Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Emacs 25.1 Released With Tons Of New Features (fossbytes.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the church-of-Emacs dept.

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?

4 of 131 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Boxer or vim for me... by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 3, Informative

    Working mostly in a Windows environment for the past 25 years I never got into emacs.

    Emacs and XEmacs are available for Windows and have been for a while (though not 25 years).

    --
    It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
  2. Re:My favorite Emacs joke by Samantha+Wright · · Score: 5, Informative

    Sadly, that joke is so old that it now has several answers. From newest to oldest, give-or-take:

    1. Evil
    2. Vimpulse
    3. Viper
    4. vim-mode

    It looks like Evil is the preferred option.

    --
    Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
  3. Re:What comes to your mind ... by s4m7 · · Score: 3, Informative

    On the one hand, duh. On the other hand, the binary download of emacs 25.1 for windows weighs in at ~60MB. Atom for windows around 90MB. Intellij IDEA community for windows: 345MB. emacs isn't really a text editor... it's an IDE. it's still VERY lean by that standard. Bear in mind too that the other two will proceed to download a bunch of stuff after installation, just to become functional.

    --
    This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
  4. Strange Tamil language support in emacs! by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 3, Informative
    A grad student named Bala Swaminathan in Washington University added one of the strangest extensions to EMACS. Support for Tamil language!. As you can see, those days there were no font support for non Romance language. Our goal was to help people post in Usenet using Tamil. So Bala Swaminathan came up with an ASCII glyph for each Tamil letter. So as you type the phonetic key sequence in an English keyboard, as soon as the Tamil phoneme is recognized, the ASCII glyph will be inserted into the display. If you are on a X terminal and set the font to 2 points, you can actually read Tamil in the EMACS editor! What you see on the screen is not what is saved in the document. It was one hell of a hack.

    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