It takes me five seconds to compile µemacs at the slowest setting I can impose on my computer, and the resulting binary is a mere 493KB. One user who maintains a personal version of µemacs is a programmer named Linus Torvalds, and his copy is available from his website, (which also, incidentally, includes a small side project of his called Linux). MicroEmacs, also known as uemacs (as in the Greek letter µ, which denotes 'micro' in scientific notation), was written by Dave Conroy, but there's a long list of users who have cloned it and modified it.

If you're looking for a basic, fast, and efficient editor that isn't Vim, you'll likely be happy with any of these options. Quite the contrary, GNU Emacs is probably one of the largest.įortunately, GNU Emacs is so popular that other emacs implementations tend to mimic most of the GNU version's basic controls.

GNU Emacs is the most famous emacsen (yes, the -en suffix is used to describe many emacs, as in the word 'oxen'), but it's not the only one. For instance, if you often found yourself typing 'teh' instead of 'the,' you could either go in and correct each one manually (no small feat when your editor can't even load the entire document into memory, as was often the case in the early 1980s), or you could invoke a macro to perform a quick swap of the 'e' and 'h.'Įventually, these macros were bundled together into a package called editing macros, or EMACS for short. Before there was GNU Emacs, there were collections of batch process scripts (called macros) that could perform common tasks for a user. The term 'emacs' is a somewhat generic term in the way that only open source produces, and a portmanteau.

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Emacs macros