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GNU Emacs 24.4 Released Today
New submitter Shade writes Well over one and a half years in the works, the latest and greatest release of GNU Emacs was made officially available today. Highlights of this release include a built-in web browser, improved multi-monitor and fullscreen support, "electric" indentation enabled by default, support for saving and restoring the state of frames and windows, pixel-based resizing for frames and windows, support for digitally signed ELisp packages, support for menus in text terminals, and much more. Read the official announcement and the full list of changes for more information.
It is perilously close to an operating system - in stark contrast to the usual unix philosophy of small tools to do single jobs well.
GNU is not Unix. :)
Emacs is not based on the UNIX.
It is based on the lisp machines.
The lisp machine have died, but Emacs still lives on.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
There are some JavaScripters at work, and lately they've been going all gaga over some text editor called Atom. They were telling the rest of us (we mostly use Vim and Emacs) about how great Atom is because it's developed by GitHub, and because it's developed as an HTML and JavaScript web app embedded in a standalone dedicated Chrome process, or something like that.
These guys tend to be wrong about most everything, but I figured that I should at least try Atom out on my own before making any judgement. Jesus Christ, what a laughably horrible experience it was!
I couldn't even find an official build for Linux. So I had to go borrow somebody's OS X laptop. You're not off to a good start, Atom!
Then I saw the size of the installer: over 60 MB! I couldn't fucking believe it! Why does does a basic text editor require an installation package that's over 60 MB?!
Well, I downloaded and installed it. I started it up, and it was, well, a pretty bare-bones text editor. The first thing I do with any text editor is to check out its preferences. Fuck me, Atom has what has got to be the worst preferences/configuration support I've ever seen in an GUI app. I thought Chrome's settings sucked ass. Atom manages to make it even worse! It's the worst of GUI configuration, with the worst of text file config.
Ignoring those problems, I decided to open up some files. Small files were rather slow to load. I thought that maybe it was just the computer, but nope, the same files loaded instantaneously in Emacs, Vim, and Nano. In Atom, I'd sit there waiting for them to finally open. Then it would take even longer before any syntax highlighting was finally applied.
Then I hit the most idiotic part of the whole experience when I went to open a 5 MB file. This file opens just fine in Vim, Emacs, Nano, and every other text editor I've ever tried. Atom? Nope! It said it couldn't open files greater than 2 MB! I'm not even kidding! Fucking unbelievable.
I just don't get these JavaScript guys. Their choice of programming language sucks. It's pure shit. They use git, which is supposedly a distributed VCS, but then they all totally centralize on GitHub! Then they think that Atom is a good text editor, when it can't even open a goddamn file that's larger than 2 MB! These JavaScript guys must be mentally deficient in some way. I don't want to call them retards, because I've never had a retard come up to me and tell me that JavaScript is "a good programming language" or that Atom is a "great text editor".
Can it read e-mail?
Serious question? :-)
Answer: I was able to read email and news within Emacs in the late 1980s. I imagine that's still true
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
There are quite a few ways (too many, which is an Emacs flaw) of achieving Source Browsing. ECB is a nice example, if you like the full windows environment. Mostly, though, I use ido.el and projectile. It's very quick. Indeed, the ability to move between files with extreme rapidity is one of the things that keeps me on Emacs.
The core of Emacs is very stable, and you get used to do things in certain ways. At times, you need to shake things about a bit and investigate new packages. While this comes with a cost, the benefit of Emacs is that the old ways still work. You won't get forced into a new way of working with each new release, if you are happy with the old.
Anarcobra description of what is happening is probably quite accurate (at least for some styles) but the problem is that he tries to give a complex interpretation to a simple behavior: What is actually happening in emacs is that everything is indented using spaces (of various numbers depending of the choosen style and context) and every sequence of 8 spaces (as controled by tab-width) is replaced by a TAB (unless indent-tabs-mode is nil).
If you wrongly believe that the indentation algorithm has rules to select spaces and tabs according to the current context then the behavior is likely to appear very strange. Most of the other editor I know also work using a similar approach except that their default tab width is smaller and their default indentation levels are choosen to match the tab width which gives the impression that everything is indented using TABs. Simply speaking, Emacs with a tab width of 2 or 4 will do exactly the same.
(setq-default indent-tabs-mode nil) .emacs file.
in your