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GNU Emacs

An extensible, self-documenting text editor.

GNU Emacs is at heart a Lisp interpreter wrapped around a programmable text editor. Almost every aspect of its behaviour can be inspected, redefined, or extended by the user from inside the editor itself, which has made Emacs a long-running platform for programming environments, mail clients (Gnus, mu4e, notmuch-emacs), organisers (Org-mode), file managers (Dired), shells (eshell), and dozens of other applications that happen to be implemented as Emacs Lisp packages.

Org-mode in particular has grown into one of the most-used plain-text productivity systems in existence — outlines, structured to-do lists, calendar/agenda integration, literate- programming source-code blocks, exportable to many formats. For many Emacs users, Org-mode is the killer feature that keeps them on Emacs even as other modal editors gain ground.

Emacs was created by Richard Stallman in 1976 (originally as a TECO macro library, then as a Lisp-based rewrite that became GNU Emacs in 1984). GNU Emacs was the GNU project's flagship application for years and remains in active maintenance. The licence is GPL-3.0+. The longstanding rivalry with vi is one of the longest-running good-natured arguments in computing — at this point both editors have evolved enough that adherents of each acknowledge the others' strengths.

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install emacs
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install emacs
Arch:          sudo pacman -S emacs
macOS:         brew install --cask emacs