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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.

30 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. Sounds nice by NoNonAlphaCharsHere · · Score: 5, Funny

    Now if it only included a text editor.

    1. Re:Sounds nice by xaosflux · · Score: 5, Funny

      Ahh, first post, I bet you prepped this offline in vi for super-speedy readiness.

    2. Re:Sounds nice by cold+fjord · · Score: 4, Funny

      What do you mean? Emacs can emulate vi.

      --
      much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
    3. Re:Sounds nice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      Or a systemd dependancy.

    4. Re:Sounds nice by ZipK · · Score: 2

      vi is too slow, with all that fancy screen movement. He used ed.

    5. Re:Sounds nice by __aaltlg1547 · · Score: 2, Funny

      What do you mean? Emacs can emulate vi.

      That's the best way to use it.

    6. Re:Sounds nice by ls671 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Only Linux versions using systemd are supported for now.

      --
      Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
    7. Re:Sounds nice by marcello_dl · · Score: 2

      They won't react badly unless emacs gets pulled as a dependency and renames network interfaces. Which it won't do because it is not cancer.

      --
      ---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
    8. Re:Sounds nice by tqk · · Score: 2

      but but but but it does more than one thing, its not the Unix Way ...

      That's what you guys have always misunderstood about emacs. It's really an operating system that merely looks like an editor.

      --
      "Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit ..." -- Pink Floyd.
  2. Emacs OS by ThePhilips · · Score: 4, Funny

    Emacs OS - I know it is missing a text editor - but does it support systemd?

    --
    All hope abandon ye who enter here.
    1. Re:Emacs OS by ThePhilips · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.
    2. Re:Emacs OS by Greyfox · · Score: 2

      Did you try meta-x systemd?

      --

      I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?

  3. Better EMACS 24.4 download link by gregben · · Score: 2

    The mirrors don't all have the latest version yet, so you can download here:

    http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/e...

  4. At least Emacs can open files over 2 MB in size. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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".

  5. Lost me because of Java by iamacat · · Score: 2

    IntelliJ code inspection and refactoring features are so great that it's worth sacrificing power tools like apply-macro-to-region-lines. Maybe theoretically some of these things could be configured in Emacs, but work to discover the packages and create/learn keyboard shortcuts is too much for my patience. It would help to have "emacs distributions" with task specific documentation for particular use cases.

    1. Re:Lost me because of Java by davids-world.com · · Score: 2
  6. Re:I think I know the question on all our minds by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 4, Informative

    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. . . .
  7. An integrated web browser? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Systemd had that since release 215.

  8. Re:I think I know the question on all our minds by Wintermute__ · · Score: 3, Funny

    M-x doctor
    M-x hanoi
    M-x tetris

    But you knew that already, didn't you?

  9. Re:I think I know the question on all our minds by Shade · · Score: 2

    Yes, with "M-x doctor" and "M-x hanoi". They've been there for longer than I can remember (which is to say, a lot). More details in the relevant section of the manual.

  10. Re:THIS JUST IN... by ls671 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.
  11. Still no decent source browser integration by Magnus+Pym · · Score: 2

    I've used Emacs for more than 20 years, but cannot justify that any more; the source browsing integration of modern IDEs is just too nice and the editing goodness that is Emacs is just not enough.

    1. Re:Still no decent source browser integration by Phillip2 · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

  12. Re:do one thing and do it well by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm shocked (shorting out usb ports need fixing) I haven't seen this posted... I guess if it doesn't say systemd that rhetoric doesn't apply.

    Because the people who don't like emacs don't use it. No one builds software with emacs as a dependency and then tried to get every Linux environment to use it as a core dependency.

    Emacs is a good citizen. It is cross-platform, stable, and easily replaceable. Unlike it-that-must-not-be-named.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  13. Re:I think I know the question on all our minds by Darinbob · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  14. Start rant here by anarcobra · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Start rant here by KingOfBLASH · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Like so many things in emacs, this is probably easy to fix if only you spoke lisp ;)

    2. Re:Start rant here by geantvert · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

         

    3. Re:Start rant here by daffmeister · · Score: 3, Informative

      (setq-default indent-tabs-mode nil)
      in your .emacs file.

  15. systemd by LocutusOfBorg1 · · Score: 2

    Can it replace systemd?