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

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!

[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!

[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:Congrats!

[Hammer]

This is good news indeed

Thanx RMS for more than 20 years w the only editor

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:Decent text editor still not included right?

[RLiegh]

feature creep
Definition from Wiktionary, a free dictionary
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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: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:Word wrapping

[Looke]

M-x longlines-mode

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:But...

[FlyingBishop]

You can also run Emacs inside of 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: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: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: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: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.