EMACS Turns Fifty

An article in MIT Technology Review, “EMACS Turns 50”, provides history on the long life of the text editor EMACS and notes that EMACS is fifty years old this year (2026).

I make note of this here because I used EMACS for a Perl project starting in 2006 for about four years. Just as with the EMACS alternative vi (which I remember using in 1988), I learned just enough to be productive without learning all the commands. Our team used EMACS because the lead programmer for the project was using EMACS. I would have preferred to use a GUI editor (at the time, BBEdit or ActiveState’s Komodo Edit), but I figured that I should conform to established practice.

Once I learned how to navigate the screen, switch buffers, and use other features of EMACS, I found it pretty efficient because my hands did not need to leave the keyboard. But I was never happy with the tools for reformatting and linting code and the need to find and install extensions written in Lisp.

What stuck with me after I stopped using EMACS were the commands that can be used in the bash shell in Linux or macOS (e.g., control-A to move the cursor to the beginning of the line, control-R to do a reverse search of the bash history, etc.).