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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.
joe - Joe's Own Editor
Description
JOE is a powerful ASCII-text screen editor. It has a "mode-less" user interface which is similar to
many user-friendly PC editors. Users of Micro-Pro's WordStar or Borland's "Turbo" languages will
feel at home. JOE is a full featured UNIX screen-editor though, and has many features for editing
programs and text.
JOE also emulates several other editors. JSTAR is a close imitation of WordStar with many "JOE"
extensions. JPICO is a close imitation of the Pine mailing system's PICO editor, but with many
extensions and improvements. JMACS is a GNU-EMACS imitation. RJOE is a restricted version of JOE,
which allows you to edit only the files specified on the command line.
Although JOE is actually five different editors, it still requires only one executable, but one with
five different names. The name of the editor with an "rc" appended gives the name of JOE's initial-
ization file, which determines the personality of the editor.
JOE is free software; you can distribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Pub-
lic License as published by the Free Software Foundation. I have no plans for turning JOE into a
commercial or share-ware product. JOE is available over the Internet from www.source-
forge.net/projects/joe-editor.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
You make the mistake of thinking that emacs is a text editor. Emacs is an extensible framework, a display system with lots of scripting code underneath. In the early days it was basically just a text editor plus shell interface, but that quickly grew and the program became more flexible.
This is just like web browsers, which are basically just display systems designed to handle an arbitrary set of layouts that are given to it. In the early days they basically just gave you a list of scientific articles from the net and then would kick off an ftp program to fetch them for you, but today they can show video and let you do banking and so forth.
Ok, maybe I've been doing it wrong all these years, but emacs default indenting scheme is completely braindead imho. (or should I say GNU indenting scheme)
Of all the indenting schemes they could have chosen, they chose the one that is the most inconsistent.
Generally here are some common indentation schemes:
Tabs only
Spaces only
Tabs for indent level, spaces for alignment
Which one do you think emacs uses by default? None of the above.
No, emacs uses spaces for indenting 4 spaces, and tabs for indenting 8 spaces.
This means that if you write a function whose name is at indentation level 0, the braces will be indented by 2 spaces.
The code will be indented by 4 spaces. If you then start an if statement, the code in the if statement will be indented not by 8 spaces, but by 1 tab.
This is completely braindead and breaks completely if you ever over one of those files in an editor with tabs configured differently.
At least with the other approaches you can still open the file in an other editor and have the indentation levels make some kind of sense.