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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."
Thanks RMS for Emacs, the GPL and the spirit of GNU that I found in 1995 and has not left me since!
Happy Hacking!
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
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?
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.
"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.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley