Emacs marks fifty years, with mouse control in the Linux console as its latest addition

The text editor Emacs is fifty years old. MIT Technology Review published a retrospective by Simson Garfinkel, and The Register marked the occasion on Sunday. The name stands for Editing MACroS: Emacs started as a collection of macros for TECO, an editor that Dan Murphy wrote at MIT in 1962 for the PDP-1 computer. According to The Register, Murphy died earlier this year at the age of 83.

Richard Stallman, a researcher at MIT's AI lab, saw an editor at Stanford that used the whole screen. Back in Cambridge, he modified the TECO add-on Control-R so that every key could run its own macro, making the editor much easier to customise, MIT Technology Review writes. Together with Guy Steele Jr. and David Moon, he settled on a standard set of commands, with the characteristic Meta key. Steele later gave Stallman most of the credit; around the end of October 1976, Stallman took over most of the development work, according to The Register.

Stallman distributed Emacs free of charge to anyone who sent in a magnetic tape and return postage, on condition that improvements were sent back. When others sold commercial versions, among them Bernard Greenberg at Honeywell and James Gosling, later one of the fathers of Java, Stallman started the GNU project for a free operating system. GNU Emacs became its first major application. Apple shipped the program with Mac OS X from 2001 to 2019, and macOS still supports some typical Emacs keyboard shortcuts.

The editor is still very much alive. GNU Emacs 31.1 came out in August, with mouse support in the Linux console as its main new feature, and the XEmacs fork received a new version in October. The Register also notes that the manual runs to 804 pages and that its eternal rival vi likewise dates from 1976. Vi now exists in countless variants, such as Vim, Neovim and Drew DeVault's new Vim Classic, which deliberately works without AI.