Emacs 24.1 Released

First time accepted submitter JOrgePeixoto writes "Emacs 24.1 has been released. New features include a new packaging system and interface (M-x list-packages), support for displaying and editing bidirectional text, support for lexical scoping in Emacs Lisp, improvements to the Custom Themes system, unified/improved completion system in many modes and packages and support for GnuTLS (for built-in TLS/SSL encryption), GTK+ 3, ImageMagick, SELinux, and Libxml2."

Comments

I wonder

[aglider]

whether there's still an ongoing debate about "emacs vs vi".

Re:I wonder

[vlm]

whether there's still an ongoing debate about "emacs vs vi".

Sure. If you need to change one line in /etc/puppet/modules/apache/files/http.conf or whatever, its silly to light up emacs and make sure you had originally SSH'ed into the puppetmaster with -X for X forwarding blah blah blah. On the other hand if you're doing "serious" all day long software development, the emacs IDE remains superior to anything else out there, and far superior to vi. All you need to do is close the view of the world down to narrow little tasks and its off to the races.

I've used both, but never interchangeably, they each have their optimum "area".

Re:I wonder

[Baloroth]

whether there's still an ongoing debate about "emacs vs vi".

Nah, people realized it was silly to still be comparing a text editor to an OS.

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

But LEXICAL SCOPING isn't one of them!

Re:I wonder

[UnknowingFool]

This was settled ages ago. Anyone who is a real programmer uses butterflies.

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

for X forwarding blah blah blah

On the contrary, as a die-hard emacs user, I alias emacs to /usr/bin/emacs -nw when I'm not on an operating system that offers a version compiled without X support. Text editors, of all things, should respect being run in TTYs.

Re:I wonder

[Chrisq]

But LEXICAL SCOPING isn't one of them!

oh bitch - I'll scratch your eyes out

Re:I wonder

[knuthin]

Did you ever feel that "emacs -nw" takes a while to start? Even more than vim or gVim?

Referring to what vlm said: I don't know what emacs does or how it starts, but I guess it is doing too much of computation on things that make it an IDE (or an OS) than a simple text editor.

Re:I wonder

[tuffy]

A more common issue is that Emacs just isn't installed by default on as many servers. So it's a good idea to know how to use vi to go to a line, perform a search, insert some text and save the file at the very least.

Re:I wonder

[DdJ]

If you need to change one line in /etc/puppet/modules/apache/files/http.conf or whatever, its silly to light up emacs and make sure you had originally SSH'ed into the puppetmaster with -X for X forwarding blah blah blah.

Heh, I almost always launch emacs with the "-nw" switch, and when I'm installing it on my own machines, I install the "-nox" flavor of the packages. I've been using Emacs since version 18 back in the 1980s, and we didn't need no fancy GUI back then, and I don't want it today neither.

You kids get off my lawn.

(Still, I do fire up vi for very small very simple editing tasks. And sometimes I try to drive both sides of the flamewar crazy by running Emacs in vi-emulation mode.)

Re:I wonder

[CronoCloud]

Obligatory XKCD reference:

There's an emacs command for that, ol C-x M-c M-butterfly

http://xkcd.com/378/

Re:I wonder

[Ed Avis]

X forwarding? You mean you've never tried emacs in tty mode? You haven't *lived*! IMHO, the days of having to use some other editor to make a 'quick change' are past. Modern hardware is so quick that starting emacs to edit a config file is pretty much instant.

Re:I wonder

[drjones78]

Of course there is....

But with evil-mode being such an amazing vi-like environment for emacs, for me, its really hard to justify vim anymore (even though I was a big vim guy for years). And org-mode rocks.

There are some nice plugins for vim these days though, that have no easy equivalent in emacs. Syntastic, for example, just works out of the box and does a lot of advanced things that emacs requires tons of lisp twiddling to accomplish... but oh well.

Re:I wonder

[jrumney]

$ time emacs -nw -Q --eval "(kill-emacs)"

real 0m0.069s user 0m0.036s sys 0m0.012s

Re:I wonder

[Bill_the_Engineer]

I think continued use of either piece of software reflects a rigid anti-change mentality that is stuck in the past and against learning new things.

It could indicate that the editors are very good, perform their tasks well, and the new things aren't good enough to replace either vim or emacs. Why learn a new editor just for the sake of using a new editor?

Re:I wonder

[idontgno]

A real emacs user doesn't "light up emacs" to make trivial changes to configuration files - a real emacs logs directly into emacs as login shell in /etc/passwd

FTFY.

Re:I wonder

[FitForTheSun]

Whatever, whippersnapper. I scratch ideograms into pads of soft clay.

Re:I wonder

[CanEHdian]

whether there's still an ongoing debate about "emacs vs vi".

No, that was preempted when WINE announced support for Notepad.exe

Re:I wonder

[INowRegretThesePosts]

Emacs does that via TRAMP.

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

Please learn about daemon mode.

emacs --daemon
alias edit='/usr/bin/emacsclient -n -c -a nano'
edit somefile.txt

If you didn't previously start emacs, it will start nano. Either way, you'll have super fast editing without the need for vi. Of course, you can always use vi in place of nano - or whichever editor you prefer.

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

So you don't use Emacs as replacement for /sbin/init? How quaint!

Re:I wonder

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

My fave emacs joke:

Emacs would be a hell of an operating system if someone would just write a decent text editor for it.

Re:I wonder

[vlm]

7s ?!

My computer is modest, and it doesn't take all that time.

Doing "admin stuff" on a production server (emergency, whatever) means the specs don't matter, its going to be busy. If it wasn't busy, then I failed when I over-speced it, or its purpose in life is incredibly low demand by modern standards (dns server, dhcp server, etc).

To some extent, if everything was working well, I'd not be changing things on the fly, would just be changing my puppet recipe and waiting a half hour...

Re:I wonder

[knuthin]

No, because emacsclient is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

No. It's the best thing since emacs. Wouldn't make any sense for it to exist before emacs.

Re:I wonder

[Darinbob]

I tend to use emacsclient for many things, so my command line sends the file to the already running emacs window.

For remote systems or those I'm unfamiliar with, I still use vi. I switch between them easily enough.

LiveCD

[Anonymous Coward]

Where can I download the LiveCD?

Let's get these out of the way

[slimjim8094]

Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping, it's a great OS but it needs a text editor, etc.

Seriously though, it's really excellent that such a mature project can continue to advance. Not many projects can continue to grow for 36 years

Re:Let's get these out of the way

[geminidomino]

Not many projects can continue to grow for 36 years

No shit. Thank the gods that RAM and HDDs have kept pace!

Re:Let's get these out of the way

[gman003]

Well I thought it stood for Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift.

Maybe I'm just too young for the Eight Megabytes one to make sense. I just can't think of 8MB as "too big to fit in RAM" - I think I've hit 8GB before with some programs.

Re:Let's get these out of the way

[INowRegretThesePosts]

Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping

The bizarre part is that some people, who seam not to have used Emacs for years,
still claim it is slow. It _was_ slow, back when 8 Megabytes was a lot of memory.
These days it is fast.

And I say that as a guy who used to remove every unneeded byte from his
riced Gentoo box. Even though I now use Ubuntu, I still have some speed-freakery
inside.

Re:Let's get these out of the way

[jones_supa]

I think I'll stick to notepad++

Gedit's Windows version is also a very nice Notepad replacement.

Re:This is an outrage!!

[vlm]

Actually the only thing emacs is missing is an interface more like VI.

(insert gameshow Bzzzzt)

http://emacswiki.org/emacs/VimMode

Re:This is an outrage!!

[tuffy]

It's been done.

Wow!

[Chemisor]

Wow! Emacs now has more features than BSD!

Re:Wow!

[hcs_$reboot]

M-x post

Catching up to ten-year-old XEmacs features

[kriston]

Ahh, it's nice to see GNU Emacs finally bothering to catch up to these ten-year-old XEmacs features.

Re:Catching up to ten-year-old XEmacs features

[olau]

I like the anthropomorphized phrasing - as if Emacs itself woke on one day and said, hey, I'm going to hack my Bazaar repository and implement those features that this other not-yet-self-aware fork has had for a decade.

Note that for Emacs, a decade is just the blink of an eye.

Pico

[tepples]

That or learn Pico. Just about every shell account I've used has had either Pico or GNU Nano installed.

Emacs env and Emacs Muse

[unixisc]

Speaking of which, if one is working under Emacs, rather than ash/bash/csh/...zsh as the interface to the OS, can one use other editors, be it vim, pico, nano or whatever other editor there may be under unix (I'm using the term loosely to cover linux, bsds, minix, svr4, or any other variant)

Another question - looking @ the GNU software directory, there is also an Emacs muse, which is 'an authoring and publishing environment for Emacs. It simplifies the process of writing documents and publishing them to various output formats.'. Has anybody ever tried that before? How is it, and what is the status of its development? How does it compare to similar tools from, say, Adobe? This seems to be one application that would do well under a CLI, and not need DEs to work under, and it would be a good extension of Emacs' capabilities.

Re:So, Emacs has become a better OS...

[unixisc]

Another suggestion - how about making all the GNU packages a part of Emacs? So that one can run, for example M-x-gnucash?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Wait

[INowRegretThesePosts]

I didn't understand you.
Can't you simply run Emacs in text-UI mode or, better yet, run it on the client using TRAMP
to access the files on the server?

Which editor?

[miltonw]

When I first started programming, I went to work at a software company that also provided consultants to their clients. At the software company, the editor-to-use was an editor created by one of their programmers. The editor was fantastic with many bells and whistles, customizable keys. Much easier to use than the common editor provided by the computer manufacturer.

So I mastered this fantastic editor.

Then I was sent out to my first assignment and this fantastic editor didn't exist there, I was in serious trouble. I had to quickly learn the common editor provided by the computer manufacturer.

I learned my lesson: First become a master of the common editor that is always installed so you can quickly handle all editing tasks, especially in an emergency -- then learn whichever editor you want.

I feel sorry for the emac-and-only-emacs gurus who, when confronted with a system lacking emacs have to flounder and misuse the always-available "vi" or "vim".

No matter how fantastic your editor-of-choice is, if you get on a system without that editor, what are you going to do?

Re:Which editor?

[Brett Diamond]

If your new Unix does not have emacs but you want to use it, then Install it. Or use one of the many editors that use the same key-strokes (zile, mg, tm). Heck, even nano/pico use emacs key-strokes for most of their operation. Long and short, if you learn the fantastic editor, you can bring it with you or use one of the lesser-featured editors that probably are available that map to your skill-set. To take the argument that "don't use X because it isn't guaranteed to be everywhere you will be in the future" a bit farther, you shouldn't use Unix because your next assignment might have you using Windows -- Windows may not be as good, it is everywhere, so use that.