Talk:GNU Emacs

Is XEmacs still first-paragraph-material?

Nowadays the XEmacs mailing lists are mostly full of spam [1], and Debian's "popularity contest" [2] reports that while 2151 computers have a recently used copy of emacs21, only 631 have a recently used copy of xemacs. ...and that 3.5:1 ratio over represents the lesser used package (xemacs) since computers with multiple users that have a recently used copy of each will still only register one vote for each despite the ratio indicating that the copy of emacs21 is probably used by more than 3.5 times as many people.

In the late 90s, the GNUemacs Vs. XEmacs was quite topical, and their usage stats were probably pretty close, but that was a long time ago. GNU Emacs has a GUI, and it is very actively maintained: the CVS repositry gets 28 commits per day on average [3], compared to 7 for xemacs [4].

Finally, a web search for "gnu emacs" and a web search for "xemacs" turn up approximately equal number of pages - despite "xemacs" being boosted by the fact that there is no command called "gnu emacs", while there is a command called "xemacs".

Now, none of the above methods are scientific. The Debian popularity contest numbers a kinda scientific, but they're not perfect. Web searches can reflect how many pages that websites use to discuss thing. CVS commits can reflect different check-in styles ...but when every unscientific method points to the same conclusion, scientists would be stupid to ignore it.

Sorry for being very wordy about something that's maybe not as controversial as I think it will be, but people to have emotional attachments to religous wars such as this. XEmacs was a reaction to Stallman's way of developing GNU Emacs. It highlighted a real problem, and in turn, GNU Emacs has now fixed that problem too. XEmacs is certainly part of the history of GNU Emacs, so I'm not saying it should be taken off the page, but are their any objections to be moving it into the body rather than the first paragraph? (Also, if anyone knows of other ways to evaluate how widely used the two packages are, please let me know.) --Gronky 16:43, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

The decline in popularity accords with my own (admittedly anecdotal) experience. One way one could check would be to compare traffic on Usenet groups, or in the IRC channels.

But I would be careful in how one changed the mention of XEmacs. While you are at it, it would be a good idea to add something to the XEmacs article. --Maru (talk) Contribs 20:16, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

My own (old) statistics on usenet showed that the version of Gnus bundled with Emacs was more popular than the unbundled Gnus and the XEmacs version combined. So I believe Emacs has always been more widely used than XEmacs.--Per Abrahamsen 17:42, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

Unicode

Is emacs unicode compatible/aware? The article does not deal with unicode, when GNU emacs is a text editor and unicode is for common world text? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.41.137.29 (talk • contribs)

Better now? --maru (talk) contribs 20:19, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

Merge into Emacs?

This article contains less information about GNU Emacs than the Emacs article does. It is small, is almost entirely made of duplicate content, and there are no signs of it improving. GNU Emacs is by far the primary implementation of Emacs, so that article is therefore talking about GNU Emacs anyway. If the Emacs article is seen as being too big, maybe elisp should be factored into a new article, but that's an "if" for future consideration. Any objections to a merge into Emacs? Gronky 09:39, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

If there is a disaparity in coverage, then fix it. If we can't even get agreement that use of GNU Emacs is greater than that of Xemacs, then I hardly think one can get consensus that GNU Emacs = Emacs for most people. --maru (talk) contribs 20:17, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

But we did get consensus that the use of GNU Emacs is greater than XEmacs - in the above section. --Gronky 21:07, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

No. You and I agreed that GNU Emacs is used more. That doesn't automatically translate to consensus, and certainly not to a consensus to swap the Emacs and GNU Emacs articles. --maru (talk) contribs 21:35, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

I thought that 2 in favour and none against, with a six month comment period, was consensus - but these are details of a tangental point. I just realised that we're not discussing the same thing. I'm not proposing "GNU Emacs = Emacs" or that the two articles be swapped. I'm proposing that the small amount of unique content in "GNU Emacs" should be merged into "Emacs". The "Emacs" article will still be about "Emacs" in general. The only difference will that it won't avoid mentioning "GNU Emacs". If GNU Emacs is to remain a seperate article, then fleshing it out will only mean further duplication of the content of the "Emacs" article. Gronky 10:14, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

I believe this article should just redirect to Emacs. Let Emacs cover both the RMS maintained editor (as the bulk of the article), and brifly cover the various forks and immitations. The forks and immitations should still have their own articles as well. I believe there is consensus, even among XEmacs developers, that the RMS's maintained editor is the base reference for what an emacs is.--Per Abrahamsen 17:38, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

I'm doing this merge now. There is more discussion on the Talk:Emacs and there is clear consensus among those who've commented. Gronky 20:23, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

Splitting Emacs and GNU Emacs? Looks bad

The recent split looks like a bad idea, and I can't find any discussion supporting it. Previous discussions concluded that the two topics should be in one article.

If this split is to be maintained, I'd suggest at least naming the two articles:

• GNU Emacs
• Emacs family of text editors

And have "Emacs" point to "GNU Emacs".

Rationale: there is no thing called "Emacs", and the vast majority of links to Emacs in Wikipedia (as well as the general usage of the term outside of Wikipedia) are about GNU Emacs. The project(s) lead by Richard Stallman define "Emacs", and his focus for the past 25 years has been GNU Emacs.

To argue for undoing the split, I'd note that all the other "Emacs" packages have their own articles, and there's not enough in common to justify an umbrella article. To the extent that they have things in common, those things are detailed in GNU Emacs (from which they are all forks, inspired-by, or predecessors).

So I'd suggest undoing the split now, before it gets messy. Then it can be discussed (but I reckon it's unlikely to happen). Gronky (talk) 13:40, 1 April 2014 (UTC)

I strongly agree that either the two articles should be merged [back] into one, or, if there are to be two articles, then one should be titled "GNU Emacs" and the other titled "Emacs family of text editors" ... with "Emacs" pointing to "GNU Emacs".

An additional reason for doing one or the other: the first sentence of the existing "GNU Emacs" article is "GNU Emacs is the second most popular and second most ported Emacs text editor on Debian." This may or may not be true, but having it be the first sentence in the whole article is profoundly misleading [to a naive reader]: it would be likely to mislead said reader into believing that GNU Emacs is somehow specific to Debian.

Now, which choice is better?

In a perfect world, maybe having only one article.

In the fallen world in which we live, though, there is something to be said for the "'GNU Emacs' and 'Emacs family'" suggestion. The argument for this is historical:

First there were two articles ("Emacs" and "GNU Emacs").

Then, after some discussion, a consensus was reached to merge them ... and it was done.

Then someone ... probably not familiar with the prior history ... came along and created a separate "GNU Emacs" article, all over again.

I think that if "Emacs" pointed to "GNU Emacs" ... and there was also a (probably small) "Emacs family" article ... then this (the ill-advised re-splitting) would be somewhat less likely to happen yet again. Madisoncnc (talk) 21:32, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

I agree with your "either .. or". I don't have a strong preference, but off the top of my head I'd say one article is better than two since the other Emacsen have their own pages which would get linked to from a "History" and/or "Alternatives" section of the GNU Emacs article. Either way, these should still be merged. I haven't had time, but I support merging. Gronky (talk) 16:17, 15 August 2015 (UTC)

Emacs has a new logo

After this blog post was published, the Emacs team actually included the reworked icon in their recent GNU Emacs 25.0.50 nightlies. I'm not sure if we should already replace it in the article, I just suggest you to keep an eye on that. Tuxman (talk) 16:26, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

Emacs 25 has reached pretest, might be a good idea to replace it. Zackp30 14:04, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

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Preview release

Does it make sense to keep "Preview release" information once the stable release it out? For instance, currently, stable release = 26.2 and preview release = 26.1.92. In general, one expects that preview release applies to what will be the next stable release, not the previous one. Vincent Lefèvre (talk) 10:07, 14 July 2019 (UTC)

"Magit" listed at Redirects for discussion

A discussion is taking place to address the redirect Magit. The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2020 July 7#Magit until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. Tea2min (talk) 10:54, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

Original operating system in the History section

The History section of the article says "GNU Emacs was later ported to the Unix operating system," but there is nowhere in the article states what operating system it was originally written for. This is information which should probably be included. Enteedee (talk) 19:41, 4 July 2021 (UTC)

It should be the Incompatible Timesharing System. Ghettoblaster (talk) 20:00, 4 July 2021 (UTC)

Most powerful *today*?

Right at the top of the article is a quotation saying <<GNU Emacs has been called "the most powerful text editor available today".[5]>>. I have no personal opinion on whether it is or it isn't (in the words of Kip Dynamite, "like anyone can even know that"), but the quotation it references is from 2005, and for software, 17 years ago doesn't really qualify as "today". Additionally, the quotation is from a press release for the book "Learning GNU Emacs, Third Edition", so it comes off as marketing-speak that seems like it shouldn't be in an authoritative wiki article IMO. Is there a more recent quotation or factoid that would be more appropriate? Kenahoo (talk) 22:23, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

I came here to say the same thing. As well, the entire lede seems a bit insecure in its slightly desperate insistence on the awesomeness of GNU Emacs. Fwiw, I'm #TeamEmacs in the tiresome Emacs-Vim rivalry. Even so, this lede is too much. -- ℜob C. alias ALAROB 20:33, 10 August 2022 (UTC)

Missing colors in the release history section

The table in the release history section has a legend that indicates that red means "Old version", yellow means "Older version, still maintained" and green means "Latest version", but none of of the releases in the table actually use those colors. All of the releases are gray. It would be nice if the colors were used. I went to this article specifically because Wikipedia often makes it easy to see which versions of a particular piece of software are still supported. BootOutMoot (talk) 14:43, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

I'm having difficulty finding any sources on which old releases are still receiving maintenance patches. If you know where we can find that information (from a reliable source!) we can certainly put the colors back. Otherwise, I think we should remove the legend. StereoFolic (talk) 17:12, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

I've tentatively removed the legend, but we can easily put it back if we find a source for this information. StereoFolic (talk) 16:15, 7 March 2024 (UTC)