Mule's ancestor was called Nemacs (Nihongo (=Japanese) Emacs) that is first released in June 1987. Nemacs is a localized version of Emacs and handles only Japanese and English.
After the release of Nemacs, we tried to get Japanese handling facilities merged into GNU Emacs itself. FSF, however, decided that the new facilities to be merged must be multilingual, because GNU Emacs should not have special treatments for one language (Japanese) only. We have thus started to develop MULE, a MULtilingual Enhancement to GNU Emacs.
Mule (ver. 1 and Ver. 2) was released as an independent package used with GNU Emacs. Emacs 20 and later has Mule facilities (except bi-directional writing) built in.
| Date of release | Version | GNU Emacs to be used with |
|---|---|---|
| June 1987 | Nemacs 1.1 | Emacs 18.47 |
| June 1990 | Nemacs 3.3.2 (last version) | Emacs 18.51 |
| August 1993 | Mule 1.0 | Emacs 18.59 |
| Febrary 1994 | Mule 1.1 | Emacs 18.59 |
| August 1994 | Mule 2.0 | Emacs 19.25 |
| November 1994 | Mule 2.1 | Emacs 19.27 |
| December 1994 | Mule 2.2 | Emacs 19.28 |
| July 1995 | Mule 2.3 | Emacs 19.28 |
| September 1997 | Emacs 20.1 | |
| June 2000 | Emacs 20.7 | |
| 21 October 2001 | Emacs 21.1 | |
| 19 March 2003 | Emacs 21.3 | |
