GNU Coughs Up Emacs 22 After Six Year Wait 500
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.'"
Re:Obligatory flamebait (Score:1, Interesting)
Um, mirrors don't have it (Score:2, Interesting)
And it's really just the sources that are out; there's precious few binaries out there.
Can we post binary torrents in this thread? I want OS X, preferably Universal, but Intel-only will do.
Hope this Fixes the Annoyances (Score:1, Interesting)
1. No key combo to delete whole line you are currently on. Sure I can ctrl-a, ctrl-k, ctrl-k, but that blows.
2. When you do global search/replace, it's easy to screw up the minibuffer if you try to scroll the view, say by merely scrolling the mouse wheel. Then you've got to type in your search and replace terms all over again.
3. Speaking of search, maybe I'm just an idiot, but I don't know how to get emacs to search through the document based on some pattern I just happen to have in the copy buffer. This is infuriating to type ctrl-s and not be able to spit into the mini-buffer whatever text you've already got in the copy buffer.
4. non-standard cut/paste key sequences. I use both mac and win32, so the cut/paste keys (ctrl-W, ctrl-Y) are standard within emacs but incredibly unstandard within the mac (apple-c/apple-v) and win32 (ctrl-c, ctrl-v) ecosystem in which it is placed. This might have been fine in the 1980s, but not in the 200x's.
UNIX Philosophy (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Nobody Cares. - my experience (Score:5, Interesting)
In the beginning emacs more than delighted with built-in debugger/mail/sokoban/all-language-modes and then I learned the power of lisp. Google for 5 minutes and then you can have your own scripts built in the editor to rotate the selection, crop 20% of the text from left, tranlsate the remaining junk into Russian and then to Polish or whatever you want, power is immense! Over time my
But, lately I've been thinking about converting to vim family. Vim is what I like in real life - quick (way faster than emacs), not-bloated (still in MBs) and above all cool features. In retrospect, emacs seem to be developed as really bloated thing, include all, nasty to use keyboard shortcuts (although I have replaced all of them with my custom settings).. things that you expect to get on your 10GB windows vista (RMS, pls pardon me for this insane comparison).
OTOH, vim has a taste of elegance, at least in default keyboard shortcuts.. that are rarely longer than 3-4 char. Looks like the developer really cared for what user really needed rather than stuffing everything down the throat. But, my tipping point was vim7.0's "time undo feature" -- something like you tell ":earlier 5m" and it'll take you (or rather your file) 5 minutes back in time. I'm sure I can do same thing in emacs after spending 2 hours on google and adding 10 more lines to
So, here I am in middle of my biggest decision of my life - should I continue emacs, where I am a power user or should I join enemy's camp.
PS: emacs users, pls dont kill me.. I have not YET switched and still visit emacs church. Vim user, you dont kill me either for I am your potential convert. Thanks!
Re:We were always using VI (Score:4, Interesting)
I got stuck in a thunderstorm riding home from work on my bike and I'm too beat to read TFA. Is there any new reason for a Linux noob to take a second look at emacs?
I just got my music/video Linux production machine (Ubuntu) set up and I'm high off my success getting my pro audio interface to work, so I'm willing to take on a mild Linux challenge.
Re:Anti-aliased / subpixel rendered fonts on linux (Score:2, Interesting)
I've never understood why Emacs (or Vi/Vim) got so much praise. Sometimes I think maybe I'm crazy and all the zealots are the ones who have it right, but this makes me feel pretty certain that I'm the one who hasn't lost it.
A text editor has got to be extremely shitty to not support anti-aliased text. That is absolutely completely insane. The more I learn about Emacs/Vi(m), the worse they sound.
Re:Nobody Cares. - my experience (Score:5, Interesting)
OTOH, vim has a taste of elegance, at least in default keyboard shortcuts
That is interesting because I see things in the opposite way.
I have been using vim pretty much since I started using Linux a few years ago. My use is limited to some elementary programming (see sig) some long XML documents, config file editing and, more recently, email in Mutt. I'd say my Vim knowledge is pretty elementary, and I am learning new things all the time.
When I first used Linux, I wanted to learn Emacs. Vi has a reputation of being mean and unfriendly. But something about Emacs just wasn't clicking with me, while the Vim tutorial was easy to follow. The commands were cryptic at first, but I soon realized how quickly I could get around a file with them, even with just rudimentary knowledge.
Every so often I take another look at Emacs. Most recently it was because shells seem to work better with Emacs key bindings (they usually have vi bindings, but I don't find they work as well at the command line.) I figured that if I was going to learn Emacs bindings, I might as well take another look at Emacs.
My most recent impression of Emacs is that the basics of the editor are much more well-designed and integrated than Vim. Vim is descended from Vi, which is descended from Ex, which comes from Ed...so there is a lot of editor history and cruft and weirdness in there. Recently I've been digging through the Ex and Ed manpages, which helps me understand Vim better. But yikes, that old line-editor history is still deeply in Vim, and it is very apt to say that the the visual part of Vim is "bolted on" to Ex.
Emacs on the other hand does not seem to have this crazy history. It seems to do many things smoothly that were later added to Vim, such as editing multiple buffers. Basic functionality like searching is easier to understand--Vim's distinction between "magic" and "nomagic", for example, took awhile for me to understand (of course, it exists in part due to compatibility with the ancient regular expressions found in Ed.)
In short, the core of Emacs seems to me to be designed, while the core of Vim seems haphazard and bolted together like a historical crazy quilt.
However, where this changes is with more advanced functionality. Features such as folding and (more recently) spell checking are built in to Vim. Emacs can do these things, sure. But you have to rely on modes. Good luck finding modes and then, if you find them, good luck documenting them. Furthermore, it often seems that doing something more advanced with Emacs requires learning Emacs Lisp, where the functionality will be built-in to Vim. I don't want to have to learn to program my editor just so I can smoothly edit a file.
So, the core of Emacs seems to me to be better designed, while when it comes to more advanced functionality, Vim wins. So Vim is harder to learn, but easier to use and grow with once you get the hang of it.
A couple of final notes. Vim's documentation is much better than Emacs. Bram has done a fantastic job by writing two manuals--the user guide, to get you started, and the reference manual to exhaustively explain everything. Emacs has only one manual. Further, Bram has documented all of Vim, including the advanced functionality. Since the advanced stuff is not built in to Emacs--it uses modes instead--good luck getting good documentation to go along with advanced Emacs usage.
Also, some people compare Emacs and vi. That is an easy contest--Emacs wins hands down. I installed nvi just to see what it would be like, and the lack of documentation alone makes it very hard to use. Thus emacs versus vi is a bogus comparison. Vim is the standard bearer now.
Just my $.02; I hope an Emacs user offers a refutation.
Emacs has excellent documentation (Score:3, Interesting)
Emacs comes with fine tutorial, available from the help menu, or via C-h t. It comes with a complete online reference manual. A tutorial introduction to elisp, aimed at getting non-programmers up to speed wrt customizing their Emacs. And there's a two-volume set for anyone interested in serious programming in elisp. And O'Reilly has a good manual as well, if you want to pay for it.
And you definitely don't have to learn elisp to use the advanced features of Emacs. You have access to a very rich suite of editing functions with standard emacs. If you want the same (comparable, if not identical) features available with Vim? you will be just fine without knowing anything about lisp.
However, with a little time invested you can increase your productivity by customizing functions. I suppose all editors worth their salt provide regexp search and replace. But if you want to automate complicated stuff having a full extension language on hand is a huge plus. For example, I'm writing a latex document, and I want to be able to pull out all the figures/tables/footnotes to a separate file. This requires a fairly sophisticated regexp, as it has to handle nested parentheses and various options for the different environment types. I don't think it can be done with a one-line regexp. It can be done in a dozen lines of elisp, and nothing too difficult to sort out since the real heavy lifting of the regexps is already done with standard functions. Of course, I'm a rank beginner at this stuff, but I'm hooked after seeing how easy it was to make a fairly complex and useful function.
I guess that dedicated TeX editors probably already have such features built-in. But another benefit of doing this with emacs is that I don't need to learn a different interface to do similar manipulations to code, mail, html...
yp.
Re:Nobody Cares. - my experience (Score:2, Interesting)
Nowadays I use both pretty regularly. I use Emacs for programming and editing large documents. I also love that its shell buffer offers improvements to other terminal programs, and not just the shell (Oracle's sqlplus within an Emacs shell buffer is much better than from a regular terminal). I use vi for quick edits or when there isn't a good mode for Emacs.
One day I caught myself alt-tabbing between an Emacs window editing C and two vim windows for lex and yacc, using all the fancy keyboard shortcuts available within each editor. It is amazing how you get so used to something that you don't even think about how to use it.
Overall, I compare the two editors by their macro capabilities. Emacs can remember long sequences of keystrokes for later recall, and if that isn't enough, you can also write LISP code to modify a buffer however you want. vim doesn't have that level of capability (and vi somewhat less), but does offer the very inconvenient "." command to repeat the last edit. This parallels how I view the two editors - I use Emacs for most serious work, and vim when I want something quick and easy.
Learn them both, you will be better off for it.
Re:Is it worth learning for the next generation? (Score:2, Interesting)
But I've finally made the switch to eclipse, and while I miss (or have yet to discover equivalents for) many of the shortcuts, I don't think I'd recommend emacs for Java development any longer. And in the Windows world, I don't think emacs can be seriously considered as an alternative to something like VS.
For text munging, on the other hand, I continue to use emacs. There are, off the top of my head, three features that I've never seen anywhere else. The first is "kill-rectangle". I sometimes am given a lage log file with say 50k lines like
I want to do some automated munging on the interesting bits, but it's inconvenient having all the other crap. picture the entire contents of the file: the other crap forms a "rectangle" in the buffer. I can easily select and kill that rectangle, leaving a buffer with only the interesting bits.of course, I could also write a regexp to filter out the crap, but why bother? I can kill-rectangle in about 5 keystrokes.
Another cool feature is "adaptive fill" mode. This was very handy back when I composed my mail in emacs. It's a line splitting algorithm which is sensitive to "list" indentation. Slashdot wil eat my formatting, but the idea is that after a line break in what emacs thinks is a list element (or any other block of text that it thinks should be intended differently) it'll indent the line "correctly". It's a minor thing, but it's strange how I miss it.
Finally, macros. Again, I have a 50k line file, and I want to apply some operation to each line. But I may not know at first exactly what operation I want to perform. So I start recording a macro, take a whack at the first line. Repeat, until I get the operation down right. Then I can apply the macro say 10 times, just to be sure. Then I run it through the rest of the buffer. I'm sure vim (etc.) have a similar feature, but at this point the emacs keystrokes are so embedded in my fingers that I do this w/o having to think about it.
Re:Nobody Cares. - my experience (Score:1, Interesting)
The feature that was the final straw was:
My
It takes me several minutes to configure Vim EXACTLY to my taste from the "out of the box" state.
I simply type
Now I can spend more time editing and less time tweaking the editor
And while Emacs has really great documentation, Vim has even better one.
Re:We were always using VI (Score:3, Interesting)
it again later - eg, if I have 3 macros I want to be able to use,
how to I run them each at will rather than just the most recently recorded ?
I've wanted an answer to this question for about, oh, maybe 15 years
now, but never badly enough to wade through enough documentation to find an answer.
Re:The Website, RMSes Passport Portrait, Emacs ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Would we all be better off if we learned things his way? Possibly so. But we don't and we're not going to, and I'm afraid that makes him a bit fringe-dimensional.
Re:Nobody Cares. (Score:3, Interesting)