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GNOME Software

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GNOME Software is a utility for installing applications and updates on Linux . It is part of the GNOME Core Applications , and was introduced in GNOME 3.10.

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98-722: It is the GNOME front-end to the PackageKit , in turn a front-end to several package management systems , which include systems based on both RPM and DEB . The program is used to add and manage software repositories as well as Ubuntu Personal Package Archives (PPA). Ubuntu replaced its previous Ubuntu Software Center program with GNOME Software starting with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS , and re-branded it as "Ubuntu Software". It also supports fwupd for servicing of system firmware. GNOME Software supports automatic updates for Flatpak applications, but not for system packages or updates. This

196-545: A GNOME Office suite. On 15 September 2003 GNOME-Office 1.0, consisting of AbiWord 2.0, GNOME-DB 1.0, and Gnumeric 1.2.0, was released. Although some release planning for GNOME Office 1.2 was happening on the gnome-office mailing list, and Gnumeric 1.4 was announced as a part of it, the 1.2 release of the suite itself never materialized. As of 4 May 2014 , the GNOME wiki only mentions "GNOME/GTK applications that are useful in an office environment". GNOME 2

294-438: A data serialisation format akin to, but simpler and more general than, well known ones such as XML , JSON , and YAML . In this way there is little difference in practice between customising existing features and writing new ones, both of which are accomplished in the same basic way. This is operatively different from most modern extensible editors, for instance such as VS Code , in which separate languages are used to implement

392-429: A free software alternative to the proprietary Gosling Emacs. GNU Emacs was initially based on Gosling Emacs, but Stallman's replacement of its Mocklisp interpreter with a true Lisp interpreter required that nearly all of its code be rewritten. This became the first program released by the nascent GNU Project. GNU Emacs is written in C and provides Emacs Lisp , also implemented in C, as an extension language. Version 13,

490-450: A mode line at the bottom (usually displaying buffer name, the active modes and point position of the buffer among others). The bottom of every frame is used for output messages (then called 'echo area') and text input for commands (then called 'minibuffer'). In general, Emacs display elements (windows, frames, etc.) do not belong to any specific data or process. Buffers are not associated with windows, and multiple windows can be opened onto

588-420: A Linux distribution that had historically used GNOME 2, switched to Xfce when GNOME 3 was released, but re-adopted GNOME 3 in time for the release of Debian 8 "Jessie". Ubuntu switched from Unity to GNOME 3 with several extensions to resemble Unity, such as a persistent left application panel instead of a hidden dock and re-enabling desktop icons, with Ubuntu 17.10 Artful Aardvark in 2017. This release also saw

686-477: A buffer but not bundled into a mode can be handled by simply focussing that buffer and live modifying the relevant data directly. Any interaction with the editor (like key presses or clicking a mouse button) is realized by evaluating Emacs Lisp code, typically a command , which is a function explicitly designed for interactive use. Keys can be arbitrarily redefined and commands can also be accessed by name; some commands evaluate arbitrary Emacs Lisp code provided by

784-432: A clock/calendar and a notification area, which can double as a sort of dock , as well. The bottom panel is commonly empty by default (other than a set of buttons to navigate between desktops) due to its use in the navigation between windows (windows minimize to the bottom panel by default). Users can populate these panels with other completely customizable menus and buttons, including new menus, search boxes, and icons, with

882-408: A control panel in GNOME 3.x. These menus hold links to common applications and areas of the file system, respectively. A user menu placed on the opposite side of the screen, which has been available since GNOME 2.14 but has become more prominent in GNOME 3.x, holds access to account and system settings as well as options to log out, switch user, and shut down the computer. The top panel usually contains

980-499: A core part of the desktop in GNOME 1 and GNOME 2 . It has been replaced in GNOME 3 by default with GNOME Shell , which only works with the Mutter window manager. GNOME Panel served as Fallback Mode until GNOME 3.8 when Mutter could not be executed, then it was replaced with a suite of officially supported GNOME Shell extensions named GNOME Classic . Now it is part of GNOME Flashback , an official session for GNOME 3 which provides

1078-534: A cost. [..] [E]ach one has a price, and you have to carefully consider its value. Many users and developers don't understand this, and end up with a lot of cost and little value for their preferences dollar. GNOME aims to make and keep the desktop environment physically and cognitively ergonomic for people with disabilities . The GNOME Human Interface Guidelines try to take this into account as far as possible but specific issues are solved by special software. GNOME addresses computer accessibility issues by using

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1176-404: A custom theme and ports of Ubuntu's own Indicators from their old GNOME 2.x desktop. Trisquel uses Fallback Mode (Flashback) for its main desktop, because GNOME Shell requires 3D acceleration as it relies on graphics composition, while some free software drivers do not support 3D acceleration, among other reasons like more usability and more stability. Each of the component software products in

1274-458: A default line editor known as Tape Editor and Corrector (TECO). Unlike most modern text editors, TECO used separate modes in which the user would either add text, edit existing text, or display the document. One could not place characters directly into a document by typing them into TECO, but would instead enter a character ('i') in the TECO command language telling it to switch to input mode, enter

1372-691: A different dialect of Lisp or a different programming language altogether. Although not all are still actively maintained, these clones include: Emacs is primarily a text editor and is designed for manipulating pieces of text, although it is capable of formatting and printing documents like a word processor by interfacing with external programs such as LaTeX , Ghostscript or a web browser. Emacs provides commands to manipulate and differentially display semantic units of text such as words , sentences , paragraphs and source code constructs such as functions . It also features keyboard macros for performing user-defined batches of editing commands. GNU Emacs

1470-528: A dot and then "alpha", "beta", or "rc" for a development release, or a decimal for a minor stable release (much like the yy mentioned previously). Emacs Emacs ( / ˈ iː m æ k s / ), originally named EMACS (an acronym for "Editor Macros"), is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility . The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs , describes it as "the extensible, customizable, self-documenting, real-time display editor". Development of

1568-550: A general package of functions and commands relevant to a buffer's data and the way users might be interacting with it (e.g. editing source code in a specific language, editing hex , viewing the filesystem, interacting with git , etc.), and minor modes define subsidiary collections of functionality applicable across many major modes (such as auto-save-mode ). Minor modes can be toggled on or off both locally to each buffer as well as globally across all buffers, while major modes can only be toggled per-buffer. Any other data relevant to

1666-495: A key focus for GNOME. To meet this end, the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) were created. All GNOME programs share a coherent style of interfaces but are not limited to the employment of the same GUI widgets . Rather, the design of the GNOME's interface is guided by concepts described in the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines , itself relying on insights from cognitive ergonomics . Following

1764-713: A large number of GTK -based programs written by various authors. Since the release of GNOME 3.0, GNOME Project concentrates on developing a set of programs that accounts for the GNOME Core Applications . The commonalities of the GNOME Core Applications are the adherence to the current GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) as well as the tight integration with underlying GNOME layers like e.g. GVfs (GNOME virtual filesystem) and also with one another e.g. GOA (gnome-online-accounts) settings and GNOME Files with Google Drive and GNOME Photos with Google Photos . Some programs are simply existing programs with

1862-401: A list of all installed applications. A search bar appears at the top and a workspace list for viewing and switching between workspaces is directly above it. Notifications appear from the top of the shell. Beginning with GNOME 3.8, GNOME provides a suite of officially supported GNOME Shell extensions that provide an Applications menu (a basic start menu ) and a "Places menu" on the top bar and

1960-673: A much wider set of licenses, including proprietary software licenses. GNOME itself is licensed under the LGPL for its libraries and the GNU General Public License (GPL) for its applications. GNOME was formerly a part of the GNU Project , but that is no longer the case. In 2021, GNOME Executive Director Neil McGovern publicly tweeted that GNOME was not a GNU project and that he had been asking GNU to remove GNOME from their list of packages since 2019. In 2021, GNOME

2058-493: A multi-monitor setup, or a terminal frame connected via ssh from a remote system and a graphical frame displaying the same Emacs process via the local system's monitor. Just as buffers don't require windows, running Emacs processes do not require any frames, and one common usage pattern is to deploy Emacs as an editing server : running it as a headless daemon and connecting to it via a frame-spawning client. This server can then be made available in any situation where an editor

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2156-435: A new remote desktop app called Connections, updates to GNOME Music app, and improvements to the power mode settings. GNOME 42 was released on 23 March 2022 and introduced the option to screen record and switch light/dark themes using a new GTK API called Libadwaita . Several default apps were replaced with more modern versions such as Text Editor instead of Gedit and Console instead of Terminal. GNOME 43 (Guadalajara)

2254-409: A new name and revamped user interface, while others have been written from scratch. The GNOME project provides a suite of software development tools to facilitate the creation of GNOME software . These tools are designed to streamline the development process for the GNOME ecosystem . These tools collectively provide a comprehensive development environment for creating software that aligns with

2352-508: A panel with a windows list at the bottom of the screen that lets users quickly minimize and restore open windows, a "Show Desktop" button in the bottom left corner, and virtual desktops in the bottom right corner. GNOME Classic also adds the minimize and maximize buttons to window headers. GNOME Flashback is an official session for GNOME 3. Based on GNOME Panel and Metacity , it is lightweight, has lower hardware requirements, and uses less system resources than GNOME Shell . It provides

2450-473: A refreshed settings app, amongst many other app changes. Other system changes included accessibility improvements and experimental support for variable refresh rates. GNOME 47 (Denver) was released on 18 September 2024 and featured user-chosen accent color support in Libadwaita applications as well as many other smaller improvements. GNOME Panel was a highly configurable taskbar for GNOME. It formed

2548-508: A stable, practical, and responsive editing environment for novice users. The main text editing data structure is the buffer , a memory region containing data (usually text) with associated attributes. The most important of these are: Modes , in particular, are an important concept in Emacs, providing a mechanism to disaggregate Emacs' functionality into sets of behaviours and keybinds relevant to specific buffers' data. Major modes provide

2646-493: A time). Because of its relatively large vocabulary of commands, Emacs features a long-established command language , to concisely express the keystrokes necessary to perform an action. This command language recognises the following shift and modifier keys: Ctrl , Alt , ⇧ Shift , Meta , Super , and Hyper . Not all of these may be present on an IBM-style keyboard, though they can usually be configured as desired. These are represented in command language as

2744-564: A traditional and highly customizable taskbar (panel) with many plug-ins bundled in one package (gnome-applets), including a customizable start menu . It provides a similar user experience to the GNOME 2.x series and has customization capacities built in. GNOME Flashback consists of the following components: GNOME Mobile is an initiative within the GNOME project to adapt the GNOME desktop environment , shell, app ecosystem and other related components for use on mobile and touch-based devices such as smartphones and tablets . There are

2842-487: A user experience similar to GNOME 2. In GNOME 3, customizing GNOME Panel is done by pressing the Alt key while right-clicking on the panel. By default, GNOME Flashback contains two panels (one on the top, and one to its opposite on the bottom) spanning the width of the screen. The top panel usually contains navigation menus labeled "Applications" and "Places" in that order, as the "System" menu from GNOME 2.x has been replaced by

2940-545: Is a free and open-source desktop environment for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems . Many major Linux distributions , including Debian , Fedora Linux , Ubuntu , Red Hat Enterprise Linux , and SUSE Linux Enterprise distribute GNOME as their default desktop environment; it is also the default in Oracle Solaris , a Unix operating system. GNOME is developed by the GNOME Project , which

3038-461: Is a real-time display editor, as its edits are displayed onscreen as they occur. This is standard behavior for modern text editors but EMACS was among the earliest to implement this. The alternative is having to issue a distinct command to display text, (e.g. before or after modifying it). This was common in earlier (or merely simpler) line and context editors, such as QED (BTS, CTSS, Multics), ed (Unix), ED (CP/M), and Edlin (DOS). Almost all of

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3136-410: Is a major version, which can include large changes such as ABI breakage; these have no regular schedule and occur in response to requirements for large-scale changes. xx is a minor version, released on the above schedule of approximately every 6 months, in which the 1- or 2-digit number's parity indicates the type of release: if xx is even (e.g. 3.20) the release is considered stable, whereas if xx

3234-600: Is also used to express the actions needed to invoke commands with no assigned shortcut: for example, the command scratch-buffer (which initialises a buffer in memory for temporary text storage and manipulation), when invoked by the user, will be reported back as M-x scra <return> , with Emacs scanning the namespace of contextually available commands to return the shortest sequence of keystrokes which uniquely lexicate it. Because Emacs predates modern standard terminology for graphical user interfaces , it uses somewhat divergent names for familiar interface elements. Buffers,

3332-498: Is composed of both volunteers and paid contributors, the largest corporate contributor being Red Hat . It is an international project that aims to develop frameworks for software development, to program end-user applications based on these frameworks, and to coordinate efforts for the internationalization, localization , and accessibility of that software. In 2023/2024, GNOME received over 1 million Euros from Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund . Since GNOME 2, productivity has been

3430-484: Is implemented through a scripting language called Emacs Lisp . Because about 70% of GNU Emacs is written in the Emacs Lisp extension language, one only needs to port the C core which implements the Emacs Lisp interpreter. This makes porting Emacs to a new platform considerably less difficult than porting an equivalent project consisting of native code only. GNU Emacs development was relatively closed until 1999 and

3528-545: Is inactive. GNU Emacs is, along with vi , one of the two main contenders in the traditional editor wars of Unix culture. GNU Emacs is among the oldest free and open source projects still under development. Emacs development began during the 1970s at the MIT AI Lab , whose PDP-6 and PDP-10 computers used the Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS) operating system that featured

3626-463: Is launched with no file to edit. The tutorial is by Stuart Cracraft and Richard Stallman. The Church of Emacs , formed by Richard Stallman , is a parody religion created for Emacs users. While it refers to vi as the editor of the beast (vi-vi-vi being 6-6-6 in Roman numerals), it does not oppose the use of vi; rather, it calls it proprietary software anathema . ("Using a free version of vi

3724-545: Is not a sin but a penance ." ) The Church of Emacs has its own newsgroup , alt.religion.emacs , that has posts purporting to support this parody religion. Supporters of vi have created an opposing Cult of vi . Stallman has jokingly referred to himself as St I  GNU  cius , a saint in the Church of Emacs. This is in reference to Ignatius of Antioch , an early Church father venerated in Christianity. The word emacs

3822-405: Is odd, it represents a current development snapshot (e.g. 3.21) that will eventually evolve into the next stable release. yy indicates a point release, e.g. 3.20.6; these are made on a frequency of weeks in order to fix issues, add non-breaking enhancements, etc. GNOME 40 started a new versioning scheme in which a single number is incremented with each biannual release. The number is followed by

3920-449: Is required, simply by declaring the client program to be the user's EDITOR or VISUAL variable. Such a server continues to run in the background, managing any child processes, accumulating stdin from open pipes, ports, or fifos, performing periodic or pre-programmed actions, and remembering buffer undo history, saved text snippets, command history, and other user state between editing sessions. In this mode of operation, Emacs overlaps

4018-457: Is supplied, the universal argument is 1 : every command implicitly runs once, but may be called multiply, or in a different way, when supplied with such a prefix. Such arguments may also be non-positive where it makes sense for them to be so - it is up to the function accepting the argument to determine, according to its own semantics, what a given number means to it. One common usage is for functions to perform actions in reverse simply by checking

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4116-547: Is the main graphical shell of GNOME. It features a top bar holding (from left to right) an Activities button, an application menu, a clock and an integrated system status menu. The application menu displays the name of the application in focus and provides access to functions such as accessing the application's preferences, closing the application, or creating a new application window. The status menu holds various system status indicators, shortcuts to system settings, and session actions including logging out, switching users, locking

4214-779: The Accessibility Toolkit (ATK) application programming interface , which allows enhancing user experience by using special input methods and speech synthesis and speech recognition software. Particular utilities are registered with ATK using Assistive Technology Service Provider Interface (AT-SPI), and become globally used throughout the desktop. Several assistive technology providers, including Orca screen reader and Dasher input method, were developed specifically for use with GNOME. The internationalization and localization of GNOME software relies on locale , and supports 197 languages with varying levels of completion, with some not being translated at all. GNOME Shell

4312-489: The C programming language , which enables GNU Emacs to be ported to a wide variety of operating systems and architectures without modifying the implementation semantics of the Lisp system where most of the editor lives. In this Lisp environment, variables and functions can be modified with no need to rebuild or restart Emacs, with even newly redefined versions of core editor features being asynchronously compiled and loaded into

4410-411: The GNOME Human Interface Guidelines , developers can create high-quality, consistent, and usable GUI programs, as it addresses everything from interface design to the recommended pixel-based layout of widgets. During the GNOME 2 rewrite, many settings deemed of little value to the majority of users were removed. The guiding principle was outlined by Havoc Pennington – a software developer involved in

4508-458: The GNU and Linux communities. Aiming to provide an easy-to-use and uncluttered user experience has led to some criticized design decisions, like the removal of minimize and maximize buttons, the simplification of configuration options, and visual clues that could lead to confusion. Several projects have been initiated to either continue development of GNOME 2.x, modify GNOME 3.x to be more like

4606-511: The Lisp machine by Mike McMahon and Daniel Weinreb , and Sine ( Sine Is Not Eine ), which was written by Owen Theodore Anderson. Weinreb's EINE was the first Emacs written in Lisp. In 1978, Bernard Greenberg wrote Multics Emacs almost entirely in Multics Lisp at Honeywell 's Cambridge Information Systems Lab. Multics Emacs was later maintained by Richard Soley , who went on to develop

4704-522: The TECO editor. It was inspired by the ideas of the TECO-macro editors TECMAC and TMACS. The most popular, and most ported, version of Emacs is GNU Emacs, which was created by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project . XEmacs is a variant that branched from GNU Emacs in 1991. GNU Emacs and XEmacs use similar Lisp dialects and are, for the most part, compatible with each other. XEmacs development

4802-564: The TENEX and TOPS-20 operating systems. Other contributors to early versions of Emacs include Kent Pitman , Earl Killian , and Eugene Ciccarelli . By 1979, Emacs was the main editor used in MIT's AI lab and its Laboratory for Computer Science. In the following years, programmers wrote a variety of Emacs-like editors for other computer systems. These included EINE ( EINE Is Not EMACS ) and ZWEI ( ZWEI Was EINE Initially ), which were written for

4900-634: The Ubuntu GNOME edition merge with the mainline release. However, Ubuntu Unity was then released, keeping the Unity desktop and continuing to update it. GNOME 40 was released on 24 March 2021. It immediately follows version 3, but adopts a new versioning scheme and a schedule of future major releases on a fixed six-month cycle (see Release Cycle ). With this quicker release cadence, major releases became somewhat leaner, because full rewrites of major packages were not occurring as often as they were in

4998-426: The sign of the universal argument, such as a sort command which sorts in obverse by default and in reverse when called with a negative argument, using the absolute value of its argument as the sorting key (e.g. -7 sorting in reverse by column index (or delimiter) 7), or undo/redo, which are simply negatives of each other (traversing forward and backward through a recursive history of diffs by some number of steps at

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5096-868: The 2.x releases, or create a desktop environment with a traditional design metaphor entirely from scratch due to the negative reception of GNOME 3: Among those critical of the early releases of GNOME 3 is Linus Torvalds , the creator of the Linux kernel . Torvalds abandoned GNOME for a while after the release of GNOME 3.0, saying, "The developers have apparently decided that it's 'too complicated' to actually do real work on your desktop, and have decided to make it really annoying to do". He promptly switched to Xfce . Over time, critical reception has grown more positive. In 2013, Torvalds resumed using GNOME, noting that "they have extensions now that are still much too hard to find; but with extensions you can make your desktop look almost as good as it used to look two years ago". Debian ,

5194-578: The AI Lab and soon accumulated a large collection of custom macros whose names often ended in MAC or MACS , which stood for macro . Two years later, Guy Steele took on the project of unifying the diverse macros into a single set. Steele and Stallman's finished implementation included facilities for extending and documenting the new macro set. The resulting system was called EMACS, which stood for Editing MACroS or, alternatively, E with MACroS . Stallman picked

5292-427: The GNOME desktop and its design principles . GNOME Circle is a collection of applications which have been built to extend the GNOME platform, utilize GNOME technologies, and follow the GNOME human interface guidelines . GNOME was started on 15 August 1997 by Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena  [ es ] as a free software project to develop a desktop environment and applications for it. It

5390-412: The GNOME project has its own version number and release schedule . However, individual module maintainers coordinate their efforts to create a full GNOME stable release on an approximately six-month schedule, alongside its underlying libraries such as GTK and GLib. Some experimental projects are excluded from these releases. Before GNOME 40, GNOME version numbers followed the scheme v.xx.yy . Here, v

5488-517: The GNOME project. The California startup Eazel developed the Nautilus file manager from 1999 to 2001. De Icaza and Nat Friedman founded Helix Code (later Ximian ) in 1999 in Massachusetts; this company developed GNOME's infrastructure and applications and was purchased by Novell in 2003. During the transition to GNOME 2 and shortly thereafter, there were brief talks about creating

5586-428: The GNOME.Asia community, GNOME 44 introduced a new file chooser grid view, updated settings panels, and redesigned accessibility settings. The new quick settings menu introduced in GNOME 43 was updated, alongside the addition of several new apps and improvements to existing apps. GNOME 45 (Rīga) was released on 20 September 2023. It introduced redesigned app styles alongside a new activities button, which replaced both

5684-859: The NILE Emacs-like editor for the NIL Project, and by Barry Margolin. Many versions of Emacs, including GNU Emacs, would later adopt Lisp as an extension language. James Gosling , who would later invent NeWS and the Java programming language , wrote Gosling Emacs in 1981. The first Emacs-like editor to run on Unix , Gosling Emacs was written in C and used Mocklisp , a language with Lisp-like syntax, as an extension language. Early Ads for Computer Corporation of America 's CCA EMACS (Steve Zimmerman) appeared in 1984. 1985 comparisons to GNU Emacs, when it came out, mentioned free vs. $ 2,400. Richard Stallman began work on GNU Emacs in 1984 to produce

5782-564: The best-known early forks in free software development occurred when the codebases of the two Emacs versions diverged and the separate development teams ceased efforts to merge them back into a single program. Lucid Emacs has since been renamed XEmacs . Its development is currently inactive, with the most recent stable version 21.4.22 released in January 2009 (while a beta was released in 2013), while GNU Emacs has implemented many formerly XEmacs-only features. Other notable forks include: In

5880-401: The close button and application name in the window decoration . GNOME 3 brought many enhancements to core software. Many GNOME Core Applications also went through redesigns to provide a better user experience. Mutter replaced Metacity as the default window manager, and Adwaita replaced Clearlooks as the default theme. The release of GNOME 3 caused considerable controversy in

5978-557: The creation of the GNOME Shell . GNOME 3 was released in 2011. While GNOME 1 and 2 interfaces followed the traditional desktop metaphor , the GNOME Shell adopted a more abstract metaphor with a minimalistic window management workflow, where switching between different tasks and virtual desktops occurs in a separate area called the   overview. The Minimize and maximize buttons were hidden by default, leaving only

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6076-480: The data that Emacs users interact with, are displayed to the user inside windows , which are tiled portions of the terminal screen or the GUI window, which Emacs refers to as frames ; in modern terminology, an Emacs frame would be a window and an Emacs window would be a split. Depending on configuration, windows can include their own scroll bars, line numbers, sometimes a 'header line' typically to ease navigation, and

6174-489: The default configuration of GNOME 2, the desktop has a launcher menu for quick access to installed programs and file locations; open windows may be accessed by a taskbar along the bottom of the screen; and the top-right corner features a notification area for programs to display notices while running in the background. However, these features can be moved to almost any position or orientation the user desires, replaced with other functions, or removed altogether. As of 2009, GNOME 2

6272-414: The editor. Extensions have been written to, among other things, manage files , remote access , e-mail , outlines , multimedia , Git integration, RSS feeds, and collaborative editing , as well as implementations of ELIZA , Pong , Conway's Life , Snake , Dunnet , and Tetris . The original EMACS was written in 1976 by David A. Moon and Guy L. Steele Jr. as a set of macros for

6370-399: The features of text terminal frames. The first Emacs contained a help library that included documentation for every command, variable and internal function. Because of this, Emacs proponents described the software as self-documenting in that it presents the user with information on its normal features and its current state. Each function includes a documentation string that is displayed to

6468-490: The first Emacs began in the mid-1970s, and work on GNU Emacs, directly descended from the original, is ongoing; its latest version is 29.4   [REDACTED] , released June 2024. Emacs has over 10,000 built-in commands and its user interface allows the user to combine these commands into macros to automate work. Implementations of Emacs typically feature a dialect of the Lisp programming language, allowing users and developers to write new commands and applications for

6566-431: The first public release, was made on March 20, 1985. The first widely distributed version of GNU Emacs was version 15.34, released later in 1985. Early versions of GNU Emacs were numbered as 1.x.x , with the initial digit denoting the version of the C core. The 1 was dropped after version 1.12, as it was thought that the major number would never change, and thus the numbering skipped from 1 to 13 . In September 2014, it

6664-483: The functionality in Emacs, including basic editing operations such as the insertion of characters into a file, is achieved through functions written in a dialect of the Lisp programming language . The dialect used in GNU Emacs is known as Emacs Lisp (Elisp), and was developed expressly to port Emacs to GNU and Unix . The Emacs Lisp layer sits atop a stable core of basic services and platform abstraction written in

6762-406: The functionality of programs like screen and tmux . Because of its separation of display concerns from editing functionality, Emacs can display roughly similarly on any device more complex than a dumb terminal , including providing typical graphical WIMP elements on sufficiently featureful text terminals - though graphical frames are the preferred mode of display, providing a strict superset of

6860-488: The icons in particular (called launchers ) performing functions similar to the quick-launch feature found in the Microsoft Windows 98 – Vista taskbar. Other applications can also be attached to the panels, and the panels are highly reconfigurable: anything on these panels can be moved, removed, or configured in other ways. For example, a migrating Microsoft Windows user might move the menus usually positioned in

6958-422: The interface and features of the editor and to encode its user-defined configuration and options. The goal of Emacs' open design is to transparently expose Emacs' internals to the Emacs user during normal use in the same way that they would be exposed to the Emacs developer working on the git tree , and to collapse as much as possible of the distinction between using Emacs and programming Emacs, while still providing

7056-429: The jumps between GNOME 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 versions. GNOME 40 organizes the activities overview in a horizontal fashion, instead of using a vertical design like its predecessors. The release also brings new touchpad gestures. GNOME 41 was released on 22 September 2021 and introduced a rewritten and redesigned GNOME Software application manager, a multitasking panel and a mobile network (for WWAN ) panel in settings,

7154-728: The key used to call it. For example, pressing the f key in a buffer that accepts text input evaluates the code ( self-insert-command 1 ?f ) , which inserts one copy of the character constant ?f at point . The 1 , in this case, is determined by what Emacs terms the universal argument : all Emacs command code accepts a numeric value which, in its simplest usage, indicates repetition of an action, but in more complex cases (where repetition doesn't make sense) can yield other behaviours. These arguments may be supplied via command prefices, such as Control + u 7 f , or more compactly Meta + 7 f , which expands to ( self-insert-command 7 ?f ) . When no prefix

7252-405: The lab's E editor, written by Fred Wright. He was impressed by the editor's intuitive WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) behavior, which has since become the default behavior of most modern text editors. He returned to MIT where Carl Mikkelsen, a hacker at the AI Lab, had added to TECO a combined display/editing mode called Control-R that allowed the screen display to be updated each time

7350-448: The live environment to replace existing definitions. Modern GNU Emacs features both bytecode and native code compilation for Emacs Lisp. All configuration is stored in variables, classes, and data structures, and changed by simply updating these live. The use of a Lisp dialect in this case is a key advantage, as Lisp syntax consists of so-called symbolic expressions (or sexprs), which can act as both evaluatable code expressions and as

7448-416: The name Emacs "because <E> was not in use as an abbreviation on ITS at the time." An apocryphal hacker koan alleges that the program was named after Emack & Bolio's , a popular Boston ice cream store. The first operational EMACS system existed in late 1976. Stallman saw a problem in too much customization and de facto forking and set certain conditions for usage. He later wrote: EMACS

7546-634: The past, projects aimed at producing small versions of Emacs proliferated. GNU Emacs was initially targeted at computers with a 32-bit flat address space and at least 1  MiB of RAM. Such computers were high end workstations and minicomputers in the 1980s, and this left a need for smaller reimplementations that would run on common personal computer hardware. Today's computers have more than enough power and capacity to eliminate these restrictions, but small clones have more recently been designed to fit on software installation disks or for use on less capable hardware. Other projects aim to implement Emacs in

7644-522: The previous "Activities" label and the app menu with a graphical workspace indicator. Other updates to the system bar included a new camera usage indicator and a keyboard shortcut to open and close the quick settings menu. GNOME 45 also introduced two new image viewer and camera apps, keyboard backlight controls, and numerous enhancements to existing apps. GNOME 46 (Kathmandu) was released on 20 March 2024 and featured an enhanced files app with global search, support for headless remote login via GDM , and

7742-541: The project – who emphasized the idea that it is better to make software behave correctly by default than to add a UI preference to get the desired behavior: A traditional free software application is configurable so that it has the union of all features anyone's ever seen in any equivalent application on any other historical platform. Or even configurable to be the union of all applications that anyone's ever seen on any historical platform ( Emacs *cough*). Does this hurt anything? Yes it does. It turns out that preferences have

7840-491: The required characters, during which time the edited text was not displayed on the screen, and finally enter a character (<esc>) to switch the editor back to command mode. (A similar technique was used to allow overtyping.) This behavior is similar to that of the program ed . By the 1970s, TECO was already an old program, initially released in 1962. Richard Stallman visited the Stanford AI Lab in 1976 and saw

7938-641: The respective prefices: C- , A- , S- , M- , s- , and H- . Keys whose names are only printable with more than one character are enclosed in angle brackets. Thus, a keyboard shortcut such as Ctrl + Alt + ⇧ Shift + F9 (check dependent formulas and calculate all cells in all open workbooks in Excel ) would be rendered in Emacs command language as C-A-S-<f9> , while an Emacs command like Meta + s f Ctrl + Meta + s (incremental file search by filename-matching regexp ), would be expressed as M-s f C-M-s . Command language

8036-408: The role at times. Stefan Monnier and Chong Yidong were maintainers from 2008 to 2015. John Wiegley was named maintainer in 2015 after a meeting with Stallman at MIT. As of early 2014, GNU Emacs has had 579 individual committers throughout its history. Lucid Emacs, based on an early alpha version of GNU Emacs 19, was developed beginning in 1991 by Jamie Zawinski and others at Lucid Inc. One of

8134-416: The same buffer, for example to track different parts of a long text side-by-side without scrolling back and forth, and multiple buffers can share the same text, for example to take advantage of different major modes in a mixed-language file. Similarly, Emacs instances are not associated with particular frames, and multiple frames can be opened displaying a single running Emacs process, e.g. a frame per screen in

8232-618: The screen, and suspending the computer. Clicking on the Activities button, moving the mouse to the top-left hot corner or pressing the Super key brings up the Overview. The Overview gives users an overview of current activities and provides a way to switch between windows and workspaces and to launch applications. The Dash on the bottom houses shortcuts to favorite applications, currently open windows, and an application picker button to show

8330-456: The top panel into a 'start' menu on the bottom panel as well as moving the notification area into the place normally positioned by the Windows notification area, then remove the top panel altogether, to interact with GNOME Panel similarly to the Windows taskbar. The version of GNOME Panel available in the repository for Ubuntu 12.04 offers a modified version of Fallback Mode with the addition of

8428-458: The user entered a keystroke. Stallman reimplemented this mode to run efficiently and then added a macro feature to the TECO display-editing mode that allowed the user to redefine any keystroke to run a TECO program. E had another feature that TECO lacked: random-access editing. TECO was a page-sequential editor that was designed for editing paper tape on the PDP-1 at a time when computer memory

8526-428: The user in various ways (e.g. a family of eval- functions, operating on the buffer , region , or individual expression ). Even the simplest user inputs (such a printable characters ) are effectuated as Emacs Lisp functions, such as the self-insert-command , bound by default to most keyboard keys in a typical text editing buffer, which parameterises itself with the locale -defined character associated with

8624-405: The user on request, a practice that subsequently spread to programming languages including Lisp , Java , Perl , and Python . This help system can take users to the actual code for each function, whether from a built-in library or an added third-party library. Emacs also has a built-in tutorial . Emacs displays instructions for performing simple editing commands and invoking the tutorial when it

8722-591: Was announced on the GNU emacs-devel mailing list that GNU Emacs would adopt a rapid release strategy and version numbers would increment more quickly in the future. GNU Emacs offered more features than Gosling Emacs, in particular a full-featured Lisp as its extension language, and soon replaced Gosling Emacs as the de facto Unix Emacs editor. Markus Hess exploited a security flaw in GNU Emacs' email subsystem in his 1986 cracking spree in which he gained superuser access to Unix computers. Most of GNU Emacs functionality

8820-475: Was distributed on a basis of communal sharing, which means all improvements must be given back to me to be incorporated and distributed. The original Emacs, like TECO, ran only on the PDP-10 running ITS. Its behavior was sufficiently different from that of TECO that it could be considered a text editor in its own right, and it quickly became the standard editing program on ITS. Mike McMahon ported Emacs from ITS to

8918-559: Was founded in part because the K Desktop Environment , which was growing in popularity, relied on the Qt widget toolkit which used a proprietary software license until version 2.0 (June 1999). In place of Qt, GTK (formerly called GIMP Toolkit) was chosen as the base of GNOME. GTK is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), a free software license that allows software linking to it to use

9016-511: Was generally small due to cost, and it was a feature of TECO that allowed editing on only one page at a time sequentially in the order of the pages in the file. Instead of adopting E's approach of structuring the file for page-random access on disk, Stallman modified TECO to handle large buffers more efficiently and changed its file-management method to read, edit, and write the entire file as a single buffer. Almost all modern editors use this approach. The new version of TECO quickly became popular at

9114-761: Was introduced in GNOME 3.30 released in 2018. Users can control whether Flatpak updates are automatically downloaded and installed GNOME Software removed Snap support in July 2019, due to code quality issues, lack of integration (specifically, the user can't tell what snap is doing after they click "install" and that it generally ignores GNOME's settings), and the fact that it competes with the GNOME-supported Flatpak standard. The goals and use cases that GNOME Software targets as of November 2020: GNOME GNOME ( /ɡəˈnoʊm/, /ˈnoʊm/ ) originally an acronym for GNU Network Object Model Environment ,

9212-491: Was released in June 2002 and was very similar to a conventional desktop interface, featuring a simple desktop in which users could interact with virtual objects such as windows, icons, and files. GNOME 2 started out with Sawfish as its default window manager , but later switched to Metacity in GNOME 2.2. The handling of windows, applications, and files in GNOME 2 is similar to that of contemporary desktop operating systems. In

9310-415: Was released on 21 September 2022 and introduced a new quick settings menu, a GNOME Files update to GTK4 , and a new 'Device Security' panel in settings, among many other changes. GNOME Web was updated, bringing in support for web apps and experimental Firefox and Chrome extension support. GNOME 44 (Kuala Lumpur) was released on 22 March 2023. Named after Kuala Lumpur in recognition of work done by

9408-402: Was removed from the list. GNOME proceeded to remove mentions of any link to GNU from their code and documentation. The name "GNOME" was initially an acronym for GNU Network Object Model Environment , referring to the original intention of creating a distributed object framework similar to Microsoft 's OLE , but the acronym was eventually dropped because it no longer reflected the vision of

9506-428: Was the default desktop for OpenSolaris . The MATE desktop environment is a fork of the GNOME 2 codebase (see Criticism , below.) In 2008, an increasing discontent among the community and developers about the lack of project direction and technical progress prompted the announcement of GNOME 3.0. Originally, the plan was to make only incremental changes and avoid disruption for users. This changed when efforts led to

9604-673: Was used as an example of the Cathedral development style in The Cathedral and the Bazaar . The project has since adopted a public development mailing list and anonymous CVS access. Development took place in a single CVS trunk until 2008 and was then switched to the Bazaar DVCS . On November 11, 2014, development was moved to Git . Richard Stallman has remained the principal maintainer of GNU Emacs, but he has stepped back from

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