Emacs Reviews in 2025

Audience

Anyone looking for an extensible, customizable, free text editor solution to create, change and interpret text modules

About Emacs

At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing. Content-aware editing modes, including syntax coloring, for many file types. Complete built-in documentation, including a tutorial for new users. Full Unicode support for nearly all human scripts. Highly customizable, using Emacs Lisp code or a graphical interface. A wide range of functionality beyond text editing, including a project planner, mail and news reader, debugger interface, calendar, IRC client, and more. A packaging system for downloading and installing extensions. Built-in support for arbitrary-size integers. Text shaping with HarfBuzz. Native support for JSON parsing. Better support for Cairo drawing. Portable dumping used instead of unexec. Support for XDG conventions for init files. Additional early-init initialization file. Built-in support for tab bar and tab-line. Support for resizing and rotating of images without ImageMagick.

Other Popular Alternatives & Related Software

Spacemacs

A community-driven Emacs distribution. The best editor is neither Emacs nor Vim, it's Emacs and Vim! Spacemacs is a new way to experience Emacs, a sophisticated and polished set-up focused on ergonomics, mnemonics and consistency. Key bindings are organized using mnemonic prefixes like b for buffer, p for project, s for search, h for help etc. Innovative real-time display of available key bindings. Simple query system to quickly find available layers, packages and more. Similar functionalities have the same key binding everywhere thanks to a clearly defined set of conventions. Community-driven configuration provides curated packages tuned by power users and bugs are fixed quickly.

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gedit

gedit is the text editor of the GNOME desktop environment. The first goal of gedit is to be easy to use, with a simple interface by default. More advanced features are available by enabling plugins. A flexible plugin system which can be used to dynamically add new advanced features.

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UltraEdit

(1 Rating)

For almost 3 decades, UltraEdit has been the go-to text editor for 2+ million users and many Fortune 100/500/1000 enterprise customers. Renowned for its power and performance in handling and processing huge files and data, UltraEdit is also a highly configurable and fully themed code editor with support for nearly any source language or syntax. Often called the "Swiss army knife" of text editors, UltraEdit is a powerful tool for users in a wide range of responsibilities and industries. From programming and project management to large file manipulation, from data sorting and column/block editing to remote (FTP/SFTP) file operations, from advanced file searching and text data reformatting, there's almost no problem that UltraEdit can't solve in the world of text editing. UltraEdit is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux and is supported by a professional development team and customer service staff located in the USA.

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Vim

(1 Rating)

Vim is a highly configurable text editor built for creating and changing any kind of text efficiently. It is included as "vi" with most UNIX systems and with Apple OS X. Vim is rock stable and is continuously being developed to become even better. Vim is persistent, multi-level, with an extensive plugin system, support for hundreds of programming languages and file formats, powerful search and replace feature, and it integrates with many tools. Vim online is a central place for the Vim community to store useful Vim tips and tools. Vim has a scripting language that allows for plugin like extensions to enable IDE behavior, syntax highlighting, colorization as well as other advanced features. These scripts can be uploaded and maintained using Vim online. Vim stands for Vi IMproved. It used to be Vi IMitation, but there are so many improvements that a name change was appropriate. Vim is a text editor which includes almost all the commands from the Unix program "Vi".

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Integrations

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Ratings/Reviews

Overall 0.0 / 5

ease 0.0 / 5

features 0.0 / 5

design 0.0 / 5

support 0.0 / 5

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