Stallman steps back from Emacs
Hears call of other projects
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Richard Stallman, industry activist and founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has - once again - relinquished his role as maintainer of the phenomenally successful GNU Extensible, Customizable, Display Editor (Emacs).
The news was slipped out on the Emacs developers' forum and Stallman explained his reasons in a later interview.
He has stepped down from the role before, with three others assuming responsibility since he wrote Emacs in 1984. Even now, Stallman's hinted he would continue to be involved in Emacs development, although he wants to spend more time on other projects.
Although still listed as maintainer on the GNU Emacs site, Stallman has passed responsibility to Stefan Monnier and Chong Yidong who have both worked with Stallman on Emacs for some time.
Stallman, an outspoken advocate of free as opposed to open source software, devised GNU Emacs to create an extensible editor for developers. It was released under the GNU free software project and has grown from its original Unix base to become one of the most widely used code editors. Although written in C, GNU Emacs draws on the ideas of extensibility used in languages such as Lisp.
Confirmation of its importance arrived in January 2008 when it was revealed that Microsoft was hiring people to build a .NET version of Emacs.®
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COMMENTS
Huh?
Microsoft had to decided to get involved before EMACS could be recognised as important? Gimme a break :)
I use nedit
Emacs is too much for me ,everybody has their favorite I don't think those holy wars were about much at all. A plain vanilla editor with some shell commands maybe some way to record macro's,when I used Windows there was another I liked, like this but it's been abandoned I can't remember it's name.Oh yes for text mode I use Jed neither Emacs nor Vim make me happy in that environment(though Vim is easier).
emacs necessary before X, and still the best
Back in the '80s, before we had X, we worked on "glass ttys" connected to Unix computers with serial lines. Pretty much the only way we had to get two windows on the terminal was with emacs. I ran a debugger in a shell in one window, while looking at the source code in another. Those poor vi guys could run the debugger OR look at the source code, but couldn't do both at the same time.
I still like the way emacs is an IDE at the right level. It understands my personal indentation schemes for various languages (including plain TeX), and nicely integrates make and gdb, and lots of other stuff. The Lisp variant used internally isn't difficult, and is actually quite useful (though I deliberately don't depend too much on custom Lisp, as I need to work on many computers, and don't always have a thumb-drive with my .emacs).
I never liked the vi's "command" and "insert" modes. I keep forgetting which mode I'm in, typing long lines of C code while in "command" mode. Yikes.
Cultural theory: go to one of the few remaining places on the earth with indigenous, non-technical people who've lived in harmony for millenia, and teach them about computers until they have a rational basis for using text editors. At this point they will naturally fall into warring "vi" and "emacs" camps, losing their generations-long tradition of peaceful cooperation.

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