Emacs Turns 50

Emacs reaches its 50th anniversary as a tool that helped transform programming from line-by-line editing on printing terminals into interactive, on-screen work. Its roots lie in TECO, a 1962 MIT text editor that evolved into a programming language for custom editing commands. In 1971, Carl Mikkelsen’s Control-R displayed edits on video terminals, but only a few lines at a time. Inspired by a full-screen editor he saw at Stanford, Richard Stallman reworked Control-R in 1976 so each keystroke could run a customizable macro. Guy Steele and David Moon helped establish a shared command set, addressing the practical problem of lab members using incompatible editing systems. The name EMACS referred to “Editor Macros” or “Editing Macros,” and its accessibility made it useful to both novice and expert users.

Stallman distributed EMACS on the condition that users return their improvements, fostering a software-sharing community. Commercial versions followed: Bernard Greenberg’s Multics implementation was sold by Honeywell, and James Gosling also marketed a version. The shift toward paid software helped motivate Stallman to create the GNU Project, whose first major application was GNU Emacs. That effort contributed to the free-software movement and preceded the GNU/Linux operating system. Emacs spread across operating systems and was included with Mac OS X beginning in 2001; Apple stopped distributing GNU Emacs in 2019 but retains a smaller, compatible program and support for many Emacs keyboard commands.