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GNU Emacs Now Has Native Support For GTK Widgets (phoronix.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The GNU Emacs text editor now has merged the X Widgets branch. What this work allows is for embedding GTK+ user interface widgets within Emacs for features like landing MPlayer or a full web browser in Emacs. This allows now for more endless opportunities for the 40 year old GNU text editor. The X/GTK widgets support will come with GNU Emacs 25.1.

133 comments

  1. Old joke even more true.... by cant_get_a_good_nick · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Emacs would be a hell of an operating system if someone would just write a decent text editor for it.

    1. Re: Old joke even more true.... by aglider · · Score: 2

      You have a choice between vi, vim and neovim. It's up to you. :wq!

      --
      Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
    2. Re:Old joke even more true.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Emacs isn't a text editor. Emacs is an interactive environment for the development of text editing programs.

    3. Re:Old joke even more true.... by PPH · · Score: 5, Funny

      Emacs is the purest implementation of Zawinski's Law

      --
      Disclaimer - These opiini^H^H damn! ^H^H ^Q ^[ .... :w :q :wq :wq! ^d exit X Q ^C ^? :quitbye CtrlAltDel ~~q :~q logout save/quit :!QUIT ^[zz ^[ZZZZZZ ^H man vi ^@ ^L ^[c ^# ^E ^X ^I ^T ? help helpquit ^D man quit ^C ^c ?Quit ?q CtrlShftDel "Hey, what does this button d..."

      --
      Have gnu, will travel.
    4. Re:Old joke even more true.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Someone has. It's called evil mode. Extensible VI Layer. But compared to VIM Emacs has also org-mode which is just great. If I just would have know about that earlier.

    5. Re:Old joke even more true.... by gstoddart · · Score: 1

      Has that been updated to include Facebook, Twitter, or Minecraft?

      I'm not even sure kids use email these days.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    6. Re: Old joke even more true.... by sumdumass · · Score: 1

      Hmm. Running vim inside emacs. You sure the universe wouldn't explode and create a giant black hole or something?

    7. Re:Old joke even more true.... by Shane_Optima · · Score: 1

      Which is a special case of the inner platform effect. But this isn't always a bad thing. If the plugins are all built using the same language, libraries, and hooks then by mastering one platform you've theoretically mastered the ability to customize, automate, or chain together anything that runs on that platform. It's an appealing thought: a GUI version of a shell with powered by a much more expressive (if parentheses-heavy) language... but the learning curve is fairly steep and (as with most projects that have been around for many decades) its need for backwards compatibility and lack of novel coolness to attract fresh blood means it's not yet compatible with a lot of commonly used stuff.

      This is certainly a big step in the right direction, but I hope it isn't too little, too late. We'll know they're on the right track if and when people finally let the old jokes die and start referring to emacs as a platform instead of a text editor with extensions.

    8. Re: Old joke even more true.... by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 2

      Hmm. Running vim inside emacs. You sure the universe wouldn't explode and create a giant black hole or something?

      Emacs already has a vi/vim emulation mode - along with several other editors.

      --
      It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
    9. Re:Old joke even more true.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's not that Emacs is that great of a text editor, it's that the alternatives are so bad in comparison.

    10. Re:Old joke even more true.... by John+Bokma · · Score: 1

      One has been able to send tweets from Emacs for years.

    11. Re:Old joke even more true.... by gstoddart · · Score: 0

      LOL ... please tell me you're joking. I can never tell with kitchen sink, I mean, emacs.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    12. Re:Old joke even more true.... by mea2214 · · Score: 1

      I'd like to see an emacs editor embedded within emacs.

    13. Re:Old joke even more true.... by CronoCloud · · Score: 2
    14. Re:Old joke even more true.... by gstoddart · · Score: 0

      Wow ... so ... what are we up to now? 8,762 pounds of shit in a 5 pound bag?

      Yeah, I reiterate, I've found that ridiculous for the last 20 years. I see nothing has changed.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    15. Re:Old joke even more true.... by TangoMargarine · · Score: 1

      You can run a terminal instance within emacs, on which you can open another instance of emacs.

      Of course it screws up the key chords because you have to specify whether they're for the inner or outer emacs.

      --
      Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
    16. Re:Old joke even more true.... by Mister+Liberty · · Score: 2

      That's a rather roundabout way of saying "I've had my head up my ass for the last thirty years".

    17. Re:Old joke even more true.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Why is it ridiculous?

      I've used emacs for 20 years almost purely as a text editor, though it was my email client for about five years. The beauty of emacs is that you *can* do almost anything, but it doesn't make you. If all you want is a text editor, that's all it is, and you won't even know it can do other things unless you try to make it.

      "Products" (word, firefox, etc...) will try to force you to use the new and useless (to you) capabilities with every release and prevent you from using it as the simple tool that you want. Emacs is the simple tool that you want first and foremost, and if you want more, it probably is that as well.

      It is perfect.

    18. Re:Old joke even more true.... by Darinbob · · Score: 2

      If you look at Emacs today, it's relatively small overall. The old joke gets stale because it's gone from being an example of a giant software package into something that is dwarfed by other packages. What makes it big is that it has a programming language which means there are thousands of optional user created programs for it. Meanwhile there are editors much bigger than Emacs which are not nearly as extensible.

      Emacs is a textual display system with a programming language to use it, with several primitives related to editing. The editor part itself is added with the programming language.

    19. Re:Old joke even more true.... by PPH · · Score: 1

      send tweets from Emacs

      Next task: Pipe the Emacs psychiatrist straight to Twitter and run as a background process. That ought to keep the Twits busy for a while.

      --
      Have gnu, will travel.
    20. Re:Old joke even more true.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Can you run Nano in Emacs?

    21. Re:Old joke even more true.... by rssrss · · Score: 1

      mod it up +5 very funny

      --
      In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
    22. Re:Old joke even more true.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That works. And it not as daft as it sounds. It might be good for running Emacs tests with debugging switched on.

    23. Re:Old joke even more true.... by jrumney · · Score: 1

      The OP probably sees Twitter integration as ridiculous, because like 99% of the population he sees Twitter as a "social" web site / mobile app for killing a few minutes of boredom with every now and then. But some people do things with Twitter that are useful to integrate into a workflow of some sort, where having the messages right there there while doing something else, and possibly automatically parsed and/or generated is actually usefui.

    24. Re: Old joke even more true.... by KGIII · · Score: 1

      I'm pretty sure that this is the straw that broke the camel's back. At some point you have to stop adding stuff. Well, no... You don't HAVE to. But you SHOULD. Who thought that this would be a good idea and how come nobody smacked them? Were they drunk? Stoned? It's a text editor. Well, no. It's supposed to be a text editor. There's probably a compiler built into it by now. It's got games in it. It's got a browser in it now, if you want to build it. It's no longer a text editor.

      You can't even say it's a text editor with a straight face - can you? I know I can't. I tried. Nope. I tried again. I can kind of keep a straight face and say it but I know I couldn't tell a n00b that it was a text editor with a straight face. Hell, I wouldn't wish emacs on a n00b - I don't even wish it on me! And the GNU folks are still calling it, on their page, a text editor.

      We bitch about systemd for overreach but emacs is the worst offender at breaking "The Unix Way" that I can think of! You can probably now use emacs as a fucking video player. Ain't nobody getting any work done now. But, damn it, you'll have a shortcut for it. Probably something with a a colon. :tv or something. I'd not be surprised if someone figured out a way to use init, the kernel, and emacs and have their own damned tiny ass distro. I almost think you could do that with not much more. It'd be lacking some features but I'd not be surprised if someone finally did it.

      I mean, come on now, this is just past the point of insanity. I am not even embarrassed to admit that there are features in emacs that I've never even discovered - I'm positive of this.

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    25. Re:Old joke even more true.... by CronoCloud · · Score: 1

      Playing devils advocate here. But does Emacs follow the Unix Philosophy of doing ONE thing and one thing well?

      Not anymore it doesn't.

    26. Re: Old joke even more true.... by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 1

      At some point you have to stop adding stuff. Well, no... You don't HAVE to. But you SHOULD.

      The GTK stuff seems dumb, but most of the extensions are loadable modules written in LISP and the "E" in Emacs stands for Extensible, so adding stuff is kind of the point. Back in the day of just ASCII terminals, a lot of the stuff Emacs did was very helpful. Using it as an IDE, auto-formating code, starting a compile (via a Makefile) and parsing the compiler output so you could jump directly to the files and lines with the errors, etc... Being able to FTP files in/out of buffers. Arbitrarily splitting screens (horz. and/or vert.) multiple times. The list goes on and on. Sure some of that is OBE with windowing systems, but one can be *very* productive in Emacs. And the programming language is LISP (a language I used as a (paid) research assistant in college - on a Xerox LISP workstation no less).

      --
      It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
    27. Re: Old joke even more true.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You can probably now use emacs as a fucking video player. Ain't nobody getting any work done now.

      That would be EMMS

      If you pay attention to it, it IS following the Unix Way.

    28. Re: Old joke even more true.... by KGIII · · Score: 1

      I haven't decided if that's awesome or insane.

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    29. Re: Old joke even more true.... by KGIII · · Score: 1

      Yeah, I mean I get it but, really, still, today, and GTK now? I'm serious, you could almost have a fully functioning OS based on the kernel, an init system (systemd would work but I wasn't going to mention that in my first post) and just emacs if you wanted to extend it out. I guess you'd still want Perl installed, probably Python, a compiler, but one could make a fairly robust but very small (yet functional) desktop OS out of this at this point - well, this and a few other things. If it were just a consumption desktop device you could get away with even fewer things - probably a small package manager to keep things up to date but I bet you could actually add that to emacs with a little bit of work - simply :apt-get or similar.

      I don't know if it's insane or brilliant. I can't quite figure it out. :/

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    30. Re: Old joke even more true.... by cthulhu11 · · Score: 1

      This is one reason to use the nox build

    31. Re:Old joke even more true.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      emacs is not a command line utility. It's an application, and really a window environment and shell.

      And, didn't it originate on LISP-machines, not unix, so why would it be expected to adhere to that philosophy?

      But yes, it edits text really well.

      If you want adhere to the unix philosophy, then vi is a bloated pig too. Stick with cat, ed and sed if you want to edit something like a real unix user.

  2. VI is forever by aglider · · Score: 2

    You insensitive text mode clods!

    --
    Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
    1. Re:VI is forever by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Look at this guy, I bet you don't even use Vi in Ed mode!

      Captcha: pedant

    2. Re:VI is forever by 110010001000 · · Score: 1

      Hey people: "vi" is all lowercase. - President Pedant.

  3. And nothing of value was added ... by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Seriously, this is SUCH a niche product. Everyone uses a VI clone because it's guaranteed to be present on *nux systems.

    --
    "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
    1. Re:And nothing of value was added ... by buchner.johannes · · Score: 1

      IIRC Ubuntu does not come with vim, but nano as a text editor for terminals (gedit for graphical). Which is fine.

      --
      NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
    2. Re:And nothing of value was added ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I can't remember any time ever that I built an ubuntu vm and it didn't have at least vim.tiny. Centos on the other hand only has vi by default.

      Of course, there is always the standard text EDitor

    3. Re:And nothing of value was added ... by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Funniest thing I ever saw was a guy who was so utterly dependent on his emacs as to be crippled without it ... and then he's on a client site, on a Solaris workstation he can't install software onto ... and the only editor he had was vi. He was almost in tears (we were too but from laughing at him).

      Anybody who is going to use unix-type systems and doesn't know how to do at least some basics in vi is just asking to be made to look like an idiot.

      I must confess, I've never grasped this incessant need to do everything from within emacs. I find it tends to create people who spend endless hours honing their editor instead of doing their jobs, and who suddenly can't do anything without all the training wheels they've added.

      Seriously, check the damned weather somewhere else.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    4. Re:And nothing of value was added ... by chispito · · Score: 1

      IIRC Ubuntu does not come with vim, but nano as a text editor for terminals (gedit for graphical). Which is fine.

      It's there.

      --
      The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
    5. Re:And nothing of value was added ... by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Seriously, this is SUCH a niche product. Everyone uses a VI clone because it's guaranteed to be present on *nux systems.

      Emacs is a niche product? I've used Emacs (or XEmacs) on every system I've every used and/or administered, from PCs running BSD, Linux and Windows to just about every known mid-large Unix BDS/SysV system to Cray supercomputers since the mid 1980s. (Running Emacs on a Cray 2 is truly a guilty pleasure.) True I may have had to install (or build and install) it myself, but still hardly niche.

      Of course, I *also* know vi/vim for simple editing tasks. For serious programming, I always use Emacs or XEmacs. One can always use the vi/vim emulation mode in Emacs... :-)

      --
      It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
    6. Re:And nothing of value was added ... by david.emery · · Score: 0

      Mod parent up, this is my experience, too. (And I love Aquamacs on my Mac.)

      Why is it I don't have moderator points when I really want them?

    7. Re:And nothing of value was added ... by aglider · · Score: 1

      IIRC Ubuntu does not come with vim, but nano as a text editor for terminals (gedit for graphical). Which is fine.

      Open a terminal and type "vi" followed by ENTER key.
      What can you see now?

      --
      Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
    8. Re:And nothing of value was added ... by aglider · · Score: 1

      Open a terminal in your Linux box and type "emacs" followed by the ENTER key. Can you see the difference?

      --
      Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
    9. Re:And nothing of value was added ... by hawk · · Score: 1

      I recall a time 10 or 15 years ago when I actually had to use ed . . . I vaguely want today that the debian I was using had dynamically linked vi, or some such, and it just wasn't available that early in the boot sequence. Or maybe /usr or /bin hadn't mounted; it's been a while.

      What I really remember from it was the shock of needing to use ed for the first time in decades, and relief that I could pull it off . . .

      hawk

    10. Re:And nothing of value was added ... by david.emery · · Score: 1

      Yes, I can. Emacs run from the terminal is the classic Emacs experience. Aquamacs has a lot tighter integration with Mac OS X including better handling of both frames and windows.

    11. Re:And nothing of value was added ... by CronoCloud · · Score: 1

      I must confess, I've never grasped this incessant need to do everything from within emacs. I find it tends to create people who spend endless hours honing their editor instead of doing their jobs, and who suddenly can't do anything without all the training wheels they've added.

      They do it because thats all they know. They started using computers as the bearded priesthood in the 70's at MIT or Stanford when all they had was some Terminal with some wacky keyboard with waaaaay too many modifier keys.

      Remember that emacs started as a set of macros for TECO, which was written in 1964. They Modified emacs to basically handle multiple applications and be a windowing system before there were any available windowing systems. Using emacs to do multiple things let one visually see the applications/processes/files in a way that "screen" or the standard process control functions can't do. For example, the picture of an Emacs session on wikipedia is basically showing it acting like Norton Commander would on early DOS machines.

      So essentially Stallman and the other Emacs grognards use Emacs as their GUI.

    12. Re:And nothing of value was added ... by Anthony · · Score: 0

      Voices of sanity in a sea of snark. Which keyindings do people use for their shell?

      When I started as a sysadmin and wanted to muscle-memorise the vi commands, I would run 'set -o vi'. Worked a treat. After I discovered the joy of emacs, it was 'set -o emacs' .

      --
      Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
    13. Re:And nothing of value was added ... by gstoddart · · Score: 1

      And yet in my experience most of the rest of the UNIX greybeards I have met ... most of the time they fire up vi.

      Emacs is as much a cultural thing as anything else. You came from an emacs shop and drank the kool-aid, or you simply don't have any interest in it.

      I cut my teeth on unix systems which didn't have emacs by default, by the time I saw it I was happy with vi and looked at emacs and went "what the hell?".

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    14. Re:And nothing of value was added ... by ClickOnThis · · Score: 2

      I recall a time 10 or 15 years ago when I actually had to use ed . . .

      [...]

      What I really remember from it was the shock of needing to use ed for the first time in decades, and relief that I could pull it off . . .

      Bless you, sir. You have not lost the pure faith.

      --
      If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
    15. Re:And nothing of value was added ... by Darinbob · · Score: 1

      Everyone? Emacs is on Macs (though it's text only). Most people I know go out of their way to stick their favorite editors on their systems, SlickEdit, JavaBeans, even full blown IDEs. I use vi and Emacs both. Why not?

      I do remember days when vi was not present on all unix systems. Had to use ed on occasion.

    16. Re:And nothing of value was added ... by ClickOnThis · · Score: 2

      Why is it I don't have moderator points when I really want them?

      I just use this command:

      M-15 M-x get-slashdot-mod-points

      --
      If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
    17. Re:And nothing of value was added ... by david.emery · · Score: 2

      Too late! I've already posted and disqualified myself.

    18. Re:And nothing of value was added ... by Darinbob · · Score: 2

      The need is because so many things require editing of some form. So you do a mail reader in emacs because you can compose your emails using the same editor that you use to edit everything else, and without spawning it as a subprocess of the mail reader. Same for news reader, etc. Same keystrokes, same commands, same environment. When the alternative was the standard command line "mail" then using Emacs was a vast improvement.

      The other reason is that you can write your own and customize the hell out of it. Remember that Emacs is not a text editor, rather Emacs is a programmable system that includes an editor. So you use that programming system to program your own tools. You could not even start to do anything like this the original vi, it had no programming language. It allows for some simple integration of development tools: compile the current code you're looking at and pop up the error messages and scroll through them. This integrated the edit/compile/debug cycle back when when most people hadn't even heard of IDEs (except perhaps on Lisp Machines and the like).

      The endless hours comes from the ability to customize. When you're stuck with an uncustomizable tool then you don't spend that time customizing but you do spend a lot of time wasted on the frustration of inadequate tools.

    19. Re:And nothing of value was added ... by Darinbob · · Score: 1

      When the only UI was an ascii terminal, that was very handy. You've got a VT100 with 24 lines only (and maybe a 25th status line). If your typical work cycle is "edit with vi then exist", "compile with cc", "remember line number of error", "edit with vi to fix error", and so on, then being able to do it all from one program is handy. Why run the shell inside of Emacs? Because you can scroll up and down and see previous shell output which you can't do with just a raw shell (though windowing systems removed a lot of that). "Screen" can do some of that but screen wasn't always available, and why learn and use screen when you've already got a tool that can do what screen does but lots more besides?

      Part of the problem with Emacs detractors I think is that they view Emacs as an editor. But it's not an editor. It's a system that has a built in editor.

    20. Re:And nothing of value was added ... by Darinbob · · Score: 1

      I use both vi and emacs also. So I surprise some people who see me use vi and then say "wait, if you know vi then why do you use emacs?"

    21. Re:And nothing of value was added ... by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 1

      I use both vi and emacs also. So I surprise some people who see me use vi and then say "wait, if you know vi then why do you use emacs?"

      When I get asked things like that I reply, because Emacs can do everything Vi does and more, but not the other way around. Then I show them my 300+ page GBC-bound printed copy of the Emacs manual from the 1980s (that I printed/bound myself way back when) and note that it doesn't even cover the thousands of elisp libraries that can be loaded ... :-)

      Yes, Vi is a fine editor for simple things and many, many people use it productively for more, but - quite frankly - there really isn't a more powerful editor on the planet than Emacs -- which can even emulate many other editors, including vi/vim, if you like.

      --
      It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
    22. Re:And nothing of value was added ... by Darinbob · · Score: 1

      I've got a coworker using vi who seems to take it as a challenge to watch me over my shoulder and point out "vi could do the same thing in fewer keystrokes". He doesn't care that Emacs can probably do it too it's only that I haven't memorized everything, and even though I use vi all the time I haven't memorized all of its keystrokes.

      It's a pointless exercise to go down that route, because most of the reason for sticking with an editor is based on muscle memory anyway.

    23. Re:And nothing of value was added ... by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      Myself, I learned to use emacs, because it had reasonable mouse integration. Then over time, I realized it was faster for making small edits to a file just to use VI.

      Now I use whatever.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    24. Re:And nothing of value was added ... by CronoCloud · · Score: 1

      When the only UI was an ascii terminal, that was very handy. You've got a VT100 with 24 lines only (and maybe a 25th status line). If your typical work cycle is "edit with vi then exist", "compile with cc", "remember line number of error", "edit with vi to fix error", and so on, then being able to do it all from one program is handy.

      yes, but we now live in a X11 world, it isn't 1978 anymore. We have systems that can handle multiple applications/windows BETTER than emacs can because that's what it's designed to do.

      Emacs started as an editor, well actually a bunch of macros for TECO....all the other stuff it can do is basically grafted on cruft designed for a computing past that doesn't exist anymore. And who uses all that cruft? People who were members of the bearded priesthood in the 70's who are still trying to live in computings past.

    25. Re:And nothing of value was added ... by aglider · · Score: 1

      Linux != OS X

      --
      Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
    26. Re:And nothing of value was added ... by david.emery · · Score: 1

      Fair enough...

      But (a) I don't have a Linux box. Part of the discussion here is the ubiquity of Emacs, so a good quality Emacs that fits well in Mac OS X is relevant. I'd expect Emacs to be part of any (reasonable) Linux distribution, (b) which windowing environment would be running on my Linux box if I had one? (c) when I actively cranked out code for a living on Sun workstations, the only reason I ran the window manager was to get screen acceleration for my terminal windows, one of which ran old-fashioned Emacs. (the second was the command line shell for running the compiler, and the third ran Rogue/NetHack, to give me something to do while compiling :-) )

  4. Mplayer??? by Tighe_L · · Score: 1

    After the FFMPEG fork is there a Linux distro that still uses FFMPEG & Mplayer? Every disto I see uses avlib and mpv. I have great animosity towards the avlib team, they have caused me much headaches.

    1. Re:Mplayer??? by buchner.johannes · · Score: 3, Informative

      Gentoo, Debian and Ubuntu had switched to libav by default, then switched back to ffmpeg.

      FFmpeg supporters wanted to keep development velocity in favour of more features, while Libav supporters wanted to improve the state of the code, take the time to design better APIs.[9][10]

      The maintainer of the FFmpeg packages for Debian[11] and Ubuntu,[12] being one of the group of developers who forked FFmpeg, switched the packages to this fork in 2011. Hence, most software on these systems that depended on FFmpeg automatically switched to Libav. In July 8, 2015, Debian announced it would return to FFmpeg[13] for various, technical reasons.[14] Several arguments justified this step. FFmpeg first had a better record of responding to vulnerabilities than libav . Secondly, Mateusz “j00ru” Jurczyk, a security-oriented developer at Google, argued that all issues he found were fixed in a timely manner, and the situation was entirely different with libav still affected by a bunch of bugs. Finally, the feature gap between FFmpeg and libav, with FFmpeg supporting a far wider variety of codecs and containers than libav does.

      Even if it has been expressed several time to merge back the two projects, this has still not happened yet. With Debian and Ubuntu stopping to use that library, the future of libav might be compromised and its development may be not sustainable any more without Debian.[15]

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

      --
      NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
    2. Re:Mplayer??? by Tighe_L · · Score: 2

      That's good because that team screwed Fabrice Bellard over. All of their improvements aren't improvements, it is a pile of rubbish. I use Gentoo on my server, but on my desktop I use Sabayon as I hate recompiling a desktop. As far as I can tell even though Gentoo which Sabayon is based on has switched, Sabayon is still defaulting to libav,

  5. I see no point by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This is just weird. Reminds me of Active Desktop in Windows 98.

  6. Security issues by 110010001000 · · Score: 1

    At least there are no security issues with doing something like that. Right?

  7. Now that it has GTK widgets by The_Dougster · · Score: 1

    Emacs will be a much better web browser.

    --
    Clickety Click ...
    1. Re:Now that it has GTK widgets by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It already is. Use w3-mode!

    2. Re:Now that it has GTK widgets by unixisc · · Score: 1

      How did they overlook the need to include GIMP? Make it a part of the... OS.

      Now, which will happen first - emacs incorporating systemd, or systemd incorporating emacs?

    3. Re: Now that it has GTK widgets by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      W3amode is ancient. If you have a recent Emacs, use eww (M-x eww RET) instead.

  8. EMACS Memory Footprint? by superid · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I remember when you would say "Eight Meg And Currently Swapping" and that was a funny criticism of how bloated EMACS was.
    What's the mem footprint today?

    1. Re:EMACS Memory Footprint? by olau · · Score: 5, Informative

      My Emacs with a ton of buffers opened with a bunch of fancy modes is using 66 MB resident, according to top. It's been open for 6 hours now.

      A fresh instance with no stuff in it (emacs -Q) is 39 MB.

    2. Re:EMACS Memory Footprint? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      GNU Emacs 24.4.1 (i686-pc-mingw32) takes 7,548K on Win7. This is immediately after launch, with the initial *GNU Emacs* buffer. I'll check my openbsd box at home to see what it's like there.

    3. Re:EMACS Memory Footprint? by erapert · · Score: 2

      Fresh instance of Sublime Text 3: 26.7MB
      With 22 tabs of HTML, CSS, JS, and PHP spread accross five windows: 64.2MB

    4. Re:EMACS Memory Footprint? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Nice.

      For comparison, I recently heard about Atom (http://atom.io/) and decided to try it out. Just after starting it consumes 190 MB with no files open and a single project folder added. After a while of use it typically eats around 600 MB. For a fairly simple text editor that only does a tiny subset of what Emacs does. Jesus.

    5. Re:EMACS Memory Footprint? by hawk · · Score: 1

      It's like the classic answer to the price of a Rolls-Royce:

          if you have to ask, you can't afford it.

      hawk

    6. Re:EMACS Memory Footprint? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      Fresh instance of emacs: $0
      Fresh instance of Sublime Text: $70

      I think I'll stick to emacs

    7. Re:EMACS Memory Footprint? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      how does that compare to VI??

    8. Re:EMACS Memory Footprint? by phantomfive · · Score: 2

      The binary is 10 MB on disk. Kind of smallish, actually.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    9. Re:EMACS Memory Footprint? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Open up enough large files, and it is possible to exhaust memory. But the basic editor isn't all that heavy.

    10. Re:EMACS Memory Footprint? by Dixie_Flatline · · Score: 1

      On Windows, with 5 frames open and 89 buffers (some of which have custom modes and highlighting running)
      170MB.

      In comparison, my Visual Studio instance is taking up over 550MB with very few plugins and way fewer files open. (The only reason I keep it running is for debugging. I do literally all my other programming and building from emacs.)

    11. Re:EMACS Memory Footprint? by Darinbob · · Score: 1

      Compare that to a fresh instance of any modern browser. Or any modern IDE. Emacs is no longer the hog.

    12. Re:EMACS Memory Footprint? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Emacs used around 10MB in the days where entire muilti-user system might only have 32MB. Now I see it using like 50MB and we don't talk about system memory in MB anymore since every machine as at least a couple GB.

      I used to have the concern about how much memory emacs used. Then web browsers came along and their memory footprint made emacs look lean.

    13. Re:EMACS Memory Footprint? by ickpoo · · Score: 1

      I thought I was the only person that operates this way. Emacs for all editing, compiling and Visual Studio for debugging only. Visual Studio at 250 MB and Emacs at 75 MB right now. They are both looking at the same project except Emacs has SQLPlus running and a whole bunch for files open.

      I honestly tried to use Visual Studio as my editor when I started at my position and it just wasn't as good as Emacs.

      The only things I want is for Visual Studio to open command line applications in an Emacs shell instead of cmd.exe.

      --
      I am not a script! .Sig?
    14. Re:EMACS Memory Footprint? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      how much does 4 gig of memory cost ?
      I would bet it costs a lot less then 5 minutes of your time

    15. Re:EMACS Memory Footprint? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Worse, unless I missed something, it automatically installs to C: on windows machines, without giving you a choice to specify install location.

      WTF?

      I hope I am just wrong and someone will tell me how to specify install location

    16. Re:EMACS Memory Footprint? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Which vi? A full vim instance is about 8 MB. vim.tiny is about 4 MB. busybox vi is about 2 MB.

    17. Re:EMACS Memory Footprint? by Cow+Jones · · Score: 1

      I'm not on the same system as GP, but here's the memory usage I see when I open Vim with an empty buffer:

      VIRT: 178M
      RES: 17M
      SHR: 12M

      In heavy coding mode I have Vims open in 20 Konsole tabs. Bit much, maybe, but that's never been the cause for memory problems. Those are typically caused by browsers, desktop multimedia applications (Amarok, mplayer, VLC, image browsers), and most of all the extreme bloat from KDE.

      --

      Ah, arrogance and stupidity, all in the same package. How efficient of you. -- Londo Mollari
    18. Re:EMACS Memory Footprint? by Dixie_Flatline · · Score: 1

      We do most of our building through a build system, so I set up some compile commands to even do all my building in emacs so I can correct the errors straight from the build log. I've switched VS to an emacs key layout, but it still does weird things sometimes, so I gave up trying to square that circle.

      I've spent a lot of time customizing my emacs setup, which I know some people think is a waste of time, but I like the intellectual stimulation of programming in a completely different language and learning elisp. It's definitely not the fastest way to do things, but I think it's good for programmers to solve problems like that from time to time. I've learned how to manipulate buffers and frames (emacs handles frames really badly, BTW--you end up having to write an obnoxious amount of handling code if you want to make sure that things are opened and closed the way you want), I've written major and minor modes, learned how to monitor processes and compilations...it's still amazing to me that using nothing but the editor and the built-in language that I can do so many things without diving into any source code.

      (I think you can probably do that command line thing you're talking about--you'd just have to a wrapper around all the commands you want to call, wouldn't you? The emacs specific stack exchange probably has an answer for you, if you haven't checked it already.)

    19. Re:EMACS Memory Footprint? by Dixie_Flatline · · Score: 1

      More memory doesn't help ergonomics or muscle memory. Nearly 20 years of using an editor isn't something an extra bit of RAM is going to change.

  9. Oh, COME ON! (Emacs User here) by Qbertino · · Score: 1

    Give me an effing break! This is not even funny anymore.

    How about building in a compiler stack into Emacs, some neat or something usefull if there's nothing more to do on Emacs?
    How about building a search function with useful defaults for the options tree or improving its integrated documentation?
    Integrated GTK toys - WTF?
    One of the huge advantages of emacs is that it runs in the CLI. The GTK Version should get CUAS support and a bar with some buttons at the top (collapsible) and that's just about all Emacs needs in terms of grafical GUI integration. AFAICT it had that allready.

    As an Emacs User I see no point whatsoever in this. They should focus on other things IMHO.

    --
    We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
    1. Re:Oh, COME ON! (Emacs User here) by sl3xd · · Score: 3, Insightful

      At the end of the day, code that goes in meets a few criteria:

      1.) (the most important one): Somebody gives a crap.
      2.) Somebody gives a crap and actually writes decent code
      3.) Somebody gives a crap and gives so much of a crap that they're willing to do an additional 400-500% of work to get the patch into the main codebase.

      Seriously, complaining what some nebulous "they" should do something is just stupid. This isn't a product that people buy, no project manager doing focus research on what consumers want, and no manager telling an employee "do this or you're fired".

      There's just some guy/gal out there with an itch to scratch, who couldn't possibly care less what you want.

      (S)he who codes, decides. End of story.

      --
      -- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
    2. Re:Oh, COME ON! (Emacs User here) by Darinbob · · Score: 1

      Because Emacs right now has support for older X Windows widgets (default GNU version, not counting branches and things). GTK widgets are more modern and flexible. So why not? It has no effect on the command line version any more than the Lucid widgets affect the command line version.

    3. Re:Oh, COME ON! (Emacs User here) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The compiler issue has been in discussion a lot. Actually, Emacs is getting a FFI interface, so that should allowing building in anything at all.

  10. To those asking what's the point... by olau · · Score: 1

    I don't know, but let me come with an example.

    You can either customize Emacs by writing a bit of Lisp and dumping it in your .emacs (or init.el), but you can also use the built-in customize interface that many packages support.

    If you've ever used M-x customize, it's like a... a toolkit built with text elements. It's... weird. I actually tried starting it again now, and I think it's less weird than it used to be, but it's still some way from any configuration window you'd ever see in a regular GUI editor.

    So presumably some of that gap can now be bridged.

    1. Re:To those asking what's the point... by sl3xd · · Score: 1

      The point is somebody thought it'd be a neat thing to do, did the work, and herded it into the codebase.

      End of story.

      --
      -- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
  11. Awesome by jwymanm · · Score: 1

    This is great news. I've been wanting to especially combine full fledged web rendering into Emacs. Next up opengl? Full power of lisp, slime/cider, tramp meets graphical support. Good job guys

    1. Re:Awesome by sl3xd · · Score: 1

      First of all: GTK has OpenGL support, so that's already there. Has nothing to do with the web.

      Although WebGL does implement OpenGL in a full-fledged web page, and I'm pretty sure GTK's WebGL just leverages GTK's OpenGL widgets.

      Really, it's just a step towards what we've all known: Emacs has taken another step to becoming a modern graphical operating system.

      Next, we need to be able to boot to Emacs from Grub, instead of using a hack like Linux to bootstrap Emacs.

      --
      -- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
    2. Re:Awesome by jwymanm · · Score: 1

      I'm pretty sure next up opengl kind of implies a relation to the GTK support merging.. I didn't mention it having something to do with the web. I think emacs as an IDE is a "tad smaller" than Visual Studio or Eclipse so even though I get the joke about the OS stuff I don't think it is a fair comparison. Maybe in early 1990s? It is really just the nice and robust expressiveness of LISP that powers it all and yet keeps it in a still small package (imo).

  12. Re:Changing Userbase? by chipschap · · Score: 3, Interesting

    A very good question. EMACS tries to be all things to all people ... and it is. I've used it since almost the very beginning and can't live without it.

    That said, I'm not interested in the GUI stuff because it slows me down, and since EMACS is infinitely customizable I just turn it off. To each his own; some people like menus and so on. I do enable display of in-line graphics but no more than that.

    Yes, there is confusion over purpose and direction, but to somewhat justify it, I'll say this. Learning EMACS, which is a big job, is a lot easier with menus and a GUI interface to help get started. Over time you learn the keystrokes and become more efficient until eventually you don't need the GUI (but you can of course still keep it).

    EMACS is very much not for everyone, but for those who love it, it's indispensable.

    And one more little fact: on my Asus Zenbook, I typically get 5 hours running time with a mixed environment. But if I run EMACS and EMACS alone, in a full screen, I get 10 hours.

  13. Compared to ActiveX by darkain · · Score: 1

    How does this compare to ActiveX? Yes, I know tons of people absolutely loath the thing (myself included), but learning how to program back in the days of Visual Basic 3 on Windows 3.1 and being able to embed an Internet Explorer 2 container into my app sure seemed sweet at the time!

  14. I used to use EMACS in 1995 when in college by Tighe_L · · Score: 2

    But now I mostly us nano for quick edits from the command line and jedit when in xwindows. Jedit while not perfect I like that I can carry my configuration from windows/linux/mac easily. VI is just plain annoying to use the way I think.

    1. Re:I used to use EMACS in 1995 when in college by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I have used Emacs since 1988 on Sun (SunView). There is no better, useful program on the planet. Now, if you don't mind I'd like to get back to my game of Emacs/Tetris.

  15. The 90s called by fph+il+quozientatore · · Score: 1

    You mean it now looks like a 90s Windows 95-era application instead of like Windows 3.1 like it did before?

    --
    My first program:

    Hell Segmentation fault

  16. Re:Changing Userbase? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    One beautiful thing about Emacs is that you can run it without the GUI:

    >$ emacs -nw

    I tend to use the terminal mode most of the time - especially for everything remote.

  17. At least... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ...it became a real true operating system.
    I'm going to integrate systemd into emacs, any volunteers ?

    1. Re:At least... by jmccue · · Score: 1

      You have it backwards, integrate emacs into systemd.

      now that is a war, who will integrate who, recursive integration anyone ?

  18. FFMPEG by DrYak · · Score: 2

    After the FFMPEG fork is there a Linux distro that still uses FFMPEG & Mplayer?

    Firstly: Not all distro switched to avlib.
    Some simply decided to stay with ffmpeg (e.g.: opensuse never switched at all)
    Some changed their opinion back (e.g.: Debian went back to ffmpeg after a while)
    This is mostly to avlib never really being a good an active fork, and didn't manage to attract most developper to it.
    (Unlike OpenOffice.org to which most developer migrated after the fork from LibreOffice.org).

    Since then the problematic leader of FFMPEG has decided to step down,
    avlib has merged back to ffmpeg
    and distro are back to- / or are still using- ffmpeg again.
    And the guy is now a contributor. He still writes code for ffmpeg, but he's not having a final say on everything and thus fighting with everyone to have his "one true vision(tm)" imposed.
    He has fully realized that his character clashes with some in the community, has seen the disastrous result on having avlib forked (the linux ecosystem split across two different forks, none of which becomes a clear leader and each laging behind the other on some important features), and decide therefor to step down for the greater good of the community.

    source: Phoronix

    --
    "Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
    1. Re:FFMPEG by Tighe_L · · Score: 1

      This is not an accurate representation of what happened. And now I see that the LibAV team is joining back up with FFMPEG I am concerned, they changed LibAV so much that all the programs that relied on FFMPEG broke when they changed command line parameters, not to make anything better, just because they wanted to do it differently. This is bad news for FFMPEG http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

    2. Re:FFMPEG by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      The splittters, well, split, because the project leader apparently wouldn't integrate the splitters changes in what they considered good time.

      The leader didn't do this, not because he couldn't, but because he thought it was poor style.

      His response to the fork was to integrate all changes implemented by the fork as soon as it was released by the fork, essentially making the original ffmpeg a super set of both projects.

      The motivation for the fork was thus undermined and the additions from it's contributors dwindled.

      The splitters then returned to the fold but interactions remained vexatious and the leader, having done all that had been asked, decided that if some one else wanted the top job so badly they could have it, thankless as it was. As an indication of the quality of the man he remains a contributor where many of us would have just called it a day, just for a quiet life.

  19. emacs is the perl of editors by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Both should have quit adding shit when they were great at doing what they were supposed to do[1] and were not trying to mop the kitchen floor too.

    [1] Perl is a (programmed) text-editor. It should not have become anything more because everything more that has been added since it was an awesome text editor because none of it has to do with editing text.

  20. In 2017 by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 1, Funny

    Will we be seeing a Slashdot story about how emacs now has native support for systemd?

    --
    #DeleteChrome
    1. Re:In 2017 by GuB-42 · · Score: 1

      Or maybe the opposite : Emacs can now be used as an init system and has a systemd mode.

  21. Great news! by tamyrlin · · Score: 4, Interesting
    That is really great news. Good enough that I actually logged in to comment rather than commenting anonymously as I usually do. I've been following the xwidgets branch from the sidelines for some time but never bothered to build Joakim Verona's branch myself. It should be noted though that what was merged was not the full xwidgets experience, rather the xwidgets_mvp branch. This branch only contains support for embedding a webkit browser widget. (Although even that will be extremely useful I believe.)

    The xwidgets branch however promises even more. The main use case (at least from my point of view) isn't really to put normal widgets such as gtk buttons or sliders or anything like that in an emacs window. From my point of view the most important thing is that you will be able to embed whole applications using the GtkSocket widget. This means that you could, for example:
    * Have a good PDF viewer embedded in one buffer while you are editing latex source code in another and be able to easily switch between those buffers using emacs commands.
    * You could have inkscape running in one buffer and use normal inkscape editing commands for almost everything, except when you are editing text. In those situations you may want to use emacs commands instead.
    * You could have a *good* webbrowser running inside emacs to search for documentation online while coding

    Of course, the main xwidgets branch also opens up possibililties when it comes to prettyifying a lot of built in emacs applications. However, I don't find that very necessary in many cases. One of the main advantages with emacs is that (almost) everything is text, which means that you get a synergistic effect the more you do inside emacs.

    ; Witty end of comment for emacs aficionados:
    (animate-string "Congratulations to Joakim Verona for getting this merged" 10 10)

  22. My favorite anti-pattern by Lussarn · · Score: 1
  23. Facebook support seems to be available. by tamyrlin · · Score: 1

    There seems to be at least an attempt at interfacing with facebook: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs...

  24. Anyone else with 'Emacs carpal tunnel?' by david.emery · · Score: 1

    When I was doing Real Work writing software, I developed the classic Emacs 'carpal tunnel' in the left hand from stretching the pinkie too much for moderator keys. A couple other people I know who are dyed-in-the-wool Emacs users have also developed that.

    What other software produces its own injury? ;-)

    1. Re:Anyone else with 'Emacs carpal tunnel?' by AlejoHausner · · Score: 1
      I think the real cause of emacs-pinkie is the modern location of the Control key. Back in the 80s the terminals I worked on didn't have a Caps-Lock key. There was a Control key right there. That's exactly where it should be, and I do my best to map that key to Control in whatever system I work on.

      I mean, who the hell needs a caps-lock key placed in such a convenient place, these days? Back in the day when computers were first sold to businesses, their target audience must have been stenographers. They expected the caps-lock (actually "Shift lock") to be there. But no one else needs it there. I mean, who uses that key nowadays, and why should be taking up such a vital piece of keyboard real estate?

      As for emacs, I use it daily. If you're a programmer, it's the most efficient way to type code. Sure, it would be nice to have it more integrated into an IDE, but I can live with that. If you absolute are addicted to things like intellisense, there are add-ons for emacs that kinda do that: http://emacs.stackexchange.com...

    2. Re:Anyone else with 'Emacs carpal tunnel?' by david.emery · · Score: 1

      Frankly, I've never been much of a fan of IDEs. My biggest project used Rational Apex, which was a full up IDE (long before Eclipse, etc.) The most productive programmers on that project, though, used a text editor (Emacs or VI) and ran the compiler from the command line. No point wasting cycles on fancy GUIs that mostly got in the way. The only time I cranked up the Rational IDE was to run the debugger, and any time I had to run a debugger, it was a direct admission that I had -no clue- what my code (or someone else's code) was doing, and I considered that a personal defeat.

      Usually, I had an Emacs session, a command line session, and a terminal session running rogue (for something to do while the compiler/linker was running, I could usually knock off a level or two.)

  25. Re:Changing Userbase? by tamyrlin · · Score: 1

    I too have little use for the menus (not to mention the screen wasting toolbar) of emacs. However, I do like the idea of running a webbrowser from within emacs (a webkit based webbrowser widget was actually the only thing that was merged. The full xwidget branch isn't merged yet). I especially hope that this will make it possible to add words from the webbrowser to emacs autocomplete. That would be really convenient in many cases.

  26. Wait, people still use GTK+? by Phil+Urich · · Score: 2

    Sorry for being troll-ish, but I've had increasing issues with GTK+ over the years and have been broadly relieved that developers seem to be generally switching over to Qt.

    --
    I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
    1. Re:Wait, people still use GTK+? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The reason why your post is troll-ish is that you don't elaborate on what the issues were.

      So what were the issues? Then it's a legitimate helpful post.

    2. Re:Wait, people still use GTK+? by Phil+Urich · · Score: 1

      Well, for example Meld crashes when you run a comparison if you use any of a half-dozen classic styles that often still ship with distributions, due to changes in the underlying GTK libraries. And that's just ridiculous; a GUI toolkit that is so incapable of handling older then-valid styles that it crashes applications? That's not a very confidence-inducing GUI toolkit.

      That's the only really recent one I can think of, but that's largely because the issues I've run into peaked about 2 years ago, at which point I largely culled GTK applications from my list of applications that I commonly use (GParted persisted for a while longer, but these days the KDE Partition Manager is on par, in fact I believe it has slightly surpassed GParted although admittedly not for anything I actually use so I can't remember the details). I've forgotten a lot of the issues since then, although they did largely come down to crashes and interface layout and iconography glitches.

      --
      I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
  27. rofl by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I hope with this emacs will catch up to notepad++ roflmao...

  28. Re:Changing Userbase? by Darinbob · · Score: 1

    Trying to be all things to all people is not a good way to put it. It's like saying that Java tries to be all things to all people because it let's you create many different kinds of programs. But that's the purpose of a programming language in the first place. Or that a web browser tries to be all things to all people, because you can go to Facebook, or GMail, or Wikipedia, or whatever, but the point of the browser is to let you do many many different things. Once you have a programming language in a system then you automatically can do many different things with few constraints.

    So Emacs is the same. It is not an editor. It is a system that you can use to do many many different things, and editing files is just one of the things it can do by default.

  29. even better as login shell by dltaylor · · Score: 1

    Back in the VAX/BSD days, one of my co-workers used emacs as his login shell because he could do everything he wanted AND had a history more easily used than csh. I liked it, but bounced between disparate systems too often to mentally switch back and forth.

    With graphics, I may need to give it a try on an X screen, since those are rather ubiquitous now.

  30. Was it too fast? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    GTK+ rendering is fucking slow. In GTK2 I used to choose the Mist rendering engine to speed things to usable speed. That's now gone in GTK3 and I don't know what to do.