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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.
Now if it only included a text editor.
Emacs OS - I know it is missing a text editor - but does it support systemd?
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. . . .
M-x doctor
M-x hanoi
M-x tetris
But you knew that already, didn't you?
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."
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.
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.