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.

inetd

[phantomfive]

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?

Re:inetd

[phantomfive]

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.

Re:inetd

[Anonymous Coward]

> 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.

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. ]

I'm a bit of an Emacs fan.

[Qbertino]

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!

baby steps

[xaosflux]

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

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.