Emacs 26.1 Released With New Features (lwn.net)

There's a new version of the 42-year-old libre text editor with over 2,000 built-in commands, reports LWN.net: Highlights include a built-in Lisp threading mechanism that provides some concurrency, double buffering when running under X, a redesigned flymake mode, 24-bit color support in text mode, and a systemd [user] unit file.
The Free Software Foundation has released a 10,653-word description of all the new features in Emacs 26.1. Here's a couple more:

• The Emacs server now has socket-launching support. This allows socket based activation, where an external process like systemd can invoke the Emacs server process upon a socket connection event and hand the socket over to Emacs... This new functionality can be disabled with the configure option '--disable-libsystemd'.

• The new function 'call-shell-region' executes a command in an inferior shell with the buffer region as input.

• Intercepting hotkeys on Windows 7 and later now works better.

• The new user variable 'electric-quote-chars' provides a list of curved quotes for 'electric-quote-mode', allowing user to choose the types of quotes to be used.

Comments

Skynet option now on by default

[goombah99]

hit ctrl-x SK option-N to toggle it off.

it's just like in the movie, except it talks with a LISP.

Not enough features to be useful

[MetricT]

I'm afraid I can't be bothered to switch to Emacs until it has a hypervisor, 3d rendering engine, distributed filesystem, and GPU-powered machine learning framework. Guess I'll stick with nano for a while longer...

Finally, a Highlander sequel I want to watch!

[fahrbot-bot]

... external process like systemd can invoke the Emacs server process ...

Let Emacs and SystemD duke it out for a while -- There can only be ONE!

[ We're all rooting for -- and counting on -- you Emacs to vanquish The Kurgan. ]

baby steps

[xaosflux]

emacs is "a great operating system, lacking only a decent editor"