XEmacs For Linux

XEmacs (formerly Lucid Emacs) and is an open source, completely free, extensible and powerful text editor, as well as an application development system that gets its roots from the powerful and well known GNU Emacs software.

As a matter of fact, XEmacs is a GUI front-end for GNU Emacs. The software is engineered in such a way that it provides an open software development model, accessible to users via a modern graphical user interface (GUI).

Being backed by powerful organizations, such as Sun Microsystems, ETL/Electrotechnical Laboratory, University of Illinois, Amdahl Corporation, BeOpen, Lucid and others, XEmacs is a cross-platform application that supports all GNU/Linux distributions, Microsoft Windows, and other UNIX-like operating systems.

However, its graphical user interface (GUI) has a design from 10 years ago, making XEmacs the number one choice of nostalgic users. You will have to click each menu item separately to activate it.

Using the XEmacs software on your GNU/Linux operating system is easy, but first you will have to install it. The project is distributed only as a source package, which needs to be compiled and installed manually. As an alternative, you can install it from the main software repositories of your distribution.

If you decided to install XEmacs using the source package, which is distributed for free on Softpedia, download it and save it on your Home directory. Then, use an archive manager utility to extract its contents, open the Terminal app and go to the location where you’ve extracted the archive file (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/xemacs-21.4.22).

Run the ‘./configure && make’ command to configure and compile the program. After a successful compilation process, run the ‘sudo make install’ command to install XEmacs system wide. Open it from the Programming section of your Start Menu (it is called XEmacs Text Editor).