XEmacs

XEmacs (formerly Lucid Emacs) and is an open source, completely free, extensible and powerful text editor, as well as an application development system that gets its roots from the powerful and well known GNU Emacs software.

A GUI front-end for GNU Emacs

As a matter of fact, XEmacs is a GUI front-end for GNU Emacs. The software is engineered in such a way that it provides an open software development model, accessible to users via a modern graphical user interface (GUI).

Being backed by powerful organizations, such as Sun Microsystems, ETL/Electrotechnical Laboratory, University of Illinois, Amdahl Corporation, BeOpen, Lucid and others, XEmacs is a cross-platform application that supports all GNU/Linux distributions, Microsoft Windows, and other UNIX-like operating systems.

However, its graphical user interface (GUI) has a design from 10 years ago, making XEmacs the number one choice of nostalgic users. You will have to click each menu item separately to activate it.

Getting started with XEmacs

Using the XEmacs software on your GNU/Linux operating system is easy, but first you will have to install it. The project is distributed only as a source package, which needs to be compiled and installed manually. As an alternative, you can install it from the main software repositories of your distribution.

If you decided to install XEmacs using the source package, which is distributed for free on Softoware, download it and save it on your Home directory. Then, use an archive manager utility to extract its contents, open the Terminal app and go to the location where you’ve extracted the archive file (e.g. cd /home/softoware/xemacs-21.4.22).

Run the ‘./configure && make’ command to configure and compile the program. After a successful compilation process, run the ‘sudo make install’ command to install XEmacs system wide. Open it from the Programming section of your Start Menu (it is called XEmacs Text Editor).

What is new in this release:

• Fix: Compile fixes for GTK+
• Fix: Fix printing on non-mswindows systems. (See http://tracker.xemacs.org/XEmacs/its/issue124).
• Fix: Fix at_dot regex matching.
• Fix: Fix off-by-one error in mule-ccl.
• Fix: Move operator definitions to autoload-operators.el and use them.
• This patch restores the building of packages in XEmacs 21.4.
• Fix: Increase connection retries in winclient.c.
• Fix: Fix compilation under Cygwin 1.7.
• Update: Update Vin Shelton's bio.
• Feature: Support Intel C compiler under Windows.

What is new in version 21.4.22 / 21.5.34 Beta:

• Fix: Compile fixes for GTK+
• Fix: Fix printing on non-mswindows systems. (See http://tracker.xemacs.org/XEmacs/its/issue124).
• Fix: Fix at_dot regex matching.
• Fix: Fix off-by-one error in mule-ccl.
• Fix: Move operator definitions to autoload-operators.el and use them.
• This patch restores the building of packages in XEmacs 21.4.
• Fix: Increase connection retries in winclient.c.
• Fix: Fix compilation under Cygwin 1.7.
• Update: Update Vin Shelton's bio.
• Feature: Support Intel C compiler under Windows.

What is new in version 21.5.33 Beta:

• The successor to XEmacs 21.5.32 "habanero", "horseradish" adds a few minor fixes and improvements. The Help menu has been reorganized, and there have been a number of syncs to GNU Emacs which are mostly useful for supporting syncs of specific packages. The most generally useful improvement is probably new support for the [remap] syntax in `define-key'.

What is new in version 21.5.28:

• This release provides InnoSetup kits for the Windows platform, making it trivial to install the stable release, the beta release, and a gnuclient kit.