XEmacs is a self-documenting, customizable, extensible real-time display editor.

Users new to XEmacs will be able to use basic features fairly rapidly by studying the tutorial and using the self-documentation features. XEmacs also has an extensive interactive manual browser. It is easily extensible since its editing commands are written in Lisp.

XEmacs's many special packages handle mail reading (RMail) and sending (Mail), outline editing (Outline), compiling (Compile), running subshells within Emacs windows (Shell), running a Lisp read-eval-print loop (Lisp-Interaction-Mode), automated psychotherapy (Doctor :-) and many more. There is a WWW browsing mode written fully in elisp that looks and behaves much like the netscape WWW browser.

XEmacs has similar functionality to GNU Emacs. It uses a different display model, including support for Motif menu and scroll bars and the ability to run as a widget inside other applications. Many people say it looks nicer than GNU Emacs.