UNIX Emacs: a retrospective (lessons for flexible system design)

Authors:
Nathaniel S. Borenstein;James Gosling
Affiliations:
Information Technology Center, and Computer Science Department, Carnegie-Mellon University;Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Venue:
UIST '88 Proceedings of the 1st annual ACM SIGGRAPH symposium on User Interface Software
Year:
1988

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Abstract

UNIX Emacs is well-known and widely used as a text editor that has been extended in a remarkable number of directions, not always wisely. Because it is programmable in a powerful yet simple programming language, Emacs has been used as a development tool for the construction of some remarkably complex user-oriented programs. Indeed, it has served as both a user interface management system and a user interface toolkit, though it was designed as neither. In this paper, we discuss the features that have made it so popular for user interface development, in an attempt to derive lessons of value for more powerful and more systematically designed systems in the future.