@Leee: Don't give up just yet, but at the same time don't hold me to any promises.
From what I see on
Debian's package listing, emelFM* no longer exists (save for a package of icons) however it doesn't mean that FM# hasn't become part of their larger packages - it also doesn't mean that it wasn't dropped completely. I have the 12.4 repo syncing with ours and can do some digging tomorrow when time permits if it's still alive and kickin' in deb. Our 'buntu repository is bare metal, so that's probably not worthy of scanning through. CentOS - went back to 7.x -- wasn't promising. OUR stable release(s) were TCL 9.x and 10.x - I'm going to time-travel (see extension "bootman") and experiment with it and the at-the-time current versions of C/GTK/X/GLIB/etc. and find our differences that way.
Here's app history for ya'...Back in '99 our original author
Michael Clark, at the time college student of Pittsburgh (pitt.edu) launched the first release of EmelFM (v0.6.0) and he took it all the way up to
v0.9.2 where... I'm guessing he must have graduated; shortly thereafter the program went cold. A number of minutes later it was forked (Tom2Tom) and FM2 (or "E2") was born and strangely enough, it went up to
v0.9.2 before
IT flat-lined somewhere in 2012 from the looks of things. Coincidence? {X-Files theme song softly plays in the distance}
2018 A TinyCore user asks for emelfm2 (we already had FM(1)) and a few posts later, FM2 is added to our 9.x repository by @Juanito. Shortly thereafter, FM3 is added to be somewhat compatible with GTK3 "of that time." From the looks of it, according to Wise Ol' Google, FM3 seems to be a TCL original.