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.
Why are we hiding from the police, daddy?
Because we use emacs son, they use vi.
The dog got loose on my computer, and now there's XP all over the screen. -Paul www.ploeb.net
Great! Now I just need to get another hard drive to have enough space to store the binary.
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/elisp/gui-xemacs/
=)
I SURVIVED THE GREAT SLASHDOT BLACKOUT OF 2002!
...does it finally cook coffee or fix my breakfast ?
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.
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
It must be a cult thing...
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Imagine the glee that would ensue if emacs became a KPart or Bonobo component. Want an editor for your new IDE? Drop in emacs. I know integrating beyond pipe support is anathema to most unix folks, but in my opinion its worth it.
What's the state of UTF-8 support in GNU/Emacs 21? Does this release include UTF-8 support, or is it still in development?
GNU/Linux. The Freshmaker.
You kids with your overgrown editors. Someone wake me up when the new version of EDLIN is released.
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
There's a difference between needing the fancy auto complete functions and using the fancy auto complete functions. If they guy was actually any good then he could have used the IDE to dramatically improve his productivity. Of course, you're obviously lying, because knowledgable and skillfull people do not use Java.
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)...
And in other news, Bram Moolenaar announced that the upcoming version of Vim will be released as version 23. During a recent interview, Bram stated that "those Emacs morons think they can gain market share by inflating the version number. This jump in Vim versioning merely helps consumers accurately choose the best text editor. With Vim v6.0, some uninformed consumers may believe that Vim does not have as many features as Emacs v21. Besides, kudos to Michael Jordan for making another comeback...just like vi!".
Richard Stallman could not be reached for comment. Sources believe that he is in Afghanistan promoting the name "GNU/Emacs" instead of just "Emacs".
So, is it easy to use yet?
/me worries that his asbestos bunker is not safe enough
Have they included the Emacs kernel with this release as well?
Seriously though, I thought the Unix-alike philosophy was to have lots of small programs each doing it's own job well, rather than one huge program trying to do everything. Emacs seems to go against this more than Microsoft goes against the philosophy that an OS should be stable.
In the spoon, there is no Soviet Russia!
Actually, this changelog is more informative and more complete.
I can't take credit for the comment I'm about to sum up, so I'll put it in italics:
Emacs is a great OS, but it lacks a good text editor. That's why I use vi.
Whoever posted that originally tickled my funny bone...
My Karma was at 49, then they switched to words. All that work for nothing!
I've been using Xemacs for a long time.
Could someone with experience explain the difference between Xemacs and gnu emacs??
Please excuse my ignorance here. But I take a huge performance hit when I use emacs beacuse I don't know how to do line folding. Let me explain (and excuse the simplistic example). Suppose a file with the following content:
/Line/" and the editor shows me...
/two/" and the editor shows...
Line one
Line two
line three
line four
Line five
I'd like a command line where I type: "all
Line one
Line two
Line five
And then I could do "less
Line one
Line five
And then I do a change... "s/e/x/g" and the buffer now shows...
Linx onx
Linx fivx
And then I type "all" to show the entire file without regular expression folding.
Linx onx
Line two
line three
line four
Linx fivx
Wala! This is the kind of editing I like.
Would someone show me how to do this with Emacs so that I can retire THE.
Clark
The problem with "Emacs 21" is that the name looks too uptight and cold. They should change it to "eMacs" - this is much more young and fresh. Also, what's with the version number? Much better to name it by year "eMacs 2001".
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
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:
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.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
Real men speak with a lisp.
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.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
How do we get rid of that cursor blinking? It's driving me up a wall.
Why are we hiding from the police daddy?
Because we use vi son, they use emacs.
~Thinkgeek.com T-Shirt
Let the war continue...
WikiAfterDark.com It's a sex wiki, go now!
Emacs
Makes
A
Computer
Slow
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
coffee.el allows Emacs users to submit a BREW request to an RFC2324-compliant coffee device (Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol, or HTCPCP). It prompts the user for the different additives, then issues a HTCPCP BREW request to the coffee device.
I saw the screenshots a poster had linked to and I noticed the toolbar buttons weren't labelled. Tooltips are nice, but they are no substitute for labelling buttons. The label decreases access time with a mouse because it makes the toolbar a button bigger target and thus easier to hit via Fitt's law. Labelling the button also immediately tells the user what the button does, and they don't have to wait with the mouse hovering over the button for several seconds. That xemacs on my machine has labelled toolbar buttons and the one in the screenshot didn't is something I consider to be a step backwards. It's another case in the linux community where the "let's make it perty" crowd won out over the "let's make it usable" folks.
That should be "GNU/GNU Emacs".
[MODERATOR INSTRUCTIONS]
+1 Funny
-1 Overrated
[/MODERATOR INSTRUCTIONS]
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
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.
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!
is the standard text editor, dagnabit! You kids these days, with your fancy-schmancy buffers and fonts. Why, in my day we had to uphill, both ways, in the snow!
Best Slashdot Co
Leave the poor CVS server alone: here.
I have not read the changelog yet, but I am wondering if they FINALLY added a talking paperclip to emacs?
It is the one feature I really think this product needs in order to be a usable product.
Anyone out there managed to get the latest CVS drop to compile? I'm having a couple of problems. There seems to be a cyclical dependency between emacs and the elisp files. You need the elisp to be compiled in order to compile emacs, and you can't compile the elisp with anything other than the new copy of emacs.
I have emacs version 20.7.1, and it reports the following error when I try to use it to compile the elisp:
/home/jpollock/emacs21/emacs/lisp/emacs-lisp/byte- opt.el
Compiling
Wrong number of arguments: #[(fn new) ÃN?xÄ=ÅN
!Å
B#ÃÄ#" [fn handler new byte-compile byte-compile-obsolete byte-obsolete-info put] 6 410024 "aMake function obsolete:
xObsoletion replacement: "], 3
make: *** [compile-files] Error 1
Make on its own generates the following errors:
make[1]: *** No rule to make target `/home/jpollock/emacs21/emacs/src/../lisp/abbrev.
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/jpollock/emacs21/emacs/src'
make: *** [src] Error 2
Turning off DOC doesn't help, emacs itself has dependencies on the elisp. Then there's the joy of the "doit" dependency in the lisp tree being empty.
Jason Pollock
Just when I thought I knew all there was to know abut Emacs, they come up with a new version...
Actually, I prefer Emacs when writing C and vim when writing almost anything else. That ability to use a Lisp macro to give you context sensitive help does occasionaly come in handy (see the man man page for the text of the macro).
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
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:
After reading a bit about RMS' pre-FSF years, about his graduation with honors from Harvard (Physics, I believe) while pulling all-nighters at MIT AI, about EMACS, about the LISP contests with Greenblatt... I am convinced that RMS was born for hacking.
Yes, but has anone been able to port EMACS (or vi even) over to RMS_OS? How are we going to get script kiddies to hack it, if we can't even get a script written for the OS?
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
And a little nitpick... it's "voila!" (a should be accented), a French word which, when translated, means "there!".
Try "mcedit"... it's part of the MC (midnight commander) package (which I guess is now GMC... or something).
Midnight Commander used to be a damn good file manager for linux, until it got mixed up with the Gnome crowd... I'm not saying gnome is bad (I use it) but... I like my filemanagers to stay in a terminal (or VC), ok?
Anyway... it had a kick-ass old-school dos-style text editor that came with it called "mcedit". It puts you in a blue screen, has pull-down menus (hidden by default though) that you can activate (keyboard controlled, of course)... and has F-key shortcuts for things like copy, move, save, quit, etc. (and keeps a bar at the bottom telling you what those F-key shortcuts are).
It's a great simple little text editor.
Just search freshmeat.net for "midnight commander" and see where it takes you.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
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
I don't even use Emacs but comparing Komodo to it is hilarious! I use vim but one day I'll check out Emacs...
Where can I download the Win32 binaries of the new version???
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
s/(eight)/$1 hundred/i;
:)
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
Looks like the Mirrors are still at 20.7
./ got to the main server before the mirrors could!
I can't even get the source to try and compile it myself.
Why is ftp.gnu.org asking for a username and password? What should I enter?
Windows Guru, Linux Newbie, seeking to become Linux Guru.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
That's what source is for! Download, compile, install, enjoy! I don't know if there is a Cocoa port but it should run in a console or X.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
So, I've put emacs-21.1.tar.gz and leim-21.1.tar.gz for a temporary mirror. Visit:
If you make a temporary mirror, perhaps you could respond to this post. ... Greg
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.
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!
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.
Try configuring with --with-x-toolkit=lucid
That way you will get all those pretty widgets
James
meta-control-shift-hyper-q is not a good choice for 'move cursor right'
The choice of keys may hve made sense on the keyboards emacs was originally designed using. However the left hand scrunch required for many emacs opertions is particularly bad on the carpel tunnel.
And don't get me started on vi. If you like using obsolete teletype editors the EDT teletype mode was better. Using vi is like trying to edit a file by casting spells. People don't use that type of program because its good, they use it because its bad giving the loser the opportunity to flame on /. about how people who say it sucks 'don't understand' 'are not worthy' and like patronizing bullcrap.
First programming job I had in a big company I was sat down in front of a Vt100 and shown how to run the EDT tutorial mode. Having spent the morning mastering line mode and thinking 'what a piece of crap' the next section of the tutorial covered screen mode...
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
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.
The rounds were stored as an unsigned 32 bit integer. It rolled over last night.
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
No offense here, I've used Emacs and it's cool but I never really payed attention to the version before. Doesn't anyone think it's about time to give up on the whole Ver. 1, Ver. 2, Ver. 541 naming scheme? Ver. 21 is a *bit* high, heh.
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.
If you're not on somebody's shit list, you're not doing anything worthwhile.....
Sure, other editors may start up faster, but so what? You only need to start emacs once when you start work and use it until you go home. Even then, it's not that slow and really depends on how much lisp code you have in .emacs. The gnuclient package allow other programs to tell emacs to edit a file. With remote file editing via ange-ftp and/or tramp, working on several machines is a breeze.
I also like using the diary and appointment mode to have it remind me to go to meetings. The timecard mode is also great for work places where one has to track how much time is being spent on different projects.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
--Mike
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
You're right. It's just about half the size of Earth by now.
With all the architechtures and operating systems listed on the page, I wouldn't be suprised :)
:)
I wonder about that internet fridge... if you could hook a keyboard and keep the light on, it'd be great for hacking away over the summer months
Talez
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
*ahem* I can hardly wait for a an implementation of EMACS in XUL (The Mozilla slow-as-hell interface thing) with the underlying Lisp interpreter written in Java.
ah.
full fledged os? For that, you'd need...
multithreading! The fact that emacs still locks up when scanning my riduculously large email directory is laughable. I presume that there are deep reasons for this not to be acheivable, as otherwise it would seem like an obvious improvement.
As you point out, the change logs are, well, trs (C speak for terse). Does anyone care to comment on why, or should I just ask Kai Grossjohann?
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!
I'm glad you like emacs so much. But I like vi just as much as you like emacs.
Using the powerful global search-and-replace functions in vi, you can do powerful things without writing any code to do it. Years ago, I helped a guy in one of the college computer labs; he had typed in a Pascal program just like it was in the textbook, i.e. with all the keywords written in ALL CAPS. The problem was that Berkeley Pascal was case-sensitive and didn't recognize ALL CAPS keywords. I told him he could either use the -S switch every time he compiled (-S for "standard" behavior, and standard Pascal is case-insensitive) or else I could fix it for him. He chose to have me fix it. I typed a one-line regexp that meant "find all words that are two letters long or longer, and are all upper-case letters, and force each one to lower case". In vi, this command looks like this:
:%s/[A-Z][A-Z][A-Z]*/\L&/g
Much easier to type than to explain! Want the explanation? Here goes...
':' enters command-line mode (as opposed to interactive text-editing mode) for one single command; '%' means run the command on every line in the file; 's' is the search-and-replace command; "[A-Z]" matches any single upper-case letter; '*' means "zero or more of whatever comes before the '*'", i.e. "[A-Z]*" means zero or more upper case letters; "\L" means "force everything after \L to lower case"; and '&' means "whatever text was matched in the search part of the search and replace command".
Anyway, I typed it in (didn't take long; I'm a fast typist and I didn't need to look anything up). I hit the Enter key, and on his screen, every ALL CAPS keyword simply went to lower-case. I really don't think he had any idea how I did that; he looked pretty surprised.
One of the cool things about vim is that you can recall, and edit, previous command-line commands you typed in; so if you have a typo in a complicated search-and-replace, you can simply undo it, fix the typo, and run it again. Nice.
I now use the version of vim that has integrated Python support, so I can write powerful functions in Python if I like. I prefer Python to LISP, so I'm happy. Plus vi has always had the ability to filter selected lines, or the whole file, through an external program; you can feed a messy source file through an indenting program or whatever. You could even feed a messy source file through a 10-line LISP program if you wanted to!
People should use vi, or emacs, or whatever else makes them productive. emacs doesn't have an exclusive lock on Zen-like elegance.
P.S. www.vim.org
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!
I love as next (more, likely) as the next guy, but open a couple of buffers above and next to each other (I prefer a 2 column display, each column with 3 odd buffers), and even simple things like moving the cursor up and down become noticably slower.
This is easy enough to work around, just make a key/command that moves several lines at once, but it IS slow. and as I pointed out above, not multi-threaded.
However, appart from its faults, it is still the tool without I could not compute. My computer is basically a tool with which to run mozilla and emacs and pan (a recently discovered gem).
Really? A few years ago when I arrived at university I started using Xemacs, but then I rediscovered vanilla GNU emacs and I thought it was way better (mainly, more stable and cleaner). What is supposedly better about Xemacs?
This variable-sized font business in 21 sounds intriguing...
...does it come with clippy?
http://saveie6.com/
The odd thing, though, is that my Emacs manual is for version 18, which was released in 1987. It would seem that they had a flurry of activity, then put it on hold for what turned out to be a very long time.
(Can't say that I've used Emacs in ages. Last time I built it at home, I was running a 386SX-25 with 4 megs of RAM running Linux 0.99pl14 (SLS, installed from 5.25" floppies). Now my home server is a K6-III-450 and my mail server at work is a P!!!-866, each with 256 megs of RAM (LFS on both, the K6-III with Linux 2.4.9 and the P!!! with Linux 2.4.12), but I haven't bothered to build Emacs on either of them. I prefer Joe for text editing nowadays, but I've also built vi (vim, actually) on them. I have one user bitching at me that Emacs isn't installed...if he insists on it, at least there's a brand-new version to try out now.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
I drasticly misread your post. I was talking about words in conversation, not app names. But the lawyer thing.. I may completely miss the intent of a short post, but even _I_ wouldn't take unsolicited legal advice from a (mostly) anonymous public forum..
Interestingly there is a mention in the nt/INSTALL file that the version of make that comes in my version of Cygwin (pretty recent) won't build, but it seems to be OK. make --version shows 3.79.1 for me.
I worked with it for a few minutes then left it idle in the background. Nothing happened. I just tried C-u 12 M-x hanoi and it seemed to run OK.
What is your configuration? I'm using this machine only with NT4 SP6 and the memory upgraded to 512 MB.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
... they keep asking "can Emacs do this ?", for which the answer is, invariently, "yes". Making coffe isn't even new with Emacs 21, I believe it was added back in the old Emacs 19 days.
The correct question is, "how can I make Emacs do this?".
I've beein using Xemacs now for a long time, really back when it was Lucid Emacs.
My understanding (most likley quite flawed) is that XEmacs is developed more with GUI's in mind, and GnuEmacs is more pure-text oriented - at least in any particular incarnation thus far when I've tried Xemacs and Gnu Emacs, XEmacs always seemed to be a bit better integrated into whatever wnvironment I happened to be working in.
For the last few years I've been using NT as a primary development machine, but soon I hope to be able to return to a proper UNIX environment. I guess I'll have to re-visit Xemacs and GnuEmacs then to see for myself which I like better.
I just re-read XEmacs vs. Gnu Emacs which I find to be a pretty fair assessment of the situsation. My understand was fiarly on-target, but there are also other reasons (like the package system) that are pretty good points.
I would like to see somewhere an outline of what Gnu Emacs now has that Xemacs lacks! That's the only unfair aspect of that page.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I don't understand why people keep arguing about this shit.
The truth is both are great editors, emacs features simply out performs vim, but vim has its own unique advantages as well.
I use both vim and emacs, and mostly I use emacs with viper mode, and now I always laugh at those idiots who keep arguing one is better than the other.
here
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.
XEmacs has a clear separation between the display driver, and the rest of the system. To XEmacs, Gnome is just another window system, just like X11, win32, and for that matter, termcap. You configure it --with-gnome to select Gnome support.
In fact, XEmacs can have multiple display drivers active simultaniously, so the Cygwin port of XEmacs can have a native win32 frame, a console (termcap) frame, and an X11 frame open simultaniously.
I hope someone will add KDE support, just for the hack value of having a single XEmacs with both a Gnome and a KDE frame open simultainously.
The speration is less elegant in Emacs, the code is full of "ifdefs" for the differnet window systems, so adding support for Gnome would be more of a maintaince burden.
However, since Gnome _is_ the supported GNU desktop, the maintainers of Emacs would very much like to see someone volunteer to add Gnome support, despite the maintainance cost.
Get it here.
What is emacs?
Unfortunately no-one can be told what Emacs is, you have to see it for yourself.
In the spoon, there is no Soviet Russia!
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
I'm a long time hard-core vi user. vi is *all* I use, for all .exrc; and in any other
/., I've just been
editing; I've got all these weird macros in
editor, I'm shortly reduced to swearing and cursing because I can't
get into command mode! I had a brief fling with emacs, but it
didn't last: all this control meta stuff all the time wore me out.
But, inspired by this and a few other comments on
trying out viper-mode, and it is really impressive. It actually does
feel like vi. I was put off by emacs' attempts to emulate vi in
the past: the old vi mode was rotten. Now that there is a "real" vi
mode, the combination of vi's wonderful user interface combined with
the power of emacs is very attractive. Maybe I'll make the switch --
if only I could get rid of this damned blinking block cursor...
It's nice to see a new release of that OS out. Now if only they would add a decent editor.
;)
(yes, I know about the vi modes. I said a _decent_ editor!
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
You have got to be joking. The base word .exe is 8.4 megs on my machine.
No. Compare them for yourself. Not just the executable, but all the associated files. You have to count elisp files as well, as those are integral to Emacs. Word only takes 15MB or so of space, installed.
well, you start emacs when you boot your computer, to be more precise... here at work I had an emacs session open for about two months, I had to close it just because I had to reboot the machine due to a planned power outage.
Without emacs life as a coder would be so much harder...
-- the cake is a lie
Unofficial RPMs of Emacs 21 for Red Hat Linux 7.2 (Enigma) are available.
They're not supported, but have been lightly tested and seem to work great - feedback appreciated (mail or bugzilla against rawhide)