The extensible, self-documenting text editor, in continuous development since 1976 and one of the founding programs of the GNU project and the free software movement itself. Its Emacs Lisp core lets it become anything — mail reader, organiser, IDE — which is why it has outlived generations of editors.
The Preservation Rating scores how well this entry is archived — not how good the software is. It's calculated automatically from what's already on this page: working mirrors, documentation, a reproducible build, a clearly identified license, and complete metadata. Nothing here is entered by hand; it updates itself whenever the entry changes.
