4. Status of Emacs

This chapter gives you basic information about Emacs, including its latest version status.

4.1 Where does the name "Emacs" come from?
4.2 What is the latest version of Emacs?
4.3 What is different about Emacs 20?
4.4 What is different about Emacs 21?

4.1 Where does the name "Emacs" come from?

Emacs originally was an acronym for Editor MACroS. RMS says he "picked the name Emacs because E was not in use as an abbreviation on ITS at the time." The first Emacs was a set of macros written in 1976 at MIT by RMS for the editor TECO (Text Editor and COrrector, originally Tape Editor and COrrector) under ITS on a PDP-10. RMS had already extended TECO with a "real-time" full-screen mode with reprogrammable keys. Emacs was started by Guy Steele as a project to unify the many divergent TECO command sets and key bindings at MIT, and completed by RMS.

Many people have said that TECO code looks a lot like line noise; you can read more at news:alt.lang.teco. Someone has written a TECO implementation in Emacs Lisp (to find it, see 8.3 Where can I get Emacs Lisp packages that don't come with Emacs?); it would be an interesting project to run the original TECO Emacs inside of Emacs.

For some not-so-serious alternative reasons for Emacs to have that name, check out the file `etc/JOKES' (see section 1.4 What are `etc/SERVICE', `src/config.h', and `lisp/default.el'?).

4.2 What is the latest version of Emacs?

Emacs 21.1 is the current version as of this writing.

4.3 What is different about Emacs 20?

To find out what has changed in recent versions, type C-h n (M-x view-emacs-news). The oldest changes are at the bottom of the file, so you might want to read it starting there, rather than at the top.

The differences between Emacs versions 18 and 19 was rather dramatic; the introduction of frames, faces, and colors on windowing systems was obvious to even the most casual user.

There are differences between Emacs versions 19 and 20 as well, but many are more subtle or harder to find. Among the changes are the inclusion of MULE code for languages that use non-Latin characters and for mixing several languages in the same document; the "Customize" facility for modifying variables without having to use Lisp; and automatic conversion of files from Macintosh, Microsoft, and Unix platforms.

A number of older Lisp packages, such as Gnus, Supercite and the calendar/diary, have been updated and enhanced to work with Emacs 20, and are now included with the standard distribution.

4.4 What is different about Emacs 21?

Emacs 21 features a thorough rewrite of the display engine. The new display engine supports variable-size fonts, images, and can play sounds on platforms which support that. As a result, the visual appearence of Emacs, when it runs on a windowed display, is much more reminiscent of modern GUI programs, and includes 3D widgets (used for the mode line and the scroll bars), a configurable and extensible toolbar, tooltips (a.k.a. balloon help), and other niceties.

In addition, Emacs 21 supports faces on text-only terminals. This means that you can now have colors when you run Emacs on a GNU/Linux console and on xterm with emacs -nw.