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

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.

• 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.

Read the file qe-doc.html.

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

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.

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.