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XEmacs

Added 31 Jul 2008

Beginning in 1991, Lucid Emacs was developed by Jamie Zawinski and others at Lucid Inc., based on an early alpha version of GNU Emacs 19. The codebases soon diverged, and the separate development teams gave up trying to merge them back into a single program.[8] This was one of the most famous early forks of a free software program. Lucid Emacs has since been renamed XEmacs; it remains the second most popular variety of Emacs, after GNU Emacs.

[edit] Other modern forks and clones

Many other derivatives of the GNU Emacs have been made, such as a Japanese version for MS Windows called Meadow[9] Steve Young's fork of XEmacs called SXEmacs,[10] and a version which focuses on integrating with the Apple Macintosh user interface called Aquamacs.

Emacs clones, not based on GNU Emacs source code, are more numerous. One motivation for writing clones was that GNU Emacs was initially targeted at computers with a 32-bit flat address space, and at least 1 MiB of RAM. At a time when such computers were considered high end, this left an opening for smaller reimplementations. Some notable modern clones include:

  • MicroEMACS, originally written by Dave Conroy and further developed by Daniel Lawrence, which exists in many variations. The editor is used by Linus Torvalds.[11]
  • mg, originally called MicroGNUEmacs (and later mg2a), a public-domain offshoot of MicroEMACS intended to more closely resemble GNU Emacs. Now installed by default on OpenBSD.
  • NotGNU [12], a small, fast, freeware implementation for DOS, Win16, Win32 and Linux by Julie Melbin.
  • JOVE (Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs), a non-programmable Emacs implementation for UNIX-like systems by Jonathan Payne.
  • Freemacs, a DOS version with an extension language based on text macro expansion, all within the original 64 KiB flat memory limit.
  • MINCE (MINCE Is Not Complete Emacs), a version for CP/M from Mark of the Unicorn. MINCE evolved into Final Word, which eventually became the Sprint word processor from Borland.[citation needed]
  • Zile
  • Climacs, an Emacs-variant implemented in Common Lisp and more influenced from Zmacs than GNU Emacs