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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.
Emacs would be a hell of an operating system if someone would just write a decent text editor for it.
You insensitive text mode clods!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
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.
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.
At least there are no security issues with doing something like that. Right?
Emacs will be a much better web browser.
Clickety Click
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?
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
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
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. . . .
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 ]
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.
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.
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
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.
Will we be seeing a Slashdot story about how emacs now has native support for systemd?
#DeleteChrome
You have it backwards, integrate emacs into systemd.
now that is a war, who will integrate who, recursive integration anyone ?
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.
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.
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)
Inner-plattform effect
There seems to be at least an attempt at interfacing with facebook: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs...
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? ;-)
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Too late! I've already posted and disqualified myself.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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. . . .
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.
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."
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.
Linux != OS X
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
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 :-) )