Friction arose between the programmers and Stallman over how to handle GUI issues, and Lucid forked; thus they were primarily responsible for the birth of what would come to be called XEmacs.
In the late 1980s, Richard P. Gabriel's Lucid Inc. faced a requirement to ship Emacs to support the Energize C++ IDE.
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while the XEmacs developers have argued that the lack of copyright assignment has allowed major companies to get involved, as sometimes companies can license their code but due to a cautious attitude concerning fiduciary duties to shareholders, companies may have trouble in getting permission to assign away code completely.
XEmacs |
It runs on many Unix-like operating systems, and is notable for features such as FFI support, enhanced number types (similar to bignums in XEmacs 21.5), raw string regexps, and an implementation of Pugh's skip lists.