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"Feline Herd" Offers Easier Package Management For Emacs
First time accepted submitter chris.kohlhepp writes "The Emacs editor just got consolidated package management with "Feline Herd", offering 2000+ packages under one roof. No struggle with convoluted keyboard shortcuts — only easy GUI navigation via toolbar buttons! Every conceivable programming language is handled. Cuts the Emacs learning curve to a minimum for learners."
Wake me when there's a Vim equivalent.
This would have been great 20 years ago. But these days, I can just apt-get install Emacs packages. Of course, on some other platforms, this may still be useful, but on Linux systems with built-in package management, these extra application specific package management systems can cause version conflicts and are best avoided.
Truly, it would be the world's most perfect operating system, if only it had a decent text editor.
It lets people be elitist and factional, of course.
Ah yes.... still using Emacs in 2013 is elitist. Of course.
Is that same way that providing universal healthcare is elitist?
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
VIM & VI also suck. The standard editor is, ed. Obviously. Ed. "Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity."
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
Emacs with packages like ProofGeneral, agda-mode, tuareg-mode, haskell-mode, SLIME and so on is the most convenient (or sometimes the only) frontend to some of the finest programming languages and theorem provers. On top of that there's org-mode for everything else from managing notes, writing big documenets, doing spreadsheet stuff and the like. I often call Emacs the Eclipse for the rest of us. It's not so much a mere editor but a platform to build interfaces to other tools on.
Not that people who only care about their own use cases would be particularly impressed by what other people do with Emacs. Me, I don't care. I get my work done in Emacs, thank you very much.
The different factions do different things. ELPA is server based, but works with a raw Emacs. el-get gets files in a number of ways, but I suspect that git checkouts are the most common. But you need git installed.
I suspect it will come together a bit more eventually though.
Phil
I believe the proper term is "clowder."
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I'm assuming to launch the GUI you need to do "CTRL + A + SHIFT + INS + X + F1 + ! + ALT + T", I don't believe Emacs has a simple learning curve in anyway shape or form, I've tried to learn / use Emacs many times over the last few years and it's never been a good go, this why I use Vim.
Ah yes.... still using Emacs in 2013 is elitist. Of course.
It would be more accurate to generalize that and say that there exist people who use this kind of software and develop an "elitist" or "purist" attitude. I've seen it happen with all manner of TUI and CLI software. Also with *nix operating systems in general. Basically anything with a steep learning curve.
Even in 2013. The statement is "I prefer more complicated software than what you use, so that makes me smarter than you." Of course not everybody has this attitude, but there are some who do.
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Hi, oldtimer here.
I know plenty of recent and 'more productive tools', as well as the older stuff.
Also, I know the correct usage of "let's"...which your modern tool appears to have missed.
(Clue: "let us" rather than "allows")
Sometimes the tool is the thing behind the keyboard.
What is the relevance of Unix today? Seriously, Unix is around because it is still useful and still does stuff better than the alternatives. Emacs which is only trivially older than Unix is around because it is still useful and still does stuff better than the alternatives. This is not a set of macros running inside of TECO anymore, it has changed since then.
Lucid Emacs was ok, but things have greatly evolved since then as well. The only real hiccup in the Emacs world I find is on Windows. Native versions use native file name schemes which is bad and they don't interoperate well with Cygwin, but non-native versions often want X11 which is clumsy to use on Windows. So on Windows I used XEmacs (direct descendant of Lucid). However on MacOS I use Aquamacs which is very nice and well integrated with Mac way of doing things. Biggest problem for all of them is finding a decent font; you want and need a fixed point font but those are very often the ugliest ones on a system and so you're forced to hunt down third party fonts (same problem with using terminal and console windows).
The only real thing it has that separates it from the typical IDE is that it doesn't have windows glued together in MDI style; you can lay out individual windows to look similar but you can't resize them on the fly without readjusting them all. But it did the stuff IDEs do long before IDEs were around; it had language sensitive modes and coloring, integration with compiler and build, integration with source code control. If it's not there then you can write it. And that's why there are so many packages for it now and why you need a package manager.
In software development today it is still active. I am using it daily, and at work I see plenty of people using it, or vi, or slickedit, or even IDEs. Even by people under thirty. You are always more efficient with tools that you know and are familiar with than reverting to a simplified form of point and click or referring to key binding cheat sheets. I am certainly not going to be elitist and tell some xyzedit user that my editor can do it better, and yet I see people who think that it's ok to bash all text editors on general principle, with misguided ideas that we're wasting hours a day.
Well, the editor is really good. It's fast and light. It's works with pretty much every language every invented and several that haven't yet. It integrates fantastically with all the different version control systems out there. You can plug it into any command line tool that you want. It's got find and grep support. You can connect to remote machines via ssh. You can use it entirely without a mouse. It has some incredible buffer and file switching facilities that mean you can open the right file instantly. It's got org-mode, which is a work of insane genius. If you do lisp it has paredit which has been widely copied.
You can configure it however you like. I configure it so that it does different things on different machines but feels that same to me; I've also got a custom colour scheme for use on my laptop, when it's sunny, It works over X, so I can use my desktop while plugged into the wall; you can also have two people editing the same file in different places this way. When it doesn't have a mode for what every you are editing, it's not that hard to write one. You can release these and people will help to improve them for you.
it's not as polished at editing Java as Eclipse that's true. It's a jack of all trades. If I worked on one project, in one language, I would use eclipse (or whatever was best for that one language). Because I switch a lot I use emacs. Actually, at the moment, I am doing a lot of clojure, so I'd use Emacs anyway. But that's a side issue.