EMACS
EMACS: /ee'maks/ n. [from Editing MACroS] The ne plus ultra of
hacker editors, a programmable text editor with an entire LISP
system inside it. It was originally written by Richard Stallman in
TECO under ITS at the MIT AI lab; AI Memo 554 described it as
"an advanced, self-documenting, customizable, extensible real-time
display editor". It has since been reimplemented any number of
times, by various hackers, and versions exist that run under most
major operating systems. Perhaps the most widely used version, also
written by Stallman and now called "GNU EMACS" or GNUMACS, runs
principally under Unix. (Its close relative XEmacs is the second
most popular version.) It includes facilities to run compilation
subprocesses and send and receive mail or news; many hackers spend
up to 80% of their tube time inside it. Other variants include
GOSMACS, CCA EMACS, UniPress EMACS, Montgomery EMACS, jove,
epsilon, and MicroEMACS. (Though we use the original all-caps
spelling here, it is nowadays very commonly `Emacs'.)
Some EMACS versions running under window managers iconify as an
overflowing kitchen sink, perhaps to suggest the one feature the
editor does not (yet) include. Indeed, some hackers find EMACS too
heavyweight and baroque for their taste, and expand the name as
`Escape Meta Alt Control Shift' to spoof its heavy reliance on
keystrokes decorated with bucky bits. Other spoof expansions
include `Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping' (from when that
was a lot of core), `Eventually `malloc()'s All Computer Storage',
and `EMACS Makes A Computer Slow' (see recursive acronym). See
also vi.
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