Emacs Hits Version 23

djcb writes "After only 2 years since the previous version, now emacs 23 (.1) is available. It brings many new features, of which the support for anti-aliased fonts on X may be the most visible. Also, there is support for starting emacs in the background, so you can pop up new emacs windows in the blink of an eye. There are many other bigger and smaller improvements, including support for D-Bus, Xembed, and viewing PDFs inside emacs. And not to forget, M-x butterfly. You can get emacs 23 from ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/ or one of its mirrors; alternatively, there are binary packages available, for example from Ubuntu PPA."

Comments

Eight megs and constantly swapping

[Anonymous Coward]

Shit, these days VIM requires no less than 30 megs....

Re:Eight megs and constantly swapping

[Lord Bitman]

at least in VIM, random typing can accidentally put you in a useful mode.
Emacs starts in some sort of.... okay, I typed "useless scratchpad thing" here, then went to see if anything had changed since last I tried it. What fun! Here goes "Attempt #4 at actually using emacs"

$ sudo apt-get install emacs22
$ emacs

Oh look, I'm in a GUI this time. Hm, I expected to get a useless scratchpad thing, but it looks like instead I'm in some sort of crudely-made slapped together temporary menu that they'll replace with something more sensible in the final version.

Oh well, there's a standard "new file" button in the corner, I'll click that.

Alright, now the bottom of the window says "Find file: ~/"... okay, I guess that wasn't it, I'll try through the menu instead.
File... "Visit new file"? Are you serious? Okay, fine, they're hippies, whatever.. I'll just click it.
oh, "find file" again.. I don't want to find a file, I want a new file.

Yeah, I get it, I'll stop playing dumb now. It's using 1970s technology or something so it needs a filename before it can edit anything. "emacs foo" opens as expected, lets me type normally and clicking the save button saves.

Now how do I use the console?
man emacs /console
nope.. /terminal
nope..

I'll force it:
DISPLAY= emacs

press C-h for help.. and C-h actually works this time! Though only once.. better than last time though. May actually be usable, I'll give it credit.

Emacs works better than it did last time I tried it. Still looks like crap, but it seems to be working, for the most part.

Re:Eight megs and constantly swapping

[__1200333]

I hope you're joking. About everything. Maybe you're even making some convoluted commentary about vim being impossible to use without knowing its secrets (but I think emacs is also guilty).

1) you can save directly from the scratch buffer
2) emacs --help clearly says use -nw for text mode (it's obviously also in the man page, but a little harder to find)

Maybe attempt #5 will work out better for you. I'm on attempt #3 myself. Perhaps try growing a giant unkempt beard or something. Good luck to both of us!

Re:Eight megs and constantly swapping

[mugurel]

at least in VIM, random typing can accidentally put you in a useful mode.

You emphasized accidentally, not useful, right?

In Emacs, just keep Control or Alt pressed (or both) during your random typing. It'll do anything from skipping to the next song, to making telnet connections to arbitrary places in the world. And that includes exporting your calendar and rebooting your computer.

Re:Eight megs and constantly swapping

[arose]

Yeah, I get it, I'll stop playing dumb now. It's using 1970s technology or something so it needs a filename before it can edit anything.

Well, strictly speaking a file is not something in your editor, it's something on your disk, so common convention aside Emacs is actually doing the sensible thing of asking which file to create when you press "new file". Anyway, in case you want to learn Emacs... You can create a new 'buffer' (which is an text object in Emacs, that might or might not be read from a file) by pressing C-x b (Emacs speak for "Control+x followed by b") and entering a name for it (you might like 'New file 1' :), now you can use it as a new file in most other editors and save it wherever you want once you decide on the actual file name and location.

Re:Eight megs and constantly swapping

[shutdown -p now]

Oh well, there's a standard "new file" button in the corner, I'll click that.

Alright, now the bottom of the window says "Find file: ~/"... okay, I guess that wasn't it, I'll try through the menu instead.

Ironically, Emacs is more friendly when run on Win32 - it actually uses system file dialogs for New (ahem, "Visit") / Open / Save.

Re:Eight megs and constantly swapping

[Lord Bitman]

I had assumed that what I needed to do was create a new buffer (vim uses the same term), but the "Buffers" menu showed no "new buffer" option -- C-x b is listed as "Select named buffer", and demands once more that I type the name of something. It nowhere mentions that typing a non-existent name (or indeed, typing a name incorrectly) will instead create a buffer.

As with every time I try emacs, I agree with the way it seems to be organized in terms of keybindings and functions, on a conceptual level, a lot more than I agree with vim (vim always seems to be written with keybindings in mind, and various commands are named after what key they are most commonly bound to; emacs seems downright sane in comparison), but as with every time I try emacs, I can't help but be struck every two seconds with the thought: "For something that claims all over the place to be self-documenting, this sure does a piss-poor job of telling you how to do things or what does what"

But I've gotten further along than I have in previous attempts to use emacs, so I'll likely be in #emacs (I'll /join as soon as I hit "submit", even if it is just to idle)

Re:Eight megs and constantly swapping

[Lord Bitman]

;; This buffer is for notes you don't want to save, and for Lisp evaluation.

It doesn't matter if I can technically save from it, it says right at the top that it's not for that. And it's not an empty buffer, which is what any sane text editor would present you with when starting without a filename. (otherwise, it's not a text editor, it's just "something else".)

And just for fun, I've now twice followed the instructions for "visit a new file", and on both occasions I've wound up opening an existing file.

Emacs seems to default to including plugins for games, debuggers I don't currently use, Version Control Systems which I don't use (common enough that I don't mind, but I don't know why it's chosen to put the one I /do/ use in a submenu, while leaving the one I /don't/ use in a main menu- shouldn't they both be in the same place?), but it doesn't seem to include a plugin or such which would add a sensible, meaningful, and real, "New File" button. (The "new file" button and the "open file" button appear to do the exact same thing. WTF?)

Just as vim claims to be well-documented, but actually isn't at all, the same applies to emacs:
If I can't grep for it without already knowing what it's called, the documentation may as well not exist.

Re:Eight megs and constantly swapping

[Just Some Guy]

Hit C-h t to run the tutorial and work through it. If you really have an interest in checking it out, the tutorial will explain the "Emacs way" and clear up a lot of basic questions for you.

Re:Eight megs and constantly swapping

[Elbows]

Yes, emacs has a steep learning curve. I don't think even emacs fanatics will dispute that point. Ease of use and discoverability just aren't major priorities. The menus and toolbars are terrible -- I think most serious emacs users turn them off to save screen space. :)

On the other hand, if you take the time to learn it, emacs is an incredibly powerful tool for editing text, and the more you use it, the more power you discover. For some people, it's worth the investment, for others not so much. I've been using emacs for 10 years and I still have lots to learn. If you like the idea of a text editor that takes a lifetime to master, emacs might be for you.

I recommend O'Reilly's "Learning GNU Emacs" as an introduction. The edition I have is kind of out of date (I don't know if it's been updated since), but it's still a good primer for the basics.

Re:Eight megs and constantly swapping

[arose]

C-x b is listed as "Select named buffer", and demands once more that I type the name of something. It nowhere mentions that typing a non-existent name (or indeed, typing a name incorrectly) will instead create a buffer.

Yeah, I had to search for how to create a new buffer to find out, I suspect creating new buffers without corresponding files is discouraged because of the possible data loss, but I'm just guessing here.

"For something that claims all over the place to be self-documenting, this sure does a piss-poor job of telling you how to do things or what does what"

Generally I've found the self documenting part excellent, once I figured out how it works, as the other post already mentioned the tutorial is a good place to start, but if you have already done it a few times and just skimmed the help parts all you really need to start exploring is C-h ?. You will probably also have to learn Info, it might seem weird if you are used to man pages but it works well for large programs as you can search easily (for example to find out how to create a new buffer you'd start Info [C-h i], go to the Emacs manual [m Emacs RET] (this might be named slightly differently I have "Emacs (emacs-snapshot)" instead of "Emacs", but it should be easy to find), search [s] and play guess the correct search string (no AI yet ;), in this case "new buffer" takes you to the menu item "Select Buffer" which has the answer and "create a new buffer" takes you to a place just below the answer you are looking for.

Re:Eight megs and constantly swapping

[Lord Bitman]

Apparently someone disputes that point, as Emacs itself constantly claims to be self-documenting, no need to learn it- it'll teach you itself, etc.

My main desire for a new text editor is "I don't like the way Vim works internally", in terms of how it is organized, which makes writing scripts/plugins for it a pain. And while I like moded-editing, I have nothing against using modifier-keys to perform other commands. (While I don't mind entering "Normal Mode" to do things like moving blocks of text around, it seems silly to do so to move to the beginning/end of a word, so from what I've heard of Emacs on that front, I always think I'd like it)
Emacs, on the other hand, I so far haven't liked the way it shows itself "externally"- the actual user interface (in general, not just GUI) seems wrong to me.

The "it starts in a useless mode and requires you to type a filename before you start!" is a very minor one- I assume I could make an .emacsrc or something like that to make it start sanely (as I do for Vim- I told it "if you're in an empty file, start in insert mode", until I got broken out of my "just start typing" habit by working with vi for a while)

But inconsistencies like "C-h ?" bringing up a split-window which seems to be controlled entirely differently from the "main" window, and very often seems to put me in a "weird" situation (type "C-h ?" for help, then "b" for a list of keybindings.. I'd like to scroll through it, but my cursor appears to have jumped out of the help window, though the listing itself remains. I type "C-h ?" again to get back to the /main/ help listing, see nothing useful, so type "q", as it says to in order to close the help window. This jumps my cursor back out of the help window, then I try hitting "q" again, which closes whatever it was I was in (it seemed to be a basic help listing of some sort) and opens up a scratch window- still leaving the "C-h ?" help window open, presumably forever.

At least in vim I know that :q is likely to get me out of any display, anywhere in the editor. (there is only one command I can think of off-hand where this is quite annoyingly not-the-case, but it's certainly not something as fundamental as a help screen). "C-h r" seems to bring up something more similar to vim's help screen, but that just begs the question of why the other one isn't like that. There's probably a reason, but it certainly doesn't say what that reason is in the help display.

I'm still an idealist who is pretty sure he just wants vim (not just "vi mode for emacs"- vim is more than just "having a moded editor"), written in the style of emacs.

Or better yet, vim, written in the style of emacs, in ruby. Because, lisp, seriously? :) (okay, I know someone whose editor runs scripts written in something as stupid-in-terms-of-language as vim scripts shouldn't mock lisp, but the stupidity of vim scripts is pretty much the main reason I don't like vim, so I feel I've already set the score at: 0-[vim scripts]------[lisp]--[what I actually want]-10)

Re:Eight megs and constantly swapping

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not saying that emacs is necessarily the best choice for you, but if you want to continue experimenting, you'd do well to learn that you can hide all other subwindows except the current one by C-x 1. The other buffers will stay open in memory, and can be restored at any time by C-x b. Another useful command is C-x o which changes to the next subwindow. IMHO the ability to control multiple subwindows within a single window (or multiple emacs windows) by keyboard is one of the more useful features of emacs, especially since you can have several subwindows open, showing different sections of the same file.

`

Of course what with emacs being older than common window systems, they aren't actually called "subwindows" and "windows" within emacs, but "windows" and "frames".

Re:Eight megs and constantly swapping

[NinjaCoder]

If you like the idea of a text editor that takes a lifetime to master, emacs might be for you.

Ah yes, the Way Of The Emacs. Kidding - I love it.

But...

[Brian Gordon]

Does it run Linux?

Re:But...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Yes it does.

Re:But...

[Anonymous Coward]

Emacs would be the perfect operating system, if only it included a decent text editor.

Re:But...

[Anonymous Coward]

lol o wow thansk i haven thead tha tone befor>e

Re:But...

[Anonymous Coward]

more importantly, of course it runs NetBSD. But NetCraft says it's dying

Re:But...

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

it does. you can run Vim inside EMACS, you know ?

Re:But...

[DrData99]

More importantly, will it blend?

Re:But...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think they make blenders that Emacs could fit in.

Re:But...

[FlyingBishop]

You can also run Emacs inside of Emacs.

Re:But...

[RAMMS EIN]

``Emacs would be the perfect operating system, if only it included a decent text editor.''

It does: M-x viper

Re:But...

[budgenator]

Not yet, but rumor has it that the reason Alan Cox whigged out was because he was secretly port the Linux kernal to eLisp and the stress was too much!

Re:But...

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people don't realize this joke is a two-fer. That is, a two for one; as emacs can emulate vi...

Re:But...

[Anonymous Coward]

And Emacs inside Vi... also

Re:But...

[selven]

But... doesn't that cause an antimatter reaction and permanent damage to the space-time continuum?

Re:But...

[CodeBuster]

Heresy! Do you not know that VI VI VI is the Number of the Beast?

Re:But...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not even this one?

Congrats!

[just_another_sean]

Thanks RMS for Emacs, the GPL and the spirit of GNU that I found in 1995 and has not left me since!

Happy Hacking!

Re:Congrats!

[Hammer]

This is good news indeed

Thanx RMS for more than 20 years w the only editor

Re:Congrats!

[Anonymous Coward]

You can get ointment for that.

Re:Congrats!

[bonch]

Wow, what a kiss-ass comment intended to get cheap upmods.

Re:Congrats!

[speculatrix]

the scars won't heal till you stop!

Re:Congrats!

[jellomizer]

The GPL spirit? Which one the idea of sharing for a common goal. Or the idea that is is pure evil to do anything not in RMS's vision?

Re:Congrats!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're against copyrights, then you're also against the GPL which is a copyright license.

Bullshit. Copyrights are wrong, the GPL is just picking up the enemy's weapon to use against them, a moral act as any irishman will tell you.

WITHOUT COPYRIGHT THE GPL WOULD BE UNENFORCEABLE. IT WOULD ALSO BE UNNECESSARY.

Re:Congrats!

[smittyoneeach]

Scar tissue remains after the healing.

Re:Congrats!

[broken_chaos]

WITHOUT COPYRIGHT THE GPL WOULD BE UNENFORCEABLE. IT WOULD ALSO BE UNNECESSARY.

Unfortunately, this isn't entirely true. It would be unenforceable, but it wouldn't be unnecessary for RMS's vision - you'd still have binaries WITHOUT source code, unless we essentially introduced "GNU Copyright", in which the source material for all formerly-copyrightable works must be provided released upon request. I don't think it's very likely to either abolish copyright, nor replace it with "GNU Copyright" - though I do hope the length of copyright terms can be brought down to a reasonable level.

Re:Congrats!

[bonch]

The GPL exists to make sure users always have access to source code. Without copyright law, people could take GPL code and sell proprietary versions with closed source modifications, going against the whole point of the GPL's existence. Basically, you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. It's no surprise you posted anonymously.

Re:Congrats!

[MikeBabcock]

You're confused between the GPL and BSD-like licenses. The GPL creates an environment that would not and could not exist without the licensing requirements of Copyright.

Re:Congrats!

[deadkennedy]

Indeed. This is a rather important piece of software historically. Nice to see it still being released.

Re:Congrats!

[Anonymous Coward]

and sell proprietary versions with closed source modifications

They could try. Without copyright or patent law, what's going to stop them being freely copied and reverse engineered? I'm fine with closed source and open source competing in a free market without copyright or patent law.

Re:Congrats!

[bonch]

They could try. Without copyright or patent law, what's going to stop them being freely copied and reverse engineered?

Nothing, but nobody's going to reverse engineer software and have access to usable source code, especially if there is any obfuscation, and without the source, the binaries could be made to run on specific platforms, specific configurations, DRM, and so forth. You really haven't thought this through, have you?

I'm fine with closed source and open source competing in a free market without copyright or patent law.

No, you're not. You're just saying this because you lost the argument. The reality is that without copyright, you would lose source code access to a lot of valuable software changes. The GPL would have zero value.

Missed the best feature!

[Just Some Guy]

The summary misses the absolute best new feature: the separation of the client and server. I have a GUI Emacs running on my workstation, always. I sshed in a few days ago, wishing I could access one of its buffers. Voila! emacsclient -nw connected to the underlying server and gave me full access, in console mode, to the running Emacs. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

Re:Missed the best feature!

[Brian Gordon]

The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

I never thought I'd see the day that a text editor needed a network-aware client-server architecture.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[Late Adopter]

I have that in 22, but you had to start the server listening from the original emacs process. Is that still the case, or does it start acting as a server by default now?

Re:Missed the best feature!

[clang_jangle]

It's not just a text editor -- emacs is a full-fledged IDE with modules for virtually every kind of work (and recreational facilities too)!

Re:Missed the best feature!

[the Atomic Rabbit]

The point is that a graphical Emacs session can now connect to a client on a tty. (And in answer to your question: yes, Emacs can now be started in daemon mode.)

Re:Missed the best feature!

[Brett Buck]

I don't know why someone modded this "Funny"! Well, actually, I do - because there's no tag for "Scary"

      Brett

Re:Missed the best feature!

[oGMo]

"Haw haw a text editor that duz stuff, we here around these parts just use NOTEPAD.EXE"

Yawn. Tired jokes that aren't funny anymore.

Text editing, text processing, and generally manipulating anything involving language---especially natural language---is the most complicated thing that's ever done on a computer. Yet people---even supposedly knowledgeable people---demand stupidly broken tools that lack sophisticated tools for doing a sophisticated thing. When you understand this, jokes about "ha ha your text-editor-operating-system does X" aren't funny. It makes you wonder why other text editors don't do things.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[Just Some Guy]

Exactly. I've been randomly using clients for about a decade, but it's only been very recently that you could connect a GUI or text client to a server that was launched in the other mode.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[morgan_greywolf]

This is also called 'multitty'. You can open a new frame anywhere, whether on another X display, or on a TTY.

You can even start Emacs in a screen session in your .profile.

And ... did I mention that because each emacs server can have it's own name, you can different emacs servers for different purposes, each with their own .emacs file.

Oh, yeah, and someone even told me that it has a decent text editor, too!

Re:Missed the best feature!

[zeromorph]

They also missed to mention the full unicode support, which is quite nice.

Anyway they could have linked to NEWS.23.1, which has a concise list of new feature.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[Just Some Guy]

I never thought I'd see the day that a text editor needed a network-aware client-server architecture.

In my case, it was so that I could SSH in, run a Python script to generate an SQL query, then run that query in a PostgreSQL interaction buffer. I'd written a macro to do all that automatically and didn't want to spend more than 3 seconds recreating something that was already working - if I was at the Emacs session running at my office.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought this was one of the main features of text editors that are actually decent. E.g., subethaedit on the Mac.

I'd try this new Emacs out, but I see no obvious Mac download. It's things like this that make Gnu software irrelevant to most people. I remember starting out on Emacs 19 back in the day, back then its syntax highlighting and features were a cut ahead, now they're way way behind.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[harmonise]

If you save your buffer to disk you can access the contents without having to use software that requires a client/server architecture just to edit files.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[SpinyNorman]

I never thought I'd see the day that a text editor needed a network-aware client-server architecture.

That day isn't here - it's only the editor that is.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[Just Some Guy]

My buffer was a connection to a PostgreSQL server and about three days worth of history. How well does that work out for you?

Re:Missed the best feature!

[gknoy]

That's great when you're only dealing with files, but if you are running a REPL, being able to remotely access the same development environment (sources+REPL) is pretty freaking cool.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[Late Adopter]

Oooh, scary post you've got there.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[retchdog]

The relevance comes in phases.

The compile-from-source people had moved to emacs23 months ago.

Now it's available for the 3rd-party binary-repository people on nix.

Then it'll become a standard package.

Eventually, Aquamacs will move to v23 or do backporting, and the Mac (without darwine, &c.) people can have it. (Aquamacs is a beautiful app, and has at least some of the features implemented independently anyway)

Re:Missed the best feature!

[VJ42]

"Haw haw a text editor that duz stuff, we here around these parts just use NOTEPAD.EXE"

Yawn. Tired jokes that aren't funny anymore.

Text editing, text processing, and generally manipulating anything involving language---especially natural language---is the most complicated thing that's ever done on a computer. Yet people---even supposedly knowledgeable people---demand stupidly broken tools that lack sophisticated tools for doing a sophisticated thing. When you understand this, jokes about "ha ha your text-editor-operating-system does X" aren't funny. It makes you wonder why other text editors don't do things.

"Perfection is achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away" - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

An application should do one thing and do it well, not do a gazillion things in a mediocre way*. Otherwise what's the point in running separate apps, why don't we just build all the functionality you'll ever need straight into the OS, it'd sure be faster that way.

*I'm not implying that emacs is mediocre just stating general principles.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[Darkness404]

Of course not, Emacs is an operating system, it just has to be put into viper mode to have a decent text editor.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[Verdatum]

When you say "scary", do you mean scary as in "scary that people are still making the same unfunny Skynet comparison"? Jesus Christ, why don't they make a reference to being "The Weakest Link, Goodbye" while they're at it.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[digitalhermit]

I think your post highlights the main difference between vi and emacs users. Not saying either is better...

^X

^F /help

^X^S :wq

oh hell.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[elasticlogic]

Awesome. The post above parent says

now all it needs is a feature that allows me to surf _pr0n_ from within emacs, and then i'd consider using it

and then I read

This is also called 'multitty'.

I was 10 Mb into the Ubuntu iso download before I read the whole post and realized what he was talking about.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[Haeleth]

Emacs is not an IDE. That term is limited to one type of work (development), while Emacs is good for pretty much anything that involves working with text. "IDE" also conjures up images of endless busy toolbars and wizards and snapins and docked windows and proprietary file formats and non-standard tools everywhere you look, while Emacs provides a single interface (the buffer) and builds on standard tools and file formats.

I'd call Emacs an "operating environment". That covers its ability to provide a unified interface to most tasks, while acknowledging that it doesn't replace the operating system (Emacs is crippled without some flavour of GNU or UNIX behind it.)

Re:Missed the best feature!

[Anonymous Coward]

Because those other Text editors follow the UNIX philosophy: Have small programs, that are easily interconnected and are really, really good at what they do. And: Everything is a file.

We have X to use graphical applications over networks. So why create a text-editor "alternative"?

That buffer the GP wanted to edit should have been (inside of reasonable limits, of course) a file somewhere, which could have been edited by ... a text editor.

Like vim ;)

Re:Missed the best feature!

[Anonymous Coward]

Text editing, text processing, and generally manipulating anything involving language---especially natural language---is the most complicated thing that's ever done on a computer.

Yup, you're an Emacs user alright.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[RAMMS EIN]

No kidding. When I started using Linux, I used emacs because it was the more user-friendly editor that was mentioned in the manual (the other being vi). Then, for years, I used vi because it is ubiquitous and usually fast.

But now I'm back to emacs. What convinced me was M-x tetris. I figured if it could do _that_, it was powerful enough for my current and future editing needs. And it is. The secret is that the people who say that Emacs is more an operating system than a text editor are right. It's a Lisp environment where anything and everything can me modified while the system is running. It has a file manager, a client for your version control system, a web browser, a tetris game, a psychoanalyst, and countless other things.

Oh, yes, I almost forgot. There is a text editor, too.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[Darinbob]

But emacsclient has been around for ages and ages. The new stuff is the "-demon" (?) that lets you start an emacs in the background more easily, and that you can have one emacsclient use terminal mode and a different one use windowed mode.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[Anonymous Coward]

I beg to differ, emacs definitely qualifies as an Integrated Development Environment. It doesn't do handholding, maybe that's what's got you confused.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought it was "Perfection is achieved when you preview your posts."

Re:Missed the best feature!

[Anonymous Coward]

It makes you wonder why other text editors don't do things.

This is because the programers (and users) for many such other text editors are fans of the Unix philosophy. Many of us prefer are programs focused. What little they do, they should do it well. If you want something more complicated, combine the tools.

While it wouldn't work for the GUI version of Emacs, the grandparent's joy over the client-server functionality could have been achieved through screen.

*IF* something cannot be done through a combination of simpler tools, then yes - complicated it. Otherwise, KISS. This applies perfectly well to text editors.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[maxwell demon]

And if you feel bad, it even includes a psychotherapist.
M-x doctor

Re:Missed the best feature!

[cervo]

I was drooling over emacs for those reasons as well, unfortunately my inferior hands cannot handle the keyboard reaches without pain.... I'm still not a vi fan though because I just can't get into the modal thing.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[ubersoldat2k7]

ehm... have you heard about the screen command???

Re:Missed the best feature!

[Anonymous Coward]

> I never thought I'd see the day that a text editor needed a network-aware client-server architecture.

You know what they say, right? IRC is just multi-player notepad.

(As anyone who has ever had to "chat" with someone connected via VNC should be well aware of.)

Re:Missed the best feature!

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought EMACS was a complete OS...

Re:Missed the best feature!

[Greyfox]

I use emacs for daily text editing, but I still bust out vi from time to time for config files, as it's much faster and generally all I need for that. Vi's regexp string replace convinced me to use it early in my career, but I like Emacs' flexibility. While working at Sun we had a database that I found to be confusing. I finally ended up writing a relationship finder in E-Lisp that would figure out relationships between two tables. That's the kind of thing I want my tools to be capable of doing.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[Draek]

Fair point, but you've gotta admit implementations of Tetris, Pong, Chess, Conway's Game of Life, a text adventure game and a psychiatrist AI are *hardly* necessary features in a text editor.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[Just Some Guy]

While it wouldn't work for the GUI version of Emacs, the grandparent's joy over the client-server functionality could have been achieved through screen.

If you really believe that, then you've never used Emacs. For starters, it's rare that I'd want the exact same view of my Emacs session in more than one terminal or GUI "frame".

Re:Missed the best feature!

[Just Some Guy]

How well does that work for graphical programs, like the version of Emacs that was running on my desktop at the time? How well does it work for programs that you didn't have the foresight to launch into a screen session to begin with?

Re:Missed the best feature!

[technik]

The secret is that the people who say that Emacs is more an operating system than a text editor are right. It's a Lisp environment where anything and everything can me modified while the system is running.

The point is that it's not an operating system or a text editor. It is, paraphrasing Alan Kay, a construction material, designed for building things that work with text.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[Anonymous Coward]

Vim doesn't follow Unix philosophy, Acme and Ed does that.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[Kingrames]

When I have to hammer a nail, I don't reach for "the greatest hammer in the world," even if it is equipped with Geiger counter, screwdriver, stilts, gloves, ratchets, automatic circumcisers, a laser sight, top-of-the-line counterweights system, and a lcd screen.

Adding bloat to something designed to be simple only breaks it. This is why Linux is the best operating system in the world. You get what you want, because you make it. I always viewed emacs as the windows of the text editor world.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[InterGuru]

It's a religion too.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[syousef]

now I'm back to emacs. What convinced me was M-x tetris. I figured if it could do _that_, it was powerful enough for my current and future editing needs. And it is.

If you're bored at work you could run a graphical tetris game just like everyone else.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[extrasolar]

You don't understand. In the GNU world, OS X users are second class citizens. Switch to a free OS and you'll have best of breed.

At least you have the possibility of porting GNU apps...

Re:Missed the best feature!

[Brett Buck]

When you say "scary", do you mean scary as in "scary that people are still making the same unfunny Skynet comparison"? Jesus Christ, why don't they make a reference to being "The Weakest Link, Goodbye" while they're at it.

    No, I would mod either of those "+1 Tiresome". Or is it -1?

        I am just amazed, like the original poster, that *it's a mother-fucking text editor* that now reads PDFs and runs on a server, for Chrissake. It's the equivalent of Cartman's Trapper Keeper.

        Brett

Re:Missed the best feature!

[ahankinson]

Text editing, text processing, and generally manipulating anything involving language---especially natural language---is the most complicated thing that's ever done on a computer.

Try writing notated music on a computer and then get back to me on how hard writing and manipulating text is.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[Anonymous Coward]

Text editing, text processing, and generally manipulating anything involving language---especially natural language---is the most complicated thing that's ever done on a computer.

But people don't use supercomputers to run Word, Emacs, Vi or AbiWord...

People do use supercomputers to run weather simulators, etc.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you switched ctrl and caps-lock yet?

Re:Missed the best feature!

[BlackCreek]

I've been using Emacs for more 10 years, and spent more time twisting it than any other program I've used. Emacs is a glorified text editor, that may be twisted to fit may other tasks.

Like being twisted into doing *some* IDE like tasks,. Emacs may be turned, after much effort, into "something like an IDE", i.e. into a late 90's idea of an IDE. But not what people nowadays understand to be a full fledged IDE.

**Out-of-the-box** there is no: (1) syntax aware completion, (2) concept of software project, (3) auto-indexing for files in the project, (4) out-of-the-box problem fixing for syntax and semantic problems, (5) auto saving of local history, and easy diffing.

Sure you can spend a couple of weeks twisting and programming emacs to "sort of" perform these tasks, but when you call something an IDE you'd expect the support to just be there.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[WWWWolf]

"Perfection is achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away" - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Proponents of certain usage scenarios might argue the makers of notepad.exe took away a little bit too much.

An application should do one thing and do it well, not do a gazillion things in a mediocre way*.

There are certain things Emacs does in a mediocre way. I have no idea why they decided to build a crappy web browser on top of Emacs, for example, and in retrospect I think Gnus is a bit silly idea too. But what comes to tasks that actually involve text editing, those "gazillion things" have been constantly improved and work nearly perfectly.

Would you want to build a separate text editor for C++ and Java? Would it be fun if the C++ editor had code highlighting but the Java editor implementors just never got around to do it? Or if C++ editor lacked automatical indenting, yet Java folks had added it? Wouldn't the first thought be something along the lines of "Damn! This is all just text, and syntax highlighting mechanisms don't differ that much from language to language. Couldn't we just write ONE editor component and ONE highlighter?"

What I'm saying is that it's silly to build an all-encompassing application, but it's not so silly to build an application that handles related tasks in an extensible manner. Making separate tools for separate tasks is okay, but making separate tools for very very similar tasks is just stupid.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[selven]

Does your switching to Emacs have something to do with your sex life?

Signed, Emacs Psychotherapist.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[MikeBabcock]

Whereas I'll move from computer to computer (home, work, etc.) and reconnect to my running screen sessions to look in on things that are going on or drop an idea that popped into my head then disconnect again.

screen may very well be the most useful productivity tool I have, and I sincerely wish I had an option other than vncserver to accomplish the same thing in a GUI.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[Just Some Guy]

Oh, I use screen all the time to fire off long-running processes at work and check in on them later from home. It's a great program and I use it a lot. However, it's very much an incomplete replacement for Emacs's client-server arrangement. In addition to the mentioned GUI/console handling, it provides different views to the same session. I could have a window open at work displaying the exact spot in my code where I left off, then connect from home to fiddle with my SQL session history.

There is a lot of overlap between the two concepts, but screen supports a (strict?) subset of Emacs's features.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[jgrahn]

I never thought I'd see the day that a text editor needed a network-aware client-server architecture.

The grandparent doesn't describe network-awareness -- he ssh:s into the machine and connects to a running emacs and its buffers. But yeah, I'm an emacs user, and I doubt I'll ever use that feature. That's what you use screen(1) for. One task, one tool.

And by the way, what does "pop up new emacs windows in the blink of an eye" mean? That's how emacs works by default on any decently new machine these days. No need to jump through hoops to accomplish that.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[jgrahn]

There is a lot of overlap between the two concepts, but screen supports a (strict?) subset of Emacs's features.

Subset? Does emacs have a working terminal emulator, then?
*checking*
M-x terminal-emulator. Damn Emacs.

I can swallow that some people still (after GUIs and screen(1) became available twenty years ago or so) prefer to live entirely inside one emacs instance, but personally I could never learn to run my shells, run make and so on there. In contrast, when I discovered screen(1), I got addicted immediately. Oh well, I don't mind new features as long as they don't hurt me.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[Just Some Guy]

Try writing notated music on a computer and then get back to me on how hard writing and manipulating text is.

There's an app for that.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[Just Some Guy]

The new stuff is the "-demon" (?) that lets you start an emacs in the background more easily, and that you can have one emacsclient use terminal mode and a different one use windowed mode.

That was exactly the part that I wrote of being excited about. :-)

Re:Missed the best feature!

[Just Some Guy]

I can swallow that some people still (after GUIs and screen(1) became available twenty years ago or so) prefer to live entirely inside one emacs instance,

Note that "one emacs instance" does not mean "one Emacs window".

but personally I could never learn to run my shells,

Zsh vs. eshell? I'll take zsh every time. The Emacs shell is mostly useful to me as a convenient place to process the output of other Emacs buffers.

run make and so on there.

Oh, you must learn to run make inside Emacs. If nothing else, pressing a key to go to the exact file and line of an error or warning is a tremendous timesaver.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[VJ42]

I don't disagree with anything that you posted, I was just replying to the GGP post who seemed to imply that any feature no matter how outlandish was a good thing. As I said, I wasn't commenting on Emacs* specifically, just stating general principles.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[treeves]

I love Lilypond, but your mention of it only reinforces GP's point. It has a steep learning curve, and there are several ways to do anything.
Unlike a word processor, the documentation for Lilypond *really does* need to be over 627 pages long.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[EvilBudMan]

I use syn.

http://syn.sourceforge.net/

Re:Missed the best feature!

[robmurray]

If you like Emacs, but like me hate the default key bindings, try ErgoEmacs. It is a set of Emacs key bindings which are not so painful.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[cervo]

Wow thank you very much. I definitely think this is worth a try. These bindings look much easier than the other ones. Too bad I don't have mod points, but even if I did they wouldn't help.... But this is definitely very informative.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[bbtom]

SubEthaEdit is different - what the grand-parent poster is pointing to is remote sessions - where you basically take your text editor (or LISP runtime or whatever Emacs is these days) and can log into it remotely and execute commands. A bit like GNU Screen or a bit like VNC.

What makes SubEthaEdit cool is the collaborative editing environment: that lets you have one document with multiple people editing it at the same time all using their own installations of SubEthaEdit. Well, there actually is a way of doing that with Emacs too. Gobby is an X11/GTK+ app that does much of what SubEthaEdit does (but without the Mac OS X prettiness). IIRC, there's a plugin for Emacs available which lets it join Gobby/Sobby sessions. (Sadly, nothing for us Vim users.)

There's also EtherPad which is all written in JavaScript and runs in the browser. I use it for collaboratively scribing meetings. Sadly, much as I'd like Gobby to be cross-platform, it's not quite there: it works great on Linux. I've heard nothing bad about it on Windows. But on Mac OS X, it's a pain in the arse to get working.

Re:Missed the best feature!

[retchdog]

In case you're reading this, AC, it looks like the Aquamacs crew has released a preview version based on emacs23:

http://aquamacs.org/news.shtml#2.0p1

M-x butterfly

[cstdenis]

Best command ever.

Decent text editor still not included right?

[dvh.tosomja]

Decent text editor still not included in this great operating system right?

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[erroneus]

emacs is what happens when a project goes too far beyond its intended purpose.

It's a frikken text editor for God's sake. If it's not a text editor any longer, and is now the beginning of its own OS, then let it be identified as such. I mean my god, the extensions this thing can have? Calendar/Planners? I like advanced text editing functions as much as the next guy... maybe some useful macros here and there... but this is just ridiculous. How long will it be before Microsoft starts seeing emacs as a threat to Windows + Office?

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[andre.ramaciotti]

M-x viper-mode

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[itsdapead]

emacs is what happens when a project goes too far beyond its intended purpose.

Why do you feel that emacs is what happens when a project goes too far beyond its intended purpose?

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[Yetihehe]

How long will it be before Microsoft starts seeing emacs as a threat to Windows + Office?

When it's too late.

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[the Atomic Rabbit]

Correct: Emacs is a text editor. And guess what: a calendar consists of text. Plans consist of text. So are emails and newsgroup contents. Source code, XML data files, patches, changelogs, directory listings, version control messages, compilation messages, are all text.

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[AvitarX]

I remember a great AIM client for it (tnt I think)

This was quite useful for me one time when I had a computer crash and had to use my old 486.

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[Glyphn]

And of course one could represent an image in straight text (e.g. rgb code) and edited it in a text editor.

Does that make a text editor the best tool for the job?

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[Tubal-Cain]

if it's not a text editor any longer, and is now the beginning of its own OS, then let it be identified as such.

Linux started as a terminal emulator....

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[Ardaen]

I have a fully graphical calendar, it contains no text, not even numbers. Guess you can represent time without text, funny that.

Just because you can represent something as text, doesn't mean text is the best representation nor does it mean a text editor is the best method of manipulating it

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[the Atomic Rabbit]

Actually, it might. For instance, Emacs 23 includes support for SVG, and SVG code consists of human-readable text. So if you need to change some parameters in an SVG image, such as its width or height, you can open it in Emacs, type C-c C-c to switch to text representation, perform your edits, and type C-c C-c again to instantly view the result.

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[Late Adopter]

I like this train of thought, but it's not really as straightforward as that. Many of the things you've listed are more concepts or relationships than text, and can be represented just as well (or better) graphically.

I find the improvement is, when they ARE represented as text, you can use your own customized powerful set of keybindings and macros written in a Turing-complete language with a WIDE degree of hooks expressly designed for manipulating text.

Emacs is an amazing hammer, so it's more appealing to start treating things as nails where you can get away with it.

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[RLiegh]

feature creep
Definition from Wiktionary, a free dictionary
Jump to: navigation, search

English

Noun

Singular
feature creep

Plural
uncountable

feature creep (uncountable)

      1. The tendency of a design project or product cycle to accumulate more and more features or details, rather than to be completed and released at a more basic level.

Examples: Emacs

[edit] Synonyms

        * creeping elegance

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[just_another_sean]

The brilliant guy who decided a xbm file should easily be able to double as a c header file thought so. I agree with him. Am I gonna go flipping bits in the textual representation of an image? No, but it's nice to know I can easily read meta data in my text editor, see if there is some obvious corruption in a file or just include it as a resource in my program.

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[Anonymous Coward]

With uuencode, everything is text.

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[morgan_greywolf]

You know, Slashdot is text. Maybe Rob and Jamie can rewrite the thing elisp...I mean, hell, there's already a Wiki Server that runs in elisp, why not Slashdot?

*ducking*

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[grumbel]

It's a frikken text editor for God's sake.

It's not and never was. It's more a kind of Lisp-OS/application-platform, not really all that different from say Java or Firefox. The one big downside that Emacs has compared to the rest is that its old and was created in a time when GUIs where a thing of the future, so everything is build around text and its GUI support is rather abysmal. Emacs also lacks plenty of advanced programming features (multi-threading, etc.), so its a bit clunky and unresponsive at times. But for all its faults, its flexibility, extensibility and self-documentation is pretty awesome, especially considering when the project was started.

All that said, Emacs is certainly showing its age and I would love to see an Emacs-like tool recreated from scratch, as a lot of the ideas and features that make Emacs so great are still missing from more modern toolkits/environments.

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[Anonymous Coward]

emacs is what happens when a project goes too far beyond its intended purpose.

It's a frikken text editor for God's sake. If it's not a text editor any longer, and is now the beginning of its own OS, then let it be identified as such. I mean my god, the extensions this thing can have?

Calendar/Planners?

If your plans involve text, and you wish to edit them, why not use a text editor that can load functionality snippits for planning, instead of having a whole separate application?

I like advanced text editing functions as much as the next guy...

Apparently not :)

maybe some useful macros here and there... but this is just ridiculous. How long will it be before Microsoft starts seeing emacs as a threat to Windows + Office?

Emacs still has to run on something (I've run it on Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD). Microsoft will see it as a threat the same time they see anything else as one... when it becomes blatantly obvious to non-technical users that it is better (it isn't for everything for me yet) and painless to switch to from Word (so effectively never).

If you want to have separate programs to do everything, feel free to do so. That's just a point on a scale of having everything separate (i.e., one VM with one program for your browsing, one VM with one program for your text editing, another for compiling, etc etc) and being able to use the same code/binaries for the same functions in different contexts. Text to edit could be a shopping list, paper outline, the paper itself, a meeting agenda, program code, object code (hex ftw), markup, or something yet to be conceived... if all of these tasks boil down to writing text, I'd prefer to use a single program with a consistent (and consistently configurable) interface, rather than have to remember that for writing C++ I need to run M-x butterfly, but for SPARC binary patching I need C-m cthulu

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[Just Some Guy]

I remember a great AIM client for it (tnt I think)

Yep. Kids these days can use M-x twit-show-recent-tweets. Nope, I'm not kidding.

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[Anonymous Coward]

All that said, Emacs is certainly showing its age and I would love to see an Emacs-like tool recreated from scratch, as a lot of the ideas and features that make Emacs so great are still missing from more modern toolkits/environments.

Rewrite massive, useful tool from scratch to fix basic design flaws not apparent at time of creation of original tool? That always works! Let's get started!

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[Omnifarious]

The best tool I have ever seen for this kind of thing is inkscape. I've been able to do some very interesting things with that tool because I got to combine the ability to edit things with drawing tools with the ability to edit the underlying XML+SVG.

For example, making various kinds of tilings works much more nicely when can create the tilings by cloning an original into a tile and then editing the original. Because of the way SVG cloned objects reference the original that means all copies change when you change the original. You can see the tiling as you edit the original.

I might use emacs for something simple and quick if it has a nice way of quickly looking at the resulting drawing as you edit. But if I really want to work with SVG I use inkscape. It's a much better editor for that task than emacs will ever be.

You can do something similar with other kinds of symmetry. And the ability to precisely control the logical structure of the SVG with the inkscape editor that is aware of which bunch of SVG your selection represents, for example, is incredibly useful.

Don't get me wrong. emacs is my favorite tool for dealing with text in all its forms. I've never met an editor I liked better, not even the Java editors that knew which class you were working with and could pop up lists of member functions after you but in a '.'. SVG is simply not just text. I wouldn't use emacs in place of gimp either.

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, calendars don't CONSIST of text. What you mean is that there is an easy - maybe even natural - textual representation of calendar data.

It's a small difference, but an important one.

That said, the fact that you already think of everything as actually *being* textual is rather interesting in itself, and incidentally, certainly explains why you like Emacs (with which there is nothing wrong, BTW): you have a hammer (Emacs), so you see every problem in its representation as a nail (text).

And this works for you because most if not all of your problems can, indeed, be represented as nails (text).

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[Anonymous Coward]

Decent text editor application available though....check out viper.el :)

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together.

Basics of the Unix Philosophy

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[Anonymous Coward]

Many years ago I used to rely on text editors like nano/pico until one day I had to code on a Solaris box that didn't have any additional non-Sun software installed beyond the basic OS. The only thing available was the version of vi that comes with Solaris so I would either have to rely on creating source files on another machine and copying them over or learning vi. So, I made the decision to learn how to use vi. It took some getting used to but within a couple of days I had become proficient enough that I continued to use it on a daily basis.

Now, I've tried to sit down and learn Emacs and I can never seem to get over its default key bindings. As a touch typist, anything that makes my hands have to leave the home row position for more than a brief moment really bothers me. It seems that Emac's default key bindings more often than not require rather awkward positioning of my hands in order to accomplish tasks compared to the same command in vi(m) (Meta-< vs 1G as an example). viper-mode helps alleviate this to some degree but if I have to use viper-mode then I'm not really learning to use Emacs.

I'm not trying to start a vi(m) vs emacs war but it seems like lots of times my complaint is dismissed as being nothing more than a familiarity issue and I really think that is unfair. If familiarity were the real cause of the problem, why was I able to transition from using nano/pico type editors to using vi(m) so quickly and yet Emac's default key bindings bother me so much? Am I really so set in my ways that I'm in denial?

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[Darinbob]

Emacs is not just a text editor. It is an extensible text editor. It has a very large framework for extending itself, for handling display of text, fonts, etc. This means that people will extend it to do more than just edit text files. I wrote a news reader for the VMS TPU editor once, because it was very simple to extend an existing text editor into a very convenient reader in short order compared to writing a one from scratch. Sure you can use other existing tools if you have them (often you don't), but they'll all have different editing styles and key mappings, and you will likely find your self cutting and pasting from your favorite editor anyway.

This is analogous to the web browser. It was originally a way to view some academic documents over the network, but people can now do word processing and update the calendars/planner through a web browser now. Once you've got an extensible framework in place, people will extend it.

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[Anonymous Coward]

Source code, XML data files, patches, changelogs...

That's actually Strings, not text...
Emacs was a text editor, it's now just an editor.


Of course, one prefers running Emacs on their iMac.

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[CronoCloud]

Because it includes an "Eliza style bot" that acts like a Rogerian therapist, that's why.

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[itsdapead]

Tell me more about an "Eliza style bot" that acts like a Rogerian therapist, that's why.

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[CronoCloud]

Ha, I was just playing with it too. Gave me a good laugh today. Thanks. Here's a conversation I just had with it:

You start it up with M-x doctor (that's alt+x doctor to us mundanes). It's one of the few emacs commands I remember.

[code]Emacs? Hah! I would appreciate it if you would continue.[/code]

I don't use emacs

[code]Are you sure?[/code]

Ha, great response.

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[ubersoldat2k7]

Imagine where Hurd would be now if all the effort behind EMACS was put on it.

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[ubersoldat2k7]

Hell yeah! We can even do it using Mono, because that's not gonna blow on our faces

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[the Atomic Rabbit]

I have a fully graphical calendar, it contains no text, not even numbers.

Without numbers or letters, how does your calendar represent the date? Does it draw, say, the 3rd of August as three pictures of Augustus Caesar, or can it only show you the current season (i.e., what you can see from looking out the window), or what? No sarcasm, I'm actually curious.

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[Glyphn]

Actually, it might.

But usually it does not.

FWIW, I use emacs and prefer to work in a text environment for many tasks. That said, I recognize that there are some tasks better performed outside of a text editor.

Out of curiosity, can anyone else replying concede that point, or is it just emacs all the way down for y'all?

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[IkeTo]

Who the hell say that you have to use the best tool for each task you need to perform? Emacs is definitely not be the most decent calendar, but it can be a sufficiently effective one for those who already type into their Emacs windows day and night.

Once you start using one tool, you start getting the habits from it, and when you do another task, you want that habits to remain valid. For whatever reason, many Emacs users expects a cursor to be available on everything, expecting Control-F and Control-B to move that cursor, and expecting Meta-F and Meta-B to do that more quickly, and type Control-x k Return to remove it and continue working on something else without touching the mouse even once. I've yet to see a single other calendar that allows exactly that simple thing.

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[dido]

78% of what most people perceive as being bloat in Emacs is actually in the form of Emacs Lisp extensions. Emacs has been designed from the ground up to be extensible, so one should not be surprised to see it extended the way its creators intended it to be. The core C code itself is not much to speak of, Emacs 22.3 is only a rather modest 233,130 source lines of C code, whereas the elisp code in the default 22.3 distribution alone is some 822,338 lines: this does not include any third-party extensions which are not part of the default distribution. Compare that to Vim 7.2, 244,082 source lines of C code in its core. Shockingly, Vim actually has slightly more code in its main C core than Emacs does!

That said, while I do use Emacs extensively, I don't have any sort of serious attachment to it. I don't edit most of my config files using Emacs but with vim, my $EDITOR is set to /usr/bin/vim, but nearly all of my serious coding is done with Emacs.

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[Glyphn]

Who the hell say that you have to use the best tool for each task you need to perform?

No one?

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[Mr. Slippery]

I have a fully graphical calendar, it contains no text, not even numbers. Guess you can represent time without text, funny that.

You can do so, yes, but it's a mighty stupid thing to do.

I tend to have things in my calendar like "karate class, 6:30 pm" or "Carl's party, 8pm". Text is a better way for 99.99999 percent of computer users to represent that data than circles, squares, or other graphical elements.

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[Mr. Slippery]

The one big downside that Emacs has compared to the rest is that its old and was created in a time when GUIs where a thing of the future, so everything is build around text...

Somehow you misspelled "advantage" as "downside".

A text editor that's built around text is a good idea.

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[arose]

I'm actually been switching back and forth between more conventional GUI tools and Emacs for some applications: note taking, email and such. It seems that while Emacs can take more work to set up right it is the more pleasant experience once you have. Right now I've actually brought my todo/scheduling into Org-Mode, I'd say I moved over from EvIt's basically plain text with some clues to the colution, but I didn't. Every time I've tried to use a dedicated time management tool I've gone back to a mixture of notes (paper and digital), mobile phone and just plain old 'hope to remember'. Org-Mode however seems to be the right combination between the strict approach of tools like Evolution and random notes.

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[Glyphn]

Understood, and I'm partial to using of Emacs as an IDE (and for statistical analyses using ESS, and LaTeX). I'm not questioning Emacs utility. I am, however, constantly surprised by Emacs advocates and their inability to see the world from any other perspective. I mean, for heaven's sake, three posts back I have someone responding by citing their own use of emacs for graphics editing. Ok, yes of course you can do that, and yes that may even make sense from time to time, but is Emacs really the best tool you can think of for all of your graphics needs (from a time or ease-of-use perspective)?

Of course, I don't care personally what you or anyone else use -- hey, if it makes you happy, great -- but I am bemused by the logic I'm seeing in this thread (i.e. "Emacs is a text editor. And guess what: a calendar consists of text ..."). For heaven's sake, everything either consists of text or can be represented by text. Follow that logic very far and the only tool you ever need is Emacs.

Anyway, I can tell from your post that you don't just use Emacs, but I swear I think some Emacs users went back for one too many cups of the Kool-aid.

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[shutdown -p now]

Correct: Emacs is a text editor. And guess what: a calendar consists of text ...

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

In the case of Emacs, it's a sledgehammer.

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[shutdown -p now]

Imagine where Hurd would be now if all the effort behind EMACS was put on it.

It would have tetris in it?

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[ClosedSource]

A list of days of the month consists of text, calendars consist of more. The mere fact that a lot of things use text doesn't mean that a text editor is the logical choice to create them.

Hard drives store a lot of text, should Emacs be able to format itself?

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[grumbel]

As said, Emacs hasn't been a pure text editor for ages and for things like mail or news reading it really couldn't hurt to have a proper treeview instead of ASCII art. Same is true for directory view's and many many other things. Even the info reader could benefit a good bit when it could do some more advanced markup and rendering instead the simplistic text stuff it does now.

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time I've tried to use a dedicated time management tool I've gone back to a mixture of notes (paper and digital), mobile phone and just plain old 'hope to remember'.

You could try "Leo" as well.

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[arose]

Anyway, I can tell from your post that you don't just use Emacs, but I swear I think some Emacs users went back for one too many cups of the Kool-aid.

Some always do, seems to be the case for everything. Some are however tongue-in-cheek (yes of course Emacs can do this, here's how!), I believe the SVG comment is one of them. Also every time I switch some text-related task to Emacs (even if I switch back later) I can understand people who spend most of their computer time in Emacs. If most of what you do with a computer is edit text, and you are an Emacs user, after a while when you need to get another task done your first inclination becomes to look for a suitable Emacs mode in the same way that an OS X user will look for a native app first and only when that fails look at something for X Windows.

I however simply do to much graphics editing to be able to stick with Emacs for everything. Even if I sometimes do wish for some of the features of Emacs in my graphics packages... Looks like I'm not the only one:

The amount of menu entries in GIMP - either from plug-ins, scripts or internal functions - is huge. The name of a particular function might be easier to remember than its menu location. Being able to search for the function and applying it to the image without having to go through the menus can help (similar to Emacs' M-x feature).

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[leighklotz]

Would you say the same about Eclipse instead of Emacs? They serve much the same purpose, except Emacs has more smaller extensions done by individuals, and Eclipse has more large extensions done by corporate-supported developer teams.

Re:Decent text editor still not included right?

[nurb432]

It's a frikken text editor for God's sake.

No, it USED to be one. Now its something different. I don't think god even knows what, but it isn't a text editor..

Terrorist post.

[girlintraining]

A lone geek runs into the middle of the forum, screaming "vi forever! Praise the hex codes!" *boom* :)

Re:Terrorist post.

[Anonymous Coward]

vi vi vi is the editor of the beast

Obligatory XKCD

[UnknowingFool]

Before anyone starts the emacs/vi wars: A primer

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[Anonymous Coward]

Real programmers use Windows Notepad.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[Bazer]

M-x butterfly

Knowing emacs, to actually issue that command, you would have to press all those buttons at once.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[Anonymous Coward]

In Soviet Russia, Windows Uses Real Programmers! ...wait, why does that sound totally wrong?

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[Andor666]

And then, obligatory Bilo & Nano:

http://en.tiraecol.net/modules/comic/comic.php?content_id=2&mode=flat&order=0

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[jDeepbeep]

Real programmers use ed.

Fixed that for you.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, its a shame you just quoted the summary, rather than bringing anything original to the discussion.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[AvitarX]

And a special keyboard with 2 "t" buttons.

But I don't remember emacs working that way at all (it has been a while though)

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[dkf]

M-x butterfly

Knowing emacs, to actually issue that command, you would have to press all those buttons at once.

Never following M-x; that let's you just type in the command name. (M-: is even better; lets you type raw elisp...)

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used Linux since 1997 and I still don't know what the Meta key is actually. I know at some point it changed from being alt+ESC to being the Windows key. Can we just call it something reasonable, like "Win" or "Option" so we don't go ... wtf is "meta" key? Is that a key that presses other keys? A self-indulgent "alt" key? A poncy, geeky "ctrl" key?

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[digitalderbs]

Splunk! It would be a swoosh, but the original joke wasn't that great to begin with.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[Pixie_From_Hell]

M-x butterfly

Knowing emacs, to actually issue that command, you would have to press all those buttons at once.

Well, no. This means "Meta-x" (which for me is esc then x) then type the command butterfly. I guess “Knowing emacs” mean “having heard all the same tired old jokes about that editor I don't use.”

Me? When I went back to grad school (early 90s), I was pleased to find I could use the same old editor I used to use in college (in the mid 80s). I still do all my work in it (used it this afternoon, and on my netbook on the bus in this morning). And version 23 is out!

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[Verdatum]

Real programmers bother to follow links that form the entire point of a grandparent post so they know that "real programmers use ed" has already been covered.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[Dragonslicer]

Obligatory text editor comparison

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[maxwell demon]

No, real programmers use cat >executable

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, just because keyboard manufacturers don't make keyboards with meta keys (except when Sun special orders them) is no reason to change established terminology. Especially when the understandable alternative is to call it a windows key... that certainly wouldn't go down well with the typical unix developer.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[heson]

And the obligatory Hackles: http://www.hackles.org/cgi-bin/archives.pl?request=284

Remember this one?

[AdmiralXyz]

Slightly shortened to accommodate the special event:

I asked my email-pal: "UNIX or Windoze?". He replied "UNIX". I said "Ah...me too!".

I asked my email-pal: "Linux or AIX?". He said "Linux, of course". I said "Me too".

I asked him: "Emacs or vi". He replied "Emacs". I said "Me too. Small world."

I asked him: "GNU Emacs or XEmacs?", and he said "GNU Emacs". I said "oh, me too."

I asked him, "GNU Emacs 22 or GNU Emacs 23?", and he replied "GNU Emacs 22". I said "DIE YOU OBSOLETE NO-GOOD SOCIALLY MALADJUSTED CELIBATE COMMIE FASCIST DORK!", and never emailed him again.

Re:Remember this one?

[h4rr4r]

Either one is better than using 99% of the other options out there. If your text editor requires the use of a mouse you need a better text editor.

Re:Remember this one?

[microbee]

Or you just need a better keyboard.

Re:Remember this one?

[h4rr4r]

I have one of the best keyboards ever made. IBM Type M(1391401).

Re:Remember this one?

[h4rr4r]

So you can do a find and replace based on a regex via the mouse? I would love to see that. Which mouse button changes the case on a whole line of text?

I use vim not because it makes me "leet", but because it is by far the best tool for the job that I have found. It can be used in all places, it runs on everything and I don't need to worry if X is even installed. It does have a steep learning curve, but so do all professional tools in darn near every field.

Re:Remember this one?

[Anonymous Coward]

When did I say that? What does that have to do with anything? No, I use a regex for a regex search/replace. No, I use the most expedient tool for the job at hand. I never said I use the mouse for everything. That's the most piss-poor attempt at a straw-man that I've ever seen. So, since the mouse is not useful for every job, the mouse is of no use.

Re:Remember this one?

[MMC Monster]

If you are editing text, why move your hands away from the keyboard?

Re:Remember this one?

[Darinbob]

Or a secretary.

Re:Remember this one?

[wildemar]

Nice try, but I say you need to work on your EMOlation skills.

Incedentally: Emacs Philips or Vim Carrey? I could never decide ... the latter seems more agile, but the former is a lot more consistent.

Re:Remember this one?

[maxwell demon]

If you are editing text, why move your hands away from the keyboard?

You never scratch your head?

Re:Remember this one?

[draxil]

Just to point out, emacs doesn't need X.

Re:Remember this one?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, would you wipe your ass with your toes?

Re:Remember this one?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, why reach for a hammer to pound a nail when you've already got a wrench in your hand. Stupid fuck.

Re:Remember this one?

[shutdown -p now]

If your text editor requires the use of a mouse you need a better text editor.

I'm not aware of any text editors that cannot be driven entirely from keyboard, and programmer-oriented ones in particular tend to both have reasonable default mappings, and be completely customizable in that regard. Heck, you can use both Eclipse and Visual Studio completely from keyboard. And you get proper code completion in them...

Re:Remember this one?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which mouse button changes the case on a whole line of text?

If you use a decent text editor, you don't *need* to change the case on whole line of text just because you typed Ctrl-Alt-Shift-Up-Down instead of Ctrl-Alt-Shift-Down-Down.

Re:Remember this one?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is it with this either one or the other business? Gods forbid someone use both the mouse and the keyboard, or worse yet prefer a GUI editor.

Take your head out of your ass, for fuck's sake.

Re:Remember this one?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course I scratch my head, with a keyboard. Would be horribly inefficient to move my hands away from the keyboard while I'm editing.

Re:Remember this one?

[MikeBabcock]

The number of times I've used the macroing feature in VIM, regex search & replace, etc. and enjoyed each feature being only a keystroke or two away is much higher than the number of times I've ever wished I could highlight text with a mouse (for which I find 'v' is faster at any rate).

For those who don't understand, tell me how you mouse-highlight exactly 420 lines of text with a mouse in less than two seconds.

Re:Remember this one?

[cafelatte]

Could you please post the long version? I'm looking for a cure for my insomnia.

Kitchen Sink

[tsalmark]

Call me old and grumpy but I think Emacs had enough features when they got the kitchen sink in it.

Re:Kitchen Sink

[compro01]

Sink? They're working on adding the whole kitchen to allow for the "cook your dinner" feature planned for version 24.

Let me know when it gets to 42

[Anonymous Coward]

What's in a forking number anyway?

Re:Let me know when it gets to 42

[maxwell demon]

I think version 42 will introduce M-x enter-singularity

SSD

[Lord Ender]

Get a fast SSD and all your apps will start in the blink of an eye without memory-hogging quickstarters. Hell, even NetBeans loads in less than a second on my X25-E.

emacs? emulate mac software

[Em Emalb]

it's a conspiracy. None of you are aware. emacs = Emulate Mac Software.

Solly, Chally. I said it, therefore it's true.

Seriously, though, happy 23rd rev, Emacs!

Still useful after all these years...

[SuperKendall]

I don't use Emacs as my primary editor anymore, but I do turn to it pretty often still.

For short repetitive tasks, there's simply nothing more useful than the macro recording mode that lets you execute a combination of searches, multiple buffer stores, and cursor position storage states to easily repeat very complex tasks over a block of code.

For reading in obscure file formats, Emacs usually has an answer - with good syntax highlighting.

I look forward to this next iteration of emacs and what else it can do...

Re:Still useful after all these years...

[jjohnson]

*good* syntax highlighting? It looks like my kid threw up fruit loops all over my screen. It's even worse with 16 bit colours enabled.

Re:Still useful after all these years...

[russotto]

For reading in obscure file formats, Emacs usually has an answer - with good syntax highlighting.

I was disappointed, however, to find that it lacks a MDL (Muddle) mode. It almost certainly had one at some point, I might have to check back in negative version numbers or something.

Re:Still useful after all these years...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh I totally agree. For example, just today I was writing a program that needs to load in around 1000 sequentially-numbered images. Like any decent coder, I had typed all of the filenames into my main program loop. But then my manager called me up to let me know that the base filename of the images had changed! You can just imagine the sinking feeling I had in my stomach, knowing that I would need to retype every single filename! It would have taken me hours, if not for the macro recording functionality in Emacs. Thanks, Emacs.

It doesn't stop there, of course. I needed a function to count how many images had been loaded in, and save that number as a string. Then my boss phones me to say that they don't want image #0003 any more. Think of all the 'if/then' statements I'd have been forced to rewrite by hand, if it wasn't for Emacs!

Re:Still useful after all these years...

[hibiki_r]

The syntax highlighting is good because it understands all kinds of different content types in different languages.

If your only problem is the default colors, that's a very easy fix: Every color in every highlighting scheme is editable. If you don't like the default, switch the scheme to zenburn or something

Re:Still useful after all these years...

[Verdatum]

Now that you mention it, that's the best description I've ever heard!

Re:Still useful after all these years...

[jjohnson]

Ah yes, the tarpit that is making use of a .emacs file to get everything just so.

I kid because I love. I've actually got a .emacs file customizing the colouring and everything. But every time I want to adjust something, and struggle to remember whether it's M-x custom-face or M-x customize-lock, I want to punch the screen.

Re:Still useful after all these years...

[Haeleth]

Using a .emacs file is a bad idea. You should be using a .emacs.d directory, with various types of customisation split up into different files. Then you stick the whole lot in version control. Much more manageable.

Of course, if you want to control where things go, you can't really use customize-mode. But it's not that hard to do things properly. Look up set-face-foreground.

Re:Still useful after all these years...

[CronoCloud]

You know, average people who just want to edit some text now and then find the very concept of putting your own personal text editor's configuration files in a version control system to be very...how shall I say it..not quite how average people think.

Putting source code or collaborative project in into a version control system...smart.

Putting your text editors configuration files that one usually sets and forgets into version control.....not quite sane.

Re:Still useful after all these years...

[xororand]

It can be very useful to have not only your editor settings but all your important settings in a central VCS repository. Whenever you have to work on a new machine, just clone your repository, run your setup script and you can feel right at home, after a few seconds. If you change anything in your configuration file, you just push it to the repository and update each copy automatically when you login.

My setup is comprised of a ~/.dotfiles/ directory which contains a setup script that symlinks all the configuration files and folder where they belong, e.g.: ~/.dotfiles/_bashrc -> ~/.bashrc ... etc...

Re:Still useful after all these years...

[Onymous Coward]

Whoa whoa, "not quite how average people think" is one thing, but "not quite sane" is just off.

Average people don't program computers. But programming computers is not insane.

Average Vim or Emacs users may not version control their config files. But doing so is not insane.

Maybe you're not a sysadmin. Version controlling your server application configs is really beneficial. Okay, now extend the concept to version controlling all your application configs. Makes sense.

And if your editor config isn't changing over time, maybe you're also not any kind of sophisticated text editor user. I'm making about 2.5 revisions a year. Every year I learn a few new things about my editor. I imagine this is what happens with most folks who take their tools seriously.

I mean, no offense. It's okay if people aren't uber-serious about the tools they use, surely they can still get things done. But your not seeing the sense in version controlling editor config files should not be mistaken for there being a lack of it.

Re:Still useful after all these years...

[Darinbob]

Do you have a MDL interpreter somewhere?

Re:Still useful after all these years...

[russotto]

Do you have a MDL interpreter somewhere?

I recently wrote one I call "Confusion". It should be up on the Interactive Fiction archive soon.

Re:Still useful after all these years...

[BlackCreek]

I'd second that. I also keep a repository with all the .*rc files and dependencies inside of it.

When having to work on a new machine, I simply clone it, and run a script to delete all .*rc files present, and create symlinks. Saves a ton of work, and allows me to keep configurations synchronized between machines.

It is the very problem that revision systems were built to solve.

Re:Still useful after all these years...

[ioshhdflwuegfh]

For short repetitive tasks, there's simply nothing more useful than the macro recording mode that lets you execute a combination of searches, multiple buffer stores, and cursor position storage states to easily repeat very complex tasks over a block of code.

That's easily done, you know, also in vi.

Re:Still useful after all these years...

[MikeBabcock]

I keep my entire home directory's configuration files in version control to be honest. Of course, I'm probably considered not quite sane either, but I don't have the 'doh' moment of having destroyed a working configuration as often either.

Re:Still useful after all these years...

[CronoCloud]

My response is a reaction to those 'nix guru's who intentionally try to complexify solutions. Like the guy I responded to, who told the GP that he shouldn't use a .emacs but emacs.d/ You'll notice I used the term "personal configuration files". Configuration files for servers a sysadmin would want to work with as a group are a different matter.

And you're right, I'm not a sysadmin, but there's this tendency on Slashdot to assume every Linux user is, and to assume that Linux users want sysadmin style solutions to everything. IIRC there was an "Ask Slashdot" where a poster asked about a solution for sharing pictures/video and recent happenings with an entire family where the whole family across the country could contribute/view/etc. You had some guys saying things like, "set up a server with an svn/git/cvs solution with a php/mysql web based frontend for the images/video and either an NNTP server or mail server for an e-mail list, and don't forget the RAID. It also should run on Linux." Then finally someone said something like, "Why don't you just use flickr and set up a flickr group with the flickr group message board for your extended family?"

Even if I updated my .vimrc a few times a year, I'd not version control it. I'd be more likely to just rename the old version with a date and keep a copy of the current version with "_current" attached to it's name rather than go through the rigmarole and hassle of using cvs/svn/git. But I don't need to, because I believe in reasonable defaults, keeping things simple, and getting it the way I want just once, setting and forgetting it. If I'm constantly changing my configuration files that means there's something wrong with my "workflow", though it really isn't a "workflow" at all since I'm not a "professional" 'nix user.

I'm the kind of user who doesn't have a cron job automatically back up my home directory on a regular basis even though I know that cron can do that, simply because I don't want to go to the hassle of learning cron, crontab, yadda yadda. There's probably a graphical frontend these days, but I'm still not used to that sort of thing being available or actually working or being easy to use.

Re:Still useful after all these years...

[Onymous Coward]

The choice to not learn is yours, and you're the most informed person with regards to the environment (your life) into which such knowledge/skill would fit. That makes you the best judge except that you probably don't know what the benefits are exactly nor the time involved to learn. If you're resistant to learning computer tools (of whichever stripe), perhaps out of perceived lack of benefit or expected difficulty (rigamarole, hassle), that will make learning harder. We all need to beware our preconceived notions. Often we're just fooling ourselves with comforting beliefs... that are wrong... and harmful.

Okay, here's how you version control config files:

ci -l .vimrc

Then you say what's changed. It's really not hard.

As for working in a system administration team v. working alone — it's almost the same. I am a different sysadmin from myself... on different days. I can't remember every change I've made or motivation for it. Version controlled files are a log of activity and intention as well as a way to revert if needed. It's useful, and the time and effort we've spent discussing the matter actually far outweigh the time and effort simply to do it. How much else in our lives is like this? We really need to beware our prejudices. "Granfalloons" may seem small, but the painful truth is that they add up. Good luck.

Re:Still useful after all these years...

[Anonymous Coward]

This made me laugh so hard I was almost crying. I'm only sorry that VI users missed the elegant sarcasm of your post!

For some reason I am reminded ...

[neonprimetime]

of a recent /. article entitled the amazing world of software version numbers

emacs is lean and mean

[FranTaylor]

It starts almost instantaneously on my machine.

It is one of the only programs that works equally well in text mode and GUI mode.

It was designed to run well on a PDP-11, so it just screams on a modern machine.

Emacs was the IDE of choice before people even knew what an IDE was.

People who freak at the emacs feature set should compare it to Eclipse.

I have used emacs on ITS, TOPS-20 and Multics. I am still getting used to this Unix emacs thing, I still smile at the fact that I don't have to put up with gosling emacs any more.

Re:emacs is lean and mean

[itsdapead]

No, its actually horribly bloated. Its just that it is horribly bloated by the standards of thirty years ago. A bit like Windows XP, but more so.

In other news, emacs 24 is to be renamed "egacs" because the previous snarky backonym of "Eight Megabytes and Continually Swapping" is now the average footprint of "Hello World".

Re:emacs is lean and mean

[dkf]

In other news, emacs 24 is to be renamed "egacs" because the previous snarky backonym of "Eight Megabytes and Continually Swapping" is now the average footprint of "Hello World".

That's a invidious lie! It stands for "Escape Meta Alt Control Shift", and that's still a valid criticism (and I admit I really like emacs); there's only one shift-like key on this keyboard that it doesn't use and that's only because it's a laptop and so needs to put some functionality off a special "Function" shift...

Re:emacs is lean and mean

[morgan_greywolf]

I have used emacs on ITS, TOPS-20 and Multics. I am still getting used to this Unix emacs thing, I still smile at the fact that I don't have to put up with gosling emacs any more.

For the last time, it's not Unix Emacs, it's GNU Emacs. The operating system it runs on is GNU. As in GNU's Not Unix.

*sigh*

Nevermind. Most you kids are too young to even be able to argue with me. :(

Re:emacs is lean and mean

[ThePhilips]

"Bloatware == slowness" is a misguided generalization.

Emacs actually is the classic example of bloatware. It doesn't matter that the bloat is fast. What matters is that when you try to change an option you discover that you have 5-10 micro-options + hooks + extra bunch of options for different modes you might happen to use. And none of their combination leads to desired result. Then you turn to lisp - hopping to tap into the programmability of Emacs - just to discover that every tiny thing has already layers of overrides, spread over dozens megabytes of preinstalled lisp code.

That what happened to me twice. Because twice I have tried to learn Emacs.

Re:emacs is lean and mean

[FranTaylor]

Super El-Wrong-O

I ran gnu emacs on a PDP-11, and it ran just fine.

Like I said, compare it to its competition: eclipse, netbeans

emacs is NOT a text editor, it is an IDE

Re:emacs is lean and mean

[itsdapead]

I ran gnu emacs on a PDP-11, and it ran just fine.

So? I run Eclipse on a pair of dual-core Xeons and it runs fine. How much did you pay for your PDP-11?

"emacs is bloated" is a meme that was established before we had memes. Don't fight it and spoil the fun :-)

Re:emacs is lean and mean

[IkeTo]

The moment it gains the menu bar and mouse control, it ceases to be a valid criticism. You don't like Control-F? You have the arrow keys. You don't like Control-x Control-s? You have Menu File Save. You don't like Meta-F, Control-V and Meta-V? You can use you mouse to scroll and move to wherever you want. The Control and Meta are just one more way you can access the Emacs windows, albeit a very effective one. The other editors would have forced you to move your fingers to your mouse, in Emacs you can remain in your most efficient posture as long as you can remember all those key binding, otherwise, fine, use the menu just as every other editor would want you to.

23?

[Timosch]

Let me be the first one to say this: "Illuminatus!"

Floame on...

[Anonymous Coward]

Warning: EMACS/VI Flame War Approaching... You now have: T - minus 10 seconds, to reach *minimum* safe distance...

I seriously doubt Alan Cox is going to upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

I seriously doubt Alan Cox is going to upgrade

Re:Now finish HURD please

[Brian Gordon]

Hurd sounds really promising and exciting until you realize that it's been in development for 19 years and it's still not ready. Until it gets the popular support from kernel developers that Linux has, I'm afraid it will never be a viable alternative (look at me saying alternative; Linux is the alternative, not Hurd!). Better (superscalable) microprocessor implementations that support even better parallelization would make also make Hurd more attractive.

I've been running emacs 23 for 2 years ... sorta

[Lemming Mark]

M-x version gives me "GNU Emacs 23.0.0.2 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.10.6) of 2007-01-18". This is a version I checked out from emacs CVS on that date, compiled with GTK support and antialiasing (at least one, possibly both of which were experimental at the time) and have been using this version ever since. I've been sticking to it because of the antialiasing, basically. Whenever I start it up it displays a warning about how it might be horribly unstable, eat my data, etc.

But I have found it to be remarkably stable - much more so than many / most final releases of software. I can probably count the crashes I've had from it on my fingers - in unary, not binary, for the benefit of any pedants out there. If the final release is at least as good as the random CVS checkout I have then it ought to be pretty good! To be fair it sounds like lots of features have been added since my checkout ...

On the basis of my experience I will consider testing CVS versions of emacs in future if they have useful features that I need. Obviously still gotta take care with that vital data when doing so, my good experiences notwithstanding!

On a side note, the emacs versioning system is amusing in itself ... IIRC they were numbering the releases 0.x and working up to 1.0 as normal. But it took so many releases that they ended up just dropping the "0." designation and calling it "x" instead. Which is why emacs is at version 23 where vim (on my machine) is only at 7.2 and nano at 2.0.9 ;-)

Re:emacs? emulate mac software

[Em Emalb]

/waves hand "The previous post was on topic."

now all it needs ...

[Anonymous Coward]

is a feature that allows me to surf _pr0n_ from within emacs, and then i'd consider using it

oh wait, those guys think of everything!

Word wrapping

[xiox]

How about adding word wrapping when displaying? My local emacs expert wasn't even able to do that, but MS Notepad can do it. It's really useful for editing latex documents where your want a paragraph on a single line (that makes it much easier to search for phrases).

Re:Word wrapping

[FranTaylor]

M-x auto-fill-mode

Re:Word wrapping

[the Atomic Rabbit]

1. M-x visual-line-mode RET (or Options->Line Wrapping->Word Wrap)
2. Live happily ever after.

Re:Word wrapping

[godztempus]

M-q ( M-x fill-paragraph )

Re:Word wrapping

[acon1modm]

http://www.google.com/#q=emacs+word+wrap
If you can't do that, stick to Notepad then.

I strongly prefer vim, though I haven't been able to figure out word wrapping in it yet.

Re:Word wrapping

[pavon]

That's not the same thing. For
starters it only works on a line
by line basis, and changes to a
line in the beginning of a
paragraph don't affect the
formatting of lines further
down in the paragraph. You still
have to manually invoke M-q to
refill the paragraph in that
situation.

Furthermore it inserts actual
newline characters at the column
limit, which is really annoying
when editing or displaying the
document in other applications.

Re:Word wrapping

[Looke]

M-x longlines-mode

Re:Word wrapping

[xiox]

That sounds great. This must be new in emacs 23 - I can't see it in 22.2.1 I have here.

Re:Word wrapping

[grumbel]

M-x longlines-mode

Re:Word wrapping

[Anonymous Coward]

:set wrap

errrr oops ;-)

Re:Word wrapping

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just scary.
Three replies already and all mention different ways to do this.

M-x auto-fill-mode
M-x visual-line-mode RET
M-x longlines-mode

Re:Word wrapping

[fsmunoz]

C-h f visual-line-mode
----
visual-line-mode is an interactive compiled Lisp function in
`simple.el'.

(visual-line-mode &optional arg)

Redefine simple editing commands to act on visual lines, not logical lines.
This also turns on `word-wrap' in the buffer.

It is even right there on the menu (Options->Line Wrapping...->Word Wrap).

Re:Word wrapping

[Haeleth]

longlines-mode is obsolete. Use visual-line-mode, like the Atomic Rabbit says. Or just (setq word-wrap t).

Re:Word wrapping

[Looke]

Already? Wow, thanks ...

Re:Word wrapping

[Anonymous Coward]

In emacs:
M-x visual-line-mode RET

In vim:
set tw=0 wrap linebreak

In notepad:
Alt-O Enter

It's actually less keystrokes in notepad. I'm so confused.

Re:Word wrapping

[unformed]

1. M-x blowjob RET
2. Enjoy the rest of your day.

Re:Word wrapping

[CronoCloud]

And the OP is using emacs 22.foo, so some of those might not work! I know M-x visual-line-mode RET won't work on the emacs 21.foo in YDL6.1, just tested it.

Re:Word wrapping

[multi io]

when editing or displaying the document in other applications.

Though shall use other applications besides the mighty EMACS.

Got it? So there.

Re:Word wrapping

[chthonicdaemon]

Just use auto-wrap on 75 chars. This makes it much easier to find the bug that LaTeX is complaining about. The long lines are the first thing I change when I inherit files.

The long lines also make change tracking that much harder, as most tools only go down to line granularity.

Re:Word wrapping

[ais523]

Word wrap view already existed, but visual-line-mode (which makes loads of wordwrap-related changes at once) is new.

Re:Word wrapping

[ghyspran]

you mean like ":set wrap"?

jmacs anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF? Joe's Own Editor? I keep typing "e" but a previous sysadmin wants me to type "j". ARRRGGHH!!!

One question

[feldicus]

Does the feature list include "Shortcuts that make sense to humans who never used the 30-year old keyboards that were around when RMS was hacking on TEX"?

Until I stop seeing Emacs primers that start with advice to start remapping my keyboard, I'll pass.

Re:One question

[tekproxy2]

nail. head.

Re:One question

[IkeTo]

I think Emacs shortcuts make a good amount of sense. Most short-cuts comes from the first characters of their respective commands, the more commonly used commands are used with just Control while the less commonly used ones are prefixed with C-x or C-c. If you ask me, vi commands make much less sense, and at times even Firefox shortcuts falls behind! (Who know why "bookmark this page" is Control-D?!)

Re:One question

[shutdown -p now]

Firefox shortcuts falls behind! Who know why "bookmark this page" is Control-D?

Because it was Ctrl+D in IE. Why it was that there is another question...

Re:One question

[Rakshasa Taisab]

Even apple figured out that the caps lock was fucking useless, and added options to easily change the modifier keys. (And that's saying something, as they don't add options in their preferences gui they don't think people need)

Re:One question

[ksheff]

It's not RMS' fault that IBM ruined a perfectly good keyboard layout by moving the "Caps Lock" key to where Ctrl should be. But I suppose that made more sense for their COBOL userbase which was probably larger than their AIX at the time. So, you can either remap your keys or get a keyboard with the Ctrl keys in the correct location. IIRC, the Happy Hacker keyboard is set up this way as is this one: http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/linux101.html The latter has the bonus feature of using buckling spring keys.

Re:One question

[ais523]

Most short-cuts comes from the first characters of their respective commands, the more commonly used commands are used with just Control while the less commonly used ones are prefixed with C-x or C-c.

There's actually more logic there than you've already mentioned; the ones starting C-c are the mode-specific ones, whereas the C-x shortcuts are constant no matter what you're doing.

Re:One question

[bbtom]

If you were a vi/Vim user, then Vimperator. It's Firefox with the totally rational key-bindings Vim users like me expect.

Emacs users can use Conkeror instead. This blog post is a pretty neat intro to Conkeror.

Looks like Conkeror has what Vimperator calls hinting - in Vimperator you hit f or F (for new tab hinting) and it labels all the links on the screen with a number. You type in the number you want and it opens it. M-l does the same in Conkeror.

One of the nice things I like in Vimperator is that you can write (in JavaScript, thankfully, not VimL) really simple plugins and remaps. There's a plugin you can get which makes it so you can use the :shorten command and it takes the URL of the current page, shortens it through $URL_SHORTENER_OF_YOUR_CHOICE and then yanks (that is, copies to the system pasteboard) the result. Or if you want to yank just the current URL, you can tap "y".

Firefox extensions that make Firefox like editors almost makes the GUI usable. Vimperator is certainly very cool on a small netbook as it really helps getting all the GUI clutter out of the way.

Re:Now finish HURD please

[Anonymous Coward]

With a charismatic figure like Stallman behind it, I can't imagine what might be holding it back.

I thought eMacs was a command shell replacement?

[Anonymous Coward]

a gui command shell for manipulating data into pipes/handlers to scripts, no different than at a text console prompt but as a GUI with more powerful control functions like as Labview.

Anyone willing to name that software IBM created to do just that, and included way back when SuSE was in version 7 Professional?

With fine RPM-based distributions on the market (SuSE, CentOS, etc), Do you realy want to install A Debian?

Re:Now finish HURD please

[CannonballHead]

Apple should take over dev of it. We could all be using iHurd

Does not compile "out of the box" in Mac OS X 10.5

[juanergie]

The image libraries for jpeg and tiff are not by default in OS X 10.5.7. You have to pass the configure flags --with-gif=no --with-jpeg=no to get it to compile.

Does it support CUA mode out of the box?

[sundarvenkata]

Can I copy/paste successfully/reliably without trying to use some kludgy third party libraries?

Emacs? Bah!

[bmo]

Emacs is merely a TECO macro.

Given enough random characters and memory space, TECO can simulate the human brain.

--
BMO

Re:Emacs? Bah!

[martin-boundary]

Given enough random characters and memory space, TECO can simulate the human brain.

Unfortunately, we cannot choose which human brain TECO simulates. Due to a wrongly placed hole in punched card #23, the only brain that can be simulated is actually Paris Hilton's.

Re:I've been running emacs 23 for 2 years ... sort

[morgan_greywolf]

On a side note, the emacs versioning system is amusing in itself ... IIRC they were numbering the releases 0.x and working up to 1.0 as normal. But it took so many releases that they ended up just dropping the "0." designation and calling it "x" instead. Which is why emacs is at version 23 where vim (on my machine) is only at 7.2 and nano at 2.0.9 ;-)

Wait, what you're saying is....that Emacs hasn't even hit 1.0 yet? This is actually emacs 0.23? *looks scared*

Will it be much better than 22?

[myowntrueself]

Because (at least in Debian Lenny) I am still using 21 because 22 hasn't been working out so well.

Lots of problems, eg find-grep-dired not finding any results at all.

I uninstalled 22 and installed 21 instead, now my find-grep-dired is working again...

Re:Will it be much better than 22?

[Anonymous Coward]

Send a detailed bug report to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org, it should be working.

Re:According to Psychologist Zippy,

[Verdatum]

Taking the time to write that out was the best usage of your time ever.

Runs in the background....

[onefriedrice]

Also, there is support for starting emacs in the background, so you can pop up new emacs windows in the blink of an eye.

It will be a sad day indeed when I have to run my text editor in the background just so it will start up in a reasonable amount of time.

Fortunately, I use Vim, so that day is further off.

Re:Runs in the background....

[FranTaylor]

That's NOT why the feature is there

It is there so you can leave sessions running and come back to them later, even from a different console

emacs starts up instantly on any modern machine so this is not an issue

You have a lot of nerve calling emacs "bloated" when you have a whole desktop full of bloated gnome or KDE stuff running.

Re:Runs in the background....

[onefriedrice]

You have a lot of nerve calling emacs "bloated" when you have a whole desktop full of bloated gnome or KDE stuff running.

Actually, I run fluxbox. Nice try.

Re:Runs in the background....

[Anonymous Coward]

can't we all just get along!?!?!?!

Re:Runs in the background....

[multi io]

emacs starts up instantly on any modern machine

Maybe so, but then your 1,000 lines .emacs file, causing another 20,000 lines of compiled elisp code to run, doesn't.

Re:Runs in the background....

[Xtifr]

Fine--then you have a lot of nerve calling emacs bloated when you have X running! :p ;)

(s-print) is undefined?

[fish waffle]

They might want to choose another image---the command entry area in the image of emacs on the linked page has an error in it: "(s-print) is undefined".

Re:(s-print) is undefined?

[dhTardis]

That's an error on the part of the user that made the image; they pressed Super-PrintScreen (Super is often the "Windows key" on modern keyboards) and that wasn't what they needed to do to get their screenshot.

Re:Now finish HURD please

[Verdatum]

Not counting his friendly samurai sword, obviously.

emacs is not a text editor

[FranTaylor]

emacs is an IDE

If you want a text editor, use nano

Correction

[turing_m]

Emacs is an amazing hammer, so it's more appealing to start treating things as nails where you can get away with it.

Vim is the hammer - it does one job really well. Emacs is more like a leatherman tool. Leatherman tool cultists have several approaches to making the leatherman function as a hammer. The first is to just place the leatherman over a nail and bash it with a rock. Problem solved! Other more advanced leatherman tool afficianados have started duct taping the leatherman to a hammer in attempting to make it more palatable to hammer users, expressing that this is the leatherman's "hammer mode". "You get all the power of the leatherman, and it "comes with" a hammer! Ha ha! See? Why are you running away from me? Come back!"

I have 4 Gig of memory

[ross.w]

So now I have enough to run Emacs.

gedit uses more ram than emacs

[FranTaylor]

look for yourself!

oblig XKCD

[speculatrix]

oblig xkcd reference

Don't remap the keys then

[extrasolar]

Remap your brain.

Emacs 23 rules! :)

Re:Don't remap the keys then

[feldicus]

Let me guess...there's a shortcut for that as well. Let's see...what would "make sense" to someone who had their mind warped by continual emacs usage?

Ah yes...C-x M-x C-f C-! embrace-emacs-religion

Silly me.

Re:Don't remap the keys then

[extrasolar]

Nope, no shortcut. You're the kind of guy who has to learn all his lessons the hard way, and still not understand them.

Re:Don't remap the keys then

[feldicus]

If it means I need surgery to have four extra fingers attached to my left hand, I'll forgo learning this one.

Look at Aquamacs

[SuperKendall]

Aquamacs has a preview version based on 23, probably shortly to become a final...

They generally have a little nicer system integration than the stock emacs.

Re:I've been running emacs 23 for 2 years ... sort

[FlyingBishop]

That's incorrect. A quick Wikipedia search will show that this is in fact Emacs 1.23 .

They dropped the 1. because it became clear that they wouldn't be introducing anything that would cause sufficient trouble to merit a 2.0 release (being that the major version number connotes a lack of backwards compatability.)

I use the Emacs-snapshot package from the repositories, which is built from the trunk every week. It is the most stable GUI program I have ever used.

Re:I've been running emacs 23 for 2 years ... sort

[Omnifarious]

I wish they would stop using CVS and start using Mercurial or something other reasonably decent DVCS so I felt like I could contribute maybe.

Not on the PPA yet

[abarrow]

Emacs23 isn't on the Ubuntu PPA archive yet, only emacs22, published last year.

Re:Not on the PPA yet

[abarrow]

...but, if you install "emacs-snapshot" you get emacs23.

(Am I talking to myself? Nahhhh.)

Re:Not on the PPA yet

[psyclone]

Try the snapshot from the summary link.

Published on 2009-06-18

Anonymous Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot flamewars are not what they used to be.. Sept 11 simply changed everything..

Re:Anonymous Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

of course. i'd also feel changed if my government would try to kill me just be able to kill much more people elsewhere...

Slashdot is the Huffington Post of computing

[FranTaylor]

Semi-literate stories, completely ignorant comments

Yabut

[sconeu]

Emacs isn't a text editor, it's an OS.

Yo dawg!

[Anonymous Coward]

I herd u liek Emacs. So I put an Emacs in yr Emacs so u can edit while u Tetris.

Re:According to Psychologist Zippy,

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah Ha McTouché!

I see you still don't remember the Zippy program in EMACS. Seeing you have knee-jerk responses, are over the 1.2 million Slashdot account number, you must be new here to GNU studies.

Taking the time to respond to my Godly postwas was the greatest use of your time.

Hey, thats an awesome idea!!

[Narcocide]

M-x firehose :)

Re:I've been running emacs 23 for 2 years ... sort

[Lemming Mark]

Ooops, I stand corrected, thanks. I was dredging that up from somewhere in my longterm memory - I probably actually got it from the Wikipedia article but my memory had apparently got corrupted in the years since ;-)

What do you use it for?

[Anonymous Coward]

Totally serious question: do you guys really use emacs (or even vi, etc) to write code rather than a modern Studio/IDE?

I wouldn't even think of doing so, but I am willing to accept that I'm missing something.

Re:What do you use it for?

[h4rr4r]

I use VIM on a daily basis.
It has text highlighting and more features than you can shake a stick at. It runs on everything, no worries if X is even installed. The learning curve is steep but so is nearly every professional tool in nearly every profession. If a gui tool was better I would use that, so far I have not found one.

Re:What do you use it for?

[maxwell demon]

Totally serious question: do you guys really use emacs (or even vi, etc) to write code rather than a modern Studio/IDE?

Totally serious answer: Yes.

Re:What do you use it for?

[Just Some Guy]

In what way is Emacs not a modern IDE, other that it also works perfectly in console mode?

Re:What do you use it for?

[dhTardis]

Totally serious question: do you guys really use emacs (or even vi, etc) to write code rather than a modern Studio/IDE?

Yes. The typical reasons (aside from Luddite tendencies and comfort) include

1. that our text editors are extensible, so that you don't have to switch to a completely different program (with a different interface) to edit SQL instead of, say, JavaScript (granted: Eclipse does both of these; I don't think any "Studio" program does)
2. that they (Emacs especially) are extensively customizable, so that things that bother you can be changed
3. that they are extremely cross-platform (more so even than Eclipse because more so even than Java)
4. that they were designed with the keyboard in mind, so they're easier on the hands (if you get over the "holy crap I have to type Escape (vi) or Ctrl-Alt (Emacs) all the time!" thing)
5. that they've been around for a long time, so that most of the bugs are gone and many many add-ons are available (quick, does Eclipse do Icon? Maybe it does, but it's been supported out-of-the-box by Emacs since at least 2001.)
6. that they integrate well with other tools in ways that sometimes surpass even an IDE's integration: I'm sure you can sort text in any IDE, but can you pass it to sort(1), use all the options and speed thereof, and replace the text you sent with what you got back? It's C-u M-| in Emacs.
7. that they've always been free (and Free).

Some people have been using such editors for longer than the modern IDEs have existed, and so are so good with them that it would take a very long time to recoup the investment of switching (if we even take as given that there will be a lasting net benefit).

Re:What do you use it for?

[ickpoo]

I use Emacs instead of Visual Studio for editing C++, C#, SQL, and XML. I even gave Visual Studio a chance when I switched to working with Visual C++, it just doesn't edit text as well (only thing it does better is Intellisense).

Emacs has better window management (multiple frames and windows, great for dual screens), better indenting (it does it for me in multiple languages), much better syntax highlighting, better searching (no silly window to search from), and even better environment for tracking through compilation errors (using Visual Studio as the compiler). The only thing I haven't got working is debugging Visual Studio executables in Emacs.

Having actually compared and used them both, I'm not sure why people use Visual Studio, it just isn't as good for developing software.

Re:What do you use it for?

[BlackCreek]

In what way is Emacs not a modern IDE, other that it also works perfectly in console mode?

Having used Emacs for 14 years now (12 years for programming), and now programming (almost exclusively) with Eclipse for the last 2 years. IMHO emacs is not a IDE because out-of-the-box there is no:

1. syntax aware completion,
2. concept of software project,
3. auto-indexing for files in the project,
4. functionality for fixing syntax and semantic problems,
5. auto saving of local history, and easy diffing,
6. (syntax-aware) code refactoring tools.

Sure, you can start *programming* emacs to attempt to do this stuff by integrating other tools or twisting options, but often the results will be mediocre. Also notice the need to maintain this code later. IMO Emacs is a lisp extensible editor and full of hooks, so you can shoehorn IDE like functions to it, but in no way an IDE.

I still use emacs for text edition(!), occasional shell-scripting, and sometimes even python scripting. But for actual Python projects and Java, I can only bring myself to use Eclipse.

Re:What do you use it for?

[Just Some Guy]

Horses for courses, I suppose. I can't stand doing Python in anything but Emacs.

Re:What do you use it for?

[chthonicdaemon]

I have honestly tried Eclipse and Netbeans for my programming, but the learning curve is just way too high. When I started using Emacs, I could do what I wanted almost instantly (open a text file and start editing it). To just open a file in Eclipse, edit it and compile it seems impossible. You need to get the correct plugins for the filetype you have chosen (and I am using many types of files). Then, you need to create a project, figure out what workspace this is supposed to be in. I suppose if I didn't already have tons of projects organised into a nice directory structure -- if Eclipse was my first experience with programming and I could just create new projects in the default workspace -- it would be a little easier, but the existing code adds a bit of inertia to my development style.

I posted a question that got some airtime on Slashdot about IDE support for multi-language projects. The studio-style apps seem to be built around the idea that you will be using a single language for the whole project. This is not bad as far as it goes, but your existing codebase is Python, C, C++ and Fortran with lots of shell scripting, m4, awk, sed and Makefiles in between, the studio stule stuff doesn't cut it. Not to mention, that even when I'm working on a large project in one language (which Ecipse does well), I may want to open a text file of some other kind (XML, CSV, whatever) and Eclipse doesn't make it easy in the same way that emacs does. I also can't fire up Eclipse from the terminal to edit a file from home via ssh. And I haven't found a text editor that does indenting the way I have grown to love -- by hitting tab anywhere and having the indentation done right.

Now, I know all the arguments for IDEs, and I have really tried, but I think many people are like me in using Emacs because they are (or at least feel) more productive in it on their codebase. The underlying mindsets are just so different that it's really hard to get going in IDEs.

Re:What do you use it for?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, there is no concept of a software project, and thank good for that, I've tried Eclipse and run screaming when I had to create a "project" just to see how its python support was...

Re:According to Psychologist Zippy,

[Verdatum]

I know of no "Zippy program"...I know of "M-x psychoanalyze-pinhead" wherein Zippy is the patient, not the psychologist, and I know it sounded nothing like your unfunny post.

I'm not going to respond to your prejudice against when I finally bothered to stop being an anonymous coward.

And I fully realize I'm being retarded in bothering to respond...Damnable trollbait.

Useless info

[TurinPT]

Emacs is now tied with Print Shop 23 for the highest version ever.

Carbon to Cocoa

[_|()|\|]

I use the Zenitani Carbon Emacs port on OS X, and I noticed a while back that the Carbon wrapper for OS X had been removed. Can anyone describe the differences in Emacs 23? The NEWS file says: "The Nextstep port is not as stable as the other existing ports."

Re:Now finish HURD please

[CarpetShark]

Apple's special "youth empowerment" team is working on iHurd now. From now on, it's going to be known as iHurdYouTheFirstTime.

Re:I've been running emacs 23 for 2 years ... sort

[Lemming Mark]

I believe they're intending to move to Bazaar, since that's apparently (whether potentially or actually I am not sure) going to become a GNU project as some point in the future.

My favourite choice for them would have been Mercurial but bzr supports distributed operation and also lightweight, current revision-style checkouts, so it's quite a nice system too.

mm CSS editing mode

[Danzigism]

my favorite!

Re:emacs? emulate mac software

[Chris Burke]

emacs = Emulate Mac Software.

Uh... in that case, all I can say to the Emacs team is "Yer doin it wrong!"

wtf

[Anonymous Coward]

People still use this? lol Do you guys still use EDLIN as well?

But that's exactly the strength of Emacs

[SuperKendall]

An application should do one thing and do it well, not do a gazillion things in a mediocre way

That is exactly what Emacs is.

It's not one giant monolithic thing, at all.

Just like UNIX it's a core in which you can write very specific modules to address some aspect of editing. Perhaps it's formatting C style code. Perhaps it's a variant built around C++ or objective-C in particular. Perhaps it's a bit of logic to sort some parts of a file based on criteria in the file - or by running a shell command.

Each of these pieces can be tied to any particular file type, or called on at will. You can easily write your own, in elisp (basically a LISP variant). All of the standard behavior is also written in elisp, so you can modify or extend it as desired (most things have many points in which you can insert behavior hooks)

Never has a program more dearly held to the concepts you espouse, and it's actually the core of why I think people who prefer emacs over VI do so.

Re:But that's exactly the strength of Emacs

[the Atomic Rabbit]

There's also the point by Debian's vim maintainer, who switched to Emacs earlier this year: that Emacs makes it very easy to interact with more specialized tools, such as ispell. Contrast with vim, which implemented its own spell checker. Now, let's see... which approach is more consistent with the Unix philosophy?

Re:But that's exactly the strength of Emacs

[Bu11etmagnet]

* If you are a professional writer - i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed - Emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish.
                    # Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning ... was the Command Line

* I use Emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor.
                    # Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning ... was the Command Line

Re:I've been running emacs 23 for 2 years ... sort

[Omnifarious]

Bazaar is as nice as Mercurial in many respects. I find the command set to be a little less nice than Mercurial's and though I haven't seen any recent benchmarks in the past it's been a lot slower.

EAGAIN

[GigsVT]

Did they fix that bug with the bad EAGAIN handling?

I was wrong...

[Lemming Mark]

Apparently my explanation of versioning wasn't correct - that's not how it happened although my explanation does preserve much of the craziness of the real events ;-)

Read (and up-mod, if you can) this guys post, he has the story straight:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1320833&cid=28888279

sure we use this

[Anonymous Coward]

it's the best and will hopefully stay the best. or do you know some program which allows me to connect to my mpd server while compiling 20000 lines of C code, debugging a perl script, executing shit on an interactive shell, reading my mail and programming cool stuff in guile and clisp? and even if there is something which can do all this and thousand things more: will it start up in 2 seconds flat in text mode ???? emacs is not just an "IDE" it's a way of life like zen buddhism or cynic philosophy. *sigh* ...nevermind!
 

Amazing

[SuperKendall]

I never realized in the ageless war between Emacs and VI, that we even had high level defectors... :-)

Ha Ha - let's try a real example

[SuperKendall]

Very amusing. But I'm not talking about simple things like that.

Let's look at a real example, that I was just doing today - you start with the following kind of code:

- (double) averageRating
{ return [self.averageRatingDD boolValue]; }
- (void) setAverageRating:(double)averageRating
{ self.averageRatingDD = [NSNumber numberWithDouble:averageRating]; }

- (int) reviewPages
{ return [self.reviewPagesII intValue]; }
- (void) setReviewPages:(int)reviewPages
{ self.reviewPagesII = [NSNumber numberWithInt:reviewPages]; }

- (BOOL) hasLoaded
{ return [self.hasLoadedBB boolValue]; }
- (void) setHasLoaded:(BOOL)hasLoaded
{ self.hasLoadedBB = [NSNumber numberWithBool:hasLoaded]; }

and you want to generate the following kinds of lines from it, keeping type and variable names into account:

@property (nonatomic) double averageRating;
@property (nonatomic) int reviewPages;
@property (nonatomic) BOOL hasLoaded;

I had about twelve sets of these things.

With just a few keystrokes more than "@property (nonatomic)", I had a macro that would let me go through each section, and automatically generate the @property line with the correct type and name.

Now I could write an awk script to do this, but it's not something I really needed to do more than this one time. Or I could manually copy and paste a bunch of text. Or I could even just type it in. But that's all slower than doing what I did. A small savings, but writing code you are endlessly coming up with small savings like this if you have an editor to help you.

Other editors support "macros" as well, but mostly those turn out to be text block insertion (sometimes with parameters), not really reacting dynamically to stuff you already have in code or offering the true ability to record absolutely everything you are doing (like switching files and searching for other things). Emacs macros as so far ahead of any other text editor macro ability, that it's not even funny...

VI actually has a similar macro recording feature, but it's not as useful in the end just because emacs has so many more things the editor understands and records as part of the macro.

Re:Now finish HURD please

[MickyTheIdiot]

What is it u Hurd?
I want to hur it, too.

ViM needs fewer versions

[ClubStew]

ViM only needs 7 versions to get it right. Emacs is at 23?

Wish list for Version 60

[jdickey]

1. Usability
2. Intuitiveness.
3. Memorability by people who don't live completely within the program.

That's not really too much to hope for in another 37 releases, is it? Seriously... I used to call WordPerfect 4.2 the Control-Alt-Shift-Left Elbow-Q software for its obscure key combinations. I take back everything I ever said about WP; after more than ten years of intermittent usage, I can't sit here and actually recall any keystroke combinations for Emacs. This tells me that, if there is a sweet spot for software usability, then Emacs inhabits the single point in the omniverse which is most distant from that spot. Geekiness was kind of fun 30 years ago when I was a teenager; I've better things to do with my time now - and so do you.

Welcome to Slashdot, love.

[Anonymous Coward]

Then I've taught you somthing, and that's to be less like your former self after meeting me to be your exhonerated teacher.

Your prejudice towards the indignity of assuming that I'm prejudice, aside, you may be less the burden this moment forward to be un-retarded, and if you relapse then you may pick-up any phone in your proximity and talk to the dial-tone for free Slashdot advice from the madam of the hour.

Go ahead mod me down but..

[GargamelSpaceman]

I wish emacs would not put stuff in /usr/local/share. I just deleted the contents of /usr/local on my debian box via a script that puts my custom stuff there since I assumed it wouldn't break anything and now emacs complains it's gone. Boo. There I vented my gripe.

Re:Go ahead mod me down but..

[cpghost]

Huh? Doesn't Emacs honor --prefix or a similar flag consistently? I can't tell, because on my FreeBSD box, Emacs installs itself in /usr/local (including /usr/local/share/emacs) just like any other third party application from the ports system would. Perhaps Debian Emacs port/package maintainers didn't set some configure flags consistently with Linux FTS (or was it Debian FTS)? This is something that really should be customizable.

Re:Go ahead mod me down but..

[GargamelSpaceman]

I don't know, it could be a debian thing since I installed emacs from a .deb. But whatever... It seems odd that the rest of emacs is installed outside of /usr/local whilst some parts are in /usr/local. It seems almost like an artefact of the emacs installation process that made it into the .deb.

Mod parent down

[JorgePeixoto2]

Parent did not read the article before posting.
Reading the Emacs news file says what the feature is there for.

Emacs 23 starts really fast in in my computer (with a cheap 80 GB HD).

FWIW, I am a speed freak, using lightweight applications such as
LXDE, claws-mail and emacs.

parent post RULES

[Anonymous Coward]

no text here

Re:I've been running emacs 23 for 2 years ... sort

[Anonymous Coward]

On a side note, the emacs versioning system is amusing in itself ... IIRC they were numbering the releases 0.x and working up to 1.0 as normal. But it took so many releases that they ended up just dropping the "0." designation and calling it "x" instead. Which is why emacs is at version 23 where vim (on my machine) is only at 7.2 and nano at 2.0.9 ;-)

Actually, I'm pretty sure it went from 1.6 to 17.

Only 19 more versions

[StarsAreAlsoFire]

... until Emacs becomes self aware.

My experiences with Emacs

[Qbertino]

I started using Emacs about 3 years ago, away from my workstation, doing web developement on my trusty old G4 iBook. Eclipse was running for PHP stuff, Mamp was running in the background, jEdit (my favorite editor) was running to edit ActionScript and Flash MX 2k4 Pro was running to compile Flash/SWF and do some vector images I needed for the project. The system was totally bogged down and I pondered the thought of buying TextMate once again. Since I do Linux, OS X and Windows and also do a lot of CLI work, I eventually dismissed the TextMate option and went for the editor I've been wishing to learn since 1997.

Using Emacs is a huge pain. Basically everything you know about common user access standard is completly obsolete - Emacs is from before such things even existed. You have to actually proactively learn and practice(!!) the equivalents to select, copy and paste in order for them to be usable in everyday work. Getting emacs extensions to run and finding the correct place to put them is a science in itself, since the options for that are countless. Using anything but the most trivial things instantly requires a lookup in reference cards and often even the manual and switching from jEdit or something else to Emacs cold turkey will have your productivity plummet to unseen depths and your frustration skyrocket for months to come. Which is why I avoid that, and only expect to be fluent in Emacs and ELisp (the native Emacs PL) after another few years of usage.

Having said all that I have to say that attemting to move to Emacs as your primary tool for all IT related work has its very solid appeals. Which is why I've allways had Emacs on the radar. Only the work and effort it takes to switch kept me away from it for way more than a decade.

1) Nowadays Emacs runs *EVERYWHERE*, contrary to TextMate, which is closed source, only runs on OS X and requires scripting as much as Emacs does. No matter how obscure the OS, no matter how limited the enviroment, Emacs will run. If it runs with electricity, it will run Emacs.

2) It's basically an Operating System in itself. ELisp - an ancient scripting language - is the foundation to Emacs and you can script *EVERYTHING*.

3) Emacs is actually native to the CLI. There is nothing worth mentioning that an Emacs shoehorned into a GUI (aka XEmacs) has as benefit over the regular CLI Emacs, appart from maybe easyer installation on Windows or something like that.

4) Emacs is very powerfull. It supports seperated Windows on the CLI and there are a huge amount of scripts. There is a very neat PHP mode, still actively maintained and available on sourceforge and there's a lot of other neat stuff out there too.

5) Emacs was a massive performance hog ... 25 years ago. Which means it's lightning fast by todays standards. It's very small and an entire custom Emacs work enviroment for every OS you can think of easyly fits on todays smallest USB-drive keychains.

6) Since it runs in the CLI, using it via a remote terminal makes no difference.

7) It is still actively maintained with regular releases (sic).

8) The input device it the Keyboard, and nothing else. Mouse support with xEmacs basically is a hack and feels very tacky and many occasions. For an editor you eventually expect to use everywhere, that is an advantage.

The 'Learn Linux' benefit of learing once, use until the day you die applies just as well to Emacs. That learning however is a walk through hell. I expect it to start paying off anytime soon.

Bottom line: Emacs is the oldest non-trivial end-user application in existance, and it shows in every respect. However, if you are an IT pro and expect to be working in the field for the rest of your worklife, in many heterogenous enviroments, learning Emacs (and Elisp) is a challange worth attempting. It is work, but with a very usefull result.

My 2 cents.

I Learned Vi First

[aquatone282]

When I tried emacs it seemed like, well, a girl with fat ankles. Know what I mean?

New/replacement category

[paxcoder]

Maybe you (Slashdot admins) should make a new category called "Free software" (or if you must, "Open Source") alongside, or better yet, replacing "Linux". All free software news are apparently not suitable for "Linux", and if someone is subscribed to Linux only (as I was), he or she is not getting all the news he'd/she'd want.

Emacs 23.1 for OS X: Differences

[Shuh]

The build seems to work well except for a few key differences with earlier Emacs versions.

Compiling a Carbon version for OS X from the /mac directory is no longer possible because that entire directory has been removed. Instead OS X users need to compile a Cocoa version for OS X by following the directions in the /nextstep directory. At first this seems like a major win: reduce old code-bloat and compile with the newer frameworks. But unfortunately this produces an executable that delivers a couple of annoying inconsistencies.

First off, the Global Menu items are no longer in the OSX Menu Bar. It just makes the newer Cocoa version look sloppy and unfinished compared to the Carbon version. The second, and far more annoying difference, is the reservation of the Command-key for OS X-style functions. Command-N (new window), Command-W (close window), Command-C (copy) now all work just like on the Mac. But the infinitely more useful Emacs Meta-key functionality is now relegated to the Alt/Option key. :(

Re:Emacs 23.1 for OS X: Differences

[Shuh]

Whoops. A little bit of reading and testing lead me to come up with this bit of code for my .emacs:

(when (and (eq 'darwin system-type) (eq 23 emacs-major-version)) (setq ns-alternate-modifier 'super) (setq ns-command-modifier 'meta))

This solves the Emacs Meta-key functionality problem. Looks like I'm moving to the newest version of Emacs today!

Re:I've been running emacs 23 for 2 years ... sort

[ksheff]

Yeah, I like this little section from the Wikipedia entry:

Version 13, the first public release, was made on March 20, 1985. The first widely distributed version of GNU Emacs was 15.34, which appeared later in 1985. Versions 2 to 12 never existed. Earlier versions of GNU Emacs had been numbered "1.x.x", but sometime after version 1.12 the decision was made to drop the "1", as it was thought the major number would never change.

Not at all

[SuperKendall]

That's easily done, you know, also in vi.

Yes I've used VI's macro creation feature extensively.

But because VI simply does not have as many functions dealing with text, it simply is not as powerful in this regard. And what if you need to write a custom text alteration method for use in a maco? That's a few lines of code in Emacs, and impossible in VI.

Re:Not at all

[ioshhdflwuegfh]

VI simply does not have as many functions dealing with text, it simply is not as powerful in this regard.

Nothing has as many functions and options as emacs, and vi is no exception.

And what if you need to write a custom text alteration method for use in a maco? That's a few lines of code in Emacs, and impossible in VI.

It's possible and I've done it: you don't try to make one big all-encompassing macro, but two: the first one does operations before the text alteration, then you do the custom text altering using ordinary commands, then apply the second one which does the rest of operations.

In vi, I don't write macros, I just do the editing and then repeat the same editing sequence again, by pressing "dot", or, in more complicated editing sequences, thinly wrapped with three keystrokes that define the macro. Actually, I'd say less than three, since I often do it by: qq<editing>q. In emacs, I'm sure you can do more things by writing a macro in some semi-exotic situations at the expense of having more things to learn/do/remember. In these situations, I'd rather put some effort in cleverly combining things I know to get the editing done, without any line of (macro) code written.

I think the choice between emacs and vi, and I must say I know noone who uses both, is a matter of taste and preferences, or, perhaps, philosophy.

Re:Not at all

[SuperKendall]

In vi, I don't write macros, I just do the editing and then repeat the same editing sequence again, by pressing "dot", or, in more complicated editing sequences, thinly wrapped with three keystrokes that define the macro.

That's exactly what I do in emacs. Start recording the sequence I wish to apply, then repeat it. It's still a macro, just not written by me so much as recorded.

But I also have the option to throw in a custom method to alter text during the recording, or call upon any of the other vast library of small helper functions... I can also switch files, to pull content from multiple files as part of the recording.

I think the choice between emacs and vi, and I must say I know noone who uses both

I've used both quite heavily because VI is on every system, but I greatly prefer the expanded abilities emacs offers when it is there.

it has that

[Anonymous Coward]

... install emacs w3m mode.

Browser with pictures inside emacs

23 starts much faster, for me anyway...

[aap]

Because of the daemon feature being added in this release, I was more surprised than I otherwise would have been: when I finally managed to compile emacs 23 for Solaris 10, it started much faster than 22.1. It really is almost instantaneous now even though I do have plenty of customization going on.

Happy 23rd birthday

[nurb432]

Is it sentient yet?