Editing XEmacs (section)

==Development==
From the project's beginnings, the developers of XEmacs aimed to have a frequent release-cycle.<ref name="XEmacs: Release Notice Archive">{{cite web|url=http://www.xemacs.org/Releases/index.html|title=XEmacs: Release Notice Archive|website=Xemacs.org|access-date=1 December 2014}}</ref>
They also aimed for more openness to experimentation, and XEmacs often offers new features before other emacsen—pioneering (for example) inline images, variable fonts and terminal coloring. Over the years, the developers have extensively rewritten the code in order to improve consistency and to follow modern programming conventions stressing data abstraction. XEmacs has a packaging system for independently maintained Lisp packages. The {{As of|2007|alt= latest}} version has [[GTK+]] support<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.us.xemacs.org/Releases/Public-21.2/projects/gtk.html|title=XEmacs: XEmacs on the GTK platform|author=Stephen J. Turnbull|website=Us.xemacs.org|access-date=1 December 2014|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160304030645/http://www.us.xemacs.org/Releases/Public-21.2/projects/gtk.html|archive-date=4 March 2016}}</ref>
and a native Carbon port for Mac OS X.<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://members.shaw.ca/akochoi-xemacs/Carbon+XEmacs/Home.html |title=Home |access-date=2009-06-22 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070914152342/http://members.shaw.ca/akochoi-xemacs/Carbon%20XEmacs/Home.html |archive-date=2007-09-14 |url-status=dead }}</ref>

XEmacs has always had a very open development-environment, including anonymous [[Concurrent Versions System|CVS]], later [[Mercurial (software)|Mercurial]] access and publicly accessible development [[mailing list|mailing-list]]s. XEmacs comes with a 500+ page internals manual (Wing, et al., 2004).<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.xemacs.org/Documentation/21.5/html/internals_toc.html|title = XEmacs Internals Manual: Table of Contents}}</ref>

Support for [[Unicode]] has become a problem for XEmacs. As of 2005, the released version depends on the unmaintained package called [[MULE|Mule]]-UCS to support Unicode, while the development branch of XEmacs has had robust native support for external Unicode encodings since May 2002, but the internal Mule character sets lack completeness, and development seems stalled as of September 2005.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://calypso.tux.org/pipermail/xemacs-beta/2006-January/008297.html|title=Mule-on-Windows, full Unicode support XEmacs|website=Calypso.tux.org|access-date=1 December 2014|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150904032706/http://calypso.tux.org/pipermail/xemacs-beta/2006-January/008297.html|archive-date=4 September 2015}}</ref>

XEmacs development features three branches: stable, gamma, and beta,<ref name="XEmacs: Release Notice Archive"/>
with beta getting new features first, but potentially having less testing, stability and security. The developers released version 20.0 on 9 February 1997, and version 21.0 on 12 July 1998. As of January 2009, the stable branch had reached version 21.4.22 and the beta branch version 21.5.28. No gamma releases exist {{as of|2007|lc = on}}. With the release of XEmacs 21.4.0, version numbers follow a scheme whereby an odd second number signals a development-version, and an even second number indicates a stable release.