GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable, self-documenting text editor, which can be extended with Lisp code. Although Emacs is a general-purpose editor, questions may be on-topic here if they are about extending Emacs itself (usually by writing Emacs Lisp functions) or about specific programming modes. Otherwise (and perhaps also in those cases), consider asking your question on Emacs Stack Exchange.
GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor. Begun in the mid-1970s as a set of macros on top of TECO, it was re-written using C and Emacs Lisp to provide portability and an extendable interface. It continues to be actively developed today.
Emacs provides context-sensitive editing modes with syntax coloring, is self documenting, has full Unicode support and extensions to do almost anything. It similarly has extensive packaging support through the built-in package.el package.
Emacs' package selection includes color themes, language-specific editing modes, RSS readers, email clients, web browsers, etc. Die-hard Emacs users do almost everything from within Emacs: write, compile, run and debug code; read/compose email; browse the web; do project planning, etc. Some other editors, like Visual Studio or Eclipse, provide Emacs key bindings.
Questions about using and configuring Emacs, not specific to programming, are off-topic for Stack Overflow, but they may be suitable for Emacs Stack Exchange. Questions about extending Emacs using Lisp or other languages, or about programming modes, are usually on-topic here.
Useful Links
- A paper by Richard Stallman describing the design of Emacs
- The Emacs Wiki, a collaborative wiki for extensions to Emacs
- Wikipedia's Emacs page
- History of Emacs and GPL
- GNU Emacs homepage
- The Emacs Stack Exchange site
Wisdom from Stack Exchange
- Is it worth investing time in learning to use Emacs?
- How to quickly get started at using and learning Emacs
- Emacs without Lisp
- Stack Overflow emacs-lisp and emacs tags
