Quick Emacs (QEmacs)

Welcome to QEmacs! A small but powerful UNIX editor with many features that even big editors lack.

Quick Description

QEmacs is a small text editor targeted at embedded systems or debugging. Although it is very small, it has some very interesting features that even big editors lack:

• Full screen editor with an Emacs look and feel with all common Emacs features: multi-buffer, multi-window, command mode, universal argument, keyboard macros, config file with C-like syntax, minibuffer with completion and history.

• Can edit huge files (hundreds of megabytes) without delay, using a highly optimized internal representation and memory mapping for large files.

• Full Unicode support, including multi charset handling (8859-x, UTF8, SJIS, EUC-JP, ...) and bidirectional editing respecting the Unicode bidi algorithm. Arabic and Indic scripts handling (in progress). Automatic end of line detection.

• C mode: coloring with immediate update, auto-indent, automatic tags.

• Shell mode: full color VT100 terminal emulation so your shell works exactly as you expect. Compile mode with colorized error messages, automatic error message parser jumps to next/previous error, works with grep too. The shell buffer is a fully functional terminal: you can run qemacs, vim or even emacs recursively!

• Input methods for most languages, including Chinese (input methods descriptions come from the Yudit editor).

• Binary and hexadecimal in place editing mode with insertion and block commands. Unicode hexa editing of UTF-8 files also supported. Can patch binary files, preserving every byte outside the modified areas.

• Works on any VT100 terminal without termcap. UTF-8 VT100 support included with double width glyphs.

• X11 support. Supports multiple proportional fonts at the same time (like XEmacs). X Input methods supported. Xft extension supported for anti-aliased font display.

• Bitmap images are displayed on graphics displays and as colored text on text terminals, which is handy when browsing files over an ssh connection. (QEmacs uses the public domain stb_image package for image parsing.

Building QEmacs

• Launch the custom configuration script ./configure. You can list the available options by typing ./configure --help.

• Type make to compile qemacs and its associated tools.

• Type make install as root to install it in /usr/local.

QEmacs Documentation

Read the file qe-doc.html.

Licensing

QEmacs is released under the MIT license. (read the accompanying LICENCE file).

Contributing to QEmacs

QEmacs official repository is available on Github. You are welcome to contribute by opening an issue or submitting a Pull Request. Older discussions are archived on the qemacs-devel mailing list.

Authors

QEmacs was started in 2000. The initial version was developped by Fabrice Bellard and Charlie Gordon, who since then, has been maintaining and extending it.