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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.
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/elisp/gui-xemacs/
=)
I SURVIVED THE GREAT SLASHDOT BLACKOUT OF 2002!
Try this link for direct access to the 21.1 changelog. It looks they've already branched in preparation for new development.
Gtk/XEmacs is available here if you really want gtk. Unfortunately this is based on an earlier version of XEmacs (21.1.12, current is like 22 something I believe), but it does look nifty and fit with your other gtk apps if you have any. There are a few minor caveats:
It does look nifty, though (depending on your taste), as screenshots indicate.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
ChangeLog
-Justin
Actually, this changelog is more informative and more complete.
Check out hideshow.el (which comes in Emacs 21).
I have also written some extensions to this package
AKA the ability to hide all function or method bodies in lisp and in java.
Kevin
From the NEWS file:
** The new coding system `mule-utf-8' has been added.
It provides limited support for decoding/encoding UTF-8 text. For
details, please see the documentation string of this coding system.
More documentation gets you this:
The supported Emacs character sets are:
ascii
eight-bit-control
eight-bit-graphic
latin-iso8859-1
mule-unicode-0100-24ff
mule-unicode-2500-33ff
mule-unicode-e000-ffff
Unicode characters out of the ranges U+0000-U+33FF and U+E200-U+FFFF
are decoded into sequences of eight-bit-control and eight-bit-graphic
characters to preserve their byte sequences. Emacs characters out of
these ranges are encoded into U+FFFD.
Note that, currently, characters in the mule-unicode charsets have no
syntax and case information. Thus, for instance, upper- and
lower-casing commands won't work with them.
Some of the new features of Emacs 21 will annoy those of us who are just too used to the old Emacs 20 interface. The following code will turn off the more "newbie-friendly" changes:
(setq emacs21 (eq emacs-major-version 21))
(when emacs21
(blink-cursor-mode -1)
(tool-bar-mode -1)
(tooltip-mode -1)
(global-set-key [home] 'beginning-of-buffer)
(global-set-key [end] 'end-of-buffer)
(setq rmail-confirm-expunge nil))
That said, a ton of the new features are very cool. The News file is gigantic... the new features I particularly like are mouse-avoidance mode, the scalable mini-windows, mouse-popup-menubar-stuff, flyspell-mode, cursor-type, and auto-image-file-mode. Have fun!
Leave the poor CVS server alone: here.
Well, I could point out that image support and colors on TTYs were in XEmacs a long time ago (I still have a machine with XEmacs 20.4 on it, which has both...) but that might start up another "frank exchange of views" so I guess I'd better be pusillanimous instead.
To be more succinct: they're different, based on the fact that the different development teams have different priorities. There are features that come in both directions, but IMHO they tend to show up on XEmacs first.
I was suprised to see it wasn't available with Cygwin yet, but it is available separately (Cygwin.dll is a POSIX api that runs under Windows, and the whole Cygwin system is a shell environment consisting of lots of programs that have been compiled to use Cygwin.dll - check it out if you use Windows at all; it's very easy to install).
Anyway, you can get what is called "NT Emacs" from one of these mirrors. Note you will need a Microsoft compiler to build it; it has not yet been configured to build under gcc for Windows - if you don't have MSVC, then get one of the binary packages.
This is the NT Emacs FAQ.
Despite that it is called "NT Emacs" it is reported to work on non-NT versions of Windows.
Here is a helpful installation guide.
Here is a Google search for "NT Emacs" that turns up a lot of helpful pages.
NT Emacs by default runs the Windows command interpreter when you run shells within it. If you use Cygwin, here is how you run bash as a shell under NT Emacs.
After getting all nostalgic about emacs in my post below, I thought I'd give my old friend another try. But right now I'm doing Windows work, and I was suprised to find Cygwin doesn't provide emacs; a little search turned up the above. I haven't actually even downloaded it yet, but I'm about to. I run Linux too (Debian PPC & Slackware) but this way I can use it for my current work.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
RMS has expressed on the Guile ML that he wants to replace Emacs Lisp with Guile (a robust version of Scheme) with some sort of backward-compat mode for old elisp code. Don't know when that's gonna happen, though.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Has anyone ever tried to make emacs into a full fledged OS? Seems to me right now all you need is the Linux kernel and a copy of emacs and you're all set for most anything.
Actually, yes. In the 1989-1990 timeframe, Texas Instruments had a machine called Explorer that used emacs (in Fundamental mode) for it's terminal. The kernel was also lisp based and they were well hooked together. Rather impressive machine. Big, and the box howled like a jet engine, but everyone in TI R&D had one or two of those things and they loved them as children.
Regards,
Ross
Most of my Emacsing is done in terminal mode on xterms or remote shell sessions.... I go into graphics mode when I'm doing serious programming, but I'm a sysadm by trade, and most of the time character mode is more than good enough. Adding GTK widgets is something I'm likely never to use. Waste of time, if you ask me.
You sure you don't have that bass-ackwards? Or are you a gamer type?-- :)
I used to run Windows for werk because I had to.
I run Linux at home because I want to.
(Lady willing come next week I'll run Linux at work too!
Disclaimer: I dislike emacs.
"Why should I use Emacs when I have a much nicer looking application that is more user friendly?"
That depends. There are a LOT of text editors including nEdit, gedit, kedit, jed, joe, pico, [ng]vi[m]. Only emacs embeds other functionality within its own lisp code instead of providing text editing functionality to other programs using stdin and stdout - the UNIX way.
You should *really* spend some time on Emacs. There is an *amazing* Zen type of relationship that you start to appreciate after about 2 weeks of using it.
I used it for YEARS.
You also should drop your prejudice of lisp (keep an open mind for about 2 weeks). Lisp and schema are *great* languages. I just wish Emacs Lisp were clooser to common lisp or scheme.
Fair enough. As a text editor user, I don't want to write ANY code. And if I were, I would certainly prefer not to use lisp, elisp, or scheme.
Ever need to parse or rework a file with 1000 lines? No problem. Just write a 10 line elisp script that does it for you with regexp. This took you maybe 5 minutes and saved you hours of work! yay emacs!
This is classic emacs mentality. If you just LEARN the emacs way, you can use emacs for everything. Well, I bet if you can do it in 10 lines with elisp I can do it in one in the shell with small utilities like sed, awk, grep, and sort.
Why should emacs do everything ? It is absolutely crappy at everything except text editing. It is a fairly bad mail reader, a fairly bad news reader, and a HORRIBLE environment for writing functions to manipulate text. It is great for writing code or TeX though.
This will reduce karma !
I always preffered GNU Emacs because it *didn't* have all the features of XEmacs. I don't want a toolbar, because I don't use the mouse. I don't want image support, or variable width fonts. I just want a programmable text editor.
Unfortunately, now that GNU Emacs has headed down the same path as X, I'm not sure what I'm going to do. Syntax highlighting in terminal mode is the only feature that I like, but I'm not sure that it is enough to make me move from 20 to 21.
Some people claim that GNU Emacs is more stable. I haven't found that to be the case, or at least, I haven't had any problems with XEmacs. XEmacs always seemed slower to me, possibly because it automatically loads more packages at startup.
Seriously, XEmacs has been leading the FSF's GNU Emacs for a whole lotta years now, in terms of the object model, the GUI, and the packaging. What's new in GNU Emacs 21 to make it the new leader? And how long will it be before the XEmacs folks adopt the worthwhile new features?
The XEmacs/FSF Emacs split was the big project fork, for those of you who don't track Emacsen.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
--Mike
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
support for tooltips (I am working on an intellisense package)
Great. Just don't call it "intellisense" because IntelliSense is a trademark that someone owns. MS had to pay money to Ademco (a burglar alarm company with "IntelliSense" brand sensors) to get permission to use the "IntelliSense" brand.
Not to mention that if you go to intellisense.com you will find a MEMS company there.
Don't pull a Killustrator! Call it something else.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Takuo Kitame has put up test packages here.
Kitame's page was one of the major sources of "leaked" Emacs 21 during the pretest. (Someone wryly referred to it as "GPL warez", as I recall.) He eventually removed the pretest debs, but I used them happily for many months. Thanks, Kitame!
My troll-sense tells me you're making stuff up, but whatever. He doesn't have carpal tunnel syndrome. He has hand problems but does not disclose here wether they are directly related to typing or not:
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/0111stallman.html
"I never had carpal tunnel syndrome. I had hand problems."
It's actually an old joke, made without attribution to boot.
Hey, if you want to code up a feature and call it IntelliSense, I'm not going to stop you. I am not a lawyer. But you would be running the risk that real lawyers would want to talk to you, in court perhaps, and that gets expensive in both money and time.
It would be even worse to write features similar to the ones Microsoft used the IntelliSense name on, and call those features "intellisense". MS absolutely would send lawyers after you then. After all, they paid money to use that trademark; why should they sit idle when someone else uses it for free?
And while you may not agree with me, I think it is common courtesy to not infringe on trademarks owned by other people. Microsoft can't add new features to Windows XP and call them the "Linux features" because Linux is a trademark belonging to someone else (Linus). If we want others to respect the trademarks we care about, we should respect the trademarks of others.
Trademarks don't give you a right to ban words from conversation.. they don't give a right to the owning corporation to have a word redefined at will.
Is "intellisense" a word? If MS "redefined" it, where was it first defined?
As long as a certain meaning is understood to refer to a specific thing, then no qualification is needed.
Are you a lawyer? Is this legal advice?
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Just a quick note to clarify what I think the above is saying - you can use the free mingw if you don't have Visual C++, but if you do have VC++ then it works pretty much out of the box too...
1. [grab source (ftp.gnu.org is back up again)]
2. cd emacs-21.1\nt
3. configure
4. nmake
5. nmake install
and you'll find all the Win32 exes in the emacs-21.1\bin directory....
Kudos to the GNU team, MS-DOS to microsoft... I'm one happy Win32 bunny
T
I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. - George Best
xemacs was derived from emacs when JWZ (http://www.jwz.org/) found working with RMS impossible. You can read the story on his web site.
:-(.
It was originally called Lucid Emacs and was going to be a free portion of a commercial product. When the commercial product failed, it was renamed xemacs.
The biggest advantage is support of variable width fonts. If you want the text you're editing to look pretty while you're editing it, xemacs is the best.
I just wish it had MacOS X Cocoa support so the fonts would look beautiful instead of simply "better than boring old Courier". Sadly, I have not the time or talent to delve into something as complex as actually doing this, so about all I can do is wait until someone else does it for me
I agree with the people who mentioned that emacs has a stiff learning curve - I learned it back in the late 70s when there was nothing easier to use - but once you give it some time, it's by far the fastest and most efficient way to edit text; you and the text become one with the speed in which you can move around and do stuff. No GUI compares to emacs incremental search - type Control-S, type in characters, watch the cursor move as you type until you find what you're looking for.
D