Slashdot Mirror
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.
So is Emacs21 properly MVC'd? Would it be possible to do an easy Qt port as well?
Gnu Emacs 20 came out 1988?? Thats a hell of a long development time.
I have been waiting for this to hit slashdot for a while. I have been playing with Emacs 21 for a while now. Hacking on lisp, etc. It is *very* stable. Almost all existing packages work perfectly.
The maintainers have done an amazing job.
This release includes a number of really cool features including:
the ability to have dynamic fonts (IE new face implementation)
a header line at the top of the file for additional inforation
support for tooltips (I am working on an intellisense package)
Resize of minibuffer windows
A fringe to the left and right of a buffer for metainfo.
Font colors can be used anywhere including the modeline, within completion, etc.
Cursors are updated if Emacs is busy
Tons more stuff. See the NEWS file in the dist for more information.
Also. I have written a ton of Emacs extensions that you guys might like.
You can also check out my Emacs bookmark which contain a lot of information.
OK.
A lot of people are asking the typical questions.
IE: "Why should I use Emacs when I have a much nicer looking application that is more user friendly?"
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.
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.
The ability to quickly write a function within Emacs, evaluate it and then *use it right away* without having to restart your editor is very addictive.
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!
Also. If learning the new key bindings is intimidating then you can just remap everything.
So for example instead of learning some the "correct way" you can just remap..
(global-set-key "\C-cb" 'browse-url)
This means that everytime I hit 'C-c b' this prompts me for a URL (or tries to guess it from the current buffer) and launches mozilla for me.
Pretty cool huh?
Also... stick to GNU Emacs... AKA the *true* Emacs.
Kevin
Maybe there are faster editors (although emacs AFAIK is not slow) or editors more user-friendly (if that's your problem, use xemacs) but I bet none of them are as powerful and flexible as emacs is.
You can do virtually everything on emacs: read email, surf the web, run a shell, play games, etc. (not that you will use all of those features, but you could). You can also write your own (using e-lisp). Even "simple" text editing rocks (with macros, registers, multiple buffers and other features).
Not to mention that its keybinds are used in many other application (like bash and mozilla)...
I'm new to unix and all that goes with it. Is there a good reference with information on the history of emacs, current state of emacs, and the future direction and goals of emacs? The GNU website has some info, but not a whole lot. Thanks in advance.
Fortunately, Emacs comes bundled with an excellent text editing capabilities, even though they're not enabled by default. M-x viper-mode is your friend. (Set it on the "wizard" user level when it asks.) No need to lose the massive power of emacs to get efficient vi-style text editing.
This is an honest question, not a rhetorical attempt to lure someone into a flamewar.
I've heard several accounts of advantages of XEmacs over GNU Emacs. I haven't heard anyone say "I'm familiar with both versions and I prefer GNU Emacs for technical reasons and here's why", but there must be such people. Anyone willing to step up and do a little advocacy? It might be enlightening.
Unfortunately, I'm not sufficiently familiar with Emacs and Emacs-Lisp to evaluate the differences for myself.
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.
In my experience, choice of text editor (within reason; Notepad is pushing it and edlin is right out) has no effect whatsoever on programmer efficiency, as long as the editor is familiar to the programmer. Programming languages are specifically designed to make fancy text manipulation unnecessary. Sure, occasionally they fail in this, and it's handy to be able to program complex text manipulation scripts, but there's no advantage to doing so within the text editor, especially if it forces you to learn a new private language.
However, when you delve into something with a complex, idiosyncratic keystroke interface like Vi or Emacs, you not only spend weeks checking the manual every 5 minutes, and years programming your editor as much as you edit your programs, you develop "editing reflexes" that lock you into that editor. Emacs got bigger and bigger because people want to spend less and less time outside it, not because they're so productive, but because typing anywhere else becomes immensely frustrating, because they have to slow themselves down and catch all the little Emacs tricks they would use.
"Try something new, it can't hurt!" "You can't judge it until you've given it a fair try over a couple of weeks!" If you really believe these claims, why not spend your whole life switching text editors, just to "be fair?" Learning Emacs is a big investment, and whether it makes you more productive or not, you won't feel like abandoning it after all that.
At least 99% of time spent editing programs is entering new text, reading text, and deleting/substituting text manually. Your choice of text editor will only significantly affect the other 1%, maybe enough to reduce it to 0.1%, but how much effort do you want to invest in that 1%?
I'm not saying that it's necessarily a bad idea, but it's something you want to consider carefully before you leap into it. You really can't try out an editor like this casually.
Actually, e21 runs a better dumped elisp engine, and is even faster than a stripped down e20.7.1. You seem awfully concerned with dissin' the tool you haven't tried yet. I agree image support is snazzy, and my gut reaction is to wonder if that's useful/slow/etc. But I try and test these gut reactions out first!
I'm sorry, but why isn't there more interest in XEmacs? Not to be jealous or anything, but apparently when that OTHER OS-Editor (and here we aren't even going to mention that *other* other editor... you know, the one that gives you colon-key cancer) gets a version upgrade, you post it, but when Xemacs does, people have to truck on over to freshmeat? For shame!
;)
I refuse to use GNU Emacs until it has a built-in package manager with automated downloads and dependency checks. Repeat this argument for any other feature N which is in the set Xemacs_Features-Emacs_features.
- undoware.ca
XEmacs has always been close to a superset of Emacs featurewise, so it is not likely many people will be able to point to a specific feature and say "that's why". However, both Emacs and XEmacs both has so many features, that only people with patological featuritis will chose XEmacs simply because it has more features. Most sane people will only let that be the deciding feature, if they really need some specific feature (like color in text terminals before Emacs 21).
Here are some real reasons most people use Emacs:
- Conservatism. Why switch when the existing solution work fine?
- Emacs is what most people hear about first, even XEmacs is often refered to as just "Emacs".
Here are some of mine:
- Emacs "feel" more coherent (both on a Lisp and UI level), probably because RMS has always been directing, even when someone else has been official maintainer. XEmacs has had different maintainers, and different parts have a different feel.
- I have submitted lots of small "scratch an itch" patches to Emacs, which makes it work better for me than XEmacs out of the box. (The big patches I also send to the XEmacs people).
- I trust Emacs to stay around because of RMS' dedication, and I like its role as flagship for the GNU project. I also like the historic significance, with RMS as the original author.
If you really want technical reasons, Emacs 21 will provide some. It's font model is stronger than XEmacs. It has limited Unicode support out of the box (XEmacs needs an add-on). I believe most of the GUI features are more elegant designed (if sometimes more limited featurewise) at the API level than for XEmacs.
Seriously, Emacs with it's old nickname "Eight Megabytes and Always Swapping" nowadays better might be called "Ten megabytes and never swapping", since we all have 64MB or more these days.
Emacs once was relatively big and perceived as bloated. However through the times all others (even vim/xvim) have grown and grown, and most have surpassed Emacs. Emacs has been developed more carefully and, where the base system once was relatively big but complete, actually today is one of the smaller programs.
Many editors are bigger, and almost any mail/newsreader, graphical ftp-client or whatever functionality Emacs includes are much bigger alone than Emacs that includes all these functionalities.
Who would have thought that, Emacs truely has become a lean and mean program.