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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.

4 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. inetd by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Once upon a time, there was a service called inet.d. With inetd it was super easy to write internet activated programs, with almost no extra effort. Service after service got added to inetd, because it was so easy.

    Then one day, someone realized that inetd was a security risk. Not that it was inherently insecure, but that it was in fact harder than you would expect to write an inetd service that was secure, so there were a lot of security holes. As the knowledge of this spread, service after service got removed from inetd, and now on most Unix systems, it's not running at all.

    There's a George Santayana quote in here somewhere. But what is it?

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    1. Re:inetd by phantomfive · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Now, with the socket based activation and handoff, you can implement the service in emacs.

      I like emacs, I used it today. I just don't trust to be that secure as a server for the world. It wasn't the design spec.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  2. I'm a bit of an Emacs fan. by Qbertino · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I find it amazing to have a piece of software that is 42 years old and still in active development. And usage. Think of it: Emacs invented the clipboard. And even though it recently has been beaten by other free editors in performance for larger files I do expect Emacs to take the crown again in upcoming versions.

    I always use Emacs in CLI mode which is where it belongs IMHO.

    Here's to another great 42 years!

    --
    We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
    1. Re:I'm a bit of an Emacs fan. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I tried to use it. But when you have a project to do and then have to learn a very complicated piece of software with its own language on top of that, it's overwhelming. I needed to figure out how to get my project done, not learn all the commands to do things that are just a mouse click on other development environments.

      And now they added 20 pages of descriptions for new features.

      Not for me.