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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."
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?
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.
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
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
I seriously doubt Alan Cox is going to upgrade
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 ;-)
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.
1. M-x visual-line-mode RET (or Options->Line Wrapping->Word Wrap)
2. Live happily ever after.
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.
Emacs is merely a TECO macro.
Given enough random characters and memory space, TECO can simulate the human brain.
--
BMO
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? /console /terminal
man emacs
nope..
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.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Because it includes an "Eliza style bot" that acts like a Rogerian therapist, that's why.
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 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!
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).