UNIX Emacs: a retrospective (lessons for flexible system design)

ABSTRACT

UNIX Emacs is well-known and widely used as a text editor that has been extended in a remarkable number of directions, not always wisely. Because it is programmable in a powerful yet simple programming language, Emacs has been used as a development tool for the construction of some remarkably complex user-oriented programs. Indeed, it has served as both a user interface management system and a user interface toolkit, though it was designed as neither. In this paper, we discuss the features that have made it so popular for user interface development, in an attempt to derive lessons of value for more powerful and more systematically designed systems in the future.

REFERENCES

• 1: Gosling, James, "Unix Emacs", Carnegie- Mellon University Computer Science Department, 1981.
• 2: Nathaniel Solomon Borenstein, The design and evaluation of online help systems, 1985
• 3: Borcnstcin, Nathaniel S., "The BAGS Message Management System", Carnegie-Mellon University Computer Science Dcpartmcnt, 1985.
• 4: Stallman, Richard M., "EMACS Manual for TOPS-20 Users", MIT AI Memo 556, 19X1.
• 5: Richard M. Stallman, EMACS the extensible, customizable self-documenting display editor, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN SIGOA symposium on Text manipulation, p.147-156, June 08-10, 1981, Portland, Oregon, United States
• 6: Donncr, Marc, and David Notkin, 'Flexible Systems; Customization and Extension", to appear in IEEE Software.
• 7: Kazar, Michael, "Camphor -- A Programming Language for Extensible Systems", Usenix Conference, 1985, Portland.
• 8: Gosling, James, and David S. H. Rosenthal, "The User Interface Toolkit'*, in Proceedings of PROTEXT I Conference, 1984.
• 9: Palay, et al., "The Andrew Toolkit: an Overview", Proceedings of the USENIX Technical Conference, February, 1988.
• 10: NcWS Manual, Sun Microsystems, Inc., March, 1987.
• 11: Robert W. Scheifler , Jim Gettys, The X window system, ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), v.5 n.2, p.79-109, April 1986 [doi>10.1145/22949.24053]
• 12: Teresa L. Roberts , Thomas P. Moran, The evaluation of text editors: methodology and empirical results., Communications of the ACM, v.26 n.4, p.265-283, April 1983 [doi>10.1145/2163.2164]
• 13: Nathaniel S. Borenstein, The evaluation of text editors: a critical review of the Roberts and Morgan methodology based on new experiments, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.99-105, April 1985, San Francisco, California, United States

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.0 General

          Nouns: UNIX

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.2 Design Tools and Techniques
          Subjects: User interfaces

General Terms:
Design, Management, Performance