Talk:Emacs

Emacs vs. GNU Emacs

This article is supposed to be about Emacs, the *class* of editors, but significant sections start to assume that it's about specifically *GNU* Emacs. Such sections should be moved to specifically GNU Emacs article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.18.203.194 (talk) 09:19, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

MicroEMACS

In the list of forks and clones, it mentions that MicroEMACS is the editor that is used by Linus Trovalds. Is that bit of information really needed or useful in this context? It seems like a bit of random piece of fanboism that, although might be useful in the editor's own article, is just superflourious here. IMO I think that the sentence should be removed Zen Clark (talk) 23:50, 7 November 2008 (UTC)

Removed the ”Torvalds” part.

Link to downloads

A good link to a list of binaries would be appreciated (especially for Windows as emacs is installed in Unix/Linux anyhow) --Hirzel

I have added a link to the GNU Emacs FAQ For Windows, which has instructions for getting the Windows binaries. I think it is inadvisable to link directly to the binaries, or even FTP directories, as those are subject to change. ---CYD

Thank you! --Hirzel

Wikipedia emacs mode needed...

What we need is a Wikipedia Emacs mode, that allows pages to be viewed and edited with the greatest of ease...

Wikipedia mode for Emacs. --Fredrik (talk) 18:38, 5 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Emacs First Aid or Using Emacs

This section should not expand into a howto. I would be willing to go there but for that it does not feel encyclopedic. I suggest the bare minimum be included. I see nothing wrong with titleing the section "Using Emacs", and having it be a minimal introduction, but my preference would be to have the table titled "Emacs First Aid" and have it contain the 'get out of trouble' commands. To that end I'd include only the original 3 appearing in the table save-buffers-kill-emacs, undo, and abort. Seems to me that expanding the table beyond this to include file-find, save-some-buffers, kill-buffer means that C-x 1 delete-other-windows, C-x o other-window, C-x b switch-to-buffer, C-x C-b list-buffers must also be included.

So, should the table be "First Aid" or a repertoire of basic commands?

The trouble with emacs is that occasionally you wander into some part of the program you're not familiar with and 'get stuck'. This is why it's useful to include some "First Aid" in the Wikipediea, the goal is a useful article. Delete-other-windows, other-window, switch-to-buffer,and list-buffers are very handy to get out of trouble as you can fairly easily accidentally get into 'buffer land' before you know what to do there. I'd include these in a 'First Aid' table, but the question is where to stop. My initial critera, leading to the list: save & exit, undo, and abort, was to consider what situation could not be recovered with just "save & exit".

Perhaps a link to a short list of emacs commands should be included in the external references. Googling for "emacs cheat sheet" comes up with some useful ones. (My vote for least appreciated command goes to C-x q.)

I think that a link to external non-encyclopedic information should be used rather than including it in the encyclopedia.

Additionally, I found two errors: an omission of a word in the Internals section (apparently the author felt that no verb fit the purpose, and thus decided against using one); and the fact that Emacs considers multiple buffers in the same frame to be windows. The term frame was used incorrectly in that regard. A text-mode Emacs has exactly one frame, while a graphical-mode Emacs has one or more frames, which are displayed as separate windows on the user's system; Emacs 'windows' are separate buffers visible simultaneously within one frame.

Actually, text-mode Emacs does support multiple frames, at least as Emacs understands them. All frame-related commands will work. Of course, only one frame is visible at a time. In practice, it is similar to having a set of easily recallable window configurations. 192.88.209.232

That sounds like a project for WikiBooks! --Maru (talk) Contribs 18:43, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

Emacs is self-documenting. It contains its own help system

'Self documenting'? Surely not? Containing its own help system surely doesn't mean that it 'self documents'? --The Recycling Troll 02:31, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

"Self documenting" has been part of the Emacs description for, approximately, ever, including back when build-in documentation was the rare exception. If you feel the phrase is wrong, you need to come up with better arguments than "surely". --Per Abrahamsen 06:47, 2004 Oct 5 (UTC)

His comment is based on the fact that emacs is not self documenting in the sense that emacs itself does not write its own documentation, but rather the people that maintain it. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 08:23, 2004 Oct 5 (UTC)

Indeed. The meaning of 'self-documenting' has changed; most applications have help files now. (The help files for vim are now larger than the application ...) --David Gerard 15:21, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I was not aware of this new meaning. Is Javadoc code considered self-documenting? Or "literate programming" in general? Apart from a large "help file", Emacs is also "self-documenting" in the sense that each function and variable has an easily available documentation string which is part of the code, rather than in a seperate file. Emacs will even show some documentations for a function that lack such a string, like the fact that it exists, where it is defined, and what arguments it takes. --Per Abrahamsen 16:14, 2004 Oct 6 (UTC)

The Church of Emacs

This article should make at least a passing reference to the Church of EMACS and the Editor war. Or has the see also category at the bottom of articles dissapeared? --metta, The Sunborn ☸ 13:00, 5 Oct

Editor wars is linked in the intro. Church of EMACS is a redirect to Editor wars. --David Gerard 15:21, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Yeah, I guess. I would prefer it if there was an actual mention that there was parody religion based on the editor. However, it is perfectly fine as is. --metta, The Sunborn ☸ 22:59, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Emacs and hypertext

Could anyone tell when and by whom Emacs began to do with hypertext? --KYPark 16:19, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Emacs uses the tops-20 hypertext system, so I suspect it was in that period it was added. --Per Abrahamsen 07:28, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

Confusing

"Some people make a distinction between the lower-case word emacs, which is used to refer to Emacs-like editors (particularly GNU Emacs and XEmacs), and the capitalized word Emacs, which is used to refer to GNU Emacs."

Is GNU Emacs emacs or Emacs ? --Humpback 01:48, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I haven't seen the distinction used as described in the article. I rewrote it as I use the distinction. --Per Abrahamsen 07:35, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

Plural

Would it be appropriate to note that the only plural given by the Collins English Dictionary is emacsen? --Twid 20:29, 11 August 2005 (UTC)

Added.--Per Abrahamsen 07:26, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

Can you explain: does the Collins English Dictionary have an entry for "emacs", and state the plural in that entry? or does it say "stuff ending in acs can be pluralised by adding en"? or something else? The current sentence implies that there is a dictionary entry for "emacs" - I find that hard to believe, so I was going to remove it and ask for a reference to be cited if it's to be re-added. --Gronky 19:44, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.emacs/msg/23791b9653685c08 --Per Abrahamsen 21:03, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

Wow, thanks. I've noted it in the article. --Gronky 00:22, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

mg

I'm going to revert the reference to mg just inserted in the first section. There are zillions of light-weight Emacs clones around. If they should be mentioned, it should be in the history section, or in a separate section (maybe even a separate article about Emacs clones, with a reference from here). --Per Abrahamsen 06:54, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

Instead of deleting mg, I moved it to a list of noteworthy light reimplementations in the end of the history section. --Per Abrahamsen 07:22, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

Most portable?

The article claims EMACS is one of the most portable non-trivial programs. While it may be one of the most ported - due to great desires on the part of its users - I'm not sure that portable (easy to port) is quite true. Certainly not for a long time - does anyone remember the dump/undump process of building Emacs, which was completely UNPORTABLE and had to be rewritten for every machine architecture/operating system combination? (I have heard that Emacs no longer requires this process - is this correct?) --—Morven 19:54, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

Even if the assembler code and the custom crt0.o file have been removed, Emacs is no more portable than autoconf based programs in general. I changed the word to ported, which is better anyway. The paragraph talks about how many platforms Emacs runs on, not how easy it is to get it to run on a new platform. --Per Abrahamsen 06:04, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

Misleading keybindings?

The small list of keybindings states that M-w is copy and C-w is cut; while it's not wrong, it may be a bit misleading, since it's not the copy/cut that people commonly know (to clipboard), it just saves a region within the application...

In the operating system I use, copies and cuts from Emacs carry over to other applications.

--64.222.123.152 18:40, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Yeah- Emacs uses the OS clipboard in my experiences. (But not always; for instance, in my Debian linux, there are two clipboards, one for when text is highlighted, and one for explicit copy and pastes- Emacs uses whichever is more recent.) --maru (talk) contribs 00:02, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Popularity

I think we should amend the introduction to state that GNU Emacs is currently the most popular version, and not merely as popular as xemacs. I've been around a fair bit on the Emacs IRC channels and the Emacs Wiki, in which most of the discussion is about GNU Emacs; and the Debian Project's Popularity Contest has GNU Emacs-related packages ranked higher[1] in popularity/installed base than the xemacs-related packages. --maru (talk) contribs 23:34, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Popularity' is arguable, regardless of user base. ;) I think it is best staying in its current state. ~LinuxeristFile:Tux-linux logo.svg E/L/T 02:54, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

Indeed, maybe "popularity" is not a good word for this context - how can we ever judge if it is wrong? I looked into development activity and usage statistics, and found that XEmacs is behind on the latter, far behind on the former, and is increasingly losing ground. I put a fuller explanation on Talk:GNU Emacs. Gronky 10:59, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

Merging in GNU Emacs

The Emacs article contains more information about GNU Emacs than the GNU Emacs article does. Also, the content of the GNU Emacs article is mostly duplicate information. GNU Emacs is the most widely used and most actively developed Emacs, so talking about it in the Emacs article is natural. The merge will be simple because the GNU Emacs article contains very little new information. For those same reasons, merging in GNU Emacs will not increase the size of the Emacs article much. (If this is a concern, then another path can be found, such as splitting elisp into a seperate article.) Gronky 15:13, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

• Merge GNU Emacs into general Emacs article. Needs to respect the historical development of Emacs, though, and give appropriate weight to other Emacsim than GNU. Waitak 13:56, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
• Merge I agree with Waitak. --kop 07:01, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
• Redistribute information into two articles. The Emacs article would deal with the history of emacsen and the familial similarities among all emacsen, while the GNU Emacs article would deal with that particular breed. --FOo 05:55, 10 June 2006 (UTC)
  • This is what we have been trying. It was a good idea to try, and I think I supported it originally, but the outcome has been lousy. Gronky 07:30, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
• Merge --Per Abrahamsen 10:21, 2 July 2006 (UTC)
• Merge. The current setup simply does not work. - Corbin ^{Be excellent} 23:24, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure what the consensus was here, but I tried merging the distinct information at GNU Emacs into the Emacs article. One of the last outstanding things to do is move the infobox. If, and when, it becomes merged there will be still more work to do. --Ashawley 02:29, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm doing this merge now. There is more discussion on the Talk:GNU_Emacs and there is clear consensus among those who've commented. Gronky 20:24, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

Responsiveness of Emacs

The article states: "However, modern computers are fast enough that Emacs is seldom felt to be slow." I use emacs for most of my work, on multiple platforms. It is noticeably unresponsive when compared to most modern applications. For instance, it commonly takes a new frame more than a second to appear, and sometimes another second to become useable. This is pretty snappy by 1990s standards, but the two main commercial OSs put a huge emphasis on having a more responsive 'feel'. Two seconds for a new window would be considered unacceptably slow. (Then there's the issue of the lack of threads -- anyone ever had to wait to edit a buffer until emacs finished talking to your mail server?) kraemer 21:01, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

Might be how it is used, I usually have one process per frame, meaning one Emacs dedicated for mail and news. It might be different for people with a MS-Windows background, where the common idiom seems to be to only have one instance of an application running at the same time.

Anyway, (new-frame) on on my laptop (an 1.2 GHz Pentium M running XP + Cygwin/X11 + Emacs) takes 0.15 seconds. --Per Abrahamsen 10:19, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

Comparing the performance of GNU Emacs with that of Netbeans on my old ThinkPad X30 (Pentium M 1,2 GHz, 768MB RAM), shows that Emacs is several orders of magnitude faster than Netbeans in everything it does. And opening new frames in Emacs has no noticeable delay. Perhaps your Emacs setup is broken? Boelthorn (talk) 13:42, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

I find Emacs to be very responsive, but the lack of threads does cause problems. Having a separate copy of Emacs for email would cut off the benefits of an integrated evironment (not sharing a kill ring and buffers would be annoying). --Gronky (talk) 17:46, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

Since switching between frames typically requires a trip through the window manager, I don't feel a great loss from relying on the window system for cut and paste of an occasional code sample between the frames. Try it. You might like it :-) --Per Abrahamsen (talk) 09:45, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

Unfortunately, I'm not a coder. Most of my work and non-work is email related, so copying in an out of mails is the norm rather than occasional. BTW, while we're offtopicly talking about emacs and productivity, I just saw this firefox plugin to make it use Emacs keybindings for editing:[2] --Gronky (talk) 10:25, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

Emacs Pinky

Sigh, my first edit war. I think that the links to the blog called "Surviving Emacs" [3] [4] [5] [6] are very useful, and informative, so they deserve to be on this article. User:Femmina thinks they are linkspam and vandalism. I don't even know the author of that blog, and I have no personal interest in putting those links in this article. Does anyone think they're useful? Should they be included? I won't bother trying to insert them again if everyone thinks it's spam. I'm sorry if I've (unintentionally) been vandalising this page. --Shreevatsa 18:20, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

I am not the person who reverted your edits, and I would not classify them as link-spam. I think, however, that Clementson's blog adds little value to this page and is not very specific to Emacs. — Tobias Bergemann 20:03, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

Fine then, I'll stop. Come to think of it, I agree with you on both counts.

I'm sorry about having deleted a large section of this page earlier; I think it's a bug (or limitation, or incorrect configuration) in Firefox, or in my internet connection, that sometimes, not all the text of the page loads in the edit box. I've been bitten by this before, and I should have been more careful. I realise this is very offtopic here, but is this a known problem? Thanks, and sorry, Shreevatsa 20:18, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

There's discussion related to that problem at the Wikipedia:Help desk. — Tobias Bergemann 21:19, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

What is Emacs?

Is it really a text editor, or emacs really emacs? Anything beyond that is assumption and possibly POV. Coderx 03:44, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure it is a text editor. Most of the references vet that. Do you think the references are inadequate? Do you think they are pOV? --71.161.220.21 05:08, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

AFAIK, it is conventional to describe Emacs as an "editor", not any particular sort of editor (e.g. "text editor"). Both GNU Emacs and XEmacs ship with dired included, so it would be just as accurate to call them "directory editors" as "text editors". Just drop the adjective and call it an "editor". 155.143.221.146 18:12, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

You'll have to take this up at Talk:Text editor, because we've made the same "inaccuracy" at text editor. --71.161.223.43 16:19, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

Emacs has been jocularly called an "operating system". But a better description is that it is an "operating environment", much like desktops like GNOME and KDE, but using a text user interface. This covers the usage of Emacs for doing all kinds of activities like operating on files, web browsing, email/news reading, audio/video editing, program development etc. Calling Emacs a "text editor" is remarkably old-fashioned. The article doesn't do justice to what Emacs really is. Here are some references: zacharypinter wordaligned comp.os.linux.misc --- Reddyuday (talk) 11:47, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

Screenshot - misleading?

I think the screenshot on the Emacs page is misleading. This shot is from an unstable branch featuring anti-aliasing and nice GTK interface. This is not what the current, official and stable Emacs is.

Why not a shot of Emacs-in-use, like Image:Emacs-editting-emacs-article.png? --maru (talk) contribs 01:16, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

That screenshot is hideous, but it's the right idea. I don't mind the GTK stuff, as much as I feel the splash screen with the Emacs logo is not representative. How about something comprable to the screenshot at Vim (text editor)? --72.92.130.121 01:53, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

Hey, that's my preferred setup you're disparaging there! :( --maru (talk) contribs 02:36, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

My point is: Someone reads the article and of course sees the shot. So they go to the Emacs page, download it, run it and see something completely different (the same idea, the same splash, no anti-aliasing, ugly menus, ugly scrollbars, etc.). That's Emacs and it's still a great editor. It's just that particular screenshot. Maybe someone could add another screenshot of the real Emacs and mark the GTK+-one as "Beta" or so. By the way, the Vim screenshot is the real thing, no unstable branches there. Blender 22:00, 9 September 2006 (UTC)

I agree, changed screenshot to the default graphical interface. Teh l33+ 09:02, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

I changed the description (syntax highlighting) Protocol 001 20:04, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

I think that the most appropriate image to have for the screenshot would be one of Emacs running in the most recent release of gNewSense 69.248.254.19 (talk) 23:51, 29 September 2009 ----who the lonely freeman

References

The article has nice shape for a 2 years old Featured one, but time have passed, and there have been some advances since then. The most important one are footnotes, which would do this article much good. I suggest begin adding them. See m:Cite/Cite.php. -- ReyBrujo 03:35, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

It has seven now, but could use more. Obviously, the other references (now under the "Bibliography" section) vet the article with pretty good references even though there are no direct citations to them. --69.173.175.94 19:45, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

Indeed, it is better, although as I stated, there are two years to catch up. -- ReyBrujo 19:49, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

Just a "me too" - I think many more References are needed in this article. I will give some help by adding {{fact}} to mark what should be referenced. Gronky 14:40, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

External links

Well, since it seems I can't edit this article, I suggest really cleaning the external links section, as right now is a bunch of unnecessary information (there is no need to have forums or fansites, chinese sites, IRC or newsgroups, and I have moved some links to the references section, following the guidelines found here.

If nobody does, I will do it again soon. If I am reverted with those kind of summaries, I will take that as a personal attack, as I am acting in good faith. -- ReyBrujo 12:31, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

I'm not following this issue, but don't take reverts as personal attacks. If someone follows you around wikipedia reverting many of your changes, that might be a personal attack. Maybe trying doing your cleanup piecemeal. Remove the 1-4 of the most inappropriate links, pause, repeat. Gronky 14:06, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

I did take it as a bad joke. If I am reverted again with that kind of summaries (vi users should not edit emacs.), then I will take it as a personal attack (Using someone's affiliations as a means of dismissing or discrediting their views — regardless of whether said affiliations are mainstream or extreme.). -- ReyBrujo 16:17, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

I removed links to sites that can also be found on the official home page as on obvious start point. Oh, and the Chinese language wiki, a link to that would belong to the Chinese language Wikipedia.

The links in the history section should probably be converted into references. --Per Abrahamsen 14:19, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

The Emacs for MS Windows and Mac OS subsection is not necessary. Per guidelines, forums are not necessary and should be avoided. I agree that the History section should be improved as reference, a section that looks pretty naked. I think a Featured Article Review may help getting some feedback about what to do with this article to conform with the current Wiki advantages. Lack of inline references alone is enough to remove the featured article status, so better to start referencing everything. -- ReyBrujo 16:17, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

I removed the irc and usenet external links. The platform links could be references from the platforms section.

Asking for a FAR would be a rude waste of he reviewers time, unless someone here is willing to put in the effort to follow the recommandations. Especially since there are obvious points to improve (references), which we don't need a review to tell us. --Per Abrahamsen 16:16, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

I assure you that no FAR is a waste of time. The individuals there try to keep the Featured articles as the best articles in Wikipedia, according to the featured guidelines. Having a featured article that is not worth the nomination (even though it may have been at the time it was featured) may be offensive for some when they are actively working trying to fix articles they maintain to get them into featured article. Also, references are the hardest part of writing an article, and I am sure the article could spend another couple of years without anyone caring about them. Unluckily, I don't know enough about Emacs to fix the article, so someone else should do it. -- ReyBrujo 17:38, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

That was not the goal you stated originally.--Per Abrahamsen 03:50, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

Pardon me? I was pretty clear in both previous talks that lack of references is enough to demote the article to a former featured article, I suggested taking it because, besides lack of references, there may be other problems, and that someone should begin working in the article to fix it before it is sent to the review. -- ReyBrujo 05:05, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

This was your third explanation. I give up.--Per Abrahamsen 09:13, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Link per link verification

Here are the current external links section. I will explain, one at the time, whether each should stay or be removed. Feel free to contest my reasoning in this talk page.

• http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html (The GNU Emacs homepage)

No objection.

• http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/ntemacs.html (GNU Emacs FAQ For Windows 95/98/ME/NT/XP and 2000)

Since anyone is able to access this link from Emacs home page, it is not necessary.

• http://www.franz.com/emacs (Emacs installer for Windows)
• http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/EmacsW32.html (EmacsW32 MS Windows integration for Emacs)
• http://aquamacs.org/ Aqua Emacs. (major emacs implementation for Mac; with Mac oriented GUI)
• http://homepage.mac.com/zenitani/emacs-e.html Carbon Emacs. (major emacs implementation for Mac)

It is not necessary to have these versions individualized. Someone may later come and add the DOS version, then the Windows Vista version, then the Atari version.

• http://www.multicians.org/mepap.html (Multics Emacs: The History, Design and Implementation)

Can be upgraded to reference.

• http://www.finseth.com/~fin/emacs.html (List of Emacs implementations)
• http://www.finseth.com/craft (The Craft of Text Editing or Emacs for the Modern World)

Repeated external link. The first one can be replaced with the new one, http://www.finseth.com/emacs.html. The second can be accessed through the first one. Can be upgraded to reference.

• http://www.jwz.org/doc/emacs-timeline.html (An Emacs timeline)

Can be upgraded to reference.

• http://www.emacswiki.org/ (EmacsWiki)

It could stay as an external link, since it can't be used as reference.

• http://www.emacs.cn/Main/HomePage (Emacs 中文站] Chinese Emacs Wiki)

It should be removed, this is the English Wikipedia, and is talking about an English software. If it were a Chinese software, the link may have stayed. But right now, that wiki is not necessary.

• http://www.nabble.com/Emacs-f1569.html (Emacs Nabble Forum)

Per guidelines, forums are not good external links. This one in particular has only 15072 threads, which is a pretty low amount when compared with others.

• irc://freenode.net/emacs Emacs IRC Channel on freenode.net
• news://comp.emacs Emacs newsgroup

These two are problematic. Note that links requiring special software to be accessed should not be included. It may be possible to name them inside the article, but external links that, when clicked, throw a warning or error are not useful for a casual user.

Feel free to object any of my comments here, and we can discuss even more. If nobody objects in some days, I will understand the changes have been implicitely accepted, and apply them. Thanks. -- ReyBrujo 14:57, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

eMacs bashing

eMacs gets bashed a whole lot online. Shouldn't there be a section or something in regards to this, under Criticism or the like?

Linkage: bash.org search on eMacs

It is hard for me to find any centralized hate or criticism websites on the topic but this seems to at least show that this has a fairly bad reputation among users. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Ihmhi (talk • contribs) .

"eMacs" is an Apple MacIntosh model. "Emacs" is the text editor this article is about.

"whole lot" is not NPOV - it's rather biased. The criticism is a extermely tiny amount of the crticism online, even of computer programs.

There are already WikiLinks to the Emacs vs vi Editor Wars, and a Comparison of Text Editors. But a well-written, NPOV section on the pluses and minuses of Emacs and it's user interface would be a good addition to the article. "Evaluation of the Design" is a better section name then "Criticism". Finding good references could be a chore. Might need work with paper sources in a good research library - Lentower 15:24, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

One notable criticism with references is the large size of a distribution and the overhead of using a Lisp interpreter. An outdated criticims, it is still included in the article. The other criticism in the article is "Emacs pinky".

IRC logs aren't reputable sources of criticism. --71.161.216.192 01:23, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

I believe Editor wars summarized most of the criticism.--Per Abrahamsen 12:27, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Weasel words in "Licensing" section

The "Licensing" section was recently marked as containing weasel words. I assume this was because of the following prose:

This requirement by the GNU Emacs maintainers is assumed to affect contributions. Some people claim that it even affects performance, e.g. the inability of GNU Emacs to handle large files in an efficient manner could be blamed on the mentioned requirement repelling any serious developer.

I'd tend to agree that "assumed", "some", "could" is a bit of original research. Maybe we can take care of this and the dreaded use of the abbreviation "e.g.". --75.68.201.229 16:10, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

I just removed it, the whole subparagraph was unfounded speculation, and even if proper sources were found, the discussion would belong in copyleft, not here.--Per Abrahamsen 16:57, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

On Portal:Free software, Emacs is currently the selected article

Just to let you know. The purpose of selecting an article is both to point readers to the article and to highlight it to potential contributors. It will remain on the portal for a week or so. The previous selected article was ZFS. Gronky 13:21, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

The selected article box has been updated again, Emacs has been superceded by PaX. The PaX article needs references. It has featured article status, but it got that status back when standards were lower. Four free software articles have already lost their featured article status recently (including Emacs!), so if you're looking for something to do, considering helping the PaX article to maintain its quality. Gronky 22:57, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

Demographics

What is the size of the active user base? Is there a "market share" figure for computer programmers? -- Beland 17:41, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

Disambiguation

Apart from a text editor, "Emacs" is also a brand of computer power supply, often seen in servers. See: http://www.pc-look.com/boutik/Plus_250019-003.php http://www.specialtech.co.uk/spshop/customer/product.php?productid=3029&cat=7&page=1 http://www.amazon.com/Zippy-MIN-6250P-R-Supply-Replacement-Redundant/dp/B000J19VKA

Suggest a link to a disambiguation page at the top of this article.

139.80.48.6 02:52, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

Kitchen sinks and jokes

There's an XKCD comic about emacs:[7]. When I saw this, I searched the article for discriptions about Emacs' status as being a do-everything editor, but I can't find anything. Jokes about Emacs having commands for obscure things are common, so they should be mentioned, but I thougt I'd ask her first to see if it's already in the article. Maybe I just missed it. --Gronky (talk) 15:47, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

Culture

It might be amusing to mention that in Rick Cook's Wizardy series, one of the first things the protagonist Wiz does in magic is code up an Emacs daemon to edit his spells with. --Gwern (contribs) 18:29 10 February 2008 (GMT)

Fat-finger

In the Emacs Pinky section I replaced fat-finger with fat-finger (a link to the Jargon File). Before, the link simply redirected to Typographical error with no explanation of the term. It is still somewhat vague and does not solve the citation issue. Also I'm not sure what the policy/standard on placing external links inside article content is—I've never seen them in non-stub articles—but this seemed appropriate. D'Agosta (talk) 19:21, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Time to split?

We're at 39k and the intro goes into contortions trying to differentiate between Emacs-as-a-concept and GNU Emacs. I think it's time we split GNU Emacs to its own article, a la XEmacs. This article can then describe the union of all Emacsen. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 20:52, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

And thus the circle is closed. --Gwern (contribs) 21:18 6 July 2008 (GMT)

Heh. It's a perfectly typical cycle. The merge was over eighteen months ago: the situation was different back then. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 00:45, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

I don't think the intro reads badly. What problem do you see?

I don't see any way to split GNU Emacs out of this article. For almost all practical purposes, GNU Emacs is Emacs. XEmacs has been gathering dust for years, so the trueness of this is increasing over time. Skimming it now, I think what the article really needs is some quality review. There are plenty of non-encyclopaedic (howto-style or advertisement-style) sentences in there:

The Emacs help system is useful not only for beginners, but also for advanced users writing Emacs Lisp code. If the documentation for a function or variable is not enough, the help system can be used to browse the Emacs Lisp source code for both built-in libraries and installed third-party libraries. It is therefore very convenient to program in Emacs Lisp using Emacs itself.

Should be replaced by something like: "Emacs includes a built-in documentation system which provides information about the functions and variables used by Emacs." --Gronky (talk) 12:52, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

I wasn't so much thinking about XEmacs (which has its own article anyway) as the early Emacsen. That's where all the interesting stuff is anyway, what with Emacs's release cycle now resembling that of mother elephants.

The problem with the intro is that it is distinctly referring to two different things: all Emacsen, and one Emacs. It's awkward.

You're certainly right about the article text. Your suggestion is a good one. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 14:18, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Hemlock?

I didn't notice Hemlock among the EMACS-like editors. It's an interesting editor. Elisp can be extended to work like common lisp. Hemlock takes the opposite aproach. As there's already a Wikipedia article here...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemlock_(editor)

...all that would be needed is a brief mention and a link. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.136.108.216 (talk) 14:12, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing this out. The omission must have just been an oversight. I've added Hemlock to Template:Emacs which is included in this article and in other related articles. Gronky (talk) 19:27, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

Created wikia page about setting Emacs up

Hi, I created an article about how to install and configure GNU Emacs at Set up and get started Wiki. I’ve already covered quite much, including variables, the .emacs file and some different commands, but you can gladly add more to the article since it’s a wiki. --Kri (talk) 14:18, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Emacs in popular culture

We might want to consider what to put in such a section; the script of The Social Network mentions Emacs multiple times, and in dialogue too apparently. --Gwern (contribs) 01:19 16 May 2010 (GMT)

Or perhaps 'famous users'? eg. Vernor Vinge (http://www.norwescon.org/archives/norwescon33/vingeinterview.htm). --Gwern (contribs) 23:27 19 September 2010 (GMT)

Yukihiro Matsumoto (a/k/a "Matz", developer of the Ruby programming language) wrote a slide presentation called "How Emacs changed my life".[8] Neil Stephenson also has a riff on Emacs in In the Beginning... Was the Command Line:

I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. It was created by Richard Stallman; enough said. It is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful. It is colossal, and yet it only edits straight ASCII text files, which is to say, no fonts, no boldface, no underlining. In other words, the engineer-hours that, in the case of Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text. If you are a professional writer--i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed--emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish.

69.228.171.149 (talk) 18:36, 24 June 2012 (UTC)

Acronym

We must find a way to include the acronym Generally Not Used, Except by Middle Aged Computer Scientists —Preceding unsigned comment added by Pantergraph (talk • contribs) 20:51, 2 December 2010 (UTC)