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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.'"
Nobody cares. We're all using VI now.
Use the unicode2 branch from emacs CVS, not this release. Hopefully emacs 23 won't take as long as emacs 22. 8-(
Release early, release often. Don't end up like Emacs.
Well, that certainly explains things...
Did they finally add the "write my code for me" command? It seems to be one of the few things emacs hasn't implemented. I suppose a "materialize a 5'4 asian Girl Friend" command would be useful too. I think we should push for that in the next revision.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Or even better, does it run linux?
My business: Farstrider Studios.
Yeah. You enter /DNF and your code gets converted into spaghetti code that will take years to untangle. That's why you need good backups. Alas, the Emacs team didn't maintain good backups and the code got hosed when this command was tested. That's why it took six years. ;)
Some day it's going to achieve sentience... Don't say I didn't warn you.
Deleted
And it takes about as long for GNU to release a new version as it takes Microsoft to release Vista.
But who shed more features before going gold?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Does it still (E)ventually (M)alloc (A)ll (C)ore (S)torage?
:-)
Or is it just now Eight Hundred Megs And Constantly Swapping?
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
But then once in a while, some among us elevated to a higher plane - the Emacs User. :-)
Emacs 22 took six years, just to find anything Emacs 21 didn't already offer...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
On the upside, matching our carpet to the color of the catfood has turned out to be a brilliant strategy so far.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Don't compare apples to.. operating systems.
Why choose?
...but is it art?
So easy to use, no wonder it's number one!
Too busy staying alive... ~ R.A.
...a good editor?
/me ducks
For those of you who have been holding your breath you may now exhale.
I think the invisible hand of the market has its middle finger extended
--A wise old fart named SC0RN
'nuff said
-- Will program for bandwidth
And it's really just the sources that are out; there's precious few binaries out there.
Can we post binary torrents in this thread? I want OS X, preferably Universal, but Intel-only will do.
Are you adequate?
The only thing more abusive than throwing someone into vi without explaining modality first would be to throw them into vi that had a message to tell you to press (whatever) for help, and popped up eliza when you did so. "How do I quit?" "How does it make you feel that how do I quit?"
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Is it just me or does emacs go completely against the grains of *nix philosophy? i.e. simple, modular, parsimony, etc. The emacs base distribution is 126 megabytes, larger then the FreeBSD operating system... How did emacs get to be like this?
Cause vi is for buttholes!
...using a front-end loader to put out the cat.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
This must be the third horseman. Let's just hope the unimaginable doesn't happen, and GNU doesn't puke out Hurd. That would mean the end of us all.
But I _still_ can't get GRUB to load it...I _still_ have to use this useless 'linux thingy' to invoke it!
Won't someone please help me with replacing my Symbolics machine?
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
Hell, even The Beatles use Vi...
Emacs asian girlfriend will cook, clean, balance your checkbook, do your taxes, and never, ever complain... but she weighs 300 lbs.
Vi asian girlfriend just stands there looking pretty, but if you thought you were going to get anything done, you're sadly mistaken. It'll take you a week to figure out how to get that dress off...
Vim asian girlfriend will do anything you ask, as soon as you learn the language. Fortunately, most of us know words like "Bukakke" already, and it doesn't take much.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I've been a regular visitor to the church of Emacs and paying my weekly tribute to RMS on Sundays.
.emacs has grown to have more than 1k lines.
.emacs but the joy is not there.
In the beginning emacs more than delighted with built-in debugger/mail/sokoban/all-language-modes and then I learned the power of lisp. Google for 5 minutes and then you can have your own scripts built in the editor to rotate the selection, crop 20% of the text from left, tranlsate the remaining junk into Russian and then to Polish or whatever you want, power is immense! Over time my
But, lately I've been thinking about converting to vim family. Vim is what I like in real life - quick (way faster than emacs), not-bloated (still in MBs) and above all cool features. In retrospect, emacs seem to be developed as really bloated thing, include all, nasty to use keyboard shortcuts (although I have replaced all of them with my custom settings).. things that you expect to get on your 10GB windows vista (RMS, pls pardon me for this insane comparison).
OTOH, vim has a taste of elegance, at least in default keyboard shortcuts.. that are rarely longer than 3-4 char. Looks like the developer really cared for what user really needed rather than stuffing everything down the throat. But, my tipping point was vim7.0's "time undo feature" -- something like you tell ":earlier 5m" and it'll take you (or rather your file) 5 minutes back in time. I'm sure I can do same thing in emacs after spending 2 hours on google and adding 10 more lines to
So, here I am in middle of my biggest decision of my life - should I continue emacs, where I am a power user or should I join enemy's camp.
PS: emacs users, pls dont kill me.. I have not YET switched and still visit emacs church. Vim user, you dont kill me either for I am your potential convert. Thanks!
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.
s co emacs ./configure --enable-carbon-app
.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.
c s -g 110x40 --no-splash"
Here's the instructions I saved:
mkdir ~/tmp
cd ~/tmp
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sv.gnu.org:/sources/emac
cd emacs
make bootstrap
make
sudo make install
Then I put the following in my
alias emacs="/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Ema
(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.
Vimacs is an affront to God...using it may very well bring about the Apocalypse. It's like what would happen if God came down to hang out with you for a while and you stole his wallet or coveted his ass or something: bad things are going to happen.
Well, I'm wary of any editor that takes the commands through the colon. Add on a Brokeback reference, and my homometer is going haywire!
I kid, I kid... I personally use both Emacs and Vim
.The view was horrible and the smell was even worse; Julie severely regretted becoming a proctologist.
The Website, RMSes Passport Portrait, Emacs itself, ... just looking at it makes it appear beyond bizar. As if I had taken some extremely mind altering substance. I couldn't describe the experience to someone who hasn't had it himself. ... heavens crickey. :-) .
Emacs may once have been an extremely powerfull tool and the best possible thing for a remote tty command line mainframe uplink some 25 years ago. I nearly started learning it back in 1996. But all this nowadays and with a stance that is way far out even by slashdot standards
How about calling it quits? Donald Knuth stopped TeX when it was finished. And it actually still is a usable tool today. Then again, Donald Knuth is a normal, respected developer, not some strange fringe-dimension entity
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I love vim. vi is ok. vim is great.
vim is an editor that can be used as an ide. Emacs is an ide that can be used as an editor.
I can honestly recommend vim for use on every platform it supports, which is pretty much all of them, including amiga.
The only warning I would give is: bring patience with you. vi and vim do not become powerful until you become proficient at the keyboard commands, the modal system, and the command line commands. vim has a menuing system, but if you are a menu-only type of guy, why subject yourself to a new set of menus?
If you do not love and believe in vi's modal editing enough to learn it, use another editor.
pb
So how many DVDs does this thing take up?
cd emacs/mac
./make-package --self-contained
Makes a .dmg which includes an installer. Self-contained means all the support files end up in the Emacs.app directory, so nothing is installed in /usr.
...the operating system disguised as an editor.
I love Emacs, it makes my code look clean !
Emacs, because life isn't complicated enough
Emacs is the only user application that I know of where I have to consult the documentation for the ability to shut it down.
My programming instructor said he had an evil boss at a government job who made him use Emacs.
You're lucky. *My* evil boss makes me edit Java and XML with Excel.
Fantasy: http://ferrisfantasy.blogspot.com/
I'd wait a bit before booting emacs. It is said that emacs is a very nice operating system, but it lacks a good editor.
Fantasy: http://ferrisfantasy.blogspot.com/
In retrospect, emacs seem to be developed as really bloated thing, include all, nasty to use keyboard shortcuts (although I have replaced all of them with my custom settings).. things that you expect to get on your 10GB windows vista (RMS, pls pardon me for this insane comparison).
OTOH, vim has a taste of elegance, at least in default keyboard shortcuts
That is interesting because I see things in the opposite way.
I have been using vim pretty much since I started using Linux a few years ago. My use is limited to some elementary programming (see sig) some long XML documents, config file editing and, more recently, email in Mutt. I'd say my Vim knowledge is pretty elementary, and I am learning new things all the time.
When I first used Linux, I wanted to learn Emacs. Vi has a reputation of being mean and unfriendly. But something about Emacs just wasn't clicking with me, while the Vim tutorial was easy to follow. The commands were cryptic at first, but I soon realized how quickly I could get around a file with them, even with just rudimentary knowledge.
Every so often I take another look at Emacs. Most recently it was because shells seem to work better with Emacs key bindings (they usually have vi bindings, but I don't find they work as well at the command line.) I figured that if I was going to learn Emacs bindings, I might as well take another look at Emacs.
My most recent impression of Emacs is that the basics of the editor are much more well-designed and integrated than Vim. Vim is descended from Vi, which is descended from Ex, which comes from Ed...so there is a lot of editor history and cruft and weirdness in there. Recently I've been digging through the Ex and Ed manpages, which helps me understand Vim better. But yikes, that old line-editor history is still deeply in Vim, and it is very apt to say that the the visual part of Vim is "bolted on" to Ex.
Emacs on the other hand does not seem to have this crazy history. It seems to do many things smoothly that were later added to Vim, such as editing multiple buffers. Basic functionality like searching is easier to understand--Vim's distinction between "magic" and "nomagic", for example, took awhile for me to understand (of course, it exists in part due to compatibility with the ancient regular expressions found in Ed.)
In short, the core of Emacs seems to me to be designed, while the core of Vim seems haphazard and bolted together like a historical crazy quilt.
However, where this changes is with more advanced functionality. Features such as folding and (more recently) spell checking are built in to Vim. Emacs can do these things, sure. But you have to rely on modes. Good luck finding modes and then, if you find them, good luck documenting them. Furthermore, it often seems that doing something more advanced with Emacs requires learning Emacs Lisp, where the functionality will be built-in to Vim. I don't want to have to learn to program my editor just so I can smoothly edit a file.
So, the core of Emacs seems to me to be better designed, while when it comes to more advanced functionality, Vim wins. So Vim is harder to learn, but easier to use and grow with once you get the hang of it.
A couple of final notes. Vim's documentation is much better than Emacs. Bram has done a fantastic job by writing two manuals--the user guide, to get you started, and the reference manual to exhaustively explain everything. Emacs has only one manual. Further, Bram has documented all of Vim, including the advanced functionality. Since the advanced stuff is not built in to Emacs--it uses modes instead--good luck getting good documentation to go along with advanced Emacs usage.
Also, some people compare Emacs and vi. That is an easy contest--Emacs wins hands down. I installed nvi just to see what it would be like, and the lack of documentation alone makes it very hard to use. Thus emacs versus vi is a bogus comparison. Vim is the standard bearer now.
Just my $.02; I hope an Emacs user offers a refutation.
Penny - plain text accounting
Are Emacs and Vi even worth learning for the next generation? I say this as a fan of Vim who uses it for all his text editing; and many of my coworkers are Vim or Emacs fans. Both are exceptionally powerful tools. But neither program is especially user friendly, and other editors and IDE seem to be catching up in terms of power. It's perfectly possible to achieve mastery and speed in more user friendly tools as well. (I know a guy who uses Visual Studio's editor with the fluidity I normally only see in Vim or Emacs users, almost never removing his fingers from the keyboard. He works almost entirely on muscle memory so his editor is almost a direct extension of his thoughts.)
Much though I love Vim and look forward to new releases, as I expect the Emacs fans do, I suspect our favorite editors are going to be increasingly marginalized. I can't in good faith suggest that younger programmers spend the time to learn either one. (Excepting of course people working on Unix, where you should know enough pure-Vi to muddle along in a worst case scenario.)
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Emacs comes with fine tutorial, available from the help menu, or via C-h t. It comes with a complete online reference manual. A tutorial introduction to elisp, aimed at getting non-programmers up to speed wrt customizing their Emacs. And there's a two-volume set for anyone interested in serious programming in elisp. And O'Reilly has a good manual as well, if you want to pay for it.
And you definitely don't have to learn elisp to use the advanced features of Emacs. You have access to a very rich suite of editing functions with standard emacs. If you want the same (comparable, if not identical) features available with Vim? you will be just fine without knowing anything about lisp.
However, with a little time invested you can increase your productivity by customizing functions. I suppose all editors worth their salt provide regexp search and replace. But if you want to automate complicated stuff having a full extension language on hand is a huge plus. For example, I'm writing a latex document, and I want to be able to pull out all the figures/tables/footnotes to a separate file. This requires a fairly sophisticated regexp, as it has to handle nested parentheses and various options for the different environment types. I don't think it can be done with a one-line regexp. It can be done in a dozen lines of elisp, and nothing too difficult to sort out since the real heavy lifting of the regexps is already done with standard functions. Of course, I'm a rank beginner at this stuff, but I'm hooked after seeing how easy it was to make a fairly complex and useful function.
I guess that dedicated TeX editors probably already have such features built-in. But another benefit of doing this with emacs is that I don't need to learn a different interface to do similar manipulations to code, mail, html...
yp.
Who can live without that!.
http://saveie6.com/
I too started as an Emacs user, then found myself wanting to learn vi. vi is quick and easy to bring up in a terminal, and is present on nearly all Unix variant machines in existence. Learning vi was not all that difficult, like Emacs there is a lot of consistency in how the various key commands combine with each other, and once you understand how it works, you find yourself just using it. And once you know the vi basics, it is really easy to pick up on the cool features in vim.
Nowadays I use both pretty regularly. I use Emacs for programming and editing large documents. I also love that its shell buffer offers improvements to other terminal programs, and not just the shell (Oracle's sqlplus within an Emacs shell buffer is much better than from a regular terminal). I use vi for quick edits or when there isn't a good mode for Emacs.
One day I caught myself alt-tabbing between an Emacs window editing C and two vim windows for lex and yacc, using all the fancy keyboard shortcuts available within each editor. It is amazing how you get so used to something that you don't even think about how to use it.
Overall, I compare the two editors by their macro capabilities. Emacs can remember long sequences of keystrokes for later recall, and if that isn't enough, you can also write LISP code to modify a buffer however you want. vim doesn't have that level of capability (and vi somewhat less), but does offer the very inconvenient "." command to repeat the last edit. This parallels how I view the two editors - I use Emacs for most serious work, and vim when I want something quick and easy.
Learn them both, you will be better off for it.
...but I hear it's still missing a text editor. :(
This is from Emacs 21:
M-x name-last-kbd-macro
to give the macro a name
M-x insert-kbd-macro
to insert it as Lisp code in the current buffer.
The VIM Quick Reference Card is nice. Hang it on your wall.
> Well... it's got a vi mode.
Here is vi-mode for emacs (with apologies to Erik Naggum):
(defun vi-mode ()
(interactive)
(use-global-map (make-keymap))
Whatever you do, it will just beep annoyingly at you.
In "vi" under older SunOS, even arrow keys didn't work! Who decided that h-j-k-l should be used instead of arrows !?!?
As with many bizarre bits of vi, the answer seems to be historical. Early terminals of course did not have arrow keys. The hjkl keys actually had arrows on them, so it made sense then.
Same goes for the escape key; it was where Tab is now, so it was easier to hit. (Now I find ctrl-[ easier to hit than escape.)
Penny - plain text accounting
especially if you're a rectangle.
You can also use the functions the sibling comment suggests to create your own macro saver (I had one that saved my macros into my emacs folder in saved-macros.el).
Also, there's an emacs extension called "better-registers". Better registers allow assignment of keyboard macros into "registers". Registers are basically variables that are assigned to keyboard keys. So you can assign a macro, string, number, or whatever into a variable associated with a key, and then perform operations on that variable (increase number, run macro) via shortcut keys. Its also pretty useful for keyboard macros (as you can have an increasing number, etc inside a macro).