Harman Patil (Editor)

SXEmacs

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Original author(s)
  
Steve Youngs

Written in
  
C, elisp

Available in
  
English only

Developer(s)
  
SXEmacs community

Operating system
  
Any Unix-like

SXEmacs

Stable release
  
22.1.16 / May 6, 2016; 10 months ago (2016-05-06)

SXEmacs is a fork of the XEmacs text editor. It runs on many Unix-like operating systems including OS X. 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.

History

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

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:

  • a belief that XEmacs was too "broken" and unstable
  • wanting to make radical changes
  • wanting a development environment not embroiled in politics
  • wanting more control over the project
  • making it easier for developers to contribute and get involved.

    • References

    SXEmacs Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA