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

[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

[jrumney]

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

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

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

[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.

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!