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
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?
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
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