📝Emacs Turns 50 as Its Creator Dan Murphy Passes at 83

Your editor just hit half a century

Emacs and vi both turned 50 this year, which makes them older than most of the engineers using them. GNU Emacs 31.1 landed in August, so it's still getting releases. If you edit text all day, the history matters less than the friction. Emacs uses a Meta key that maps to Alt on Windows and Linux and Opt on Macs, while KDE calls it Windows or Command and GNOME calls it Super. That mismatch is why people bounce off it. Projects like Doom Emacs, Emacs Solo, Aquamacs, and ErgoEmacs exist to smooth those edges, and that's the practical path in. The program is written in Lisp, and its exhaustive manual runs 804 pages. The original macros came from TECO, written by Dan Murphy in 1962, and Richard Stallman began the GNU version in 1974 by improving TECO. Guy L. Steele Jr. did early work in 1975. XEmacs, a fork, first shipped in 2020. Worth watching: whether the modernized distributions pull new users in or just give veterans another config to maintain.