GNU Emacs is a text editor and suite of free software tools. Its development began in 1984 by GNU Project founder Richard Stallman , based on the Emacs editor developed for Unix operating systems. GNU Emacs has been a central component of the GNU project and a flagship project of the free software movement.
126-479: The program's tagline is "the extensible self-documenting text editor." Most functionality in GNU Emacs is implemented in user-accessible Emacs Lisp , allowing deep extensibility directly by users and through community-contributed packages. Its built-in features include a file browser and editor ( Dired ), an advanced calculator (Calc), an email client and news reader ( Gnus ), a Language Server Protocol integration, and
252-517: A compiler which can translate Emacs Lisp source files into a special representation termed bytecode . Emacs Lisp bytecode files have the filename suffix " .elc ". Compared to source files, bytecode files load and run faster, occupy less disk space, and use less memory when loaded. Bytecode still runs more slowly than primitives, but functions loaded as bytecode can be easily modified and re-loaded. In addition, bytecode files are platform-independent. The standard Emacs Lisp code distributed with Emacs
378-524: A dialog box . Some of these notifications are displayed briefly in the minibuffer, and GNU Emacs provides a *Messages* buffer that keeps a history of the most recent notifications of this type. When the minibuffer is used for output from Emacs, it is called the "echo area". Longer notifications are displayed in buffers of their own. The maximum length of messages that will be displayed in the minibuffer is, of course, configurable. Buffers can also serve as input and output areas for an external process such as
504-438: A free software replacement to the proprietary Gosling Emacs . GNU Emacs was initially based on Gosling Emacs, but Stallman's replacement of its Mocklisp interpreter with a true Lisp interpreter required that nearly all of its code be rewritten. This became the first program released by the then-nascent GNU Project. GNU Emacs is written in C and provides Emacs Lisp , also implemented in C, as an extension language. Version 13,
630-410: A shell or REPL . Buffers which Emacs creates on its own are typically named with asterisks on each end, to distinguish from user buffers. The list of open buffers is itself displayed in this type of buffer. Most Emacs key sequences remain functional in any buffer. For example, the standard Ctrl-s isearch function can be used to search filenames in dired buffers, and the file list can be saved to
756-415: A status bar called the "mode line" displayed by default at the bottom edge of the window. Emacs windows are available both in text-terminal and graphical modes and allow more than one buffer, or several parts of a buffer, to be displayed at once. Common applications are to display a dired buffer along with the contents of files in the current directory (there are special modes to make the file buffer follow
882-485: A NEWS file distributed with Emacs. Changes brought about by downgrading to the previous release are listed in an "Antinews" file, often with some snarky commentary on why this might be desirable. Emacs Lisp Emacs Lisp is a Lisp dialect made for Emacs . It is used for implementing most of the editing functionality built into Emacs, the remainder being written in C , as is the Lisp interpreter . Emacs Lisp code
1008-520: A direct approach to the infringing party in order to settle the dispute out of court. "... by 1978, the scope was expanded to apply to any 'expression' that has been 'fixed' in any medium, this protection granted automatically whether the maker wants it or not, no registration required." With older technology like paintings, books, phonographs, and film, it is generally not feasible for consumers to make copies on their own, so producers can simply require payment when transferring physical possession of
1134-510: A dramatic increase in the demand for reading matter. Prices of reprints were low, so publications could be bought by poorer people, creating a mass audience. In German-language markets before the advent of copyright, technical materials, like popular fiction, were inexpensive and widely available; it has been suggested this contributed to Germany's industrial and economic success. The concept of copyright first developed in England . In reaction to
1260-749: A fixed period, after which the copyright expired. It was "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or the Purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned." The act also alluded to individual rights of the artist. It began, "Whereas Printers, Booksellers, and other Persons, have of late frequently taken the Liberty of Printing ... Books, and other Writings, without
1386-497: A header along with its implementation file for C-based languages. In addition, there is follow-mode , a minor mode that chains windows to display non-overlapping portions of a buffer. Using follow-mode , a single file can be displayed in multiple side-by-side windows that update appropriately when scrolled. In addition, Emacs supports "narrowing" a buffer to display only a portion of a file, with top/bottom of buffer navigation functionality and buffer size calculations reflecting only
SECTION 10
#17328454256401512-425: A major mode (either for a new file type or to build a non-text-editing user interface); others define only commands or minor modes, or provide functions that enhance another extension. Since version 24 GNU Emacs includes a built-in package manager accessible with the list-packages command that allows users to search for and install packages. Historically, packages were downloaded manually, often distributed through
1638-482: A nation that has domestic copyright laws or adheres to a bilateral treaty or established international convention such as the Berne Convention or WIPO Copyright Treaty . Improper use of materials outside of legislation is deemed "unauthorized edition", not copyright infringement. Statistics regarding the effects of copyright infringement are difficult to determine. Studies have attempted to determine whether there
1764-474: A package that originally was a third-party add-on but has been included in GNU Emacs since version 22. Emacs uses the "minibuffer," normally the bottommost line, to display messages and request information, functions that are often performed by dialog boxes in GUI editors. The minibuffer holds information such as text to target in a search or the name of a file to read or save. When applicable, command-line completion
1890-417: A product of an individual, with attendant rights. The most significant point is that patent and copyright laws support the expansion of the range of creative human activities that can be commodified. This parallels the ways in which capitalism led to the commodification of many aspects of social life that earlier had no monetary or economic value per se. Copyright has developed into a concept that has
2016-490: A public development mailing list and anonymous CVS access. Development took place in a single CVS trunk until 2008, and today uses the Git DVCS . Richard Stallman has remained the principal maintainer of GNU Emacs, but he has stepped back from the role at times. Stefan Monnier and Chong Yidong have overseen maintenance since 2008. On September 21, 2015 Monnier announced that he would be stepping down as maintainer effective with
2142-577: A regular key produces modified keystrokes that invoke functions from the Emacs Lisp environment. Commands such as save-buffer and save-buffers-kill-emacs combine multiple modified keystrokes. Some GNU Emacs commands work by invoking external programs, such as ispell for spell-checking and the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for program compilation . Emacs also supports "inferior processes," long-lived child processes that interact with
2268-531: A security flaw in GNU Emacs's email subsystem in his 1986 cracking spree, in which he gained superuser access to Unix computers. Although users commonly submitted patches and Elisp code to the net.emacs newsgroup , participation in GNU Emacs development was relatively restricted until 1999, and was used as an example of the "Cathedral" development style in The Cathedral and the Bazaar . The project has since adopted
2394-411: A significant effect on nearly every modern industry, including not just literary work, but also forms of creative work such as sound recordings , films , photographs , software , and architecture . Often seen as the first real copyright law, the 1709 British Statute of Anne gave authors and the publishers to whom they did chose to license their works, the right to publish the author's creations for
2520-412: A single word is insufficient to comprise a copyright work. However, single words or a short string of words can sometimes be registered as a trademark instead. Copyright law recognizes the right of an author based on whether the work actually is an original creation , rather than based on whether it is unique ; two authors may own copyright on two substantially identical works, if it is determined that
2646-456: A special file that only Customize uses, to avoid the possibility of altering the user's own file. Besides being a programming language that can be compiled to bytecode and transcompiled to native code , Emacs Lisp can also function as an interpreted scripting language , much like the Unix Bourne shell or Perl , by calling Emacs in batch mode . In this way it may be called from
SECTION 20
#17328454256402772-518: A tangible medium of expression" to obtain copyright protection. US law requires that the fixation be stable and permanent enough to be "perceived, reproduced or communicated for a period of more than transitory duration". Similarly, Canadian courts consider fixation to require that the work be "expressed to some extent at least in some material form, capable of identification and having a more or less permanent endurance". Note this provision of US law: c) Effect of Berne Convention.—No right or interest in
2898-419: A text file just as any other buffer. Dired buffers can be switched to a writable mode, in which filenames and attributes can be edited textually; when the buffer is saved, the changes are written to the filesystem. This allows multiple files to be renamed using the search and replace features of Emacs. When so equipped, Emacs displays image files in buffers. Emacs is binary safe and 8-bit clean. Emacs can split
3024-435: A time, but multiple minor modes can operate simultaneously. These may operate directly on documents, as in the way the major mode for the C programming language defines a separate minor mode for each of its popular indent styles , or they may alter the editing environment. Examples of the latter include a mode that adds the ability to undo changes to the window configuration and one that performs on-the-fly syntax checking. There
3150-444: A versatile text editor over implementing a general-purpose programming language. For example, Emacs Lisp cannot easily read a file a line at a time—the entire file must be read into an Emacs buffer. However, Emacs Lisp provides many features for navigating and modifying buffer text at a sentence, paragraph, or higher syntactic level as defined by modes. Here follows a simple example of an Emacs extension written in Emacs Lisp. In Emacs,
3276-599: A whole. A right to profit from the work has been the philosophical underpinning for much legislation extending the duration of copyright, to the life of the creator and beyond, to their heirs. Yet scholars like Lawrence Lessig have argued that copyright terms have been extended beyond the scope imagined by the Framers. Lessig refers to the Copyright Clause as the "Progress Clause" to emphasize the social dimension of intellectual property rights. The original length of copyright in
3402-610: A wide range of creative, intellectual, or artistic forms, or "works". Specifics vary by jurisdiction , but these can include poems , theses , fictional characters , plays and other literary works , motion pictures , choreography , musical compositions, sound recordings , paintings , drawings , sculptures , photographs , computer software , radio and television broadcasts , and industrial designs . Graphic designs and industrial designs may have separate or overlapping laws applied to them in some jurisdictions. Copyright does not cover ideas and information themselves, only
3528-528: A work eligible for protection under this title may be claimed by virtue of, or in reliance upon, the provisions of the Berne Convention, or the adherence of the United States thereto. Any rights in a work eligible for protection under this title that derive from this title, other Federal or State statutes, or the common law, shall not be expanded or reduced by virtue of, or in reliance upon, the provisions of
3654-552: A work must meet minimal standards of originality in order to qualify for copyright, and the copyright expires after a set period of time (some jurisdictions may allow this to be extended). Different countries impose different tests, although generally the requirements are low; in the United Kingdom there has to be some "skill, labour, and judgment" that has gone into it. In Australia and the United Kingdom it has been held that
3780-476: Is a monetary loss for industries affected by copyright infringement by predicting what portion of pirated works would have been formally purchased if they had not been freely available. Other reports indicate that copyright infringement does not have an adverse effect on the entertainment industry, and can have a positive effect. In particular, a 2014 university study concluded that free music content, accessed on YouTube , does not necessarily hurt sales, instead has
3906-513: Is also a minor mode that allows multiple major modes to be used in a single file, for convenience when editing a document in which multiple programming languages are embedded. GNU Emacs supports the capability to use it as an interpreter for the Emacs Lisp language without displaying the text editor user interface. In batch mode, user configuration is not loaded and the terminal interrupt characters C-c and C-z will have their usual effect of exiting
GNU Emacs - Misplaced Pages Continue
4032-462: Is an exception, often appearing as " .emacs " despite being evaluated as any Emacs Lisp code. Since the mid-1990s, Emacs also loads ~/.emacs.el and ~/.emacs.d/init.el . Additionally, users may specify any file to load as a config file on the command line, or explicitly state that no config file is to be loaded. When the files are loaded, an interpreter component of the Emacs program reads and parses
4158-411: Is available using the tab and space keys. Emacs keeps text in data structures known as buffers . Buffers may or may not be displayed onscreen, and all buffer features are accessible by both Emacs Lisp programs and the user interface. The user can create new buffers and dismiss unwanted ones, and many buffers can exist at the same time, limited only by available memory. Emacs can be configured to save
4284-1102: Is bundled with GNU Emacs and can be viewed with the built-in info browser. Two additional 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 included. All three manuals are also published in book form by the Free Software Foundation . GNU Emacs has support for many alphabets, scripts, writing systems, and cultural conventions and provides spell-checking for many languages by calling external programs such as ispell . Version 24 added support for bidirectional text and left-to-right and right-to-left writing direction for languages such as Arabic, Persian and Hebrew. Many character encoding systems, including UTF-8 , are supported. GNU Emacs uses UTF-8 for its encoding as of version 23, while prior versions used their own encoding internally and performed conversion upon load and save. The internal encoding used by XEmacs
4410-426: Is generally slower than under lexical scoping. Copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive legal right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work , usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educational, or musical form. Copyright is intended to protect the original expression of an idea in
4536-570: Is implemented by a collection of Emacs code called a package or library . For example, there is a library for highlighting keywords in program source code, and a library for playing the game of Tetris . Each library is implemented using one or more Emacs Lisp source files. Libraries can define one or more major modes to activate and control their function. Emacs developers write certain functions in C. These are primitives , also termed built-in functions or subrs . Although primitives can be called from Lisp code, they can only be modified by editing
4662-415: Is in its use of dynamic rather than lexical scope by default. That is, a function may reference local variables in the scope it is called from, but not in the scope where it was defined. Recently, there has been an ongoing effort to update code to use lexical scoping, for reasons outlined below. The development of Emacs Lisp was guided by the goal of providing data structures and features specific to making
4788-559: Is loaded as bytecode, although the matching source files are usually provided for the user's reference as well. User-supplied extensions are typically not byte-compiled, as they are neither as large nor as computationally intensive. Notably, the "cl-lib" package implements a fairly large subset of Common Lisp . This package replaces an earlier "cl" package, which would overwrite existing Emacs Lisp function definitions with ones more similar to those found in Common Lisp. The "cl-lib" package, on
4914-436: Is most closely related to Maclisp , with some later influence from Common Lisp . It supports imperative and functional programming methods. Lisp was the default extension language for Emacs derivatives such as EINE and ZWEI . When Richard Stallman forked Gosling Emacs into GNU Emacs, he also chose Lisp as the extension language, because of its powerful features, including the ability to treat functions as data. Although
5040-650: Is similar to that of GNU Emacs but differs in details. The GNU Emacs user interface originated in English and, with the exception of the beginners' tutorial, has not been translated into any other language. A subsystem called Emacspeak enables visually impaired and blind users to control the editor through audio feedback. The behavior of GNU Emacs can be modified and extended almost without limit by incorporating Emacs Lisp programs that define new commands, new buffer modes, new keymaps, add command-line options, and so on. Many extensions providing user-facing functionality define
5166-450: Is used to modify, extend and customize Emacs. Those not wanting to write the code themselves the Customize function can be used. It provides a set of preferences pages allowing the user to set options and preview their effect in the running Emacs session. When the user saves their changes, Customize simply writes the necessary Emacs Lisp code to the user's config file , which can be set to
GNU Emacs - Misplaced Pages Continue
5292-595: The Copyright Law in United States , the Copyright Office concluded that many diverse aspects of the current moral rights patchwork – including copyright law's derivative work right, state moral rights statutes, and contract law – are generally working well and should not be changed. Further, the Office concludes that there is no need for the creation of a blanket moral rights statute at this time. However, there are aspects of
5418-615: The European Union require their member states to comply with them. All member states of the World Trade Organization are obliged to establish minimum levels of copyright protection. Nevertheless, important differences between the national regimes continue to exist. The original holder of the copyright may be the employer of the author rather than the author themself if the work is a " work for hire ". For example, in English law
5544-561: The Free Software Foundation (FSF.) Small contributions of fewer than 10 lines of code are exempt. This policy is in place so that the FSF can defend the software in court if its copyleft license is violated. In 2011, it was noticed that GNU Emacs had been accidentally releasing some binaries without corresponding source code for two years, in opposition to the intended spirit of the GPL. Richard Stallman described this incident as "a very bad mistake," which
5670-528: The Internet , creating a much bigger threat to producer revenue. Some have used digital rights management technology to restrict non-playback access through encryption and other means. Digital watermarks can be used to trace copies, deterring infringement with a more credible threat of legal consequences. Copy protection is used for both digital and pre-Internet electronic media. For a work to be considered to infringe upon copyright, its use must have occurred in
5796-609: The Middle Ages in Europe, there was generally a lack of any concept of literary property due to the general relations of production, the specific organization of literary production and the role of culture in society. The latter refers to the tendency of oral societies, such as that of Europe in the medieval period, to view knowledge as the product and expression of the collective, rather than to see it as individual property. However, with copyright laws, intellectual production comes to be seen as
5922-483: The RIAA are increasingly targeting the file sharing home Internet user. Thus far, however, most such cases against file sharers have been settled out of court. ( See Legal aspects of file sharing ) In most jurisdictions the copyright holder must bear the cost of enforcing copyright. This will usually involve engaging legal representation, administrative or court costs. In light of this, many copyright disputes are settled by
6048-709: The United International Bureaux for the Protection of Intellectual Property signed the Rome Convention for the Protection of Performers, Producers of Phonograms and Broadcasting Organizations . In 1996, this organization was succeeded by the founding of the World Intellectual Property Organization , which launched the 1996 WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty and the 2002 WIPO Copyright Treaty , which enacted greater restrictions on
6174-622: The Usenet newsgroup gnu.emacs.sources. Over time many popular packages have been included in Emacs by default; for example version 21 began bundling Org-mode , Calc, TRAMP, and many others. Notable packages include: In its early history, GNU Emacs often ran noticeably slower than rival text editors because the loading and interpreting of its Lisp -based code incurs a performance overhead. Modern computers are powerful enough to run GNU Emacs with ease, but versions prior to 19.29 (released in 1995) couldn't edit files larger than 8 MB. The file size limit
6300-465: The source code of many markup and programming languages , as well as displaying web pages , directory listings and other system info. Each major mode involves an Emacs Lisp program that extends the editor to behave more conveniently for the specified type of text. Major modes typically provide some or all of the following common features: The use of "minor modes" enables further customization. A GNU Emacs editing buffer can use only one major mode at
6426-409: The 1976 Copyright Act to conform to most of the provisions of the Berne Convention. As a result, the use of copyright notices has become optional to claim copyright, because the Berne Convention makes copyright automatic. However, the lack of notice of copyright using these marks may have consequences in terms of reduced damages in an infringement lawsuit – using notices of this form may reduce
SECTION 50
#17328454256406552-446: The Berne Convention, or the adherence of the United States thereto. Before 1989, United States law required the use of a copyright notice, consisting of the copyright symbol (©, the letter C inside a circle; Unicode U+00A9 © COPYRIGHT SIGN ), the abbreviation "Copr.", or the word "Copyright", followed by the year of the first publication of the work and the name of the copyright holder. Several years may be noted if
6678-433: The Berne Convention. As soon as a work is "fixed", that is, written or recorded on some physical medium, its author is automatically entitled to all intellectual property rights in the work, and to any derivative works unless and until the author explicitly disclaims them, or until the rights expires. The Berne Convention also resulted in foreign authors being treated equivalently to domestic authors, in any country signed onto
6804-444: The C source files and recompiling. In GNU Emacs , primitives are not available as external libraries; they are part of the Emacs executable. In XEmacs , runtime loading of such primitives is possible, using the operating system's support for dynamic linking . Functions may be written as primitives because they need access to external data and libraries not otherwise available from Emacs Lisp, or because they are called often enough that
6930-514: The Common Lisp standard had yet to be formulated, Scheme existed at the time but Stallman chose not to use it because of its comparatively poor performance on workstations (as opposed to the minicomputers that were Emacs' traditional home), and he wanted to develop a dialect which he thought would be more easily optimized. The Lisp dialect used in Emacs differs substantially from the more modern Common Lisp and Scheme dialects used for applications programming. A prominent characteristic of Emacs Lisp
7056-604: The Consent of the Authors ;... to their very great Detriment, and too often to the Ruin of them and their Families:". A right to benefit financially from the work is articulated, and court rulings and legislation have recognized a right to control the work, such as ensuring that the integrity of it is preserved. An irrevocable right to be recognized as the work's creator appears in some countries' copyright laws. The Copyright Clause of
7182-523: The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 provides that if a copyrighted work is made by an employee in the course of that employment, the copyright is automatically owned by the employer which would be a "Work for Hire". Typically, the first owner of a copyright is the person who created the work i.e. the author . But when more than one person creates the work, then a case of joint authorship can be made provided some criteria are met. Copyright may apply to
7308-409: The GNU Emacs documentation appeared under an ad-hoc license that required the inclusion of certain text in any modified copy. In the GNU Emacs user's manual, for example, this included instructions for obtaining 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
7434-578: The Statute of Anne. While the national law protected authors' published works, authority was granted to the states to protect authors' unpublished works. The most recent major overhaul of copyright in the US, the 1976 Copyright Act , extended federal copyright to works as soon as they are created and "fixed", without requiring publication or registration. State law continues to apply to unpublished works that are not otherwise copyrighted by federal law. This act also changed
7560-652: The U.S. economy at least $ 29.2 billion in lost revenue each year." An August 2021 report by the Digital Citizens Alliance states that "online criminals who offer stolen movies, TV shows, games, and live events through websites and apps are reaping $ 1.34 billion in annual advertising revenues." This comes as a result of users visiting pirate websites who are then subjected to pirated content, malware, and fraud. According to World Intellectual Property Organisation , copyright protects two types of rights. Economic rights allow right owners to derive financial reward from
7686-524: The US. The Berne International Copyright Convention of 1886 finally provided protection for authors among the countries who signed the agreement, although the US did not join the Berne Convention until 1989. In the US, the Constitution grants Congress the right to establish copyright and patent laws. Shortly after the Constitution was passed, Congress enacted the Copyright Act of 1790 , modeling it after
SECTION 60
#17328454256407812-495: The Union to prescribe that works in general or any specified categories of works shall not be protected unless they have been fixed in some material form." Some countries do not require that a work be produced in a particular form to obtain copyright protection. For instance, Spain, France, and Australia do not require fixation for copyright protection. The United States and Canada, on the other hand, require that most works must be "fixed in
7938-634: The United States was 14 years, and it had to be explicitly applied for. If the author wished, they could apply for a second 14‑year monopoly grant, but after that the work entered the public domain , so it could be used and built upon by others. In many jurisdictions of the European continent, comparable legal concepts to copyright did exist from the 16th century on but did change under Napoleonic rule into another legal concept: authors' rights or creator's right laws, from French: droits d'auteur and German Urheberrecht . In many modern-day publications
8064-515: The United States, Constitution (1787) authorized copyright legislation: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." That is, by guaranteeing them a period of time in which they alone could profit from their works, they would be enabled and encouraged to invest the time required to create them, and this would be good for society as
8190-452: The authors even after the authors have transferred their economic rights. In some EU countries, such as France, moral rights last indefinitely. In the UK, however, moral rights are finite. That is, the right of attribution and the right of integrity last only as long as the work is in copyright. When the copyright term comes to an end, so too do the moral rights in that work. This is just one reason why
8316-468: The authors even after the authors have transferred their economic rights. This means that even where, for example, a film producer or publisher owns the economic rights in a work, in many jurisdictions the individual author continues to have moral rights. Recently, as a part of the debates being held at the US Copyright Office on the question of inclusion of Moral Rights as a part of the framework of
8442-696: The calculation of copyright term from a fixed term (then a maximum of fifty-six years) to "life of the author plus 50 years". These changes brought the US closer to conformity with the Berne Convention, and in 1989 the United States further revised its copyright law and joined the Berne Convention officially. Copyright laws allow products of creative human activities, such as literary and artistic production, to be preferentially exploited and thus incentivized. Different cultural attitudes, social organizations, economic models and legal frameworks are seen to account for why copyright emerged in Europe and not, for example, in Asia. In
8568-513: The civil law system. The printing press made it much cheaper to produce works, but as there was initially no copyright law, anyone could buy or rent a press and print any text. Popular new works were immediately re- set and re-published by competitors, so printers needed a constant stream of new material. Fees paid to authors for new works were high, and significantly supplemented the incomes of many academics. Printing brought profound social changes . The rise in literacy across Europe led to
8694-434: The code is evaluated . It is not necessary to recompile, restart Emacs, or even rehash a configuration file. If the code is saved into an Emacs init file, then Emacs will load the extension the next time it starts. Otherwise, the changes must be reevaluated manually when Emacs is restarted. Emacs Lisp code is stored in filesystems as plain text files, by convention with the filename suffix " .el ". The user's init file
8820-448: The command line or via an executable file, and its editing functions, such as buffers and movement commands are available to the program just as in the normal mode. No user interface is presented when Emacs is started in batch mode; it simply executes the passed-in script and exits, displaying any output from the script. Emacs Lisp is also termed Elisp , although there are also older, unrelated Lisp dialects with that name. Emacs Lisp
8946-469: The comparative speed of C versus Emacs Lisp makes a worthwhile difference. However, because errors in C code can easily lead to segmentation violations or to more subtle bugs, which crash the editor, and because writing C code that interacts correctly with the Emacs Lisp garbage collector is error-prone, the number of functions implemented as primitives is kept to a necessary minimum. Byte-compiling can make Emacs Lisp code execute faster. Emacs contains
9072-454: The concepts throughout the years have been mingled globally, due to international treaties and contracts, distinct differences between jurisdictions continue to exist. Creator's law was enacted rather late in German speaking states and the economic historian Eckhard Höffner argues that the absence of possibilities to maintain copyright laws in all these states in the early 19th century, encouraged
9198-474: The convention. The UK signed the Berne Convention in 1887 but did not implement large parts of it until 100 years later with the passage of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 . Specially, for educational and scientific research purposes, the Berne Convention provides the developing countries issue compulsory licenses for the translation or reproduction of copyrighted works within the limits prescribed by
9324-590: The convention. This was a special provision that had been added at the time of 1971 revision of the convention, because of the strong demands of the developing countries. The United States did not sign the Berne Convention until 1989. The United States and most Latin American countries instead entered into the Buenos Aires Convention in 1910, which required a copyright notice on the work (such as all rights reserved ), and permitted signatory nations to limit
9450-481: The copyright holder is entitled to enforce their exclusive rights. However, while registration is not needed to exercise copyright, in jurisdictions where the laws provide for registration, it serves as prima facie evidence of a valid copyright and enables the copyright holder to seek statutory damages and attorney's fees. (In the US, registering after an infringement only enables one to receive actual damages and lost profits.) A widely circulated strategy to avoid
9576-561: The copyright holder reserves, or holds for their own use was once required to assert copyright, but that phrase is now legally obsolete. Almost everything on the Internet has some sort of copyright attached to it. Whether these things are watermarked, signed, or have any other sort of indication of the copyright is a different story however. In 1989 the United States enacted the Berne Convention Implementation Act , amending
9702-477: The cost of copyright registration is referred to as the poor man's copyright . It proposes that the creator send the work to themself in a sealed envelope by registered mail, using the postmark to establish the date. This technique has not been recognized in any published opinions of the United States courts. The United States Copyright Office says the technique is not a substitute for actual registration. The United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office discusses
9828-477: The documentation use the GNU Free Documentation License with "invariant sections" that require the inclusion of the same documents and that the manuals proclaim themselves as GNU Manuals . For GNU Emacs, like 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
9954-416: The duplication was coincidental, and neither was copied from the other. In all countries where the Berne Convention standards apply, copyright is automatic, and need not be obtained through official registration with any government office. Once an idea has been reduced to tangible form, for example by securing it in a fixed medium (such as a drawing, sheet music, photograph, a videotape, or a computer file),
10080-517: The duration of copyrights to shorter and renewable terms. The Universal Copyright Convention was drafted in 1952 as another less demanding alternative to the Berne Convention, and ratified by nations such as the Soviet Union and developing nations. The regulations of the Berne Convention are incorporated into the World Trade Organization 's TRIPS agreement (1995), thus giving the Berne Convention effectively near-global application. In 1961,
10206-409: The editing area can be split into separate areas called windows , each displaying a different buffer . A buffer is a region of text loaded into Emacs' memory (possibly from a file) which can be saved into a text document. Users can press the default C-x 2 key binding to open a new window. This runs the Emacs Lisp function split-window-below . Normally, when the new window appears, it displays
10332-410: The editing area into separate non-overlapping sections called "windows," a feature that has been available since 1975, predating the graphical user interface in common use. In Emacs terminology, "windows" are similar to what other systems call " frames " or " panes " – a rectangular portion of the program's display that can be updated and interacted with independently. Each Emacs window has
10458-416: The editor. This is used to implement shell-mode , running a Unix shell as inferior process, as well as read–eval–print loop (REPL) modes for various programming languages. Emacs' support for external processes makes it suitable for interactive programming along the lines of Interlisp or Smalltalk . Users who prefer the widely used IBM Common User Access keyboard shortcut layout can use cua-mode ,
10584-682: The exogenous differential introduction of author's right (Italian: diritto d’autore ) in Napoleonic Italy shows that "basic copyrights increased both the number and the quality of operas, measured by their popularity and durability". The 1886 Berne Convention first established recognition of authors' rights among sovereign nations , rather than merely bilaterally. Under the Berne Convention, protective rights for creative works do not have to be asserted or declared, as they are automatically in force at creation: an author need not "register" or "apply for" these protective rights in countries adhering to
10710-612: The feature freeze of Emacs 25. Longtime contributor John Wiegley was announced as the new maintainer on November 5, 2015. Wiegley was joined by Eli Zaretskii in July, 2016, and Lars Ingebrigtsen in September, 2020. 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. Older versions of
10836-510: The file highlighted in dired), to display the source code of a program in one window while another displays a shell buffer with the results of compiling the program, to run a debugger along with a shell buffer running the program, to work on code while displaying a man page or other documentation (possibly loaded over the World Wide Web using one of Emacs' built-in web browsers) or simply to display multiple files for editing at once such as
10962-438: The first public release, was made on March 20, 1985. The first widely distributed version of GNU Emacs was version 15.34, released later in 1985. Early versions of GNU Emacs were numbered as "1.x.x," with the initial digit denoting the version of the C core. The "1" was dropped after version 1.12 as it was thought that the major number would never change, and thus the major version skipped from "1" to "13". A new third version number
11088-414: The form of a creative work, but not the idea itself. A copyright is subject to limitations based on public interest considerations, such as the fair use doctrine in the United States and fair dealings doctrine in the United Kingdom. Some jurisdictions require "fixing" copyrighted works in a tangible form. It is often shared among multiple authors, each of whom holds a set of rights to use or license
11214-418: The form or manner in which they are expressed. For example, the copyright to a Mickey Mouse cartoon restricts others from making copies of the cartoon or creating derivative works based on Disney's particular anthropomorphic mouse, but does not prohibit the creation of other works about anthropomorphic mice in general, so long as they are different enough not to be judged copies of Disney's. Typically,
11340-399: The functions and variables, storing them in memory. They are then available to other editing functions, and to user commands. Functions and variables can be freely modified and redefined without restarting the editor or reloading the config file. In order to save time and memory space, much of the functionality of Emacs loads only when required. Each set of optional features shipped with Emacs
11466-401: The graphics systems native to macOS and Windows to provide menubars , toolbars , scrollbars and context menus conforming more closely to each platform's look and feel . Lucid Emacs, based on an early version of GNU Emacs 19, was developed beginning in 1991 by Jamie Zawinski and others at Lucid Inc. One of the best-known forks in free software development occurred when the codebases of
11592-411: The help of the polysylabi platform bridge. Emacs Lisp is a Lisp-2 like Common Lisp, meaning that it has a function namespace which is separate from the namespace it uses for other variables. Like MacLisp, Emacs Lisp uses dynamic scope , offering static (or lexical) as an option starting from version 24. It can be activated by setting the file local variable lexical-binding . Before this option
11718-504: The holder in a civil law court, but there are also criminal infringement statutes in some jurisdictions. While central registries are kept in some countries which aid in proving claims of ownership, registering does not necessarily prove ownership, nor does the fact of copying (even without permission) necessarily prove that copyright was infringed. Criminal sanctions are generally aimed at serious counterfeiting activity, but are now becoming more commonplace as copyright collectives such as
11844-423: The jurisdiction . Some countries require certain copyright formalities to establishing copyright, others recognize copyright in any completed work, without a formal registration. When the copyright of a work expires, it enters the public domain . The concept of copyright developed after the printing press came into use in Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries. It was associated with a common law and rooted in
11970-487: The legally recognised rights and interests of others. Most copyright laws state that authors or other right owners have the right to authorise or prevent certain acts in relation to a work. Right owners can authorise or prohibit: Moral rights are concerned with the non-economic rights of a creator. They protect the creator's connection with a work as well as the integrity of the work. Moral rights are only accorded to individual authors and in many national laws they remain with
12096-429: The likelihood of a defense of "innocent infringement" being successful. In the UK, the publisher of a work automatically owns the copyright in the "typographical arrangement of a published work", i.e. its layout and general appearance as a published work. This copyright lasts for 25 years after the end of the year in which the edition containing that arrangement was first published. Copyrights are generally enforced by
12222-470: The list of open buffers on exit, and reopen this list when it is restarted. Some buffers contain text loaded from text files , which the user can edit and save back to permanent storage. These buffers are said to be "visiting" files. Buffers also serve to display other data, such as the output of Emacs commands, dired directory listings, documentation strings displayed by the "help" library and notification messages that in other editors would be displayed in
12348-607: The moral rights regime within the UK is often regarded as weaker or inferior to the protection of moral rights in continental Europe and elsewhere in the world. The Berne Convention, in Article 6bis, requires its members to grant authors the following rights: These and other similar rights granted in national laws are generally known as the moral rights of authors. The Berne Convention requires these rights to be independent of authors' economic rights. Moral rights are only accorded to individual authors and in many national laws they remain with
12474-401: The new window to display another (new) buffer. The second statement, (global-set-key ...) re-binds the key sequence "C-x 2" to the new function. This can also be written using the feature called advice , which allows the user to create wrappers around existing functions instead of defining their own. This has the advantage of not requiring keybindings to be changed and working wherever
12600-423: The original function is called, as well as being simpler to write but the disadvantage of making debugging more complicated. For this reason, advice is not allowed in the source code of GNU Emacs, but if a user wishes, the advice feature can be used in their code to reimplement the above code as follows: This instructs split-window-below to execute the user-supplied code whenever it is called, after executing
12726-542: The other hand, follows Emacs Lisp style guidelines more closely and prefixes each function and macro it defines with "cl-" (e.g., cl-defun , which doesn't conflict with the name of the built-in defun ), avoiding the unexpected changes in behavior that could occur whenever the "cl" package was loaded. Emacs Lisp (unlike some other Lisp implementations) does not do tail-call optimization . Without this, tail recursions can eventually lead to stack overflow . The apel library aids in writing portable Emacs Lisp code, with
12852-424: The owner's permission, often through a license. The owner's use of the property must, however, respect the legally recognised rights and interests of other members of society. So the owner of a copyright-protected work may decide how to use the work, and may prevent others from using it without permission. National laws usually grant copyright owners exclusive rights to allow third parties to use their works, subject to
12978-588: The potential to increase sales. According to the IP Commission Report the annual cost of intellectual property infringement to the US economy "continues to exceed $ 225 billion in counterfeit goods, pirated software, and theft of trade secrets and could be as high as $ 600 billion." A 2019 study sponsored by the US Chamber of Commerce Global Innovation Policy Center (GIPC), in partnership with NERA Economic Consulting "estimates that global online piracy costs
13104-826: The printing of "scandalous books and pamphlets", the English Parliament passed the Licensing of the Press Act 1662 , which required all intended publications to be registered with the government-approved Stationers' Company , giving the Stationers the right to regulate what material could be printed. The Statute of Anne , enacted in 1710 in England and Scotland, provided the first legislation to protect copyrights (but not authors' rights). The Copyright Act of 1814 extended more rights for authors but did not protect British from reprinting in
13230-607: The productivity system Org-mode . A large community of users have contributed extensions such as the Git interface Magit , the Vim emulation layer Evil, several search frameworks, the window manager EXWM, and tools for working with a wide range of programming languages. The original EMACS was written in 1976 by David A. Moon and Guy L. Steele Jr. as a set of macros for the TECO editor, and in 1984, Richard Stallman began work on GNU Emacs, to produce
13356-475: The program or suspending execution instead of invoking Emacs keybindings. GNU Emacs has command line options to specify either a file to load and execute, or an Emacs Lisp function may be passed in from the command line. Emacs will start up, execute the passed-in file or function, print the results, then exit. The shebang line #!/usr/bin/emacs --script allows the creation of standalone scripts in Emacs Lisp. The GNU Emacs Manual , written by Richard Stallman,
13482-440: The publishing of low-priced paperbacks for the masses. This was profitable for authors and led to a proliferation of books, enhanced knowledge, and was ultimately an important factor in the ascendency of Germany as a power during that century. After the introduction of creator's rights, German publishers started to follow English customs, in issuing only expensive book editions for wealthy customers. Empirical evidence derived from
13608-454: The rest of the function. Advice can also be specified to execute before the original function, around it (literally wrapping the original), or to conditionally execute the original function based on the results of the advice. Emacs 24.4 replaces this defadvice mechanism with advice-add , which is claimed to be more flexible and simpler. The advice above could be reimplemented using the new system as: These changes take effect as soon as
13734-410: The same buffer as the previous one. Suppose we wish to make it display the next available buffer. In order to do this, the user writes the following Emacs Lisp code, in either an existing Emacs Lisp source file or an empty Emacs buffer: The first statement, (defun ...) , defines a new function, my-split-window-func , which calls split-window-below (the old window-splitting function), then tells
13860-585: The selected range. Emacs windows are tiled and cannot appear "above" or "below" their companions. Emacs can launch multiple "frames", which are displayed as individual windows in a graphical environment. On a text terminal, multiple frames are displayed stacked filling the entire terminal, and can be switched using the standard Emacs commands. GNU Emacs can display or edit a variety of different types of text and adapts its behavior by entering add-on modes called "major modes". There are major modes for many different purposes including editing ordinary text files,
13986-435: The storage medium. The equivalent for digital online content is a paywall . The introduction of the photocopier , cassette tape , and videotape made it easier for consumers to copy materials like books and music, but each time a copy was made, it lost some fidelity. Digital media like text, audio, video, and software (even when stored on physical media like compact discs and DVDs ) can be copied losslessly, and shared on
14112-408: The technique and notes that the technique (as well as commercial registries) does not constitute dispositive proof that the work is original or establish who created the work. The Berne Convention allows member countries to decide whether creative works must be "fixed" to enjoy copyright. Article 2, Section 2 of the Berne Convention states: "It shall be a matter for legislation in the countries of
14238-402: The terms copyright and authors' rights are being mixed, or used as translations, but in a juridical sense the legal concepts do essentially differ. Authors' rights are, generally speaking, from the start absolute property rights of an author of original work that one does not have to apply for. The law is automatically connecting an original work as intellectual property to its creator. Although
14364-400: The territory of that specific jurisdiction. Copyrights of this type vary by country; many countries, and sometimes a large group of countries, have made agreements with other countries on procedures applicable when works "cross" national borders or national rights are inconsistent. Typically, the public law duration of a copyright expires 50 to 100 years after the creator dies, depending on
14490-555: The two Emacs versions diverged and the separate development teams ceased efforts to merge them back into a single program. After Lucid filed for bankruptcy, Lucid Emacs was renamed XEmacs . XEmacs development has slowed, with the most recent stable version 21.4.22 released in January 2009, while GNU Emacs has implemented many formerly XEmacs-only features. This has led some users to proclaim XEmacs' death. Other forks, less known than XEmacs, include: Changes in each Emacs release are listed in
14616-453: The use of technology to copy works in the nations that ratified it. The Trans-Pacific Partnership includes intellectual property provisions relating to copyright. Copyright laws and authors' right laws are standardized somewhat through these international conventions such as the Berne Convention and Universal Copyright Convention. These multilateral treaties have been ratified by nearly all countries, and international organizations such as
14742-459: The use of their works by others. Moral rights allow authors and creators to take certain actions to preserve and protect their link with their work. The author or creator may be the owner of the economic rights or those rights may be transferred to one or more copyright owners. Many countries do not allow the transfer of moral rights. With any kind of property, its owner may decide how it is to be used, and others can use it lawfully only if they have
14868-500: The user can load dynamic modules. Since version 28.1, Emacs can natively compile Emacs Lisp files via libgccjit , as opposed to just byte compiling them, resulting in a significant boost in performance. GNU Emacs runs on a wide variety of operating systems , including DOS , Windows , and most Unix-like operating systems, such as Linux , the various BSDs , Solaris , AIX , HP-UX and macOS . Many Unix-like systems include Emacs by default. In 2023 an official port for Android
14994-445: The work has gone through substantial revisions. The proper copyright notice for sound recordings of musical or other audio works is a sound recording copyright symbol (℗, the letter P inside a circle, Unicode U+2117 ℗ SOUND RECORDING COPYRIGHT ), which indicates a sound recording copyright, with the letter P indicating a " phonorecord ". In addition, the phrase All rights reserved which indicates that
15120-403: The work, and who are commonly referred to as rights holders. These rights normally include reproduction, control over derivative works , distribution, public performance , and moral rights such as attribution. Copyrights can be granted by public law and are in that case considered "territorial rights". This means that copyrights granted by the law of a certain state do not extend beyond
15246-501: Was added to represent changes made by user sites. In the current numbering scheme, a number with two components signifies a release version, with development versions having three components. GNU Emacs was later ported to the Unix operating system . It offered more features than Gosling Emacs, in particular a full-featured Lisp as its extension language, and soon replaced Gosling Emacs as the de facto Unix Emacs editor. Markus Hess exploited
15372-520: Was added, one could use the lexical-let macro from the (now deprecated) "cl" package to provide effective lexical scope. In dynamic scoping, if a programmer declares a variable within the scope of a function, it is available to subroutines called from within that function. Originally, this was intended as an optimization ; lexical scoping was still uncommon and of uncertain performance. In computer scientist Olin Shivers's recollection, "I asked RMS when he
15498-442: Was implementing emacs lisp why it was dynamically scoped and his exact reply was that lexical scope was too inefficient." Dynamic scoping was also meant to provide greater flexibility for user customizations. However, dynamic scoping has several disadvantages. Firstly, it can easily lead to bugs in large programs, due to unintended interactions between variables in different functions. Secondly, accessing variables under dynamic scoping
15624-431: Was promptly fixed. The FSF did not sue any downstream redistributors who unknowingly violated the GPL by distributing these binaries. In its normal editing mode, GNU Emacs behaves like common text editors by allowing the user to type text with the keyboard and move the editing point with arrow keys . Escape key sequences or pressing the control key and/or the meta key , alt key or super keys in conjunction with
15750-425: Was raised in successive versions, and 32 bit versions after GNU Emacs 23.2 can edit files up to 512 MB in size. Emacs compiled on a 64-bit machine can handle much larger buffers. While GNU Emacs is largely written in Emacs Lisp, it makes extensive use of natively compiled C code to improve performance. In addition to its own C code, it uses external libraries such as libxml2 for parsing XML . Packages installed by
15876-399: Was released. Version 23.1 removed supported for some platforms deemed obsolete. GNU Emacs runs both on text terminals and in graphical user interface (GUI) environments. On Unix-like operating systems, GNU Emacs can use the X Window System to produce its GUI either directly using Athena widgets or by using a "widget toolkit" such as Motif , LessTif , or GTK+ . GNU Emacs can also use
#639360