GNU Emacs
An extensible, customizable, free/libre text editor — and more.
At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing.
The features of GNU Emacs include
- Content-aware editing modes, including syntax coloring, for many file types.
- Complete built-in documentation, including a tutorial for new users.
- Full Unicode support for nearly all human scripts.
- Highly customizable, using Emacs Lisp code or a graphical interface.
- A wide range of functionality beyond text editing, including a project planner, mail and news reader, debugger interface, calendar, IRC client, and more.
- A packaging system for downloading and installing extensions.
Discover Emacs in video
- @emacsrocks ;; episode 15"Restclient"
- @emacsrocks ;; episode 14"Paredit"
- @emacsrocks ;; episode 13"multiple-cursors"
Watch more episodes on Emacsrocks.com.
Emacs 31.1
Released Aug 24, 2026
Emacs 31.1 has a wide variety of new features, including:
- Using the mouse to control Emacs in a terminal enabled by default
- New user-lisp/ subdirectory of your Emacs configuration directory
- Child frames supported on text frames
- Various improvements to the *Completions* buffer
- Commands to split windows make better choices about the split direction
- The *grep* and *xref* buffers now support editable modes
- New feature to review changes to packages before installing or upgrading them
- New theme designed to make Emacs more approachable for new users
Emacs 30.2
Released Aug 14, 2025
Emacs 30.2 is a maintenance release.
Emacs 30.1
Released Feb 23, 2025
Emacs 30.1 has a wide variety of new features, including:
- Native compilation is enabled by default
- Ported to the Android operating system
- New user option trusted-contents
- Numerous performance improvements
- Native JSON support is always available
- New Tree-Sitter major modes for Elixir, HEEx, HTML, Lua, and PHP
- Support for the EditorConfig standard
- Improved support for touchscreens
- Tool bars per window and on bottom
- New package which-key
- Automatic regeneration of TAGS files
- New minor mode visual-wrap-prefix-mode
- Support for underline colors on TTY frames
See also dates of older releases.
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