[FSFE PR][EN] [GNU/FSF Press] GNU Emacs 21.1 has been released

[Bradley M. Kuhn]

[ This press release is also available on the Internet at:
  http://www.gnu.org/press/2001-10-22-Emacs.html
]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Media Contact: Free Software Foundation
               Bradley M. Kuhn <pr at gnu.org>
               Phone: +1-617-542-5942

     FSF Announces Version 21 of the GNU Emacs Editing Environment

Boston, Massachusetts, USA - Monday, October 22, 2001 - The Free Software
Foundation announced today the 21.1 release of GNU Emacs.  Emacs is a Free
Software multilingual text editor, licensed under the GNU General Public
License (GNU GPL).

Richard Stallman said, "Emacs 21 is a big step forward in our long-term
plan to take Emacs from a programmable text editor to a programmable word
processor."

Emacs 21.1 includes support for proportional fonts: characters in a line
can be of variable width and lines can have variable heights.  It also
supports including images in text.  Emacs 21.1 adds a number of new
user-interface features: it has tool bars for executing frequently used
commands, it supports native scroll bars, it displays tool tips, and it
has a mouse-sensitive mode line.  Even on text-only terminals, Emacs 21.1
supports colors and other display attributes.

With the release of version 21.1, the Emacs development sources are
accessible via anonymous CVS from http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/emacs/.
The anonymous CVS services are provided by Savannah, GNU's
SourceForge-like system for project collaboration.

GNU Emacs 21.1 can be downloaded from the FTP directory at
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/.  However, users are encouraged to use mirror
sites for downloads, to decrease the load on GNU and FSF servers.  A list
of mirrors can be found at http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html.

GNU Emacs 21.1 has already been packaged for Debian.  Users of Debian
GNU/Linux's unstable branch can install GNU Emacs 21 via the native Debian
APT system.


About GNU Emacs:

Emacs is the extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time
display editor.

If this seems to be a bit of a mouthful, an easier explanation is
Emacs is a text editor and more.  At its core is an interpreter for
Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions
to support text editing.

Some of the features of GNU Emacs include:

  * Content-sensitive major modes for a wide variety of file types, from
    plain text to source code to HTML files.

  * Complete online documentation, including a tutorial for new users.

  * Highly extensible through the Emacs Lisp language.

  * Support for many languages and their scripts, including all the
    European "Latin" scripts, Russian, Greek, Japanese, Chinese, Korean,
    Thai, Vietnamese, Lao, Ethiopian, and some Indian scripts.

  * Many extensions for jobs such as reading and sending mail, reading
    net news, calendar, and diary.  More Emacs extensions are distributed
    separately--even a web browser.


History of Emacs:

Richard Stallman developed the original Emacs text editor in 1975 while
working at MIT.  Emacs, first developed in 1975, is an extensible text
editor that allows the user to program editing commands.  The original
Emacs used TECO as the user programming language.  GNU Emacs, which uses
Lisp as the user programming language, was started in September 1984 as
part of developing the GNU operating system.

Emacs has undergone continuous development since that time, and has been
approved based on user bug reports and contributions from the Free
Software community.  Emacs 19 added support for multiple frames using the
X Windowing System.  Emacs 20 added multi-lingual support.


About GNU:

GNU is a Free Software Unix-like operating system.  Development of GNU
began in 1984.  http://www.gnu.org/gnu/the-gnu-project.html gives
more information about GNU and its history.

GNU/Linux is the integrated combination of the GNU operating system with
the kernel, Linux, written by Linus Torvalds in 1991.  The various
versions of GNU/Linux have an estimated 20 million users.

Some people call the GNU/Linux system "Linux", but this misnomer leads to
confusion (people cannot tell whether you mean the whole system or the
kernel, one part), and spreads an inaccurate picture of how, when and
where the system was developed.  Making a consistent distinction between
GNU/Linux, the whole operating system, and Linux, the kernel, is the best
way to clear up the confusion.  See
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html for more explanation.

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