What is the difference between Emacs and XEmacs (formerly Lucid Emacs)?
First of all, they’re both GNU Emacs. XEmacs is just as much a later version of GNU Emacs as the FSF-distributed version. This FAQ refers to the latest version to be distributed by the FSF as “Emacs,” partly because the XEmacs maintainers now refer to their product using the “XEmacs” name, and partly because there isn’t any accurate way to differentiate between the two without getting mired in paragraphs of legalese and history. XEmacs, which began life as Lucid Emacs, is based on an early version of Emacs 19 and Epoch, an X-aware version of Emacs 18. Emacs (i.e., the version distributed by the FSF) has a larger installed base and now always contains the MULE multilingual facilities. XEmacs can do some clever tricks with X and MS-Windows, such as putting arbitrary graphics in a buffer. Similar facilities have been implemented for Emacs as part of a new redisplay implementation for Emacs 21, and are available in the latest Emacs releases. Emacs and XEmacs each come with Lisp packages th
XEmacs is a branch version of Emacs. It was first called Lucid Emacs, and was initially derived from a prerelease version of Emacs 19. In this FAQ, we use the name “Emacs” only for the official version. Emacs and XEmacs each come with Lisp packages that are lacking in the other. The two versions have some significant differences at the Lisp programming level. Their current features are roughly comparable, though the support for some operating systems, character sets and specific packages might be quite different. Some XEmacs code has been contributed to Emacs, and we would like to use other parts, but the earlier XEmacs maintainers did not always keep track of the authors of contributed code, which makes it impossible for the FSF to get copyright papers signed for that code. (The FSF requires these papers for all the code included in the Emacs release, aside from generic C support packages that retain their separate identity and are not integrated into the code of Emacs proper.) If you
Related Questions
- XEmacs (and Emacs in general) UI is pretty different from what is expected of a typical MS Windows program. How will the MS Windows port cope with it?
- In his flavor of Emacs 20, Richard Stallman has renamed all the win32-* symbols to w32-*. Will XEmacs do the same?
- What is the difference between Lucid Production and its competitors in the digital market?
