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The Future of Emacs
An anonymous reader writes "If you've not heard much about Emacs development in recent years, you might
be surprised to find that it is has been very active. Emacs 22 will have many
new features such as support for Mac OS X and Cygwin; mouse wheel support
and many new modes and packages. It can also be built with Gtk+ widgets and
supports drag and drop for X. The NEWS file details all the changes.
Although its very stable, don't expect to see it released any time shortly because according to
RMS, the Emacs developers haven't been fixing bugs quickly enough. Those
who have followed Emacs for long enough might see a different pattern."
mouse-wheel.el has been providing mouse wheel support for years. It's just being added to the core distribution.
Debian unstable has weekly snapshots of cvs emacs.- snapshot
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/editors/emacs
I have been using it for some time now and it works like a charm.
Alright man, it's obvious you're just trying to get a rise out of people but let me assure you that emacs is not the only Linux based editor. You can try vi too
But seriously, I know for a fact that my scroll wheel works in emacs (windows binary even!) so check that out if it's so important to you. You know, some people just want a text editor without a huge memory footprint yet lots of functionality. I think programs like emacs provide exactly that and are what these people are looking for.
You can keep your windows editors
My work here is dung.
use tramp mode; then, you can run email in full mouse-supporting glory on the client platform, and emacs will transparently copy files hence and forth. All you need is ssh access to the robot, not even emacs there.
Technically, it's Emacs 1.22, but the leading 1 has been dropped ages ago (no major incompatibilities, just new features...).
AS far as I know, Emacs already supports the mouse wheel. I know I've scrolled with the mouse wheel, although it's some obscure option to turn that on. I find that I don't really use the mousewheel that much anyway though, it takes too long to move your hand from the keyboard to the mouse.
Well, I'd like to see another editor with which I can read mail, news, rss-feeds or which builts wikis or which has superior LaTeX support. And this are only my needs.
Which UI guidelines? Text editor UI guidelines? Care to provide a link?
I don't know about Emacs, but XEmacs fits nicely into Windows' GUI. Better than both on Linux.
UnNetHack: NetHack Improved!
Despite the trollish title of this post, I'm essentially an emacs fan. I am a writer, not a coder, and prefer the command line over GUI. I am the author of the Woodnotes Guide to Emacs for Writers (HTML) (PDF Version) and a bunch of books and papers..
But I find myself using emacs less and less frequently. My first complaint is getting emacs and my Linux console to work correctly with diacritical marks. I know that's a function not only of emacs but also the packagers of my distribution, plus a deplorable lack of easily-installed console fonts that contain those glyphs. But regardless of whose fault it is, this problem makes it hard for me to get my work done the way I want to.
I also need to program lots of small macros for very specific text editing features while writing a book that requires a silly markup format unique to the industry. Emacs was simply too hard to program for me to be able to implement it. Instead, I found Jedit, which easily facilitated things like switching between soft and hard wrap, keystroke macros, and some features I now find indispensable, like search and replace across all documents in a directory.
It's not that emacs doesn't or can't implement these features, it's that it doesn't do so easily. I wrote up a little page about the macros and jedit features I use most frequently. It would be extremely difficult to publish similar instructions for emacs because of the greater difficult inherent in installing, using, and sharing macros.
I still use emacs, but I use it for emailing, in conjunction with Mutt, the world's best email client. And for writing, I tend to stick to Jedit. Best of luck to emacs, which I still like, but I think for people like me the world has progressed and emacs is of limited use.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
I'm feeling trollish, but I have to say it : if you are new to linux, you won't touch emacs (nor vi, nor ed, nor...) you'll probably use a graphical editor which works 'out of the box' (or out of the emerge, or out of the apt-get) which has auto-highlight, the same shortcuts as windows editors. Of course they also have mouse wheel support since many years.
emacs is made to work in text-mode and use a lot of cryptic (let's get real) shortcuts that you just have to know. If you are ready to train a day or two memorizing them, you'll probably be comfortable and productive with it but if you are not, juste use kate, scite, etc... which are editors equivalent of your usual 30$ windows-shareware tool of choice.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
http://aquamacs.org
EMACS used to stand for Editor Macros.
Because when it was first released (by the end of the 70s), EMACS was in fact a TECO macros package, result of the unification of several TECO macro packages such as TMACS and TECMACS.
The "modern" Emacs, as an independant program (and not a bunch of TECO macros) built upon Lisp, came a few years later, taking inspiration from Multics Emacs and EINE (Eine Is Not Emacs) and ZWEI (Zwei Was Eine Initially) which opened the way for Emacs being written in Lisp (you should read the Multics Emacs article BTW, it's extremely interresting). GNU Emacs "a we know it" was first released with v13.0 in 1985.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Yes you can,google for "emacs terminal mouse" and you'll find pointers
1 /emacs/emacs/lisp/xt-mouse.el
http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/7.0b
Remaps caps lock as control if you're a heavy emacs user. Your hands will thank you.
David Gay
Better yet, learn to use Emacs in viper-mode.
Well, at least for some of these, I still use Eclipse.
For Perl:
http://e-p-i-c.sourceforge.net/
For Ruby:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/rubyeclipse
For Latex:
http://texlipse.sourceforge.net/
For C++:
http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/
More and more languages are finding support in Eclipse with plugins. Granted, emacs is good for editing in the general sense, but for any serious development, I find myself turning to eclipse.
Unless you are doing CJK (which will be fixed in the next release), Unicode on Emacs presents no especial challenge. Just place these two lines in your ~/.emacs:
As a student of comparative linguistics, I regularly mix the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic (including the arcane Old Church Slavonic portions of Unicode) scripts with ease. It's so much easier than with any other editor, because with C-x RET C-\ I have my pick of dozens of input methods (for Latin I'm especially fond of the TeX one) that let me type anything in my buffer, which will be saved in nice, standard UTF-8.
Of course, the default font on many systems doesn't include much in the way of non-ISO-8859-15 characters, but luckily GNU solved that with their Unifont set and one can see all one needs just by downloading that and adding this to your ~/.Xdefaults:
As you can see here, I use the super-readable Terminus font for basic ASCII and the well-endowned unifont for all else.
The funny thing is that people developping under Emacs can tell you exactly the same. And they'll tell the truth too, Emacs modes are extremely powerful on top of allowing you to write in pretty much any language from a single editor with the same efficiency.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Really!?! I worked at a mid-sized speech synthesis/recognition software company a few years ago, and did some pretty heavy work with Emacs under Solaris and a bit under Linux. I had my Sun Type 5 keyboard set up with all sorts of elisp macros attached to the extra column of keys on the let. *Sigh* I miss that keyboard
We also used gcc, gprof, gmake, gdb, heavily. Gcc and MSVC were the two supported compilers for a product. I worked on very low-level code optimization of a virtual machine, and Gcc was *waaay* better for that kinda thing than MSVC.
My bicyles
Mouse wheel has worked for ages with a simple option in ~/.emacs This works for me: (global-set-key [mouse-4] 'scroll-down) (global-set-key [mouse-5] 'scroll-up)
Who is John Galt?
It already exists (sort of): http://www.emmett.ca/~sabetts/
"LiCE is the GNU Emacs clone I'm building."
It runs on movitz (image available for download, if you want to run it yourself). I guess it'd be easier to extend LiCE than to port FSF Emacs to a non-C-based OS. Or porting McCLIM to work on movitz(+ framebuffer), which, in addition to enabling movitz to run Climacs, would also open up other programs.
Try Corewar @ www.koth.org - rec.games.corewar