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

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: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?

[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: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: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.

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: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).