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 24.5 − latest release

The current stable release is 24.5 (released April 10, 2015; see also dates of older releases).
To obtain it, visit the download page.

Emacs 24 has a wide variety of new features, including:

  • A packaging system and interface (M-x list-packages) for downloading and installing extensions. A default package archive is hosted by GNU and maintained by the Emacs developers.
  • Support for displaying and editing bidirectional text, including right-to-left scripts such as Arabic and Hebrew.
  • Support for lexical scoping in Emacs Lisp.
  • Improvements to the Custom Themes system (M-x customize-themes).
  • Unified and improved completion system in many modes and packages.
  • Built-in support for GnuTLS, GTK+ 3, ImageMagick, SELinux, and Libxml2.

For more information, read the News file.

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