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

Re:I'm a MICRO-emacs fan

[shoor]

I was first exposed to emacs at my job back in the 1980s, running on some kind of Vax, and it slowed the damn machine down, so I used vi instead, like everybody else. Then I got an Atari 520 ST. It had a minimal word processor, but no good text editor. So I downloaded micro-emacs off usenet from one of the alt-binary newsgroups. It was encoded into an ascii format using uuencode and you got the binary back using uudecode. (That's how things were done in the 80s). Anyway, it worked great! I use emacs now for a few things (I like being able to select a rectangle of text for instance). But my fingers would have never learned the basic text editing commands that are 95% of the keystrokes you use, if I hadn't learned them on micro-emacs.

So yeah, I always have emacs around, for those occasional times when it seems like the right tool, and that's partly because it's a tool I've already learned how to use, at least for certain things. At one time I did explore all the commands in emacs, and there were a few that I actually found handy and still use, like select rectangle, the rest I've forgotten, and I can't see myself ever learning any of the new stuff. But, if I was young, things might be different.