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

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.