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.
New to Emacs? → Take the tour!

Emacs 28.2

Released Sep 12, 2022

Emacs 28.2 is a maintenance release.

Emacs 28.1

Released Apr 4, 2022

Emacs 28.1 has a wide variety of new features, including:

  • Native compilation of Lisp files
  • Text shaping with HarfBuzz and drawing with Cairo
  • Support for loading Secure Computing filters
  • Much improved display of Emoji and Emoji sequences
  • New system for documenting groups of functions
  • A minor mode for context menus
  • Mode-specific commands
  • Emacs shows matching parentheses by default
  • Many improvements and extensions to project.el

Emacs 27.2

Released Mar 25, 2021

Emacs 27.2 is a maintenance release.

  • The behavior of the user option 'resize-mini-frames' has changed.

Emacs 27.1

Released Aug 10, 2020

Emacs 27.1 has a wide variety of new features, including:

  • Built-in support for arbitrary-size integers
  • Text shaping with HarfBuzz
  • Native support for JSON parsing
  • Better support for Cairo drawing
  • Portable dumping used instead of unexec
  • Support for XDG conventions for init files
  • Additional early-init initialization file
  • Built-in support for tab bar and tab-line
  • Support for resizing and rotating of images without ImageMagick

See also dates of older releases.

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