1985. Early versions of GNU Emacs were numbered as "1.x.x," with the initial digit denoting the version of the C core. The "1" was dropped after version 1.12 as it was thought that the major number would never change, and thus the major version skipped from "1" to "13". A new third version number was added to represent changes made by user sites. In the current numbering scheme, a number with two components signifies a release version, with development versions having three components.
GNU Emacs was later ported to the Unix operating system. It offered more features than Gosling Emacs, in particular a full-featured Lisp as its extension language, and soon replaced Gosling Emacs as the de facto Unix Emacs editor. Markus Hess exploited a security flaw in GNU Emacs's email subsystem in his 1986 cracking spree, in which he gained superuser access to Unix computers.
Although users commonly submitted patches and Elisp code to the net.emacs newsgroup, participation in GNU Emacs development was relatively restricted until 1999, and was used as an example of the "Cathedral" development style in The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
Official source
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