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"Feline Herd" Offers Easier Package Management For Emacs

Posted by samzenpus on from the vim-coming-soon dept.

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."

10 of 142 comments (clear)

  1. Yawn by BringYourOwnBacon · · Score: 3, Funny

    Wake me when there's a Vim equivalent.

    1. Re:Yawn by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      well. you can always run Vim inside of Emacs

      captcha: satisfy

    2. Re:Yawn by Coryoth · · Score: 4, Funny

      Yes, emacs, in its glorious tolerance of even the worst free ideas, sports a Vim-equivalent mode.

      For users new to the world of UNIX editors Emacs supports the simpler Vi emulation via

      (setq global-map (make-sparse-keymap))

      which faithfully emulates a novice user's experience of vi.

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      Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
    3. Re:Yawn by BrokenHalo · · Score: 3, Informative

      It comes as no surprise that the first post is a bump to vi(m), and I (for one), don't really care that much. Whatever rocks your boat, say I.

      But the GUIfication of emacs is sad. The beauty of emacs is that as a text editor, it runs happily in console mode as well as in X11.

      I came across an instance not long ago when having installed a server system (i.e. without X11) from binaries, I fired up emacs to edit a config file, and it spat errors due to missing gtk libraries. That really pissed me off.

      The good news is that TECO, the direct ancestor to emacs still exists. The thing about TECO (Tape Editor/COrrector) is that although the wetware address space needs to be quite large to remember all those line-transmission-noise commands, if you use it a lot for a month or two, your muscle memory kicks in automatically. There is no menu, no GUI, no cruft, just a lean, fast and really scriptable editor that gets the job done.

  2. too much package management by stenvar · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  3. Ahh, EMACS by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 4, Funny

    Truly, it would be the world's most perfect operating system, if only it had a decent text editor.

  4. EMACS SUCKS AND SO DOES YOUR MOTHER! by magic+maverick+ · · Score: 4, Funny

    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."

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    HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
  5. Re:"divergent package manager paradigms" by Phillip2 · · Score: 3, Informative

    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

  6. "Feline Herd?" by Tarlus · · Score: 3, Informative

    I believe the proper term is "clowder."

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  7. Ya right by Murdoch5 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.