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EINE and ZWEI are two discontinued Emacs-like text editors developed by Daniel Weinreb and Mike McMahon for Lisp machines in the 1970s and 1980s.

History

EINE was a text editor developed in the late 1970s. In terms of features, its goal was to "do what Stallman's PDP-10 (original) Emacs does". It was an early example of what would become many Emacs-like text editors. Unlike the original TECO-based Emacs, but like Multics Emacs, EINE was written in Lisp. It used Lisp Machine Lisp. Stallman later wrote GNU Emacs, which was written in C and Emacs Lisp and extensible in Emacs Lisp. EINE also made use of the window system of the Lisp machine and was the first Emacs to have a graphical user interface.

In the 1980s, EINE was developed into ZWEI. Innovations included programmability in Lisp Machine Lisp, and a new and more flexible doubly linked list method of internally representing buffers.

ZWEI would eventually become the editor library used for Symbolics' Zmacs (Emacs-like editor), Zmail (mail client), and Converse (message client), which were integrated into the Genera operating system which Symbolics developed for their Lisp machines.

Naming

EINE is a recursive acronym for "EINE Is Not Emacs", coined in August 1977. It was a play on Ted Anderson's TINT, "TINT is not TECO". Anderson would later retort with "SINE is not EINE".

ZWEI follows this pattern as an acronym for "ZWEI Was Eine Initially".

With "zwei" being the German word for "two", "EINE" could be (re-)interpreted as being a reference to the German word for "one" (in the feminine adjectival form, as in "eine Implementierung", "one implementation").

Further reading

• Weinreb, Daniel L. (January 1979). A Real-Time Display-oriented Editor for the LISP Machine (Undergraduate thesis). MIT EECS Department.
  • Edward Coffin (20 October 2018). "A synopsis of Dan Weinreb's undergrad thesis: A Real-Time Display-oriented Editor for the LISP Machine". Reddit.
• Symbolics Genera 6.0 documentation, Book 3, Text Editing and Processing Archived 2016-03-04 at the Wayback Machine, March 1985
• Symbolics Genera 7.0 documentation, Book 3, Text Editing and Processing Archived 2016-03-04 at the Wayback Machine, July 1986
• MIT CADR Lisp Machine Source code

References

1. "[no subject]".
2. "Comment by ZWEI's author Dan Weinreb". I wrote the second Emacs ever: the Lisp machine implementation, whose spec was "do what Stallman's PDP-10 (original) Emacs does", and then progressed from there. There's just a whole LOT of it. It took me and Mike McMahon endless hours to implement so many commands to make ZWEI/Zmacs.
3. ^ Electronic message to BUG-LISPM, Daniel Weinreb, 8 August 1977
4. Owen Theodore Anderson (January 1979). "The Design and Implementation of a Display-Oriented Editor Writing System" (PDF). Retrieved 2012-09-09.

External links

• Entry at the Emacs Wiki

v t e Emacs
Implementations	GNU and derivative GNU Emacs XEmacs Other Freemacs EINE Gosling Emacs Mocklisp Hemlock JOVE mg MicroEMACS MINCE Multics Emacs Perfect Writer GNU TeXmacs vile Zmacs ZWEI
Modes	AUCTeX Dired Dunnet Emacs Speaks Statistics Emacspeak EMMS ERC eww Gnus Magit Org-mode Planner rcirc RefTeX SLIME w3m
Internals	Emacs Lisp MULE
Community	Organizations Honeywell Perfect Software Mark of the Unicorn Massachusetts Institute of Technology Thorn EMI Computer Software UniPress People Thomas Dickey Paul Fox Richard P. Gabriel James Gosling Jim Hall Joris van der Hoeven Daniel Murphy Russ Nelson David Reitter Richard Stallman Guy L. Steele Jr. Daniel Weinreb
Other	Conkeror Dissociated press Editor war Spacemacs
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