The Emacs editor

Emacs comes from the Free Software Foundation. In fact, these folks have quite a lot of software and a pretty good philosophy to boot. Emacs is a freakin' great editor because it allows customization and highlighting of special words. Here are the places to get Emacs:

• To get Emacs for Mac OS X, trot over and get a copy of Aquamacs Emacs. It is the Emacs which has the kindest setup for the Mac. All the typical Mac keyboard shortcuts work just fine, so you don't need to retrain your fingers to bizarre Emacs key-bindings, while if you did use Emacs for a while, and think that C-x C-f is the normal key sequence for opening a file, you will still be at home.
• To get Emacs for MS WinWhatever, there are good instructions from the gnu folks themselves. The instructions are complete, but a bit old, so don't trust their latest version numbers.
• To get Emacs for some version of unix, go to the Free Software Foundation's GNU Emacs page.

If you'd like a brief tutorial about Emacs (or you'd like to see what it does), head over here.