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GNU Emacs 23.3.1
Original author(s)	Richard Stallman
Developer(s)	the GNU project
Initial release	1976, 35–36 years ago
Stable release	23.4  (January 29, 2012; 4 months ago  (2012-01-29))[1] [±]
Preview release	24.1-rc  (June 1, 2012; 25 days ago  (2012-06-01))[2] [±]
Written in	C, Emacs Lisp
Operating system	Cross-platform, GNU
Available in	English
Type	Text editor
License	GNU GPLv3
Website	www.gnu.org/software/emacs

Emacs ( /ˈiːmæks/) is a family of text editors, characterized by their extensibility. One manual describes it as "the extensible, customizable, self-documenting, real-time display editor." Development began in the mid-1970s and continues actively as of 2012^[update]. Emacs has over 2,000 built-in commands and allows the user to combine these commands into macros to automate work, in particular with the use of Emacs Lisp, a variant of Lisp, providing a deep extension capability.

The original EMACS consisted of a set of Editor MACroS for the TECO editor. It was written in 1976 by Richard Stallman, initially together with Guy L. Steele, Jr.^[3][4][5][6] It was inspired by the ideas of TECMAC and TMACS, a pair of TECO-macro editors written by Steele, Dave Moon, Richard Greenblatt, Charles Frankston, and others.^[7]

In Unix culture, Emacs became one of the two main contenders in the traditional editor wars, the other being vi. The word "emacs" is often pluralized as emacsen, by analogy with boxen (itself used by analogy with oxen) and VAXen.^[8]

The most popular (and most ported) version of Emacs is GNU Emacs, created by Stallman for the GNU Project.^[9] Another version in common use, XEmacs, was forked from GNU Emacs in 1991. XEmacs has remained mostly compatible and continues to use Emacs Lisp like GNU Emacs.

History[link]

Emacs development began at the MIT AI Lab during the 1970s. Before its introduction, the Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS), the operating system on the AI Lab's PDP-6 and PDP-10 computers, featured a default line editor known as Tape Editor and Corrector (TECO) (later changed to Text Editor and Corrector, the ‘tape' referring to paper tape). Unlike most modern text editors, TECO has separate modes which the user used to either add text, edit existing text, or display the document. Typing characters into TECO did not place those characters directly into a document; one had to write a series of instructions in the TECO command language telling it to enter the required characters, during which time the edited text was not displayed on the screen. This behavior is similar to the program ed.

Richard Stallman visited the Stanford AI Lab in 1972 or 1974 and saw the lab's "E" editor, written by Fred Wright.^[10] The editor had an intuitive WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) behavior as used almost universally by modern text editors, which impressed Stallman. He returned to MIT where Carl Mikkelsen, a hacker at the AI Lab, had added a combined display+editing mode called "Control-R" to TECO, allowing the screen display to be updated each time the user entered a keystroke. Stallman reimplemented this mode to run efficiently, then added a macro feature to the TECO display-editing mode, allowing the user to redefine any keystroke to run a TECO program.^[6]

E had another feature which TECO lacked: random-access editing. Since TECO's original implementation was designed for editing paper tape on the PDP-1, it was a page-sequential editor. Typical editing could only be done on one page at a time, in the order of the pages in the file. To provide random access in Emacs, Stallman decided not to adopt E's approach of structuring the file for page-random access on disk, but instead modified TECO to handle large buffers more efficiently, and then changed its file management method to read, edit, and write the entire file as a single buffer. Almost all modern editors use this approach.

The new version of TECO quickly became popular at the AI Lab, and soon there accumulated a large collection of custom macros, whose names often ended in "MAC" or "MACS", which stood for "macro". Two years later, Guy Steele took on the project of unifying the overly diverse macros into a single set. After one night of joint hacking by Steele and Stallman, the latter finished the implementation, which included facilities for extending and documenting the new macro set.^[6] The resulting system was called EMACS, which stood for "Editing MACroS". An alternative version is that EMACS stood for "E with MACroS", a dig at E's lack of a macro capability.^{[citation needed]} According to Stallman, he picked the name Emacs "because <E> was not in use as an abbreviation on ITS at the time."^[11] (It has also been noted that "Emack & Bolio's" was the name of a popular ice cream store in Cambridge, within walking distance of MIT. A text-formatting program used on ITS was later named BOLIO by Dave Moon, who frequented that store. However, Stallman did not like that ice cream, and did not even know of it when choosing the name "Emacs"; this ignorance is the basis of a hacker koan, Emacs and Bolio).^{[citation needed]}

According to Stallman, the first operational EMACS system existed in late 1976.^[12]

Stallman saw a problem in too much customization and de-facto forking and set certain conditions for usage.^{[citation needed]} He later wrote:^[12]

"EMACS was distributed on a basis of communal sharing, which means all improvements must be given back to me to be incorporated and distributed."

The original Emacs, like TECO, ran only on the PDP line of computers. It behaved sufficiently differently from TECO to be considered a text editor in its own right. It quickly became the standard editing program on ITS. It was also ported from ITS to the Tenex and TOPS-20 operating systems by Michael McMahon, but not Unix, initially. Other contributors to early versions of Emacs include Kent Pitman, Earl Killian, and Eugene Ciccarelli. By 1979, Emacs was the editor used by most people in MIT's AI lab and its Computer Science lab.^[13]

Other early implementations[link]

Programmers wrote many Emacs-like editors in the following years for other computer systems, including SINE (Sine is not EMACS), EINE ("EINE Is Not EMACS") and ZWEI ("ZWEI Was EINE Initially"), for the Lisp machine, which were written by Michael McMahon and Daniel Weinreb. Weinreb's EINE was the first Emacs written in Lisp. In 1978, Bernard Greenberg wrote Multics Emacs almost entirely in Multics Lisp at Honeywell's Cambridge Information Systems Lab; it was later maintained by Richard Soley (who went on to develop the NILE Emacs-like editor for the NIL Project) and Barry Margolin. Many versions of Emacs, including GNU Emacs, later adopted Lisp as an extension language.

James Gosling (who later invented NeWS and the Java programming language) wrote the first Emacs-like editor to run on Unix: Gosling Emacs, in 1981. It was written in C and, notably, used a language with Lisp-like syntax known as Mocklisp as an extension language. In 1984 it was proprietary software.

GNU Emacs[link]

In 1984, Stallman began working on GNU Emacs to produce a free software alternative to Gosling Emacs; initially he based it on Gosling Emacs, but he replaced the Mocklisp interpreter at its heart with a true Lisp interpreter, which entailed replacing nearly all of the code. It became the first program released by the nascent GNU project. GNU Emacs is written in C and provides Emacs Lisp (itself implemented in C) as an extension language. Version 13, the first public release, was made on March 20, 1985. The first widely distributed version of GNU Emacs was 15.34, which appeared later in 1985. Versions 2 to 12 never existed. Earlier versions of GNU Emacs had been numbered "1.x.x", but sometime after version 1.12 the decision was made to drop the "1", as it was thought the major number would never change.^{[citation needed]}

GNU Emacs was later ported to Unix. Since it had more features than Gosling Emacs, in particular a full-featured Lisp as extension language, it soon replaced Gosling Emacs as the de facto Emacs editor on Unix. A security flaw in GNU Emacs' email subsystem was exploited by Markus Hess in his 1986 hacking spree to gain superuser access to Unix computers.^[14]

Until 1999, GNU Emacs development was relatively closed, to the point where it was used as an example of the "Cathedral" development style in The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The project has since adopted a public development mailing list and anonymous CVS access. Development took place in a single CVS trunk until 2008, and today uses the Bazaar DVCS.

Richard Stallman remained the maintainer of GNU Emacs through most of the time, but took several breaks. The latest one persists and started 2008, when maintenance was handed over to Stefan Monnier and Chong Yidong.^[15]

Release history[link]

XEmacs[link]

Beginning in 1991, Jamie Zawinski and others at Lucid Inc. developed Lucid Emacs, based on an early alpha version of GNU Emacs 19. The codebases soon diverged, and the separate development teams gave up trying to merge them back into a single program.^[21] This was one of the most famous early forks of a free software program. Lucid Emacs has since been renamed XEmacs; it remains the second most popular variety of Emacs, after GNU Emacs.^{[citation needed]}

Other forks and clones[link]

Many other derivatives of the GNU Emacs have emerged, such as a Japanese version for MS Windows called Meadow,^[22] Steve Youngs' fork of XEmacs called SXEmacs,^[23] and a version which focuses on integrating with the Apple Macintosh user interface called Aquamacs.

Emacs clones, not based on GNU Emacs source code, have proliferated. One motivation for writing clones was that GNU Emacs was initially targeted at computers with a 32-bit flat address space, and at least 1 MiB of RAM. At a time when such computers were considered high end, this left an opening for smaller reimplementations. Some notable modern clones include:

• MicroEMACS, originally written by Dave Conroy and further developed by Daniel Lawrence, which exists in many variations.
• mg, originally called MicroGNUEmacs (and later mg2a), a public-domain offshoot of MicroEMACS intended to more closely resemble GNU Emacs. Now installed by default on OpenBSD.
• NotGNU,^[24] a small, fast, freeware implementation for DOS, Win16, Win32 and GNU/Linux by Julie Melbin.
• JOVE (Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs), a non-programmable Emacs implementation for UNIX-like systems by Jonathan Payne.
• Freemacs, a DOS version with an extension language based on text macro expansion, all within the original 64 KiB flat memory limit.
• MINCE (MINCE Is Not Complete Emacs), a version for CP/M and later, for DOS from Mark of the Unicorn. MINCE evolved into Final Word, which eventually became the Sprint word processor from Borland.
• Zile - (Zile is lossy Emacs)
• Climacs, an Emacs-variant implemented in Common Lisp and more influenced by Zmacs than GNU Emacs.
• Yi, an editor written and extensible in Haskell having an emulation mode for Emacs.
• QEmacs,^[25] small editor by Fabrice Bellard with UTF-8 support and support for fast editing of large files (hundreds of MiB).
• Epsilon (text editor),^[26] an Emacs clone by Lugaru Software. Versions for DOS, Windows, GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X and O/S 2 are bundled in the release. Notable for a non-lisp extension language with C syntax, and a very early concurrent command shell buffer implementation under the single tasking MS-DOS.
• Joe's Own Editor has an emulation mode for emacs.
• e3 has an emulation mode for emacs.
• JED has an emulation mode for emacs.
• PceEmacs is the editor for SWI-Prolog that is based on Emacs.
• EmACT a 1986 fork of MicroEmacs by Christian Jullien. EmACT^[27] source code is available on sourceforge.

Licensing[link]

The terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) state that the Emacs source code, including both the C and Emacs Lisp components, are freely available for examination, modification, and redistribution.

For GNU Emacs (and many other GNU packages), it remains policy to accept significant code contributions only if the copyright holder executes a suitable disclaimer or assignment of their copyright interest to the Free Software Foundation, although one exception to this policy occurred in the case of MULE (MULtilingual Extension, which handles Unicode and more advanced methods of dealing with other languages' scripts) code,^[28] since the copyright holder (the Japanese government) could not assign copyright. This does not apply to extremely minor code contributions of less than 10 lines, or to bug fixes. This policy is in place so that FSF can defend the software in court if its copyleft licence is violated.

Older versions of the GNU Emacs documentation appeared under an ad-hoc license which required the inclusion of certain text in any modified copy. In the GNU Emacs user's manual, for example, this included how to obtain GNU Emacs and Richard Stallman's essay The GNU Manifesto. The XEmacs manuals, which were inherited from older GNU Emacs manuals when the fork occurred, have the same license. Newer versions of the documentation use the GNU Free Documentation License and makes use of "invariant sections" to require the inclusion of the same documents, additionally requiring that the manuals proclaim themselves as GNU Manuals.

Features[link]

Emacs is primarily a text editor, not a word processor; it concentrates on manipulating pieces of text, rather than manipulating the typeface (the "font") of the characters or printing documents (though Emacs can do these as well). Emacs provides commands to manipulate words and paragraphs (deleting them, moving them, moving through them, and so forth), syntax highlighting for making source code easier to read, and "keyboard macros" for performing arbitrary batches of editing commands defined by the user.

GNU Emacs is a "real-time display" editor in that edits get displayed on the screen as they occur. This is standard behaviour for modern text editors.

Customizability[link]

Almost all of the functionality in the GNU Emacs editor, ranging from basic editing operations such as the insertion of characters into a document to the configuration of the user interface, comes under the control of a dialect of the Lisp programming language known as Emacs Lisp. This unique and unusual design provides many of the features found in Emacs. In this Lisp environment, variables and even entire functions can be modified without having to recompile or even restart the editor.

Users have three primary ways of customizing Emacs:

1. the customize extension, which allows the user to set common customization variables, such as the colour scheme, using a graphical interface, etc. This is intended for Emacs beginners who do not want to work with Emacs Lisp code.
2. collecting keystrokes into macros and replaying them to automate complex, repetitive tasks. This is often done on an ad-hoc basis, with each macro discarded after use, although macros can be saved and invoked later.
3. using Emacs Lisp. Usually, user-supplied Emacs Lisp code is stored in a file called .emacs and loaded when Emacs starts up. The .emacs file is often used to set variables and key bindings different from the default setting, and to define new commands that the user finds convenient. Many advanced users have .emacs files hundreds of lines long, with idiosyncratic customizations that cause Emacs to diverge wildly from the default behavior.

Extensibility[link]

As a result, the behavior of Emacs can be modified almost without limit, either directly by the user, or by loading Emacs Lisp code known variously as "libraries", "packages", or "extensions".

Emacs contains a large number of Emacs Lisp libraries, and users can find more "third-party" libraries on the Internet. Emacs can be used as an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), allowing programmers to edit, compile, and debug their code within a single interface. Other libraries perform more unusual functions. A few examples include:

• AUCTeX, a suite of extensions that facilitate the creation of TeX and LaTeX documents
• Calc, a powerful RPN numerical calculator
• Calendar-mode, for keeping appointment calendars and diaries
• Dissociated Press, a Racter-like text generator.
• Dunnet, a text adventure
• Ediff and Emerge, for comparing and combining files interactively.
• Emacs/W3, a web browser
• ERC and rcirc, IRC clients (22.1)^[29]
• Gnus, a full-featured newsreader and email client (and early evidence for Zawinski's Law, along with Rmail)
• MULE, MultiLingual extensions to Emacs, allowing editing text written in multiple languages, somewhat analogous to Unicode
• Org-mode for keeping notes, maintaining lists (to-do lists and other types of lists) and doing project planning and measuring
• Info, an online help-browser
• Planner, a personal information manager
• SES, a spreadsheet
• VM (View Mail), another full-featured email client
• Wanderlust, yet another full-featured email and news client

Many third-party libraries exist on the Internet; for example, there is a library called wikipedia-mode for editing Wikipedia articles. There is even a Usenet newsgroup, gnu.emacs.sources, which is used for posting new libraries. Some third-party libraries eventually make their way into Emacs, thus becoming a "standard" library.

Performance[link]

On the systems in which Emacs was first implemented, Emacs often ran noticeably slower than rival text editors, because its Lisp-based design incurs a performance overhead resulting from loading and interpreting the Lisp code. Several joke backronyms allude to this: Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping (from the days when eight megabytes was a lot of memory), Emacs Makes A Computer Slow, Eventually Mallocs All Computer Storage, and Eventually Makes All Computers Sick. However, modern computers are fast enough that Emacs is seldom felt to be slow. In fact, Emacs starts up more quickly than most modern word processors.^{[citation needed]} Handling large files on 32 bit systems is still a weak point for Emacs. Before version 23.2 Emacs could handle files up to around 256 MB; with 23.2 this was raised to around 512 MB. Even on 64 bit systems the limit of 512MB is only lifted in Emacs-24.^{[citation needed]}

Platforms[link]

Emacs has become one of the most ported non-trivial computer programs. It runs on a wide variety of operating systems, including most Unix-like systems (GNU/Linux, the various BSDs, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, IRIX, Mac OS X,^[30][31] etc.), DOS, Microsoft Windows^[32][33][34] and OpenVMS. Unix systems, both free and proprietary, frequently provide Emacs bundled with the operating system.

Emacs runs both on text terminals and in graphical user interface (GUI) environments. On Unix-like operating systems, Emacs uses the X Window System to produce its GUI, either directly or using a "widget toolkit" such as Motif, LessTif, or GTK+. Emacs can also use the native graphical systems of Mac OS X (using the Carbon or Cocoa interfaces) and Microsoft Windows. The graphical interface provides menubars, toolbars, scrollbars, and context menus.

Editing modes[link]

Emacs adapts its behavior to the types of text it edits by entering add-on modes called "major modes". Defined major modes exist for ordinary text files, for source code of many programming languages, for HTML documents, for TeX and LaTeX documents, and for many other types of text. Each major mode involves an Emacs Lisp program that extends the editor to behave more conveniently for the particular type of text it covers. Typical major modes will provide some or all of the following common features:

• Syntax highlighting (called "font lock" in Emacs): using different "faces" (font/color combinations)^[35] to display keywords, comments, and so forth.
• Automatic indentation: maintaining consistent formatting within a file.
• "Electric" features, i.e. the automatic insertion of elements such as spaces, newlines, and parentheses which the structure of the document requires.
• Special editing commands: for example, major modes for programming languages usually define commands to jump to the beginning and the end of a function, while major modes for markup languages such as XML provide commands to validate documents or to insert closing tags.

Programmers can add extra customized features by using "minor modes". While an Emacs editing buffer can use only one major mode at a time, multiple minor modes can operate simultaneously. These may affect documents directly. For example, the major mode for the C programming language defines a different minor mode for each of the popular indent styles. Or minor modes may affect the editing environment instead. For example, "Winner mode" adds the ability to undo changes to the window configuration, while "MMM-mode" adds the ability to use more than one major mode in a single file, as required in common cases such as editing an HTML document with embedded CSS and JavaScript.

The SLIME major mode extends Emacs into a development environment for Common Lisp. With SLIME the Emacs editor communicates with a (possibly remote) Common Lisp system over a special communication protocol and provides tools like a read–eval–print loop, a data inspector and a debugger.

Self-documenting[link]

The first Emacs included an innovative help library that can display the documentation for every single command, variable, and internal function. Because of this, Emacs-proponents described the tools as "self-documenting" in that it presents its own documentation, not only of its normal features but also of its current state, to the user. For example, the user can find out about the command bound to a particular keystroke simply by entering C-h k (which runs the command describe-key), followed by the keystroke. Each function includes a documentation string, specifically to be used for showing to the user on request. The practice of giving functions documentation strings subsequently spread to various programming languages such as Lisp and Java. Through Emacs's help system, users can be taken to the actual code for each function, whether a built-in library or an installed third-party library.

Emacs also has a built-in tutorial. When Emacs starts with no file to edit, it displays instructions for performing simple editing commands and invoking the tutorial.

Manuals[link]

Apart from the built-in documentation, Emacs has an unusually long and detailed manual. An electronic copy of the GNU Emacs Manual, written by Richard Stallman, comes bundled with GNU Emacs and can be viewed with the built-in Info browser. Two other manuals, the Emacs Lisp Reference Manual by Bil Lewis, Richard Stallman, and Dan Laliberte, and An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp by Robert Chassell, are also included. Apart from the electronic versions, all three manuals are also available in book form, published by the Free Software Foundation. XEmacs has a similar manual to the GNU Emacs Manual, which forked from the GNU Emacs Manual at the same time as the XEmacs software.

Internationalization[link]

Emacs supports the editing of text written in many human languages. It has support for many alphabets, scripts, writing systems, and cultural conventions. Emacs provides spell-checking for many languages by calling external programs such as ispell. Many encoding systems, including UTF-8, are supported. In Emacs 22 Unicode support is fairly advanced; however, it uses Emacs-specific encoding internally,^[36] necessitating conversion upon load and save. The internal encoding used by XEmacs is similar but differs in details.^[37]

In Emacs 23, UTF-8 has become the Emacs-internal encoding. As for writing direction however, only left-to-right writing is supported. In the forthcoming version, Emacs 24, right-to-left writing will be supported.^[38]

The Emacs user interface originated in English, and has not been translated into any other language, with the exception of the beginners' tutorial.

Visually impaired and blind users can use a subsystem called Emacspeak which allows the editor to be used through audio feedback only.

Using Emacs[link]

Commands[link]

In the normal editing mode, Emacs behaves like other text editors: the character keys (a, b, c, 1, 2, 3, etc.) insert the corresponding characters, the arrow keys move the editing point, backspace deletes text, and so forth. Users invoke other commands with modified keystrokes: pressing the control key and/or the meta key/alt key/Escape key in conjunction with a regular key. Every editing command is actually an invocation of a function in the Emacs Lisp environment. Even a command as simple as typing a to insert the character a involves calling a function: in this case, self-insert-command.

Alternatively, users preferring IBM Common User Access style keys can use "cua-mode". This has been a third-party package up to, and including, GNU Emacs 21, but is included in GNU Emacs from version 22 onward.

The commands save-buffer and save-buffers-kill-emacs use multiple modified keystrokes. For example, C-x C-c means: while holding down the control key, press x; then, while holding down the control key, press c.

Some Emacs commands work by invoking an external program (such as ispell for spell-checking or gcc for program compilation), parsing the program's output, and displaying the result in Emacs.

Minibuffer[link]

Emacs uses the minibuffer (normally the bottommost line) to request information. Text to target in a search, the name of a file to read or save and similar information is entered in the minibuffer. When applicable, command line completion is usually available using the tab and space keys.

File management and display[link]

Emacs keeps text in objects called buffers. The user can create new buffers and dismiss unwanted ones, and several buffers can exist at the same time. Most buffers contain text loaded from text files, which the user can edit and save back to disk. Buffers also serve to store temporary text, such as the documentation strings displayed by the help library.

In both text-terminal and graphical modes, Emacs can split the editing area into separate sections (referred to since 1975 as "windows", which can be confusing on systems that have another concept of "windows" as well), so that more than one buffer, or several parts of a buffer, can be displayed at a time. This has many uses. For example, one section can be used to display the source code of a program, while another displays the results from compiling the program. In graphical environments, Emacs can also launch multiple graphical-environment windows, known as "frames" in the context of Emacs.

Emacs pinky[link]

Many heavy Emacs users have experienced repetitive strain injury pain in their pinky fingers,^[39] dubbed the Emacs pinky, because of Emacs' strong dependence on Control and Meta keys, and in particular because many keyboard-users press control keys with the little finger (pinky), due to today's common IBM PC keyboard layout.

There are software-side and hardware attempts to mitigate this problem. Software-side methods are:^[40]

• Swapping the position of Control key.^[41] Although not limited to Emacs, many users transpose the left Control key and the left Caps-lock key. Some define the Caps-lock as Control keys as well, or transpose the Control and Meta keys.
• Viper-mode, a feature built into Emacs that allows the use of the vi keys for basic text editing and the Emacs keys for more advanced features.^[42]
• StickyKeys as a means to turn key combinations into key sequences.^[43]
• "Dual role" modifier keys. For example, using the Space bar both as the space and the control, where a simple press of the space bar is a space, but when it's pressed with other keys, it works as the control. With keyboards with enough keys around the space bar, Japanese keyboards for example, both Meta and Ctrl (and Shift or whichever) can be pressed with thumbs.^[44]

Hardware side solutions are special keyboards such as Kinesis's Contoured Keyboard, which reduces the strain by moving the modifier keys so that they are in a position to be easily pushed by the thumb, or the Microsoft Natural keyboard, which has large modifier keys placed symmetrically on both sides of the keyboard so that they can be pressed with the palm.^[39] Foot pedals can also be used.

Historically, the "Emacs pinky" problem didn't exist; the Space-cadet keyboard on which Emacs was originally developed had the Control keys adjacent to the space bar, making them easy to hit with the thumb, and both the Control keys and the dedicated Meta key were larger than the regular keys.

Vi advocates often cite Emacs pinky as a reason to switch to vi—even though vi users often transpose Caps Lock with their mode change key for similar reasons^[45].

See also[link]

Free software portal

	Book: Editor war
Wikipedia books are collections of articles that can be downloaded or ordered in print.

• Comparison of text editors
• Conkeror
• GNU TeXmacs
• List of text editors
• List of Unix programs

Notes[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Emacs

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Emacs

• Official website
• Reviewed entry in the Free Software Directory.
• EmacsWiki
• List of Emacs implementations
• Emacs stuff comparison

v t e Emacs GNU Emacs and derivatives GNU Emacs XEmacs SXEmacs Aquamacs Other Emacs implementations Climacs Epsilon Freemacs EINE Gosling Emacs Mocklisp Hemlock JOVE mg MicroEMACS Multics Emacs GNU TeXmacs vile Zile Zmacs ZWEI Emacs modes AUCTEX Dired Dunnet Emacs Speaks Statistics Emacspeak ERC Gnus org-mode Planner rcirc RefTeX SLIME Emacs/W3 w3m wanderlust Emacs internals Emacs Lisp Apel Leim MULE Other Conkeror Dissociated press Editor war Emacs on Wikimedia Commons Emacs on Wikiquotes

v t e GNU Project History GNU Manifesto Free Software Foundation Europe India Latin America History of free software Licenses GNU General Public License GNU Lesser General Public License Affero General Public License GNU Free Documentation License GPL linking exception Software GNU (variants) Hurd GNOME Bash GCC GNU Emacs glibc Coreutils Build system GNUnet Gnuzilla (IceCat) Gnash more... Public speakers Alexandre Oliva Benjamin Mako Hill Bradley M. Kuhn Eben Moglen Federico Heinz Georg C. F. Greve Loïc Dachary Ricardo Galli Richard Stallman Robert J. Chassell John Sullivan Other topics GNU/Linux naming controversy Revolution OS BadVista Defective by Design

Richard Matthew Stallman
Richard Stallman at the University of Pittsburgh 2010
Born	(1953-03-16) March 16, 1953 (age 59) New York City, New York, United States
Nationality	American
Other names	rms, St. iGNUcius (avatar)
Alma mater	Harvard University Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Occupation	President of the Free Software Foundation
Known for	Free software movement, GNU, Emacs
Website
www.stallman.org

Richard Matthew Stallman (born 16 March 1953), often shortened to rms,^[1] is an American software freedom activist and computer programmer. In September 1983, he launched the GNU Project^[2] to create a free Unix-like operating system, and he has been the project's lead architect and organizer. With the launch of the GNU Project, he initiated the free software movement; in October 1985^[3] he founded the Free Software Foundation.

Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft, and he is the main author of several copyleft licenses including the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license.^[4] Since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time advocating for free software, as well as campaigning against software patents, digital rights management, and what he sees as excessive extension of copyright laws. Stallman has also developed a number of pieces of widely used software, including the original Emacs,^[5] the GNU Compiler Collection,^[6] the GNU Debugger,^[7] and various tools in the GNU coreutils.^[8] He co-founded the League for Programming Freedom in 1989.

Early years[link]

Stallman was born to Daniel Stallman and Alice Lippman,^[9] in 1953 in New York City. His first experience with computers was at the IBM New York Scientific Center when he was in high school. He was hired for the summer to write a numerical analysis program in Fortran. He completed the task after a couple of weeks and spent the rest of the summer writing a text editor in APL.^[10] Stallman spent the summer after his high-school graduation writing another program, a preprocessor for the PL/I programming language on the IBM System/360.^{[citation needed]}

During this time, Stallman was also a volunteer laboratory assistant in the biology department at Rockefeller University. Although he was already moving toward a career in mathematics or physics, his teaching professor at Rockefeller thought he would have a future as a biologist.^[11]

As a first-year student at Harvard University, Stallman was known for his strong performance in Math 55.^{[citation needed]} In 1971 he became a programmer at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and became a regular in the hacker community, where he was usually known by his initials, rms (which was the name of his computer accounts). In the first edition of the Hacker's Dictionary, he wrote "'Richard Stallman' is just my mundane name; you can call me 'rms'."^[1] Stallman graduated from Harvard magna cum laude earning a BA in Physics in 1974.^[12]

Stallman enrolled as a graduate student at MIT, but then ended his pursuit of a doctorate in physics to focus on his programming at the MIT AI Laboratory.

While a graduate student at MIT, Stallman published a paper with Gerald Jay Sussman on an AI truth maintenance system, called dependency-directed backtracking.^[13] This paper was an early work on the problem of intelligent backtracking in constraint satisfaction problems. As of 2003, the technique Stallman and Sussman introduced is still the most general and powerful form of intelligent backtracking.^[14] The technique of constraint recording, wherein partial results of a search are recorded for later reuse, was also introduced in this paper.^[14]

As a hacker in MIT's AI laboratory, Stallman worked on software projects like TECO, Emacs, and the Lisp machine Operating System. He would become an ardent critic of restricted computer access in the lab, which at that time was funded primarily by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. When MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) installed a password control system in 1977, Stallman found a way to decrypt the passwords and sent users messages containing their decoded password, with a suggestion to change it to the empty string (that is, no password) instead, to re-enable anonymous access to the systems. Around 20% of the users followed his advice at the time, although passwords ultimately prevailed. Stallman boasted of the success of his campaign for many years afterward.^[15]

Decline of MIT's hacker culture[link]

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the hacker culture that Stallman thrived on began to fragment. To prevent software from being used on their competitors' computers, most manufacturers stopped distributing source code and began using copyright and restrictive software licenses to limit or prohibit copying and redistribution. Such proprietary software had existed before, and it became apparent that it would become the norm. This shift in the legal characteristics of software can be regarded as a consequence triggered by the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, as stated by Stallman's MIT fellow Brewster Kahle.^[16]

When Brian Reid in 1979 placed time bombs in the Scribe markup language and word processing system to restrict unlicensed access to the software, Stallman proclaimed it "a crime against humanity."^[17] He clarified, years later, that it is blocking the user's freedom that he believes is a crime, not the issue of charging for the software.^[18]

In 1980, Stallman and some other hackers at the AI Lab were refused access to the source code for the software of a newly-installed laser printer, the Xerox 9700. Stallman had modified the software for the Lab's previous laser printer (the XGP, Xerographic Printer), so it electronically messaged a user when the person's job was printed, and would message all logged-in users waiting for print jobs if the printer was jammed. Not being able to add these features to the new printer was a major inconvenience, as the printer was on a different floor from most of the users. This experience convinced Stallman of people's need to be free to modify the software they use.^[19]

Richard Greenblatt, a fellow AI Lab hacker, founded Lisp Machines, Inc. (LMI) to market Lisp machines, which he and Tom Knight designed at the lab. Greenblatt rejected outside investment, believing that the proceeds from the construction and sale of a few machines could be profitably reinvested in the growth of the company. In contrast, the other hackers felt that the venture capital-funded approach was better. As no agreement could be reached, hackers from the latter camp founded Symbolics, with the aid of Russ Noftsker, an AI Lab administrator. Symbolics recruited most of the remaining hackers including notable hacker Bill Gosper, who then left the AI Lab. Symbolics forced Greenblatt to also resign by citing MIT policies. While both companies delivered proprietary software, Stallman believed that LMI, unlike Symbolics, had tried to avoid hurting the lab's community. For two years, from 1982 to the end of 1983, Stallman worked by himself to clone the output of the Symbolics programmers, with the aim of preventing them from gaining a monopoly on the lab's computers.^[20]

Stallman argues that software users should have the freedom to share with their neighbor and to be able to study and make changes to the software that they use. He maintains that attempts by proprietary software vendors to prohibit these acts are antisocial and unethical.^[21] The phrase "software wants to be free" is often incorrectly attributed to him, and Stallman argues that this is a misstatement of his philosophy.^[22] He argues that freedom is vital for the sake of users and society as a moral value, and not merely for pragmatic reasons such as possibly developing technically superior software.

In February 1984, Stallman quit his job at MIT to work full-time on the GNU project, which he had announced in September 1983.

GNU project[link]

Richard Stallman in 2003 at the opening ceremony of NIXAL (a GLUG) at Netaji Subhash Engineering College, Calcutta, India

Stallman announced the plan for the GNU operating system in September 1983 on several ARPANET mailing lists and USENET.^[23]

In 1985, Stallman published the GNU Manifesto, which outlined his motivation for creating a free operating system called GNU, which would be compatible with Unix. The name GNU is a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not Unix." Soon after, he started a non-profit corporation called the Free Software Foundation to employ free software programmers and provide a legal infrastructure for the free software movement. Stallman is the nonsalaried president of the FSF, which is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded in Massachusetts.^[24] Stallman popularized the concept of copyleft, a legal mechanism to protect the modification and redistribution rights for free software. It was first implemented in the GNU Emacs General Public License, and in 1989 the first program-independent GNU General Public License (GPL) was released. By then, much of the GNU system had been completed. Stallman was responsible for contributing many necessary tools, including a text editor (Emacs), compiler (GCC), debugger (gdb), and a build automator (gmake). The notable exception was a kernel. In 1990, members of the GNU project began a kernel called GNU Hurd, which has yet to achieve the maturity level required for widespread usage.

In 1991, Linus Torvalds, a Finnish student, used the GNU development tools to produce the Linux kernel. The existing programs from the GNU project were readily ported to run on the resultant platform; most sources use the name Linux to refer to the general-purpose operating system thus formed. This has been a longstanding naming controversy in the free software community. Stallman argues that not using GNU in the name of the operating system unfairly disparages the value of the GNU project and harms the sustainability of the free software movement by breaking the link between the software and the free software philosophy of the GNU project.

Cover picture for O'Reilly Media's book Free as in Freedom

Stallman's influences on hacker culture include the name POSIX^[25] and the Emacs editor. On UNIX systems, GNU Emacs's popularity rivaled that of another editor vi, spawning an editor war. Stallman's take on this was to canonize himself as St. IGNUcius of the Church of Emacs^[26][27] and acknowledge that "vi vi vi is the editor of the beast," while "using a free version of vi is not a sin; it is a penance".^[28]

Around 1992, developers at Lucid Inc. doing their own work on Emacs clashed with Stallman and ultimately forked the software into what would become XEmacs.^[29] Technology journalist Andrew Leonard has characterized what he sees as Stallman's uncompromising stubbornness as common among elite computer programmers:

There's something comforting about Stallman's intransigence. Win or lose, Stallman will never give up. He'll be the stubbornest mule on the farm until the day he dies. Call it fixity of purpose, or just plain cussedness, his single-minded commitment and brutal honesty are refreshing in a world of spin-meisters and multimillion-dollar marketing campaigns.

—Andrew Leonard, Salon.com^[30]

Activism[link]

Richard Stallman giving a speech on "Free Software and your freedom" at the biennale du design of Saint Etienne (2008)

Stallman has written many essays on software freedom and since the early 1990s has been an outspoken political campaigner for the free software movement. The speeches he has regularly given are titled The GNU project and the Free Software movement,^[31] The Dangers of Software Patents,^[32] and Copyright and Community in the age of computer networks.^[33] In 2006 and 2007, during the eighteen month public consultation for the drafting of version 3 of the GNU General Public License, he added a fourth topic explaining the proposed changes.^[34]

Linus Torvalds has criticized Stallman for what he considers "black-and-white thinking" and bringing more harm than good to the free software community.^[35]

Stallman's staunch advocacy for free software inspired the Virtual Richard M. Stallman (vrms), software that analyzes the packages currently installed on a Debian GNU/Linux system, and report those that are from the non-free tree.^[36] Stallman would disagree with parts of Debian's definition of free software.^[37]

In 1999, Stallman called for development of a free on-line encyclopedia through the means of inviting the public to contribute articles.^[38] The resulting GNUPedia was eventually retired in favour of the emerging Wikipedia, which had similar aims and was enjoying greater success.^[39]

In Venezuela, Stallman has delivered public speeches and promoted the adoption of free software in the state's oil company (PDVSA), in municipal government, and in the nation's military. In meetings with Chávez and in public speeches, Stallman criticised some policies on television broadcasting, free speech rights, and privacy.^[40][41] Stallman was on the Advisory Council of Latin American television station teleSUR from its launch^[42] but resigned in February 2011, criticizing pro-Gaddafi propaganda during the 2011 North Africa uprisings.^[43]

In August 2006 at his meetings with the government of the Indian State of Kerala, he persuaded officials to discard proprietary software, such as Microsoft's, at state-run schools. This has resulted in a landmark decision to switch all school computers in 12,500 high schools from Windows to a free software operating system.^[44]

After personal meetings, Stallman has obtained positive statements about the free software movement from the then-President of India, Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam,^[45] French 2007 presidential candidate Ségolène Royal,^[46] and the president of Ecuador Rafael Correa.^[47]

Richard Stallman giving a speech at WSIS-2005

Stallman has participated in protests about software patents,^[48] DRM,^[49][50] and proprietary software.

Protesting against proprietary software in April 2006, Stallman held a "Don't buy from ATI, enemy of your freedom" placard at a speech by an ATI representative in the building where Stallman works, resulting in the police being called.^[51] ATI has since merged with AMD Corporation and has taken steps to make their hardware documentation available for use by the free software community.^[52]

Stallman has also helped and supported the International Music Score Library Project in getting back online, after it had been taken down on October 19, 2007 following a cease and desist letter from Universal Edition.^[53]

After the death of Steve Jobs, Stallman wrote the following eulogy:

Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.

As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die — not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.

Richard Stallman using his Lemote machine at Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai before his lecture on 'Free Software, Freedom and Education' organized by Free Software Foundation, Tamil Nadu (FSFTN).

Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective.

—Richard Stallman^[54]

Stallman's remark stirred up accusations of being in bad taste, while Eric S. Raymond, author of Cathedral and the Bazaar, summarized that Stallman's statement was not personal, but was simply criticizing walled gardens.^[55]

Stallman's only computer is a Lemote Yeeloong netbook (using the same company's Loongson processor) which he chose because it can run with 100% free software even at the BIOS level, stating "freedom is my priority. I've campaigned for freedom since 1983, and I am not going to surrender that freedom for the sake of a more convenient computer."^[56] Lemote is a joint venture of the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, an institution of the State Council of China.

Stallman has suggested that the United States government may encourage^[57][58] the use of software as a service because this would allow them to access users' data without needing a search warrant.^[59][60][61]

Terminology[link]

Richard Stallman gets into his St. iGNUcius avatar at Techniche, IIT Guwahati, India

Stallman places great importance on the words and labels people use to talk about the world, including the relationship between software and freedom. He untiringly asks people to say free software and GNU/Linux, and to avoid the terms intellectual property and piracy (in relation to copyright). His requests that people use certain terms, and his ongoing efforts to convince people of the importance of terminology are a source of regular misunderstanding and friction with parts of the free software and open source communities.

One of his criteria for giving an interview to a journalist is that the journalist agree to use his terminology throughout the article.^[62] Sometimes he has even required journalists to read parts of the GNU philosophy before an interview, for "efficiency's sake".^{[citation needed]} He has been known to turn down speaking requests over some terminology issues.^[63]

Stallman rejects a common alternative term, open source software, because it does not call to mind what Stallman sees as the value of the software: freedom.^[64] Thus it will not inform people of the freedom issues, and will not lead to people valuing and defending their freedom.^[65] Two alternatives which Stallman does accept are software libre and unfettered software, but free software is the term he asks people to use in English. For similar reasons, he argues for the term "proprietary software" rather than "closed source software", when referring to software that is not free software.

Stallman repeatedly asks that the term GNU/Linux, which he pronounces "GNU slash Linux", be used to refer to the operating system created by combining the GNU system and the Linux kernel. Stallman refers to this operating system as "a variant of GNU, and the GNU Project is its principal developer."^[63] He claims that the connection between the GNU project's philosophy and its software is broken when people refer to the combination as merely Linux.^[66] Starting around 2003, he began also using the term GNU+Linux, which he pronounces "GNU plus Linux", to prevent others from pronouncing the phrase "GNU/Linux" as "GNU Linux", which would erroneously imply that the Linux kernel is maintained by the GNU project. (See: GNU/Linux naming controversy)

Stallman argues that the term intellectual property is designed to confuse people, and is used to prevent intelligent discussion on the specifics of copyright, patent, trademark and other laws by lumping together areas of law that are more dissimilar than similar.^[67] He also argues that by referring to these laws as property laws, the term biases the discussion when thinking about how to treat these issues.

These laws originated separately, evolved differently, cover different activities, have different rules, and raise different public policy issues. Copyright law was designed to promote authorship and art, and covers the details of a work of authorship or art. Patent law was intended to encourage publication of ideas, at the price of finite monopolies over these ideas — a price that may be worth paying in some fields and not in others. Trademark law was not intended to promote any business activity, but simply to enable buyers to know what they are buying.^[68]

An example of cautioning others to avoid other terminology while also offering suggestions for possible alternatives, is this sentence of an email by Stallman to a public mailing list:

I think it is ok for authors (please let's not call them creators, they are not gods) to ask for money for copies of their works (please let's not devalue these works by calling them content) in order to gain income (the term compensation falsely implies it is a matter of making up for some kind of damages).^[69]

Personal life[link]

Stallman has devoted the bulk of his life’s energies to political and software activism.^[70] Professing to care little for material wealth, he explains that "I've always lived cheaply ... like a student, basically. And I like that, because it means that money is not telling me what to do."^[71]

Until around 1998, his office at MIT's AI Lab was also his residence.^[72] He was registered to vote from there. Nowadays he has a separate residence in Cambridge not far from MIT.^[73] His position as a research affiliate at MIT is unpaid.^[74]

In a footnote to an article he wrote in 1999, he says "As an atheist, I don't follow any religious leaders, but I sometimes find I admire something one of them has said."^[21] Stallman often wears a button that reads "Impeach God".^[75][76]

Stallman chooses not to celebrate Christmas, instead celebrating "Grav-mass" on December 25. The name and date are references to Isaac Newton, whose birthday falls on that day on the old style calendar.^[77]

When asked about his influences, he replied that he admires Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, Ralph Nader, and Dennis Kucinich, and commented as well: "I admire Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, even though I criticize some of the things that they did."^[78] Stallman is a Green Party supporter,^[1] and a supporter of the National Initiative proposal.^[79]

Stallman recommends not owning a mobile phone,^[80] as he believes the tracking of cell phones creates harmful privacy issues.^[81] Also, Stallman avoids use of a key card to enter the building where his office is.^[82] Such a system would track doors entered and times. For personal reasons, he generally does not actively browse the web from his computer; rather, he uses wget and reads the fetched pages from his e-mail mailbox, claiming to limit direct access via browsers to a few sites such as his own or those related to his work with GNU and the FSF.^[83][84]

In a lecture in Manchester, England on May 1, 2008, Stallman advocated paper voting over machine voting, insisting that there was a much better chance of being able to do a recount correctly if there was a paper copy of the ballots.^[85]

Stallman enjoys a wide range of musical styles from the works of Conlon Nancarrow^[86] to folk;^[87] the Free Software Song takes the form of alternative words for the Bulgarian folk dance Sadi Moma. More recently he wrote a take-off on the Cuban folk song Guantanamera, about a prisoner in the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, and recorded it in Cuba with Cuban musicians.^[88] He also enjoys music by Béla Fleck and the Flecktones and Weird Al Yankovic.^[89]

Stallman is a fan of science fiction, including works by the author Greg Egan.^[90] He occasionally goes to science fiction conventions^[28] and wrote the Free Software Song while awaiting his turn to sing at a convention. He has written two science fiction stories, "The Right to Read" and "Jinnetic Engineering".

Along with his native English, Stallman is also fluent enough in French and Spanish to deliver his two-hour speeches in those languages, and claims a "somewhat flawed" command of Indonesian.^[91][92]

Honors and awards[link]

Stallman receiving an Honorary doctorate from National University of Córdoba, Argentina.

Stallman has received the following recognition for his work:

• 1986: Honorary lifetime membership of the Chalmers University of Technology Computer Society^[93]
• 1990: Exceptional merit award MacArthur Fellowship ("genius grant")^[94]
• 1990: The Association for Computing Machinery's Grace Murray Hopper Award "For pioneering work in the development of the extensible editor EMACS (Editing Macros)."^[95]
• 1996: Honorary doctorate from Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology^[96]
• 1998: Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer award^[97]
• 1999: Yuri Rubinsky Memorial Award^[98]
• 2001: The Takeda Techno-Entrepreneurship Award for Social/Economic Well-Being (武田研究奨励賞)^[99]
• 2001: Honorary doctorate, from the University of Glasgow^[100]
• 2002: United States National Academy of Engineering membership^[101]
• 2003: Honorary doctorate, from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel^[102]
• 2004: Honorary doctorate, from the Universidad Nacional de Salta.^[103]
• 2004: Honorary professorship, from the Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería del Perú.^[104]
• 2007: Honorary professorship, from the Universidad Inca Garcilaso de la Vega.^[105]
• 2007: First Premio Internacional Extremadura al Conocimiento Libre^[106]
• 2007: Honorary doctorate, from the Universidad de Los Angeles de Chimbote.^{[citation needed]}
• 2007: Honorary doctorate, from the University of Pavia^[107]
• 2008: Honorary doctorate from the Universidad Nacional de Trujillo, in Peru^{[citation needed]}
• 2009: Honorary doctorate, from Lakehead University^[108][109]
• 2011: Honorary doctorate, from National University of Córdoba.^[110]