Who knew? It turns out the XEmacs is still a thing. Although until now there’s been no releases since 2013, they have a new Beta release. It’s reasonable to take the position of “Who cares?” but I think it’s always a good idea to have an alternative if only to keep the other players honest.
Every once in a while the GNU Emacs project falls into a sort of paralysis where they refuse to move things forward. Sometimes this is for ideological reasons, sometimes because “the way things are have always been this way.” XEmacs was born because GNU Emacs wasn’t implementing a GUI version of Emacs.
Those days are, of course, far in the past but the lesson holds. Sometimes you need an interloper to get things moving again. Having XEmacs lurking in the wings helps keep everyone on their toes.
As you all know, I love GNU Emacs and hope and expect that it will continue to thrive but if silliness overtakes the project, it’s nice to know there is an alternative.