Mastering Emacs is now available in Japanese

If you’re a Japanese speaker, you can now read my book, Mastering Emacs, in Japanese. I owe all this hard work to AYANOKOJI Takesi and USAMI Kenta, two legendary Emacs hackers and writers in the Japanese Emacs community. There’s a large Emacs community in Japan but, unless you speak Japanese, you probably wouldn’t know that!

It’s easy to miss, but Emacs owes its superb Unicode and multilingual support to the Japanese National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) who created (and maintained) a separate fork of Emacs called Nihongo (“Japanese”) Emacs, first created in 1987. Later it was wrapped up into a separate package called MULE (M-x find-library mule.)

MULE was merged into Emacs 20.1 in 1997 (C-u 20 C-h n to open the NEWS file from then and search for MULE), and it’s one of the few exceptions Richard Stallman and the FSF made to their ironclad rule that copyright must be assigned to the FSF. So there’s a bit of trivia for you.

So, once again, thanks to Takesi and Kenta for their hard work. If you own my book, you can download the translated version for free.