Slashdot Mirror
Emacs 25.1 Released With Tons Of New Features (fossbytes.com)
After four years of development there's a major new release of Emacs, the 40-year-old libre text editor with over 2,000 built-in commands. An anonymous Slashdot reader writes:
Emacs 25.1 now lets you embed GTK+ user interface widgets, including WebKitGTK+, "a full-featured WebKit port that can allow you to browse the internet and watch YouTube inside Emacs." And it can also load shared/dynamic modules, meaning it can import the extra functionality seen in Emacs Lisp programs. This version also includes enhanced the network security, experimental support for Cairo drawing, and a new "switch-to-buffer-in-dedicated-window" mode.
Emacs 25.1 is available at the GNU FTP server, and since it's the 40th anniversary of Emacs, maybe it's a good time for a discussion about text editors in general. So leave your best tips in the comments -- along with your favorite stories about Emacs, Vim, or the text editor of your choice. What comes to your mind on the 40th anniversary of Emacs?
Emacs 25.1 is available at the GNU FTP server, and since it's the 40th anniversary of Emacs, maybe it's a good time for a discussion about text editors in general. So leave your best tips in the comments -- along with your favorite stories about Emacs, Vim, or the text editor of your choice. What comes to your mind on the 40th anniversary of Emacs?
Does it depend on systemd yet?
Yay! :)
.
allow you to browse the internet and watch YouTube inside Emacs
Emacs would be a hell of an operating system if someone would just write a decent text editor for it.
https://news.slashdot.org/comm...
If I wanted an operating system to watch YT videos, I'd use Hurd!!!
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Emacs Pinky!
Working mostly in a Windows environment for the past 25 years I never got into emacs. Of course I do need to function in Linux/UNIX environments from time to time and when I do it's vi/vim for me. However the majority of my text editing has been done in Boxer since 1996. I've never had a Windows computer without it, always the first thing I install after loading a (non-server) Windows OS.
... "a full-featured WebKit port that can allow you to browse the internet and watch YouTube inside Emacs."
As a long time, fairly hard-core, Emacs user (since the '80s) have have to ask: Seriously, why?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
This is exactly the thing that kills projects with a deadline of less than 40 years. Seems to me that there may be a bit of feature bloat.
It's totally better than vi
First job, at Airbus, Toulouse, France. Fresh from university (I'd graduated in maths). I was shown my desk and computer. The OS was some flavour of Unix I've forgotten about. My first assignment was "to have a look at this programming language, ADA, and learn about the customized preprocessor #pragma entries Airbus uses". I asked "but how the hell do I edit this?"
"Oh, most of us here use emacs". I was baffeld. Learned it, painfully so. Never looked back to another editor.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
I started an Emacs vs vim comparison test last year.
When Emacs finishes loading I'll post the results.
I probably need to add more RAM in order to really test Emacs, I only have 8 GB.
Yes, emacs has a lot of features, but what else are they going to do with it? Could it be faster or use less memory?
"Tabs create smaller file sizes, all right? I mean, why not just use Vim over Emacs?”
“I do use Vim over Emacs.”
“Oh, god help us!”
Even iOS supports Emacs key combos on the iPhone or iPad for editing if you use a BlueTooth keyboard. This is some legacy...
Does this mean we can finally embed a good text editor like gVim to make it a complete operating system?
I can't believe VI(m) is mentioned in a post about emacs! ;)
(Nothing like a good text editor religious war.) Can't believe I've been using emacs almost 35 years.
Most of the Emacs users I know are too busy trying to debug why this package or key-binding or the other isn't working right to do any actual editing. Lets see a user with a raw Emacs setup try to watch a You Tube video in it. I doubt it can actually be done without a 2K+ long init.el. You start to ask whether the single environment "efficiency" really is worth more than just opening a browser window - OSes these days are multi-window, you know...
That is all.
My favorite recursive acronym. (EMACS = Emacs Makes A Computer Slow)
*pours gasoline*
oh, and VI is *way* better than emacs.
*whoosh* :-)
Ian Ameline
Is there a vim widget that allows me to run vim inside of emacs?
This emacs is such wonderful operating system. It is hampered by not having a good text editor. Has someone ported vi to emacs, yet?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
So Emacs includes "a full-featured WebKit port that can allow you to browse the internet and watch YouTube inside Emacs."
This is a joke, right? I know it's not April 1st yet, but this has to be a joke.
Someone tell me this is a joke, because I don't think a text editor should be able to browse the web and play Youtube videos.
Now if it could retrieve hourly weather reports from Jupiter, that would be a must-have feature.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I can not reach any of the gnu.org sites - down?
Because otherwise real programmers will have to use butterflies.
Emacs has had a text editor for a while. It's called Viper Mode.
I've done some minor Linux administration, generally in the realm of getting some Turnkey Linux appliance or other to run. When I've done so, I've always used nano - it tends to do what I need it to do, it has command cues on the bottom so I don't need to memorize the man file to use it, and it seems to be available basically-everywhere. I used vi a bit in college, and the concept of a modal text editor with next-to-no window dressing doesn't seem, at first blush, to have any real advantages to using something more like nano.
I am *not* looking to enter into some sort of flame war, but I do hope that someone would be generous enough to help me understand the draw to either vi or emacs.
/me shudders!
OSX also supports some emacs keys in just about any text editing area - Ctrl-A for begin of line, Ctrl-E for end. But most useful is Ctrl-K for kill (kill text to end of line), which puts text in a copy buffer that is distinct from the Cmd-C copy. Then you can use Ctrl-Y to paste the text you "Killed".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Found the original release and FAQ and documentation. I actually wrote an extension that will convert that document into a LaTeX document, with actual post script Tamil font support. You could print in Tamil from the Madurai encoded Tamil document. Fun times, 26 years ago!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Not sure which side Slashdot is taking in the Emacs vs VIM war. On the one side they posted the Emacs article before the VIM article so they got to it first. On the other side it's below the VIM article on the front page.
I'm so confused. Slashdot which should I use?
There was a time when the command line was the best thing you had. It meant you couldn't just sit down and start doing stuff. You had to learn commands. This applied to applications like text editors also. I'm not here to evangelize for command line stuff, but now, when I have the choice of the command line, or something graphical, I very often choose the command line because it's quicker and easier now that I've paid my dues on the learning curve.
When I entered the Unix world, the most popular editor was vi. (I had a little experience with ed, and I'd come from other operating systems with editors whose names I don't even remember. My brother even wrote his own homebrew text editor for a homebrew computer in one weekend, but it was all command line oriented.)
When I tried emacs at work on some kind of Vax computer, it noticeably slowed the computer down, so I stayed with vi, like everybody else. Eventually though, I got an Atari ST as my home computer, and after trying various things out, to my amazement, the best text editor for the Atari was a 'micro-emacs' that had just the most useful emacs commands and nothing else. Those commands got ingrained enough that my fingers would type them out automatically without my even having to think about them. So, when computers got fast enough that emacs was responsive, I'd sometimes use it when I wanted to do something that I thought was easier with it than with vi. I was a computer programmer and none of the other programmers ever bothered to learn emacs. It was only because of that Atari experience that I had even bothered, and I was grateful for that.
I looked at the emacs manuals and tried out various features. There were some things I liked that micro-emacs didn't have or anything else, like delete-rectangle, so I incorporated that into my repertoire, since I used it often enough for it to become 'automatic' and stay 'automatic', but I didn't see the point of learning things that would be so rare for me that I'd have to keep going back to consult the manual.
So, when I see that there are even more features, I scratch my head. For those that want to learn all that, more power to them. Maybe they're on to something. Maybe one gets to the point where they're just in emacs and do everything with fingers hovering over the keyboard and it's really fast and automatic and one never has to reach for the mouse and that's really cool. But personally, I don't think I'll be having a go at it anytime soon.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
In the war between Emacs and Vi I come down on Emacs' side, but this is beyond silly.
And it goes to show that the GTK version is as pointless as I make it out to be. I only use Emacs in the CLI, and if I even chose to set up a speedy minimal linux system emphasising the CLI I will run it in CLI mode.
I've seen a lot of silly stuff come out of the Emacs camp, but adding webkit to Emacs take the nonsense to a new level in my book.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The password policy on gamma is only slightly better than pokey. Bob's password isn't his first name, but it is a dictionary word. Of course, security is just terrible at Old Building if a grizzly bear can break into pokey, steal the CPU, and bury it outside.
I think HURD can be redesigned as any glue needed that's provided by neither systemd nor emacs
I use emacs in no windows mode. It's an excellent file system navigator and editor over ssh and locally.
My typical Emacs session has 3-4 Shell Mode buffers, each typically with tens of thousands of lines of input and output (often spanning weeks or months of work). I watch co-workers running in xterms (or equivalent), running commands repeatedly to see their output or using "more" (or "less"), or not catching or remembering some error message or whatever and I just cringe internally. I want to scream "It's 2016--you can have a searchable record of more than the last screenful of output!". But I don't :-)
I explicitly try to extend my Emacs skills periodically and it's had great pay-off. Earlier this year a co-worker introduced me to Magit (a Git UI that runs inside Emacs). It took a little while to get the hang of it, but it's been a life-changer. Check it out.
-- Happy Emacs user since 1980.
Is XEmacs moribund? It was my go-to editor since GNU Emacs still can't handle multiple columns properly on a terminal window. Unfortunately it feels like someone ported the bad terminal code from GNU Emacs a few years ago into XEmacs and now they both suck in Linux terminal windows.
Kriston
1. Can boot over a network or from a flash stick
2. Includes Wayland and 3D compositor.
3. Has built-in e-mail, web browsing, solitare, minecraft, a c++ compiler, and Blender
4. It can run Quake
5. Rumored to have a PS4 emulator embedded as an Easter egg, though the secret key sequence is not documented.
6. With 50MB of optional modules, it can emulate a text editor almost as powerful as SED
Sadly, it now takes 90 minutes to start, unlike the previous version which started in 85 minutes, and could barely run Doom...
Eventually though, I got an Atari ST as my home computer, and after trying various things out, to my amazement, the best text editor for the Atari was a 'micro-emacs' that had just the most useful emacs commands and nothing else.
Weird, the Amiga also came with a micro-emacs. I wonder if it was the era or if there was something about 68k processors that went hand-in-hand. People have described both as being beautiful, but people are weird
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Apple stopped selling these education only macs years ago.
TBH I've never gotten into Emacs. I'll use it when it is there, but the amount of extended commands and the frankly arcane knowledge necessary to configure it has always been a turn off. I still remember looking to enable syntax highlighting and discovered it was called "font lock mode" - WTF??? Micro emacs was just an editor and reasonably easy to set up. Joe was another editor in the same vein.
These days I'd probably just use Atom, Notepad++ and/or IDE and leave them open all day. I only fire up a text editor when I'm in a console and I have something fast I need to do.
Someone should make a beefed up fork of nano (Objective C port anyone?) - following the emacs philosophy of 'cram in all the usability you can get'. But the nice thing would be that all the keyboard shortcuts would be conveniently displayed on a little bar at the bottom of the screen, It could have cool features like source control, ASCII art editor, native FORTH interpreter, EBDIC code page support, GNU/Hurd emulator, the list goes on and on...
Emacsbooks?