GNU Coughs Up Emacs 22 After Six Year Wait

lisah writes "After keeping users waiting for nearly six years, Emacs 22 has been released and includes a bunch of updates and some new modes as well. In addition to support for GTK+ and a graphical interface to the GNU Debugger, 'this release includes build support for Linux on AMD64, S/390, and Tensilica Xtensa machines, FreeBSD/Alpha, Cygwin, Mac OS X, and Mac OS 9 with Carbon support. The Leim package is now part of GNU Emacs, so users will be able to get input support for Chinese, Tibetan, Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, and other languages without downloading a separate package. New translations of the Emacs tutorial are also available in Brasilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, simplified and traditional Chinese, Italian, French, and Russian.'"

Comments

Re:Cue the vi versus emacs flamewars

[Bongo Bill]

Why choose?

Re:Any OS X builds?

[Zaurus]

Someone on a slashdot post or blog somewhere posted instructions on how to build and install carbon emacs from CVS. I've used it on my PowerBook, and two MacBook Pro's (Core Duo, then Core 2 Duo) with great success.

Here's the instructions I saved:

mkdir ~/tmp
cd ~/tmp
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sv.gnu.org:/sources/emacs co emacs
cd emacs ./configure --enable-carbon-app
make bootstrap
make
sudo make install

Then I put the following in my .bashrc so that I can easily launch it from the command-line. The best part is that when you launch it in the background with a file argument, emacs grabs focus when it comes up. The emacs that requires Apple's X11 would never come to the front on launch.

alias emacs="/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emac s -g 110x40 --no-splash"

(you may want to adjust the columns and width from 110 and 40 to your own preference)

NOTE: I haven't tried this since 22 was officially released.

Re:UNIX Philosophy

[TheRaven64]

EMACS was never based on the UNIX philosophy. EMACS comes from the Lisp Machines philosophy. In many ways, it is an attempt to re-create the old Lisp Machines.

If you want an editor like EMACS that follows the UNIX philosophy, take a look at mg, from the OpenBSD team (now runs pretty much anywhere). Most people who use EMACS, however, would feel horribly lost on something like mg, since it's the non-UNIX-like nature of it that is its strength.

Re:We were always using VI

[SuperKendall]

It would be similar...

Really, there's nothing in Emacs to figure out - since it has a menu, you can save and so faroth using that, if you don't feel like learning the keyboard commands (whch have a huge amount of depth and are logically organized).

You load files and the appropriate mode should be applied. You get more out of it if you learn some modal specific commands (like autoflow comments in C mode) but you can always go without them.

The feature I still find most powerful is macro recording, if you ever decide to go in for a second look - C-x ( starts a key board macro, C-x ) ends recording, and C-x e runs the macro you last recorded.

Re:We were always using VI

[666999]

You most likely meant http://www.emacswiki.org/.