GNU Coughs Up Emacs 22 After Six Year Wait

lisah writes "After keeping users waiting for nearly six years, Emacs 22 has been released and includes a bunch of updates and some new modes as well. In addition to support for GTK+ and a graphical interface to the GNU Debugger, 'this release includes build support for Linux on AMD64, S/390, and Tensilica Xtensa machines, FreeBSD/Alpha, Cygwin, Mac OS X, and Mac OS 9 with Carbon support. The Leim package is now part of GNU Emacs, so users will be able to get input support for Chinese, Tibetan, Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, and other languages without downloading a separate package. New translations of the Emacs tutorial are also available in Brasilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, simplified and traditional Chinese, Italian, French, and Russian.'"

Don't forget

[SnowZero]

Release early, release often. Don't end up like Emacs.

Re:Nobody Cares.

[__aaclcg7560]

My programming instructor said he had an evil boss at a government job who made him use Emacs. Horrors! I think Emacs exist to scare the new generation into using VI.

We were always using VI

[SuperKendall]

But then once in a while, some among us elevated to a higher plane - the Emacs User. :-)

Emacs 22 took six years, just to find anything Emacs 21 didn't already offer...

Re:Feature Rich

[chris_mahan]

Be careful, my 5'4 Asian Girlfriend became my 5'4 asian wife (japanese) and now I have the half-asian 2year old kid that, maybe, someday, after much training, will write code for me.

3. Profit!

Re:Nobody Cares.

[buswolley]

Perhaps this should be tagged: flamewar!

Re:Why wait for Emacs...

[Riverman5]

Cause vi is for buttholes!

Re:Nobody Cares.

[bckrispi]

Emacs vs. vi?? They both suck!!

Re:Nobody Cares. - my experience

[poor_boi]

I love vim. vi is ok. vim is great.

vim is an editor that can be used as an ide. Emacs is an ide that can be used as an editor.

I can honestly recommend vim for use on every platform it supports, which is pretty much all of them, including amiga.

The only warning I would give is: bring patience with you. vi and vim do not become powerful until you become proficient at the keyboard commands, the modal system, and the command line commands. vim has a menuing system, but if you are a menu-only type of guy, why subject yourself to a new set of menus?

If you do not love and believe in vi's modal editing enough to learn it, use another editor.

pb

Re:We were always using VI

[jbolden]

Is there any new reason for a Linux noob to take a second look at emacs?

Not as a noob. Give it a few years. There is no one who has learned emacs that regrets it.

Re:Nobody Cares.

[smittyoneeach]

My son, the Esteemed Mother Among Computer Software smiles at you.
May the icon factories currently stuffing lesser programming tools with meaningless little objects of idolatry never pollute your conscious with bric-a-brac.
May you never touch an editor that is less than extensible, customizable, self-documenting, and resplendent, whether dressed in an X session or a humble terminal.
And may e vi l never your doorway darken, though emacs has a mode to help your recovery therefrom.

Re:Anti-aliased / subpixel rendered fonts on linux

[be-fan]

Emacs is a programmers editor. Most programmers don't like to stare at anti-aliased code. That said, I'm firmly in the anti-aliased camp, which is fine for me because the various Mac builds support anti-aliasing (I believe the Windows ports do as well).

Emacs is a really powerful tool once you get the hang of it. It has absolutely unparalleled support for chopping/dicing/splicing and otherwise throwing text around really fast without ever taking your hands of the keyboard. And Emacs has language-aware modes for a whole bunch of different languages.

I used to use vi when I was on linux, and it was an excellent tool. When I first got my Macs, I used TextMate, which was all the rage among Mac users. Somebody turned me on to Emacs not too long ago, and I haven't looked back. It's just very well-designed for working on large amounts of code, and scales way better than TextMate ever did (tabs become useless when you're working on dozens of files!).

That said, the learning curve for Emacs is *steep*. It's definitely a "hands off the mouse" kind of system. It took me a month and 2000 lines of code before I was really comfortable with it, and I still haven't tapped a fraction of its full power!

Re:We were always using VI

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

Agreed. I Think it actually is a change you do out of necessity. When you find the need to edit at the same time +5 php files, php.ini, httpd.conf, a few very complex SQL sentences, and at the same time test those SQLs, those PHPs, restart services, and tail a few logfiles, all while checking e-mail, Emacs comes as a natural solution.

Re:Anti-aliased / subpixel rendered fonts on linux

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

Actually, REAL coders don't use Emacs under X. You run the console version, which is the real Emacs. Maybe Emacs inside an x-term, but not the shitty X version. alias emacs='emacs -nw'. There. Fixed.

Is it worth learning for the next generation?

[ChaosDiscord]

Are Emacs and Vi even worth learning for the next generation? I say this as a fan of Vim who uses it for all his text editing; and many of my coworkers are Vim or Emacs fans. Both are exceptionally powerful tools. But neither program is especially user friendly, and other editors and IDE seem to be catching up in terms of power. It's perfectly possible to achieve mastery and speed in more user friendly tools as well. (I know a guy who uses Visual Studio's editor with the fluidity I normally only see in Vim or Emacs users, almost never removing his fingers from the keyboard. He works almost entirely on muscle memory so his editor is almost a direct extension of his thoughts.)

Much though I love Vim and look forward to new releases, as I expect the Emacs fans do, I suspect our favorite editors are going to be increasingly marginalized. I can't in good faith suggest that younger programmers spend the time to learn either one. (Excepting of course people working on Unix, where you should know enough pure-Vi to muddle along in a worst case scenario.)

Re:We were always using VI

[mwpeters]

When you find the need to edit at the same time +5 php files, php.ini, httpd.conf, a few very complex SQL sentences, and at the same time test those SQLs, those PHPs, restart services, and tail a few logfiles, all while checking e-mail, Emacs comes as a natural solution.

You misspelt "screen". HTH!

Re:Nobody Cares.

[ebh]

Ed? Ed??

Wimp.

$ export EDITOR=cat

Re:Nobody Cares.

[Em Adespoton]

I'd suggest using vi/vim instead of pico/nano for sysadmin editing... pico and nano hard-wrap your text, which can really mess up config files. Of course, you COULD use EMACS, but then hey... you could use ed too....