Emacs turns 50, with the classic text editor still going strong in 2026

[Jude86]

One of the oldest pieces of software still in daily use has reached a big birthday. The Register marks 50 years of Emacs, the famously powerful text editor that grew out of MIT's AI Lab

The name comes from Editing MACroS, a set of macros running on TECO, an earlier editor written by Dan Murphy in 1962. Guy L. Steele Jr. began the work in 1975 but credited Richard Stallman with turning the macros into a powerful editor, and Stallman took over most development around late October 1976

Emacs is still actively developed. GNU Emacs 31.1 came out in August 2026, with mouse support on the Linux console as its headline feature, and the XEmacs fork released a new version in October. The official manual runs to 804 pages, and an old joke said the name stood for Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping

The editor relies on a Meta key from the rare Space Cadet keyboard, which modern keyboards replace with Alt or Option. There are many flavours today, including Doom Emacs, Spacemacs with Vi style controls and ErgoEmacs with more familiar shortcuts. Its great rival Vi also turns 50 this year, and in 1999 Neal Stephenson called Emacs a thermonuclear word processor

Very few programs survive half a century, let alone keep a loyal community. Emacs lasted because it is endlessly customisable, almost an operating system in its own right. Whether you love it or find its shortcuts baffling, it shaped how programmers think about their tools

Do you use Emacs, Vim or something else? And which software do you think will still be around in 50 years?

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[Resistor88]

I tried Emacs once and gave up after an hour of strange key combinations. Vim was no friendlier, mind you. Both have a learning curve like a cliff