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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?

34 of 131 comments (clear)

  1. Ohh ohh! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Does it depend on systemd yet?

    1. Re:Ohh ohh! by sribe · · Score: 4, Funny

      WTF? Of course not, Emacs will embed systemd!

    2. Re:Ohh ohh! by unixisc · · Score: 2

      Does it depend on systemd yet?

      systemd could be its kernel. In fact, I've often joked that if one just combined systemd and emacs, one can bypass the whole saga of distro-wars, BSD vs linux, maybe even System V vs BSD. No need to include any of that - it's all there in systemd and emacs.

      We joke, but if one looks at some of the systemd 'features' - like networkd, where you can now build your IP tables under it, then it pretty much does a lot of the kernel part of the job. And emacs provides the shell. A part of me thinks that this could be a worthy Computer Science project ;-)

      Coming up at some date - an FSF endorsed GUI, such as gnome or gnustep or any other pet project they take up

  2. What comes to your mind ... by QuietLagoon · · Score: 4, Insightful
    One thing comes to my mind... that Emacs has become far too bloated with feature creep.

    .
    allow you to browse the internet and watch YouTube inside Emacs

    1. 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.
  3. My favorite Emacs joke by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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...

    1. 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!
    2. Re:My favorite Emacs joke by nut · · Score: 2

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

      My favourite used to be, "Eight Mb And Constantly Swapping." Now guess how old that joke is...

      --
      Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, Never drive a car when you're dead
    3. Re:My favorite Emacs joke by markus · · Score: 2

      Escape meta alternate control shift

    4. Re:My favorite Emacs joke by lgw · · Score: 2

      Eighty MB are continuously swapping!

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    5. Re:My favorite Emacs joke by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2

      Aren't the others are lesser Evil, sort of?

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
  4. What comes to your mind on the 40th anniversary? by Nutria · · Score: 4, Funny

    If I wanted an operating system to watch YT videos, I'd use Hurd!!!

    --
    "I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
  5. Sigh ... by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 2

    ... "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. . . .
    1. Re:Sigh ... by bkmoore · · Score: 2

      So they can put the emacs tutorial up on YouTube. You just have to figure out how to get YouTube to work in Emacs first. For that there's another video.

    2. Re:Sigh ... by Solandri · · Score: 2

      As a long time, fairly hard-core, Emacs user (since the '80s) have have to ask: Seriously, why?

      Because the Emacs ethos is: Why not?

      (I was a long-time, fairly hard-core Emacs user too. Some habits don't die. The way I'd browse YouTube is windows key, chr, enter, ctrl-L, youtube.com. Although newer versions of browsers have made the ctrl-L superfluous for the initial URL. Waste time by moving my right hand to the mouse? Ridiculous!)

    3. Re:Sigh ... by Shane_Optima · · Score: 2

      I'm surprised more people haven't figured out that Emacs is actually a specialized (though highly configurable) desktop environment. I think all of the jokes disguise the reality of the fact that Emacs went beyond the paltry goal of text editing a very long time ago.

      At least one person has taken this to heart and actually written an Emacs-style tiling window manager, although like Emacs itself I suspect it will remain in the shadows, useful only to people willing to put in hundreds of hours necessary to learn it and write their own utilities to match their workflow. What the world really needs are more projects that bridge the wide gulf between intuition and power, but I suspect we're more likely to end up with (in twenty years' time) some variant of iOS as the most popular desktop in the world with a small cabal of hackers in a darkened corner diligently cranking out Emacs 67.

  6. 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. . . .
  7. one thing the summary forgot to mention... by apcullen · · Score: 5, Funny

    It's totally better than vi

  8. 23 years ago by vikingpower · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  9. I started a comparison test last year by raymorris · · Score: 2

    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.

  10. The best thing about Emacs by joh · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Even iOS supports Emacs key combos on the iPhone or iPad for editing if you use a BlueTooth keyboard. This is some legacy...

    1. Re:The best thing about Emacs by pz · · Score: 2

      I can't vouch for the recent versions, but at least in Visual Studio 2010, there was an Emacs package available that made using that IDE quite tolerable.

      --

      Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
  11. Re: Is there a vim widget? by joh · · Score: 2

    Emacs comes with a vi emulator since ages.

  12. Does C-x M-c M-butterfly still work? by jfdavis668 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Because otherwise real programmers will have to use butterflies.

  13. Genuine question - Why Modal Text Editors? by Voyager529 · · Score: 3

    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.

    1. Re:Genuine question - Why Modal Text Editors? by Phillip2 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Emacs -- provides a functional and highly customizable editor. It's got a lot of very nice packages (org and magit, for example, are both superb). It also has a different user interface paradigm -- it's usable entirely from the keyboard. Once you are used to this moving back to something with all that clicking around is rather hard to cope with. And it's very easy to add new functionality.

      VIM -- like Emacs, it is entirely usable from the keyboard. It's not as functional as Emacs, but is it very regular. The main editing commands are very predictable which makes the raw editor of text very efficient.

      That's about the best quick description I can give -- I am mostly an Emacs user, and use VIM for systems administration, so there is a bias in what I say. They are both fantastic tools and it's worth trying them out.

    2. Re:Genuine question - Why Modal Text Editors? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Vi (and vim by extension) is a different way of editing. In a normal editor, you position the cursor manually and then the operations affect the text at that point. Generally, the operations affect only the character under the cursor. For a few limited commands, you can affect a whole line or a word. Again, generally speaking, operations the affect more than one character are usually limited to some limited navigation and deletion.

      Vi is built around the concept of describing what you want to do and where you want to do it. Remember that it is an extension of ex/ed. If you've ever used sed, you will understand the power of it. Vi essentially takes the programming concepts in ex/ed and adds interactivity. In other words, the vocabulary and grammar for describing what you want to do and where you want to do it, is dramatically expanded compared to most normal editor. Of course, whether or not you want to think that way is a matter of choice, but most people who take the time to learn seem to find that it's a much more natural way of interacting with the text. The problem is that it takes quite a lot of effort to learn the method.

      Vim is an extended version of Vi. It can be set up to be completely compatible with Vi, but usually people prefer the Vim extensions. Vim is quite a lot more powerful than Vi. Emacs now has a mode (called Evil) with is pretty much on par with Vim. I use it every day and although it operates slightly differently in some circumstances, it's the first Vi-style mode of emacs that I think is just as good as Vim.

      Vim has some downsides. One of the biggest is the scripting language it uses, which is not very much fun to work with. Emacs, on the other hand has one of the best scripting languages of any editor ever: emacs-lisp. It's not just that it is a complete lisp implementation, but the editor interfaces are really, really well thought out. The result of this is that you can program practically anything and use Emacs as your front end. It's a bit like Javascript is in a browser except that it is awesome (and I say that as someone who actually enjoys writing javascript -- but seriously, the DOM is mind blowingly awful and I'll take elisp over JS any day of the week). This is why emacs has nearly as many packages as McDonald's has served hamburgers (I exaggerate... slightly...)

      One of the best Emacs packages ever is Org mode. If you have never used Org mode, it is worth learning emacs for. If you still like your other editor for everything else, you should still use Org mode in Emacs. It is life-changing. But my point is not to get you to use Org mode (well... you should). My point is that Org mode exists in Emacs basically because Emacs excels in that kind of thing. I don't think there is anything out there that can touch it.

      Finally, if you get down to nano or whatever... I will almost never use it any more, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with nano. Obviously, if I'm on some random unix box, I'm going to use Vi because I know and love Vi. If I didn't, though, I'd probably use nano. It's great for getting small things done. But it doesn't compare at all with the big boys. If I'm on a random Windows box, I'll probably use Notepad++. It's fine. I wouldn't go out of my way to find them, though.

    3. Re:Genuine question - Why Modal Text Editors? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You're asking two different question:

      1) Why modal text editor (editor with modes)
      Answer: Because writing text and editing text are two very different operations. Cutting, copying, pasting, replacing, overwriting, searching, etc are done often enough that constantly holding down a modifier key becomes questionable for some. IANAVU.

      2) Why something as big as Emacs over nano or JOE.
      Because after a while -- maybe a long while -- you will want your editor to have additional feature. Maybe you want more windows. Maybe you want an in editor shell. Maybe you want automatic document complication on file changes with interactive output display. Maybe you want auto tab completion. Maybe you want syntax highlighting. Maybe you want (this is my personal favourite) snippets for auto "template" completion. Maybe you want to run your music editor inside the editor. Maybe you want to run lisp directly. Maybe you want to organise notes in org-mode. Maybe you want to (i presume) use a file editor. Hell, maybe you want to have a video or Youtube vid run in a little corner of the screen while you write code.

      All of these things are possible with a few keystrokes in Emacs. Once you introduce yourself to the commands for opening(Ctrl-x, Ctrl-f) and saving files(C-x C-s), switching between buffers, and maybe opening news windows, all the possibilities of become open to you if someday (and that day eventually comes) you want your computer or editor to do a little bit more than just edit text.

      Oh. And you can also define macros.

  14. 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
  15. Emacs vs VIM by thegarbz · · Score: 2

    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?

    1. Re:Emacs vs VIM by DivineKnight · · Score: 2

      Nano, like everyone else when they are trying to get work done, and aren't trying to preen their tail feathers.

  16. I learned it when I had to, and still sometimes... by shoor · · Score: 2

    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)
  17. Re: And OSX, supports Kill/Yank by joh · · Score: 2

    OS X even looks for a configuration file where you can customize all that. It's easy to add shift+movement combos for selecting text. Like shift-control-b for moving the cursor backwards and selecting. I never use the cursor keys on my MacBook.

  18. Re:Is XEmacs moribund? by jrumney · · Score: 2

    Pretty much. By multiple columns, do you mean C-x 3? Or something else? Filing a bug report would be the best way to get this addressed - the GNU Emacs maintainers do still very much care about terminal support.