MULE

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For other uses of "Mule", see Mule (disambiguation).

MULE is the MULtilingual Enhancement to GNU Emacs. It provides facilities not only for handling text written in many different languages, but in fact multilingual texts containing several languages in the same buffer. This goes beyond the simple facilities offered by Unicode for representation of multilingual text. Mule also supports input methods, composing display using fonts in various different encodings, changing character syntax and other editing facilities to correspond to local language usage, and more.

MULE was originally based on Nemacs, a version of Emacs extended to handle Japanese, released in 1987. Development stalled, and the effort to incorporate increased language functionality into the main Emacs version stalled, until the fork between Lucid Inc. and the FSF led to XEmacs, which for several years boasted considerably better support for multiple languages and character sets. This competition reinvigorated the development, and led to the inclusion of MULE within GNU Emacs 21.