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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.'"

34 of 500 comments (clear)

  1. Nobody Cares. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Nobody cares. We're all using VI now.

    1. Re:Nobody Cares. by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      My programming instructor said he had an evil boss at a government job who made him use Emacs. Horrors! I think Emacs exist to scare the new generation into using VI.

    2. Re:Nobody Cares. by bckrispi · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Emacs vs. vi?? They both suck!!

      --
      Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
    3. Re:Nobody Cares. by smittyoneeach · · Score: 5, Insightful

      My son, the Esteemed Mother Among Computer Software smiles at you.
      May the icon factories currently stuffing lesser programming tools with meaningless little objects of idolatry never pollute your conscious with bric-a-brac.
      May you never touch an editor that is less than extensible, customizable, self-documenting, and resplendent, whether dressed in an X session or a humble terminal.
      And may e vi l never your doorway darken, though emacs has a mode to help your recovery therefrom.

      --
      Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
  2. Don't forget by SnowZero · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Release early, release often. Don't end up like Emacs.

    1. Re:Don't forget by marcosdumay · · Score: 4, Funny

      Yep... And Debian has just released another stable, just a bit more than a year after the last one... And the new emacs is released... What is up with all those things?!?!?! Will we have perl6 and hurd released now?!?!?!

      The world is a crazy place.

  3. Feature Rich by king-manic · · Score: 4, Funny

    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."
    1. Re:Feature Rich by Mattintosh · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.

      Once that's implemented, the whole vi vs. Emacs thing is over.

      Hot asian girlfriend FTW!

    2. Re:Feature Rich by larry+bagina · · Score: 5, Funny

      the hot asian girlfriend writes your code, silly.

      --
      Do you even lift?

      These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

    3. Re:Feature Rich by king-manic · · Score: 4, Funny

      Wait a minute, the specs didn't call for her to be hot... It just said 5'4" and Asian...

      So we could be talking about a chunky girl with mosquito bites, and a mouth full of crooked teeth, a strict no-sex-before-marriage policy, and a really foul attitude... Like the kind that would be all screaming at you in Cantonese every night, unless you cater to her every whim, as uttered in broken, thickly-accented English - and then if you give her the boot she sneaks back into your place and steals or destroys all your stuff...

      See? SEE? Now do you understand why it's important to clearly and thoroughly define the requirements of your software before coding begins?


      I prefer my personal impelmentation of "5'4 Asian Girl Friend v10.0". It's a great improvement over "5'3 blonde German Girl friend v9.5" who was actually an upgrade on "5'5 filipina stripper Girl Friend v6.9". I still fondly remember the one I started with "5'1 half filipina half chinese Girl friend v.5.0" however that implementation was not as asthetically pleaseing as the other three and came with "waiting for marriage" DRM but was more stable then two of the other three.

      The current one ("5'4 Asian Girl Friend v10.0") is both stable, DRM free, include the "hot" feature and "sane" feature which some of the previous versions lacked. I was thinking of trying make the "threesome" feature but I might be pushing my luck :D

      --
      "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
  4. Y'know... by Colin+Smith · · Score: 5, Funny

    Some day it's going to achieve sentience... Don't say I didn't warn you.

    --
    Deleted
  5. Obligatory flamebait by Alioth · · Score: 4, Funny

    Does it still (E)ventually (M)alloc (A)ll (C)ore (S)torage?

    Or is it just now Eight Hundred Megs And Constantly Swapping? :-)

  6. We were always using VI by SuperKendall · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:We were always using VI by SuperKendall · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
      "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
    2. Re:We were always using VI by Mr.+Underbridge · · Score: 5, Funny

      Emacs 22 took six years, just to find anything Emacs 21 didn't already offer...

      Sure. Now maybe that they're done with that, they'll finish Hurd.

    3. Re:We were always using VI by Javagator · · Score: 5, Funny
      Now maybe that they're done with that, they'll finish Hurd.

      If you have Emacs, you don't need Hurd.

    4. Re:We were always using VI by GNUALMAFUERTE · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Agreed. I Think it actually is a change you do out of necessity. When you find the need to edit at the same time +5 php files, php.ini, httpd.conf, a few very complex SQL sentences, and at the same time test those SQLs, those PHPs, restart services, and tail a few logfiles, all while checking e-mail, Emacs comes as a natural solution.

      --
      WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
    5. Re:We were always using VI by 666999 · · Score: 4, Informative

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

  7. Re:Cue the vi versus emacs flamewars by plams · · Score: 4, Funny

    Don't compare apples to.. operating systems.

  8. Re:Cue the vi versus emacs flamewars by Bongo+Bill · · Score: 4, Informative
    --
    ...but is it art?
  9. Using Emacs to edit a text file is like... by toadlife · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...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.
  10. OMG, what next?? by mobby_6kl · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

  11. Re:Cue the vi versus emacs flamewars by BobNET · · Score: 5, Funny

    Hell, even The Beatles use Vi...

  12. He didn't say "hot" by SanityInAnarchy · · Score: 4, Funny

    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!
    1. Re:He didn't say "hot" by dstar · · Score: 5, Funny

      MS Word asian girlfriend is actually nouveau riche white trash with tens of thousands of dollars worth of cosmetic surgery, but she's already done the entire city and she's got a collection of diseases that would make the CDC jealous.

  13. Re:Nobody Cares. - my experience by NovaSupreme · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've been a regular visitor to the church of Emacs and paying my weekly tribute to RMS on Sundays.

    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 .emacs has grown to have more than 1k lines.

    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 .emacs but the joy is not there.

    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!

  14. Re:Any OS X builds? by Zaurus · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  15. Re:UNIX Philosophy by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Informative
    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.

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  16. Re:Nobody Cares. - my experience by poor_boi · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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

  17. You're so lucky by ericferris · · Score: 5, Funny

    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/
  18. You shouldn't boot emacs right away by ericferris · · Score: 4, Funny

    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/
  19. Re:Nobody Cares. - my experience by massysett · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  20. obligatory by DeepHurtn! · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...but I hear it's still missing a text editor. :(

  21. Re:Another keyboard shortcut by ic4x0r · · Score: 4, Funny

    especially if you're a rectangle.