developer erc 
Emacs and its derivatives are a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility . The manual for the most widely used variant , ___MASK41___ Emacs , describes it as " the extensible , customizable , self - documenting , real - time display editor ". Development of the first Emacs began in the mid - 1970s and continues actively . File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing ___MASK17___ to digital media , such as computer programs , multimedia ( audio , images and video ), documents or electronic books . File sharing may be achieved in a number of ways . Common methods of storage , transmission and dispersion include manual sharing utilizing removable media , centralized servers on computer networks , World Wide Web - based hyperlinked documents , and the use of distributed peer - to - peer networking . ___MASK41___ is an operating system and an extensive collection of computer software . ___MASK41___ is composed wholly of free software , most of which is licensed under the ___MASK30___ ' s own GPL . ERC is an Internet Relay Chat ( IRC ) client integrated into ___MASK41___ Emacs . It is written in Emacs Lisp . A text editor is a type of program used for editing plain text files . Such programs are sometimes known as " notepad " software , following the ___MASK44___ Notepad . XEmacs is a graphical - and console - based text editor which runs on almost any Unix - like operating system as well as ___MASK44___ Windows . XEmacs is a fork , based on a version of ___MASK41___ Emacs from the late 1980s . Any user can download , use , and modify XEmacs as free software available under the ___MASK41___ General Public License version 2 or any later version . Emacs Lisp is a dialect of the Lisp programming language used as a scripting language by Emacs ( a text editor family most commonly associated with ___MASK41___ Emacs and XEmacs ). It is used for implementing most of the editing functionality built into Emacs , the remainder being written in C ( as is the Lisp interpreter itself ). Emacs Lisp is also referred to as Elisp , although there is also an older , unrelated Lisp dialect with that name . Richard Matthew Stallman ( born March 16 , 1953 ), often known by his initials , rms , is an American software freedom activist and programmer . He campaigns for software to be distributed in a manner such that its users receive the freedoms to use , study , distribute and modify that software . Software that ensures these freedoms is termed free software . Stallman launched the ___MASK30___ , founded the Free Software Foundation , developed the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs , and wrote the GNU General Public License . ___MASK41___ Emacs is the most popular and most ported Emacs text editor . It was created by ___MASK30___ founder Richard Stallman . In common with other varieties of Emacs , ___MASK41___ Emacs is extensible using a Turing complete programming language . ___MASK41___ Emacs has been called " the most powerful text editor available today ." With proper support from the underlying system , ___MASK41___ Emacs is able to display files in multiple character sets , and has been able to simultaneously display most human languages since at least 1999 . Throughout its history , ___MASK41___ Emacs has been a central component of the ___MASK30___ , and a flagship of the free software movement . ___MASK41___ Emacs is sometimes abbreviated as GNUMACS , especially to differentiate it from other EMACS variants . The tag line for ___MASK41___ Emacs is " the extensible self - documenting text editor ". Internet Relay Chat ( IRC ) is an application layer protocol that facilitates communication in the form of text . The chat process works on a client / server networking model . IRC clients are computer programs that a user can install on their system . These clients communicate with chat servers to transfer messages to other clients . IRC is mainly designed for group communication in discussion forums , called channels , but also allows one - on - one communication via private messages as well as chat and data transfer , including file sharing . The ___MASK30___ is a free software , mass collaboration project , announced on September 27 , 1983 , by Richard Stallman at MIT . Its aim is to give computer users freedom and control in their use of their computers and computing devices , by collaboratively developing and providing software that is based on the following freedom rights : users are free to run the software , share it ( copy , distribute ), study it and modify it . GNU software guarantees these freedom - rights legally ( via its license ), and is therefore free software ; the use of the word " free " always being taken to refer to freedom .