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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.
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.
I seriously doubt Alan Cox is going to upgrade
1. M-x visual-line-mode RET (or Options->Line Wrapping->Word Wrap)
2. Live happily ever after.
Oh I totally agree. For example, just today I was writing a program that needs to load in around 1000 sequentially-numbered images. Like any decent coder, I had typed all of the filenames into my main program loop. But then my manager called me up to let me know that the base filename of the images had changed! You can just imagine the sinking feeling I had in my stomach, knowing that I would need to retype every single filename! It would have taken me hours, if not for the macro recording functionality in Emacs. Thanks, Emacs.
It doesn't stop there, of course. I needed a function to count how many images had been loaded in, and save that number as a string. Then my boss phones me to say that they don't want image #0003 any more. Think of all the 'if/then' statements I'd have been forced to rewrite by hand, if it wasn't for Emacs!
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
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