An extensible, customizable, free/libre text editor — and more.

At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing.

The features of GNU Emacs include

  • Content-aware editing modes, including syntax coloring, for many file types.
  • Complete built-in documentation, including a tutorial for new users.
  • Full Unicode support for nearly all human scripts.
New to Emacs? → Take the tour!

Emacs 27.2

Released Mar 25, 2021

Emacs 27.2 is a maintenance release.

  • The behavior of the user option 'resize-mini-frames' has changed.

Emacs 27.1

Released Aug 10, 2020

Emacs 27.1 has a wide variety of new features, including:

  • Built-in support for arbitrary-size integers
  • Text shaping with HarfBuzz
  • Native support for JSON parsing
  • Better support for Cairo drawing
  • Portable dumping used instead of unexec
  • Support for XDG conventions for init files
  • Additional early-init initialization file
  • Built-in support for tab bar and tab-line
  • Support for resizing and rotating of images without ImageMagick

Emacs 26.3

Released Aug 28, 2019

Emacs 26.3 is a maintenance release.

  • New GPG key for GNU ELPA package signature checking.

Emacs 26.2

Released Apr 12, 2019

Emacs 26.2 has a wide variety of new features, including:

  • Emacs modules can now be built outside of the Emacs tree source.
  • Emacs is now compliant with the latest version 11.0 of the Unicode Standard.
  • In Dired, the 'Z' command on a directory name compresses all of its files.

Emacs 26.1

Released May 28, 2018

Emacs 26.1 has a wide variety of new features, including:

  • Limited form of concurrency with Lisp threads
  • Support for optional display of line numbers in the buffer
  • Emacs now uses double buffering to reduce flicker on the X Window System
  • Flymake has been completely redesigned
  • TRAMP has a new connection method for Google Drive
  • New single-line horizontal scrolling mode
  • A systemd user unit file is provided
  • Support for 24-bit colors on capable text terminals

See also dates of older releases.

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