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Why are there so many forks of emacs?


Asked by Milan Hinton on Dec 03, 2021 FAQ



Emacs is a widely used tool with a long history, broad platform support and strong backward compatibility requirements. The core team is understandably cautious in making far-reaching changes. Forking is a longstanding tradition in the Emacs community for trying different approaches.
Indeed,
Yes, forks of Emacs exist. But if you care about the integrity and cohesion of Emacs as a software development platform, then they ARE disasters—because each of them is ALSO a fork of the Emacs Lisp language definition. (Imagine if each fork of the Linux kernel were to significantly modify the C language or the UNIX library system call interface.)
One may also ask, You (and even others) trying to unify the “Emacsverse” does not turn other people’s forks into disasters. Forks happen because people have ideas that they aren’t able to implement and push in the mainstream Emacs, and because users see a need for those features and make a fork successful.
Next,
GNU Emacs. GNU Emacs is the most popular and most ported Emacs text editor. It was created by GNU Project founder Richard Stallman. In common with other varieties of Emacs, GNU Emacs is extensible using a Turing complete programming language.
Keeping this in consideration,
If you are a Mac user new to Emacs, many people find Aquamacs to be a good choice. Many find it to be more Mac-like than Emacs.app. If you’ve used Emacs before and already have your own Emacs initialization file, then Emacs.app is likely a better choice.