XEmacs is a graphical- and console-based text editor which runs on almost any Unix-like operating system as well as Microsoft Windows.

[4] In the late 1980s, Richard P. Gabriel's Lucid Inc. faced a requirement to ship Emacs to support the Energize C++ IDE.

XEmacs has commands to manipulate words and paragraphs (deleting them, moving them, moving through them, and so forth), syntax highlighting for making source code easier to read, and "keyboard macros" for performing arbitrary batches of editing commands defined by the user.

Running on Mac OS requires X11; while development has started[update] on a native Carbon version.

Two versions of XEmacs for the Microsoft Windows environment exist: a native installer and a Cygwin package.

[12] They also aimed for more openness to experimentation, and XEmacs often offers new features before other emacsen—pioneering (for example) inline images, variable fonts and terminal coloring.

Over the years, the developers have extensively rewritten the code in order to improve consistency and to follow modern programming conventions stressing data abstraction.

As of 2005, the released version depends on the unmaintained package called Mule-UCS to support Unicode, while the development branch of XEmacs has had robust native support for external Unicode encodings since May 2002, but the internal Mule character sets lack completeness, and development seems stalled as of September 2005.

This has led some users to proclaim XEmacs' death, advocating that its developers contribute to GNU Emacs instead.

[24][25] In December 2015 project maintainer Stephen J. Turnbull posted a message to an XEmacs development list stating the project was "at a crossroads" in terms of future compatibility with GNU Emacs due to developer attrition and GNU Emacs' progress.

[26] This last option was the direction decided, with commitments from individual contributors to provide minimal support for the web site and development resources.

[27] The SXEmacs project forked XEmacs 21.4 and continued development for over a decade, issuing new releases as late as 2020.