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

Emacs Turned Me Into a Real Programmer

[goingware]

Early in my career I programmed because I was able to get a job doing it and it paid the rent. I didn't like doing it, I didn't make all that much money off of it, and I didn't write particularly good code either.

Then a consultant visited my employer and installed Emacs on our Suns. He gave me a little introductory lecture about Free Software and showed me a couple demos, but I didn't use it much right away.

Then my friend Jeff Keller, who was an ardent user of GNU Emacs and personally acquainted with RMS from his time at MIT, spent an evening driving around in my car with me singing the praises of Emacs. I decided to give it a try.

It wasn't too long before I discovered that it was extensible, but it wasn't too clear how one did it. For some reason I got hooked on the idea of writing my own native C functions callable from elisp - there are a lot of such functions built in - as well as calling lisp from C.

I started reading the source code.

I kind of dropped out of site as far as my employer was concerned for quite some time, diving headlong into both learning to use emacs proficiently and to program in it, but in the end I had a profound realization:

There was something worth a damn someone can create by programming.

I decided it would be worth the effort to program for real, in hopes that someday I could make a program as great as Richard Stallman's Emacs. Previously I had had the idea that software was more of a curiousity and not something to be taken seriously.

My education was in Physics and Astronomy and back then I hadn't even completed my degree so I had a lot of work ahead of me.

For most of my career I have usually selected the jobs I took based on what there was to learn in them. So I got my education in programming on the job, and in a very practical way. But I also spent a lot of time with basic texts, learning the fundamentals.

It's been about 14 years since then - I learned about Free Software before Linus even started at the University, let alone wrote Linux - and I've learned a lot and written quite a lot of software.

I still haven't written my Great Program but I have various thoughts as to what it might be.

With mixed feelings I say now that my favorite development environment is the Metrowerks CodeWarrior IDE. I don't have the Linux version yet so often when programming on Linux I mount my source code directory via samba or netatalk on a Mac or Windoze box and edit my files using codewarrior, doing my compiles and testing via X over the net.

If I'm just programming within Linux I use whatever calls itself "vi" on my box, whether that is Vim or Elvis or whatnot.

Every now and then I do pull out emacs though. When I need the power. Usually these days I just want something quick and simple.

Re:Time for environment integration

[Speare]

Want an editor for your new IDE? Drop in emacs.

Some IDEs and desktop managers seem to be trying that out. The problem is that Emacs general set of key bindings really isn't designed for use a widget in a dialog box, or as a component in a larger application.

The problem is sovereignty. Emacs assumes it is sovereign; that is, that it has the full attention of the user and everything the user does has some bearing on Emacs. Keystrokes involve the Meta (or Alt) and the Ctrl keys, so it's hard to find keystrokes that obviously fall outside the Emacs sovereign domain.

Conversely, widgets are not sovereign, they are transient and flocking. Unknown keystrokes are usually passed up to larger and larger contexts, so that it's easy to navigate from one widget to another, or to select specific widgets from afar. Accelerators in a given window manager context typically use an obvious and consistent Alt or Ctrl scheme, which precludes mixing their use between Emacs-ish widgets and the greater context of a dialog box or application window.

Emacs is nice when you want to use it AS the IDE, but Emacs within some other IDE seems to be like fitting a baseball stadium inside a football stadium: too much confusion about overlapping sovereignty, or too much orchestration to ensure only one context is being used at a time.

Those are just my thoughts. I use whatever editor will let me get my job done the simplest way that will possibly work. Sometimes that's Emacs, sometimes that's vi, sometimes that's a WYSIWYG Rich Text editor.