Slashdot Mirror
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.
Technically, it's Emacs 1.22, but the leading 1 has been dropped ages ago (no major incompatibilities, just new features...).
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.
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
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.