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

Nobody Cares.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody cares. We're all using VI now.

Re:Nobody Cares.

[__aaclcg7560]

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.

Re:Nobody Cares.

[smittyoneeach]

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.

Y'know...

[Colin Smith]

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

We were always using VI

[SuperKendall]

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...

Re:We were always using VI

[Mr. Underbridge]

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.

Re:We were always using VI

[Javagator]

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

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

Re:Feature Rich

[larry bagina]

the hot asian girlfriend writes your code, silly.

Re:Cue the vi versus emacs flamewars

[BobNET]

Hell, even The Beatles use Vi...

Re:Nobody Cares. - my experience

[NovaSupreme]

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!

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.

You're so lucky

[ericferris]

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.

Re:He didn't say "hot"

[dstar]

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.

obligatory

[DeepHurtn!]

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