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."

Comments

Re:Mouse wheel support

[Anonymous Coward]

mouse-wheel.el has been providing mouse wheel support for years. It's just being added to the core distribution.

Cvs version

[petteri_666]

Debian unstable has weekly snapshots of cvs emacs.
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/editors/emacs- snapshot
I have been using it for some time now and it works like a charm.

Emacs slowly less relevant

[water-and-sewer]

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.