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ere have been two major CJKV-capable GNU Emacs developments over the years:
NEmacs and Mule, each of which is installed as a series of patches to the GNU Emacs
source code. NEmacs stands for Nihongo Emacs (Nihongo, written , is the Japanese
word that means “Japanese [language]”). Mule stands for MULtilingual enhancement to
GNU Emacs. While it may be obvious by their names, NEmacs was a Japanese-only ver-
sion of GNU Emacs, whereas Mule provided support for a large number of languages,
including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
Both NEmacs and Mule were developed by a core team made up of Ken’ichi Handa (
handa ken’ichi), Satoru Tomura ( tomura satoru), and Mikiko Nishikimi (
nishikimi mikiko). Mule was also one of the very rst programs to support the
characters and encoding methods for the JIS X 0212-1990 character set standard. Both
ISO-2022-JP-2 and EUC-JP encodings were supported for the encoding of this character
set in Mule. GNU Emacs version 20 and greater incorporates all functionality of Mule.
In other words, the Mule extensions were integrated back into the standard GNU Emacs
distribution as of version 20.
With GNU Emacs, it is possible to use any encoding within any given language environ-
ment. Changing the language environment aects only the following behaviors:
Which encoding is used as the default•
e priority of encodings ...