Emacs Hits Version 23 367
djcb writes "After only 2 years since the previous version, now emacs 23 (.1) is available. It brings many new features, of which the support for anti-aliased fonts on X may be the most visible. Also, there is support for starting emacs in the background, so you can pop up new emacs windows in the blink of an eye. There are many other bigger and smaller improvements, including support for D-Bus, Xembed, and viewing PDFs inside emacs. And not to forget, M-x butterfly. You can get emacs 23 from ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/ or one of its mirrors; alternatively, there are binary packages available, for example from Ubuntu PPA."
Congrats! (Score:5, Insightful)
Thanks RMS for Emacs, the GPL and the spirit of GNU that I found in 1995 and has not left me since!
Happy Hacking!
Re:Decent text editor still not included right? (Score:5, Insightful)
emacs is what happens when a project goes too far beyond its intended purpose.
It's a frikken text editor for God's sake. If it's not a text editor any longer, and is now the beginning of its own OS, then let it be identified as such. I mean my god, the extensions this thing can have? Calendar/Planners? I like advanced text editing functions as much as the next guy... maybe some useful macros here and there... but this is just ridiculous. How long will it be before Microsoft starts seeing emacs as a threat to Windows + Office?
Re:Missed the best feature! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Remember this one? (Score:3, Insightful)
Either one is better than using 99% of the other options out there. If your text editor requires the use of a mouse you need a better text editor.
Re:Decent text editor still not included right? (Score:5, Insightful)
Correct: Emacs is a text editor. And guess what: a calendar consists of text. Plans consist of text. So are emails and newsgroup contents. Source code, XML data files, patches, changelogs, directory listings, version control messages, compilation messages, are all text.
Re:Now finish HURD please (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Missed the best feature! (Score:5, Insightful)
"Haw haw a text editor that duz stuff, we here around these parts just use NOTEPAD.EXE"
Yawn. Tired jokes that aren't funny anymore.
Text editing, text processing, and generally manipulating anything involving language---especially natural language---is the most complicated thing that's ever done on a computer. Yet people---even supposedly knowledgeable people---demand stupidly broken tools that lack sophisticated tools for doing a sophisticated thing. When you understand this, jokes about "ha ha your text-editor-operating-system does X" aren't funny. It makes you wonder why other text editors don't do things.
Re:Decent text editor still not included right? (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, it might. For instance, Emacs 23 includes support for SVG, and SVG code consists of human-readable text. So if you need to change some parameters in an SVG image, such as its width or height, you can open it in Emacs, type C-c C-c to switch to text representation, perform your edits, and type C-c C-c again to instantly view the result.
Re:Remember this one? (Score:3, Insightful)
So you can do a find and replace based on a regex via the mouse? I would love to see that. Which mouse button changes the case on a whole line of text?
I use vim not because it makes me "leet", but because it is by far the best tool for the job that I have found. It can be used in all places, it runs on everything and I don't need to worry if X is even installed. It does have a steep learning curve, but so do all professional tools in darn near every field.
Re:Missed the best feature! (Score:3, Insightful)
"Haw haw a text editor that duz stuff, we here around these parts just use NOTEPAD.EXE"
Yawn. Tired jokes that aren't funny anymore.
Text editing, text processing, and generally manipulating anything involving language---especially natural language---is the most complicated thing that's ever done on a computer. Yet people---even supposedly knowledgeable people---demand stupidly broken tools that lack sophisticated tools for doing a sophisticated thing. When you understand this, jokes about "ha ha your text-editor-operating-system does X" aren't funny. It makes you wonder why other text editors don't do things.
"Perfection is achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away" - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
An application should do one thing and do it well, not do a gazillion things in a mediocre way*. Otherwise what's the point in running separate apps, why don't we just build all the functionality you'll ever need straight into the OS, it'd sure be faster that way.
*I'm not implying that emacs is mediocre just stating general principles.
Runs in the background.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Also, there is support for starting emacs in the background, so you can pop up new emacs windows in the blink of an eye.
It will be a sad day indeed when I have to run my text editor in the background just so it will start up in a reasonable amount of time.
Fortunately, I use Vim, so that day is further off.
Re:emacs is lean and mean (Score:3, Insightful)
"Bloatware == slowness" is a misguided generalization.
Emacs actually is the classic example of bloatware. It doesn't matter that the bloat is fast. What matters is that when you try to change an option you discover that you have 5-10 micro-options + hooks + extra bunch of options for different modes you might happen to use. And none of their combination leads to desired result. Then you turn to lisp - hopping to tap into the programmability of Emacs - just to discover that every tiny thing has already layers of overrides, spread over dozens megabytes of preinstalled lisp code.
That what happened to me twice. Because twice I have tried to learn Emacs.
Re:Not on the PPA yet (Score:2, Insightful)
...but, if you install "emacs-snapshot" you get emacs23.
(Am I talking to myself? Nahhhh.)
Re:Missed the best feature! (Score:1, Insightful)
It makes you wonder why other text editors don't do things.
This is because the programers (and users) for many such other text editors are fans of the Unix philosophy. [wikipedia.org] Many of us prefer are programs focused. What little they do, they should do it well. If you want something more complicated, combine the tools.
While it wouldn't work for the GUI version of Emacs, the grandparent's joy over the client-server functionality could have been achieved through screen.
*IF* something cannot be done through a combination of simpler tools, then yes - complicated it. Otherwise, KISS. This applies perfectly well to text editors.
Re:Still useful after all these years... (Score:3, Insightful)
You know, average people who just want to edit some text now and then find the very concept of putting your own personal text editor's configuration files in a version control system to be very...how shall I say it..not quite how average people think.
Putting source code or collaborative project in into a version control system...smart.
Putting your text editors configuration files that one usually sets and forgets into version control.....not quite sane.
But that's exactly the strength of Emacs (Score:5, Insightful)
An application should do one thing and do it well, not do a gazillion things in a mediocre way
That is exactly what Emacs is.
It's not one giant monolithic thing, at all.
Just like UNIX it's a core in which you can write very specific modules to address some aspect of editing. Perhaps it's formatting C style code. Perhaps it's a variant built around C++ or objective-C in particular. Perhaps it's a bit of logic to sort some parts of a file based on criteria in the file - or by running a shell command.
Each of these pieces can be tied to any particular file type, or called on at will. You can easily write your own, in elisp (basically a LISP variant). All of the standard behavior is also written in elisp, so you can modify or extend it as desired (most things have many points in which you can insert behavior hooks)
Never has a program more dearly held to the concepts you espouse, and it's actually the core of why I think people who prefer emacs over VI do so.
Re:What do you use it for? (Score:3, Insightful)
Totally serious question: do you guys really use emacs (or even vi, etc) to write code rather than a modern Studio/IDE?
Yes. [kdedevelopers.org] The typical reasons (aside from Luddite tendencies and comfort) include
Some people have been using such editors for longer than the modern IDEs have existed, and so are so good with them that it would take a very long time to recoup the investment of switching (if we even take as given that there will be a lasting net benefit).
Re:Still useful after all these years... (Score:3, Insightful)
Whoa whoa, "not quite how average people think" is one thing, but "not quite sane" is just off.
Average people don't program computers. But programming computers is not insane.
Average Vim or Emacs users may not version control their config files. But doing so is not insane.
Maybe you're not a sysadmin. Version controlling your server application configs is really beneficial. Okay, now extend the concept to version controlling all your application configs. Makes sense.
And if your editor config isn't changing over time, maybe you're also not any kind of sophisticated text editor user. I'm making about 2.5 revisions a year. Every year I learn a few new things about my editor. I imagine this is what happens with most folks who take their tools seriously.
I mean, no offense. It's okay if people aren't uber-serious about the tools they use, surely they can still get things done. But your not seeing the sense in version controlling editor config files should not be mistaken for there being a lack of it.