SXEmacs

SXEmacs

SXEmacs 22.1.10 beta running under Linux.
Original author(s) Steve Youngs
Developer(s) SXEmacs community
Stable release 22.1.15 / June 16, 2012
Preview release 22.1.10 (from tla)
Written in C, elisp
Operating system Any Unix-like
Available in English only
Type Text editor, Lisp environment
Licence GPL v3
Website www.sxemacs.org

SXEmacs is a fork of the XEmacs text editor. It runs on many Unix-like operating systems as well as on Mac OS X.[1] It is notable for features such as FFI support, enhanced number types (similar to bignums in XEmacs 21.5), raw string regexps, and an implementation of Pugh's skip lists.[2]

History

On December 31, 2004, Steve Youngs (lead developer) announced the creation of SXEmacs on the emacs-devel and xemacs-beta mailing lists.[3]

The software community generally refers to GNU Emacs, XEmacs, SXEmacs (and a number of other similar editors) collectively or individually as emacsen or as emacs, since they all take their inspiration from the original TECO Emacs.

The reasons he cited for the fork were:

SXEmacs and GPLv3

On November 25, 2007, patch-34 of the main 22.1.8 development branch was committed.[4] This marked the start of a transition to GPLv3. This transition was completed the following day (November 26, 2007) with patch-37.

References

  1. "15 useful Mac OS X editors".
  2. Feature list extract taken from SXEmacs Homepage
  3. See the announcement at Merry Xmacs and a... OMG, what did you just say?
  4. Original post on GPLv3 at You, Me, and GPLv3