// the find
torvalds/uemacs
Random version of microemacs with my private modificatons
Linus Torvalds' personal fork of uEmacs/PK, a minimal terminal editor he's used for decades. It's a single-directory C codebase under 50 files, descended from MicroEMACS 3.9e. If you want to study what Torvalds actually edits kernel patches with, this is it.
UTF-8 support was added to a codebase from the early 90s and it actually works; the utf8.c/utf8.h additions are clean and non-invasive. The codebase is genuinely small — you can read all of it in an afternoon, which almost nothing can claim anymore. Recent commits through early 2026 show Linus still actively uses and fixes it, so it's not abandoned cargo-cult code. The flat file layout with no build system complexity means a working binary from source is just 'make'.
This is explicitly personal software — the description says 'my private modifications' and it means it. There is no documentation of what Linus changed from the upstream 4.0.15, no changelog, no roadmap. The Makefile targets Linux and that's about it; the README's VMS and DOS instructions are archaeology. You're also looking at global mutable state scattered across globals.c and edef.h in classic 1987 C style — not a problem if you're just using it, a significant problem if you want to extend it.