GNU Emacs 21

Alex writes: "After a wait worthy of the Mozilla project, GNU Emacs 21 is finally released! Image support, colour syntax highlighting on terminals, nice scrollbars and tooltips, it's all there folks. Also, for the first time in it's long illustrious history (and a step forward for GNU Project development in general) it's now available via anonymous CVS on savannah. No more waiting a year for the latest features... Now all we need is a port to GTK/GNOME...." Other submitters point out that the changelog is available through CVS (this is a serious changelog!), and you might try the mirrors, or maybe some light reading while you download.

Comments

Lilo support

[smartin]

No one has mentioned yet the coolest part. You can now point lilo at your emacs executable and boot directly into emacs. Yes, that's right no more pesky and redundant operating system in the way, emacs does everything you need anyway.

Stupid Slashdot...

[susano_otter]

That should be "GNU/GNU Emacs".

[MODERATOR INSTRUCTIONS]
+1 Funny
-1 Overrated
[/MODERATOR INSTRUCTIONS]

Antinews

[the Atomic Rabbit]

As always, the best source of information on the features of a new release is the Anti-News in the (excellently written) Emacs Manual, which should come bundled with each installation. It's provided to prepare "those users who live backwards in time" for Emacs version 20, and is great fun. A sample:

• Emacs now provides its own "lean and mean" scroll bars instead of using those from the X toolkit. Toggle buttons and radio buttons in menus now look just like any other menu item, which simplifies them, and prevents them from standing out and distracting your attention from the other menu items.
  
• The arrangement of menu bar items differs from most other GUI programs. We think that uniformity of look-and-feel is boring, and that Emacs' unique features require its unique menu-bar configuration.
  
• Emacs 20 does not pop up a buffer with error messages when an error is signaled during loading of the user's init file. Instead, it simply announces the fact that an error happened. To know where in the init file that was, insert `(message "foo")' lines judiciously into the file and look for those messages in the `*Messages*' buffer.
  
• Some commands no longer treat Transient Mark mode specially. For example, `ispell' doesn't spell-check the region when Transient Mark mode is in effect and the mark is active; instead, it checks the current buffer. (Transient Mark mode is alien to the spirit of Emacs, so we are planning to remove it altogether in an earlier version.)
  
• Many complicated display features, including highlighting of mouse-sensitive text regions and popping up help strings for menu items, don't work in the MS-DOS version. Spelling doesn't work on MS-DOS, and Eshell doesn't exist, so there's no workable shell-mode, either. This fits the spirit of MS-DOS, which resembles a dumb character terminal.
  
• The `woman' package has been removed, so Emacs users on non-Posix systems will need _a real man_ to read manual pages. (Users who are not macho can read the Info documentation instead.)
  
• To keep up with decreasing computer memory capacity and disk space, many other functions and files have been eliminated in Emacs 20.
  

editor wars

[bozo42]

I asked my email-pal: "UNIX or Windoze?".
He replied "UNIX".
I said "Ah...me too!".

I asked my email-pal: "Linux or AIX?".
He said "Linux, of course".
I said "Me too".

I asked him: "Emacs or vi".
He replied "Emacs".
I said "Me too. Small world."

I asked him: "GNU Emacs or XEmacs?",
and he said "GNU Emacs".
I said "oh, me too."

I asked him "GNU Emacs 19 or GNU Emacs 20"?
and he said "GNU Emacs 19".
I said "oh, me too."

I asked him, "GNU Emacs 19.29 or GNU Emacs 19.34",
and he replied "GNU Emacs 19.29".
I said "DIE YOU OBSOLETE NOGOOD SOCIALLY MALADJUSTED CELIBATE COMMIE FASCIST DORK!" , and never emailed him again.