Emacs merchandise

Emacs was originally implemented in 1976 on the MIT AI Lab's Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS), as a collection of TECO macros. The name “Emacs” was originally chosen as an abbreviation of “Editor MACroS”. Emacs is a text editor designed for POSIX operating systems and available on Linux, BSD, macOS, Windows, and more. Users love Emacs because it features efficient commands for common but complex actions and for the plugins and configuration hacks that have developed around it for nearly 40 years.

Because it's an old editor that was developed well before modern computer conventions and terminology existed (for instance, you "visit" instead of "opening" a file, and you "write" instead of "save," and so on), Emacs is often viewed as complex and even... mysterious. As time has shown, however, once you learn the basics, you have a powerful, efficient, and extremely hackable editor for life.

Features: computer enthusiasts don't love Emacs just because it happens to be old and free. Emacs' appeal crosses industries and interests for the following reasons. Compared to modern programming editors, Emacs is fairly lightweight. It used to be considered an unusually large tool for what it did, but with modern editors using web browser engines and JavaScript servers as their backends, a "simple" editor written in C and Lisp hardly makes a dent on system resources. Still, it does a lot more than just text editing.

Since 2010, FreeWear.org has been a close collaboration with FSF/GNU and FreeWear, that donate a portion of the sales of Emacs materials in this website. This Emacs donations go to GNU.

Texts extracted from: GNU Emacs and opensource.com.