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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."
Shit, these days VIM requires no less than 30 megs....
Does it run Linux?
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
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!
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Best command ever.
1984 was not supposed to be an instruction manual.
A lone geek runs into the middle of the forum, screaming "vi forever! Praise the hex codes!" *boom* :)
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
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?
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.
Dislike the Electoral College? Lobby your state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
M-x viper-mode
Call me old and grumpy but I think Emacs had enough features when they got the kitchen sink in it.
M-x butterfly
Knowing emacs, to actually issue that command, you would have to press all those buttons at once.
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?
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
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...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When it's too late.
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
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.
of a recent /. article entitled the amazing world of software version numbers
And then, obligatory Bilo & Nano:
http://en.tiraecol.net/modules/comic/comic.php?content_id=2&mode=flat&order=0
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.
Let me be the first one to say this: "Illuminatus!"
I seriously doubt Alan Cox is going to upgrade
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.
Real programmers use ed.
Fixed that for you.
Reply to That ||
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 ;-)
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).
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.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
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.
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)
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Does that make a text editor the best tool for the job?
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....
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
Apple should take over dev of it. We could all be using iHurd
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.
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.
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
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.
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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...)
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Splunk! It would be a swoosh, but the original joke wasn't that great to begin with.
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.
Aeroespacio.org
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!
Can I copy/paste successfully/reliably without trying to use some kludgy third party libraries?
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*
My blog
Emacs is merely a TECO macro.
Given enough random characters and memory space, TECO can simulate the human brain.
--
BMO
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.
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*
My blog
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...
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
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.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Taking the time to write that out was the best usage of your time ever.
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.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
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".
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.
Not counting his friendly samurai sword, obviously.
emacs is an IDE
If you want a text editor, use nano
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!"
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
So now I have enough to run Emacs.
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
look for yourself!
Remap your brain.
Emacs 23 rules! :)
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
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.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
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.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Emacs23 isn't on the Ubuntu PPA archive yet, only emacs22, published last year.
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).
I herd u liek Emacs. So I put an Emacs in yr Emacs so u can edit while u Tetris.
M-x firehose :)
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 ;-)
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.
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.
Emacs is now tied with Print Shop 23 for the highest version ever.
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."
Apple's special "youth empowerment" team is working on iHurd now. From now on, it's going to be known as iHurdYouTheFirstTime.
Because it includes an "Eliza style bot" that acts like a Rogerian therapist, that's why.
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.
Obligatory text editor comparison
my favorite!
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
emacs = Emulate Mac Software.
Uh... in that case, all I can say to the Emacs team is "Yer doin it wrong!"
The enemies of Democracy are
Tell me more about an "Eliza style bot" that acts like a Rogerian therapist, that's why.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
No, real programmers use cat >executable
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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
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.
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.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Totally serious answer: Yes.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
Imagine where Hurd would be now if all the effort behind EMACS was put on it.
In what way is Emacs not a modern IDE, other that it also works perfectly in console mode?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Did they fix that bug with the bad EAGAIN handling?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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
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).
Hell yeah! We can even do it using Mono, because that's not gonna blow on our faces
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.
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
I think version 42 will introduce M-x enter-singularity
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I never realized in the ageless war between Emacs and VI, that we even had high level defectors... :-)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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?
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.
What is it u Hurd?
I want to hur it, too.
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.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Who the hell say that you have to use the best tool for each task you need to perform?
No one?
ViM only needs 7 versions to get it right. Emacs is at 23?
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.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
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.
Somehow you misspelled "advantage" as "downside".
A text editor that's built around text is a good idea.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
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.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
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.
I am not a script!
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.
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.
...
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.
DISABLED ACCOUNT
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.
Imagine where Hurd would be now if all the effort behind EMACS was put on it.
It would have tetris in it?
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?
... until Emacs becomes self aware.
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.
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.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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:
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.
When I tried emacs it seemed like, well, a girl with fat ankles. Know what I mean?
What?
Horses for courses, I suppose. I can't stand doing Python in anything but Emacs.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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:
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
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
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.
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.
Whoops. A little bit of reading and testing lead me to come up with this bit of code for my
(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!
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.
Languages aren't inherently fast -- implementations are efficient
Yeah, I like this little section from the Wikipedia entry:
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
And the obligatory Hackles: http://www.hackles.org/cgi-bin/archives.pl?request=284
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
Is it sentient yet?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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..
---- Booth was a patriot ----