Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised Jun 19, 2026

Freemacs

Freemacs is a small, programmable computer text editor for MS-DOS with some degree of compatibility with GNU Emacs. Written by Russ Nelson and later maintained by Jim Hall, Freemacs is currently distributed under the GPL-1.0-only license in the FreeDOS project.

Last revised
Jun 19, 2026
Read time
≈ 1 min
Length
143 w
Citations
6
Source
Freemacs
Original authorRuss Nelson
DeveloperJim Hall
Stable release
1.6H / October 19, 2008 (2008-10-19)
Operating systemMS-DOS, FreeDOS
TypeText editor
LicenseGPL-1.0-only
Websitewww.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/edit/emacs/

Freemacs is a small, programmable computer text editor for MS-DOS with some degree of compatibility with GNU Emacs.1 Written by Russ Nelson and later maintained by Jim Hall,2 Freemacs is currently distributed under the GPL-1.0-only license in the FreeDOS project.2

Freemacs' executable binary, in the current 1.6 version, is only ~21k in size. Most features are implemented in MINT (Mint Is Not Trac),1 whose role is akin to that of Emacs Lisp as used by other implementations of Emacs.

The most recent version of Freemacs is 1.6H, released in 2008.3 Version 1.6G was released in 1999.4

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