Richard Stallman wrote the first Emacs in 1976 as a set of editing macros for the TECO editor, then rewrote it as GNU Emacs in 1984. In the decades since, Emacs has accumulated a mail client, a news reader, a calendar, an IRC client, a file manager, a spreadsheet, a Tetris clone, and M-x psychoanalyze-pinhead — a mock therapy session powered by the Eliza chatbot. Stallman’s position is that an editor should be extensible enough to do anything, and GNU Emacs, written in Lisp and infinitely configurable, arguably proves the point. The counter-argument is that an editor should primarily edit text efficiently, which is the position of every vi user who has ever timed Emacs startup. Both camps are still shouting. The Tetris clone runs fine.
