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.'"
Nobody Cares. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Nobody Cares. (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't expect this announcement to affect my work environment.
You're so lucky (Score:5, Funny)
My programming instructor said he had an evil boss at a government job who made him use Emacs.
You're lucky. *My* evil boss makes me edit Java and XML with Excel.
We were always using VI (Score:5, Insightful)
Emacs 22 took six years, just to find anything Emacs 21 didn't already offer...
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:We were always using VI (Score:5, Informative)
Really, there's nothing in Emacs to figure out - since it has a menu, you can save and so faroth using that, if you don't feel like learning the keyboard commands (whch have a huge amount of depth and are logically organized).
You load files and the appropriate mode should be applied. You get more out of it if you learn some modal specific commands (like autoflow comments in C mode) but you can always go without them.
The feature I still find most powerful is macro recording, if you ever decide to go in for a second look - C-x ( starts a key board macro, C-x ) ends recording, and C-x e runs the macro you last recorded.
Re:We were always using VI (Score:4, Informative)
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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.
Naming and saving Emacs keyboard macros (Score:3, Informative)
M-x name-last-kbd-macro
to give the macro a name
M-x insert-kbd-macro
to insert it as Lisp code in the current buffer.
Addition to sibling's comment (Score:3, Informative)
Also, there's an emacs extension called "better-registers". Better registers allow assignment of keyboard macros into "registers". Registers are basically variables that are assigned to keyboard keys. So you can assign a macro, string, number, or whatever into a variable associated with a key, and then perform operations on that variable (increas
Re:Another keyboard shortcut (Score:4, Funny)
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Not as a noob. Give it a few years. There is no one who has learned emacs that regrets it.
Re:We were always using VI (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:We were always using VI (Score:4, Informative)
Re:We were always using VI (Score:5, Funny)
Emacs 22 took six years, just to find anything Emacs 21 didn't already offer...
Sure. Now maybe that they're done with that, they'll finish Hurd.
Re:We were always using VI (Score:5, Funny)
If you have Emacs, you don't need Hurd.
obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
vi-mode for Emacs, the code (Score:4, Funny)
Here is vi-mode for emacs (with apologies to Erik Naggum):
(defun vi-mode ()
(interactive)
(use-global-map (make-keymap))
Whatever you do, it will just beep annoyingly at you.
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:Nobody Cares. - my experience (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Nobody Cares. - my experience (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Ah yes, the vi editor ... (Score:4, Informative)
As with many bizarre bits of vi, the answer seems to be historical. Early terminals of course did not have arrow keys. The hjkl keys actually had arrows on them, so it made sense then.
Same goes for the escape key; it was where Tab is now, so it was easier to hit. (Now I find ctrl-[ easier to hit than escape.)
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 ed
Re:Nobody Cares. (Score:4, Funny)
You shouldn't boot emacs right away (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Nobody Cares. (Score:4, Insightful)
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And what would you suggest instead? NEdit [nedit.org] seems to be distinctly sub-emacs in features (though with different bindings) and Eclipse [eclipse.org] is massive (though good for a few things: notably Java and XSD/WSDL, all of which are impossibly officious without a fancy editor to help you out). Everyone knows that notepad is a terrible editor for real use, and ed [hmc.edu] is only for the real hard-core. (OK, I admit I like ed. But I wouldn't want to write code in it if at all possible, not these days.
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Re:Nobody Cares. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
I can finally upgrade from Windows 2000 (Score:2)
Anti-aliased / subpixel rendered fonts on linux (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Anti-aliased / subpixel rendered fonts on linux (Score:4, Insightful)
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!
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Don't forget (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Don't forget (Score:5, Funny)
Yep... And Debian has just released another stable, just a bit more than a year after the last one... And the new emacs is released... What is up with all those things?!?!?! Will we have perl6 and hurd released now?!?!?!
The world is a crazy place.
Coughs up? (Score:2, Funny)
Feature Rich (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Feature Rich (Score:5, Funny)
Once that's implemented, the whole vi vs. Emacs thing is over.
Hot asian girlfriend FTW!
He didn't say "hot" (Score:5, Funny)
Vi asian girlfriend just stands there looking pretty, but if you thought you were going to get anything done, you're sadly mistaken. It'll take you a week to figure out how to get that dress off...
Vim asian girlfriend will do anything you ask, as soon as you learn the language. Fortunately, most of us know words like "Bukakke" already, and it doesn't take much.
Re:He didn't say "hot" (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Feature Rich (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Feature Rich (Score:4, Funny)
But she would be open source, so you could change those features.
Re:Feature Rich (Score:5, Funny)
So we could be talking about a chunky girl with mosquito bites, and a mouth full of crooked teeth, a strict no-sex-before-marriage policy, and a really foul attitude... Like the kind that would be all screaming at you in Cantonese every night, unless you cater to her every whim, as uttered in broken, thickly-accented English - and then if you give her the boot she sneaks back into your place and steals or destroys all your stuff...
See? SEE? Now do you understand why it's important to clearly and thoroughly define the requirements of your software before coding begins?
I prefer my personal impelmentation of "5'4 Asian Girl Friend v10.0". It's a great improvement over "5'3 blonde German Girl friend v9.5" who was actually an upgrade on "5'5 filipina stripper Girl Friend v6.9". I still fondly remember the one I started with "5'1 half filipina half chinese Girl friend v.5.0" however that implementation was not as asthetically pleaseing as the other three and came with "waiting for marriage" DRM but was more stable then two of the other three.
The current one ("5'4 Asian Girl Friend v10.0") is both stable, DRM free, include the "hot" feature and "sane" feature which some of the previous versions lacked. I was thinking of trying make the "threesome" feature but I might be pushing my luck
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Did they finally add the "write my code for me" command? It seems to be one of the few things emacs hasn't implemented. I suppose a "materialize a 5'4 asian Girl Friend" command would be useful too. I think we should push for that in the next revision.
It's all in there, you just don't know the right modeline.
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3. Profit!
But does it run on linux? (Score:2, Funny)
Y'know... (Score:5, Funny)
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M-x psychoanalyze-pinhead
Try them...
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So EMACS really is like an operating system... (Score:4, Funny)
But who shed more features before going gold?
Obligatory flamebait (Score:5, Funny)
Or is it just now Eight Hundred Megs And Constantly Swapping?
Actually that's the reason for the delay... (Score:2)
Actually it's now eighty meg and that's the reason for the long delay: They had to put in a whole plumbers' supply of kitchen sinks to get from 8 meg to 80.
How do I turn that OFF? (Score:2)
How do I turn that off?
The linux install my company did on my desktop has a true vi but simlinks "view" (the canonical "vi it in read-only mode") to "vim". Unfortunately, some of the files I need to work on come out in unreadable purple-on-black under vim, so when I "view" them to open them read-only they become unreadable-only. B-(
Re:Obligatory flamebait (Score:4, Informative)
So it is quite ironical that emacs used to be a pig, but nowadays is lean and mean compared to most other editors. Still it is more powerful than most.
Re:Obligatory flamebait (Score:4, Funny)
I love the headline (Score:3, Funny)
On the upside, matching our carpet to the color of the catfood has turned out to be a brilliant strategy so far.
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So I take it whoever modded me as flamebait thinks this isn't the best thing that has been coughed up since the hairball incident? Will the persecution of emacs never end?????
Number One (Score:4, Funny)
Ok, but does it include... (Score:3, Funny)
For those of you...., (Score:4, Funny)
ln -s vi emacs (Score:3, Funny)
Gtk (Score:2)
Thank God for that OS9 support (Score:2)
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.
Any OS X builds? (Score:2)
I just started a build on an Intel Tiger system with "./configure --sysconfdir=/etc --prefix=/usr --enable-carbon-app" and all seems OK so far, though I have never built emacs on OS X before and I am not sure if this is the way to build emacs on OS X.
Re:Any OS X builds? (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the instructions I saved:
mkdir ~/tmp
cd ~/tmp
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sv.gnu.org:/sources/emac
cd emacs
make bootstrap
make
sudo make install
Then I put the following in my
alias emacs="/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Ema
(you may want to adjust the columns and width from 110 and 40 to your own preference)
NOTE: I haven't tried this since 22 was officially released.
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cd emacs/mac
./make-package --self-contained
Makes a .dmg which includes an installer. Self-contained means all the support files end up in the Emacs.app directory, so nothing is installed in /usr.
UNIX Philosophy (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:UNIX Philosophy (Score:5, Informative)
If you want an editor like EMACS that follows the UNIX philosophy, take a look at mg, from the OpenBSD team (now runs pretty much anywhere). Most people who use EMACS, however, would feel horribly lost on something like mg, since it's the non-UNIX-like nature of it that is its strength.
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1. Emacs predates the Lisp machines, it was originally developed for the MIT mainframes (in TECO, with TECO as an extension language). GNU Emacs has its origins mostly in Multics Emacs, a port to a different mainframe/OS, both the first Emacs implemented in Lisp and the first Emacs extended using Lisp (also the only standard Multics program using Lisp
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
OMG, what next?? (Score:5, Funny)
I don't know who's a fault... (Score:4, Funny)
But I _still_ can't get GRUB to load it...I _still_ have to use this useless 'linux thingy' to invoke it!
Won't someone please help me with replacing my Symbolics machine?
The Website, RMSes Passport Portrait, Emacs ... (Score:3, Funny)
Emacs may once have been an extremely powerfull tool and the best possible thing for a remote tty command line mainframe uplink some 25 years ago. I nearly started learning it back in 1996. But all this nowadays and with a stance that is way far out even by slashdot standards
How about calling it quits? Donald Knuth stopped TeX when it was finished. And it actually still is a usable tool today. Then again, Donald Knuth is a normal, respected developer, not some strange fringe-dimension entity
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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
Eight Megs Is Nothing Nowadays (Score:3, Funny)
Is it worth learning for the next generation? (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Is it worth learning for the next generation? (Score:4, Informative)
I think it depends a lot on how many systems you use, both now and in the future, and also your rate of learning.
If I'm a new Java programmer I'll probably get more out of Eclipse than vi or Emacs; if I'm using Windows I might get more out of Visual Studio than vi or Emacs. But that's just in the short term. In the long term, the language and operating system might change, but the need to work on text files is likely to still be there. If I'm using multiple languages or OSes now, or if I expect that I'll be using different languages or OSes in the future, it means I'm likely to change IDEs. Each time I change, I'm learning from scratch. This means I don't get more than a decade of becoming an expert with one editor; instead I learn the most common tasks but not the advanced features.
With vi(m) or Emacs, I get something that's not optimized (specialized) for one environment, but instead something that's general-purpose and adapts to many different systems, and I can carry what I learn from one system to the next. I've been using vi and Emacs on Solaris, OS/2, Linux, Windows, Mac, with C, Scheme, C++, Java, Ruby, Python, Perl, SML, and many other languages. I could've used Visual Age on OS/2, but most of what I learned would not have been that useful when I switched to Eclipse on Linux, and most of that would not be useful when I switched to Visual Studio on Windows, and most of that would not be useful when I switched to XCode on Mac. Instead, I'm using a tool that's less optimal for my current needs, but it's something that I can keep using for other needs.
It extends beyond programming to my editing of text files, email, messages for newsgroups, HTML, my diary, my calendar, blogs, XML, config files, etc. Do you use Visual Studio for editing your blog, or do you use a different editor? Do you use yet a different editor for HTML? For email? I think it's a reasonable way to go but I find that I only use the simplest editing functions when I use lots of editors, because I can't count on features being available as I switch from one context to another.
It's a tradeoff, and I don't know for sure whether it's better to be a novice with specialized tools or an expert with a single general-purpose tool. I'd consider vi(m) and/or Emacs if you're editing a whole lot and expect to be editing on many different systems, languages, etc. I'd stick to IDEs if you're using one system a lot and don't expect to switch often, or if you don't edit enough that there's any benefit to learning vi(m) or Emacs.
But vim has clippy (Score:3, Funny)
Re:NEW - DNF mode! (Score:4, Funny)
Needing (Score:2)
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Re:Cue the vi versus emacs flamewars (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Cue the vi versus emacs flamewars (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Cue the vi versus emacs flamewars (Score:5, Funny)
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If you want an editor that supports Esperanto, then you should switch to FreeDOS EDLIN 2.10c, [freedos.org] as Esperanto support was already added. :-)
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Well, I'm wary of any editor that takes the commands through the colon. Add on a Brokeback reference, and my homometer [crooksandliars.com] is going haywire!
I kid, I kid... I personally use both Emacs and Vim
.