Editing XEmacs (section)

==History==
Between 1987 and 1993 significant delays occurred in bringing out a new version of [[GNU Emacs]] (presumed to be version 19).<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.jwz.org/doc/emacs-timeline.html|title=Emacs Timeline|website=Jwz.org|access-date=1 December 2014}}</ref>
In the late 1980s, [[Richard P. Gabriel]]'s [[Lucid Inc.]] faced a requirement to ship Emacs to support the Energize [[C++]] [[Integrated Development Environment|IDE]]. So Lucid recruited a team to improve and extend the code,<ref>{{cite web |url=http://commandline.org.uk/2007/history-of-emacs-and-xemacs/ |title= Command Line Warriors - History of Emacs and XEmacs|website=commandline.org.uk |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20101122021051/http://commandline.org.uk/2007/history-of-emacs-and-xemacs/ |archive-date=November 22, 2010}}</ref>
with the intention that their new version, released in 1991, would form the basis of GNU Emacs version 19. However, they did not have time to wait for their changes to be accepted by the [[Free Software Foundation]] (FSF).<ref>{{cite web|url=http://foldoc.org/?Lucid+Emacs|title=Xemacs from FOLDOC|website=Foldoc.org|access-date=1 December 2014}}</ref>
Lucid continued developing and maintaining their version of Emacs, while the FSF released version 19 of GNU Emacs a year later, while merging some of the code and adapting some other parts.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://stallman.org/articles/xemacs.origin|title=The Origin of XEmacs|author=Richard Stallman|website=Stallman.org|access-date=1 December 2014}}</ref>

When Lucid went out of business in 1994, other developers picked up the code.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.xemacs.org/About/index.html |title=XEmacs: History of XEmacs |author=john s jacobs anderson, stealing content the FAQ |website=Xemacs.org |access-date=1 December 2014 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20141218211326/http://www.xemacs.org/About/index.html |archive-date=December 18, 2014 }}</ref>
Companies such as [[Sun Microsystems]] wanted to carry on shipping Lucid Emacs, but using the trademark had become legally ambiguous because no one knew who would eventually control the trademark "Lucid". Accordingly, the "X" in XEmacs represents a compromise among the parties involved in developing XEmacs.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.xemacs.org/Documentation/21.5/html/internals_3.html#SEC11|title=XEmacs Internals Manual: A History of Emacs|website=Xemacs.org|access-date=1 December 2014}}</ref>

The "X" in XEmacs is thus not related to the [[X Window System]]. After initially only supporting X11,<ref>{{Cite web |date=2022-08-20 |title=Lucid Emacs was released 30 years ago |url=https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/08/lucid-emacs-was-released-30-years-ago/ |access-date=2022-08-25 |website=www.jwz.org |language=en-US}}</ref> XEmacs supported text-based terminals and windowing systems other than X11. Installers can compile both XEmacs and GNU Emacs with and without X support. For a period of time XEmacs even had some terminal-specific features, such as [[Syntax highlighting|coloring]], that GNU Emacs lacked.

The software community generally refers to GNU Emacs, XEmacs (and a number of other similar editors) collectively or individually as ''emacsen'' (by analogy with [[wikt:oxen|oxen]]) or as ''emacs'', since they both take their inspiration from the original [[Text Editor and Corrector|TECO]] Emacs.