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?

Comments

Ohh ohh!

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it depend on systemd yet?

Re:Ohh ohh!

[sribe]

WTF? Of course not, Emacs will embed systemd!

What comes to your mind ...

[QuietLagoon]

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

Re:What comes to your mind ...

[s4m7]

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.

My favorite Emacs joke

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:My favorite Emacs joke

[Samantha Wright]

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.

What comes to your mind on the 40th anniversary?

[Nutria]

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

Re:Boxer or vim for me...

[fahrbot-bot]

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).

one thing the summary forgot to mention...

[apcullen]

It's totally better than vi

23 years ago

[vikingpower]

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.

The best thing about Emacs

[joh]

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

Does C-x M-c M-butterfly still work?

[jfdavis668]

Because otherwise real programmers will have to use butterflies.

Genuine question - Why Modal Text Editors?

[Voyager529]

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.

Re:Genuine question - Why Modal Text Editors?

[Phillip2]

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.

Re:Genuine question - Why Modal Text Editors?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Strange Tamil language support in emacs!

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

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!