What is XEmacs?

XEmacs is a highly customizable open source text editor and application development system. It is licensed under the GNU Public License and related to other versions of Emacs, in particular GNU Emacs. Its emphasis is on modern graphical user interface support and an open software development model, similar to Linux. XEmacs runs on Windows 95 and NT, Linux and nearly every other version of Unix in existence. Support for XEmacs was supplied by Sun Microsystems, University of Illinois, Lucid, ETL/Electrotechnical Laboratory, Amdahl Corporation, BeOpen, and others, as well as the unpaid time of a great number of individual developers.

XEmacs Community News

2026-01-12

XEmacs 21.4.25 "Too Much Mozart" has been released. See the release notes for more details.

2025-06-15

XEmacs 21.5 beta 36 "leeks" has been released. See the release notes for more details.

2023-08-08

Administering the XEmacs mailing lists, https://list-archive.xemacs.org/ has been difficult for several years, given the limited support of Mailman3 for integrating spam filtering and its limited support on the administrative side for dealing with large volumes of spam building up to be deleted.

Running a mailing list at all for XEmacs is no longer relevant given how common use of Gmail is for receiving email, and the extreme difficulty in having Gmail accept forwarded email in a reliable manner. The volume of spam received by the XEmacs lists means that eventually some will get through to Gmail, and that endangers further mail delivery to Gmail from the forwarding mail server.

As a result, I do not plan to reactivate the XEmacs mailing lists. Please post discussion to the newsgroup comp.emacs.xemacs , also available as https://groups.google.com/g/comp.emacs.xemacs on Google Groups.

2023-05-17

As of 2020, XEmacs development moved to Heptapod (thank you Mike Sperber, thank you Heptapod). The relevant Mercurial repositories are available under https://foss.heptapod.net/xemacs/; most importantly, the current development trunk is available to check out under https://foss.heptapod.net/xemacs/xemacs. Please use the issue tracker there for bug reports.

2023-05-13

XEmacs 21.5 beta 35 "kohlrabi" has been released. See the release notes for more details.

2017-03-11

Since the late 1990s, before spam became the problem it is at the moment, we have offered @xemacs.org addresses to participants in the project. Following the infrastructure problems of 2016, these haven't in general been restored—most of them function more as spam traps rather than legitimate email addresses.

Should you have had an @xemacs.org address and should you like to have it restored, get in touch with me at kehoea@parhasard.net.

Current XEmacs Core Releases

Problem reports and requests for enhancement may be filed at the new XEmacs issue tracking system.

XEmacs 21.4 has been promoted to stable, and the XEmacs 21.1 series has been retired. For those with classic taste, these historical releases are still available. We will continue to support, at a lower level, 21.1 users. See the announcement of 21.4.12 for details.

Stable branch:: 21.4.22
Beta branch:: 21.5.35

Current XEmacs Package Releases

See the Quickstart Package Guide for information about the XEmacs package system. It is a feature differentiating XEmacs from GNU Emacs by allowing us to deploy bug fixes and enhancements of our lisp packages on a separate, usually faster, schedule than core XEmacs releases.

Official Release:: 2009-02-17

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