EmacsWiki: Emacs Implementations

Locally Documented

Mainstream GNU Emacs and derivates:

GnuEmacs
XEmacs – formerly LucidEmacs
SXEmacs – a fork of XEmacs

Other implementations still alive:

µEmacs (aka. uemacs aka. MicroEmacs) — a small, light-weight console Emacs
- memacs — a Japanese variant of µemacs
- Jasspa MicroEmacs — a semi-commercial development of MicroEmacs
GNU Zile – a tiny Emacs clone.
EdWin – based on Scheme, included in GNU/MIT Scheme.
EfunsEditor – based on ObjectiveCaml.
Mg – a lightweight public domain Emacs clone
Zmacs, a port of the editor integrated in some Lisp-Machine IDEs
Ymacs – an Emacs-like AJAX language editor for the Web (ie., embedded in webpages)
9ne, an HTML/Java-embedded light-weight Emacs
CommonLisp variants:
- Climacs, a Common Lisp Implementation of Emacs
- Second Climacs (successor to Climacs, in development)
- PortableHemlock, a Common Lisp variant of Hemlock „to free Hemlock from its CMUCL prison”

Other more or less obscure implementations:

Historic implementations and predecessors to modern Emacsen:

TecoEmacs (one of the earliest implementations; RMS wrote his initial „Editor MACroS” in TECOs cryptic scripting language)
EINE „EINE Is Not Emacs” (intended pun: eine is German for one)
ZWEI „ZWEI Was EINE Initially” (intended pun: zwei is German for two)
MulticsEmacs
Hemlock, included in CMU Common Lisp as (ed)
Zmacs, integrated in some Lisp-Machine development environments

Not locally documented:

EmACT at http://www.eligis.com/emacs comes with Win32 binaries.
PceEmacs at http://www.swi-prolog.org/PceEmacs.html

Emulations, not implementations:

jed – JED is a text editor that makes extensive use of the S-Lang library.

Complete List

http://www.finseth.com/emacs.html

It is a pretty long page, though.

This document, by CraigFinseth, provides a partial – and not comprehensive – list of implementations of Emacs-type editors and literature about such editors. You can help make it more comprehensive by sending the author additional information and/or updates.

This document is also gradually acquiring the role of a repository of (at least) Emacs-related history. While that subject requires a book to itself, this document will probably serve until someone (not the author!) writes one.

Would it make sense to host a mirror of CraigFinseth’s list here on this page? It is indeed long, but it is a valuable doc, and it can be updated periodically as Craig updates it on his site. – KamenNedev

I guess we could… But what’s the the point? Do you think it needs to be mirrored in case it falls off the Internet? Or do you think it would be nice if results from it would show up on the Emacs Wiki search? I guess I just don’t feel too attached to the list. – Alex Schroeder

Oh, no, there’s no way it’s falling off the Internet! I’ve got my herd of trained unicorns down there, poised to catch anything falling off the Internet. ;)

On a more serious note, I think mirroring the list here has some

Pros:

It would be nice to have it on the EmacsWiki because that turns the wiki more into a reference resource than simply a place where things are linked to.
The list has a certain historical value, and the EmacsWiki is a good place to hold documents like that.
The list also has a decent (if not very up-to-date) bibliographical reference, so that’s another thing we gain for the EmacsWiki.

…and, of course, there are some

Cons:

The list is long and rather unwieldy for a WikiWiki page; it can be nicely structured, cross-referenced and formatted, but it’s still long.
The list is not very up-to-date. (Although we can continue to document EmacsImplementations independently on this page at our usual pace).
I don’t know whether CraigFinseth would like the idea.

Of course, we could leave it as it is, and continue to add-to and document different Emacs as it has been done up to now. – KamenNedev