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Emacs 26.1 Released With New Features (lwn.net)

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

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.

2 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I'm a bit of an Emacs fan. by phantomfive · · Score: 2, Informative

    not learn all the commands to do things that are just a mouse click on other development environments.

    This is a troll, but in case anyone else is wondering, all the basic commands are available in a regular menu in modern emacs. You can learn the basic hot keys as you go, just like any environment. And if you want to, you can learn the more advanced commands. But you don't have to.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  2. Re:inetd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    > I just don't trust to be that secure as a server for the world. It wasn't the design spec.

    I wouldn't either. That's also what the authors think: that's why, by default, it only listens on an Unix domain socket (i.e. local to the machine). You can enable it to listen on a TCP socket. In that case, the client has to provide a key (by default randomly generated by the server).

    It's all in the docs.

    The Emacs devels do know what they are doing. They are not known to sacrifice security for "shiny", mind you.