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user-interfaceemacs
SabreWolfy
SabreWolfy

Reputation: 5540

First GUI version of Emacs

The first versions of Emacs ran on text-only consoles. Currently, Emacs can be run in text-only mode with the -nw parameter. When was the first GUI version of Emacs released? Was it GNU Emacs?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 406

Answers (1)

phils
phils

Reputation: 73274

For GNU Emacs, the earliest mention I can see in the NEWS files is in version 18, which appears to have included some form of X support from the outset.

That pre-dates Lucid and also Epoch (from which Lucid was derived).

Indeed, Epoch is described as:

a set of patches to Emacs 18 that gave it much better GUI support (Emacs 18 was very much a tty program, with GUI support crudely grafted on as an afterthought.)

so clearly there was some GUI functionality present already at the time that work began.

Unless there was some lesser-known fork that went down this path prior to 1986, it would certainly seem that GNU Emacs was the first to include GUI support.

This is based on Jamie Zawinski's very informative timeline and history:

Upvotes: 5

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