XEmacs is a highly customizable open source text editor and application development system.Its emphasis is on modern graphical user interface support and an open software development model, similar to Linux. XEmacs runs on Windows 95 and NT, Linux and nearly every other version of Unix in existence. Support for XEmacs was supplied by Sun Microsystems, University of Illinois, Lucid, ETL/Electrotechnical Laboratory, Amdahl Corporation, BeOpen, and others, as well as the unpaid time of a great number of individual developers.

XEmacs Mailing Lists

For most problems of configuration and daily usage, the best channel is the Usenet newsgroup comp.emacs.xemacs. The participants in c.e.x are users at every level of experience as well as a few developers, and they are there specificially for the purpose of helping each other. For common problems responses are fast and accurate, and normally faster than they will be on the developers' mailing lists.

However, if you have read the documentation, believe you understand it, and still don't understand why XEmacs does what it does, then that is most likely a bug (often in the documentation, but still a bug), and you should let the developers know about it. The best way to do that is M-x report-xemacs-bug.

Several mailing lists are available to facilitate development and discussion of XEmacs. These mailing lists are essential to the development process of XEmacs. If you wish to participate effectively, you should subscribe or regularly review the archives of the relevant lists. Besides information about each list, this page provides information about subscribing to XEmacs mailing lists (and each list description contains a link to facilitate subscription), help with list-related problems, and information about anti-spam policy. 

Development

• XEmacs has always had a very open development-environment, including anonymous CVS, later Mercurial access and publicly accessible development mailing-lists. 
• Support for Unicode has become a problem for XEmacs.
• the developers have extensively rewritten the code in order to improve consistency and to follow modern programming conventions stressing data abstraction.
• Emacs has a packaging system for independently maintained Lisp packages.

XEmacs and GNU Emacs
The XEmacs project has a policy of maintaining compatibility with the GNU Emacs API. For example, it provides a compatibility-layer implementing overlays via the native extent functionality. "XEmacs developers strive to keep their code compatible with GNU Emacs, especially on the Lisp level.

As XEmacs development has slowed—the most recent stable version 21.4.22 was released in January 2009—XEmacs has incorporated much code from GNU Emacs,[19] while GNU Emacs has implemented many formerly XEmacs-only features. This has led some users to proclaim XEmacs' death, advocating that its developers contribute to GNU Emacs instead.

Specifications

Industry :

General