GNU Emacs 24.4 Released Today 156
New submitter Shade writes Well over one and a half years in the works, the latest and greatest release of GNU Emacs was made officially available today. Highlights of this release include a built-in web browser, improved multi-monitor and fullscreen support, "electric" indentation enabled by default, support for saving and restoring the state of frames and windows, pixel-based resizing for frames and windows, support for digitally signed ELisp packages, support for menus in text terminals, and much more. Read the official announcement and the full list of changes for more information.
Sounds nice (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sounds nice (Score:5, Funny)
Ahh, first post, I bet you prepped this offline in vi for super-speedy readiness.
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Re:Sounds nice (Score:4, Funny)
What do you mean? Emacs can emulate vi.
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What do you mean? Emacs can emulate vi.
That's the best way to use it.
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I do that often, as it happens. I often test my lisp in batch, so I run emacs inside a compilation window. I also use Emacs in batch for some builds of things other than Emacs software. For this, I run make which runs emacs inside a compilation window.
There is a widgetized branch of Emacs which lets you use Emacs as a widget and lets you put widgets into Emacs, so you could probably do it graphically if you really wanted.
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If the web browser supports Javascript, then you may be able to run Linux inside the browser using something like jslinux [bellard.org], so you could compile an Emacs to run inside the web browser inside your Emacs.
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Emacs can emulate vi which is emulating emacs.
Re:Sounds nice (Score:4, Funny)
Or a systemd dependancy.
Re: Sounds nice (Score:1)
so, emacs can't read it's own log files directly yet? I think we need vimacs.
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Why should emacs depend on systemd when it can reimplement it?
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They won't react badly unless emacs gets pulled as a dependency and renames network interfaces. Which it won't do because it is not cancer.
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but but but but it does more than one thing, its not the Unix Way ...
That's what you guys have always misunderstood about emacs. It's really an operating system that merely looks like an editor.
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Emacs is neatly packaged [debian.org] so you can install only the things you like, just as debian does for python, ruby, and lots other environments (emacs is more like them than a mere editor).
Because, I repeat, it is not cancer.
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Emacs works fine as pid1, as long as you don't expect X.
(In practice I've done this with a startup sh script as init=/bin/do_emacs.sh that set up stuff and ended as
"exec emacs" but still. An old underpowered laptop as file editor, with tramp mode for remote editing, no problem.
New Web Browser (Score:2)
Now if it only included a text editor.
You can run it in the new "built-in web browser." They must have refactored Firefox to Emacs Lisp. Firefox can run java when you bundle it with the jre, and there are lots of text editors in java. So you're golden.
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But does it run Linux?
Re:Sounds nice (Score:5, Funny)
Only Linux versions using systemd are supported for now.
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Imagine a Beowulf mode cluster of Emacs....
At least Emacs can open files over 2 MB in size. (Score:3, Informative)
There are some JavaScripters at work, and lately they've been going all gaga over some text editor called Atom. They were telling the rest of us (we mostly use Vim and Emacs) about how great Atom is because it's developed by GitHub, and because it's developed as an HTML and JavaScript web app embedded in a standalone dedicated Chrome process, or something like that.
These guys tend to be wrong about most everything, but I figured that I should at least try Atom out on my own before making any judgement. Jesu
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i had a ver similar experience. :) it was amusing.
no, it's not viable as a heavy duty editor yet, by far. however it's remarkable that such apps are at all possible grinding the dom in a browser. the setup for desktop integration is awkward, but keep in mind that this is a pure standard html webapp. you can easily embed that thing in any webpage to be used in any browser, considering this fact both functionality and performance are quite remarkable.
oh, and i'm afraid you don't know anything about javascript
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https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/viper.html
Start your engines! (Score:1)
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Emacs OS (Score:5, Funny)
Emacs OS - I know it is missing a text editor - but does it support systemd?
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Includes everything, including the kitchen sink :-)
First editor I ever really liked, and my standard for longer than I care to think now.
It is perilously close to an operating system - in stark contrast to the usual unix philosophy of small tools to do single jobs well.
Aaahh!, I see the cunning plan. By using all of those small tools, emacs can do everything for you without ever needing to see the shell again!
Fiendishly cunning, those GNU people!
Re:Emacs OS (Score:5, Informative)
It is perilously close to an operating system - in stark contrast to the usual unix philosophy of small tools to do single jobs well.
GNU is not Unix. :)
Emacs is not based on the UNIX.
It is based on the lisp machines [wikipedia.org].
The lisp machine have died, but Emacs still lives on.
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It might not be based on unix, but it is strongly supported by tools from unix, and does it's best to provide you access to most unix tools in some form.
I certainly first encountered it on unix platform of some kind, and it is (in my mind) strongly associated with various unix descendants, derivatives, and other hangers on. Including the unix toolset supported by linux.
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C-x M-c A-systemd (it's 2 lines of lisp).
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Actually, it sounds more like the complete system to put on top of HURD, once that project has a stable microkernel. How's that going, btw?
The web browser that Emacs now includes - is it linq, or is it epiphany/GNOME web? Or is it Stallman's wet dream of an offline browser that one can't use while online for one's own good & protection from Snowden's NSA?
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But systemd is written in C. I gather we would have to start by implementing C in elisp.
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But systemd is written in C. I gather we would have to start by implementing C in elisp.
emacs is written in C, too.
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But systemd is written in C. I gather we would have to start by implementing C in elisp.
Not really just moving the lisp interperter to /bin and it should work, and from what I'm hearing it should add much to systemd's runtime size or slow it down much. A recursive run level manager, sounds like tons of fun!
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It would be more fun to first implement C in Elisp and then let the C interpeter run systemd.
Bring back 19.34b (Score:2)
emacs releases have been on a downward arc since 19.34b. Unfortunately that version won't build on any recent versions of Linux. /. back in 2008, and things have not improved.
I said this on
The problems are a mix of bloat and changes to the default behaviors.
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Yes, how hard can it possibly be to get millions of lines of code written over a span of decades by thousands of authors to interoperate close enough to flawlessly to parse some simple text in hundreds of grammars through the use of a couple dozen basic operations executed billions of times a second? Geez.
Whenever a computer problem arises, the first thing to remember is that it's not strange that it doesn't work.
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That happens to me when fixing bugs in a particularly old piece of code (usually the stuff done by overseas consultants... friends don't let friends outsource programming)... once getting the thing fixed, I often fail to understand how it could have ever worked in the first place.
Better EMACS 24.4 download link (Score:2)
The mirrors don't all have the latest version yet, so you can download here:
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/e... [gnu.org]
Huzzah (Score:2)
Emacs is still my favorite programming editor.
Looking forward to using this latest version.
I think I know the question on all our minds (Score:2)
Can it read e-mail?
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Of course it can! It can even edit videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
The question should be, what ridiculous use of a text editor has the developers not think of yet?
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A sufficiently smart grammar checker.
Re:I think I know the question on all our minds (Score:5, Interesting)
You make the mistake of thinking that emacs is a text editor. Emacs is an extensible framework, a display system with lots of scripting code underneath. In the early days it was basically just a text editor plus shell interface, but that quickly grew and the program became more flexible.
This is just like web browsers, which are basically just display systems designed to handle an arbitrary set of layouts that are given to it. In the early days they basically just gave you a list of scientific articles from the net and then would kick off an ftp program to fetch them for you, but today they can show video and let you do banking and so forth.
Re:I think I know the question on all our minds (Score:4, Funny)
M-x doctor
M-x hanoi
M-x tetris
But you knew that already, didn't you?
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Yes, with "M-x doctor" and "M-x hanoi". They've been there for longer than I can remember (which is to say, a lot). More details in the relevant section [gnu.org] of the manual.
Re:I think I know the question on all our minds (Score:5, Informative)
Can it read e-mail?
Serious question? :-)
Answer: I was able to read email and news within Emacs in the late 1980s. I imagine that's still true
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This is emacs. The question is not whether it can read email, but which way you want to do it.
One of my colo servers has a permanent screen session in which one virtual terminal is dedicated to running emacs -f gnus. I access it daily (normally when email needs rescued from procmail+bogofilter).
Lost me because of Java (Score:3)
IntelliJ code inspection and refactoring features are so great that it's worth sacrificing power tools like apply-macro-to-region-lines. Maybe theoretically some of these things could be configured in Emacs, but work to discover the packages and create/learn keyboard shortcuts is too much for my patience. It would help to have "emacs distributions" with task specific documentation for particular use cases.
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So, what you're saying is that you want to add a package manager?
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The package manager was added back in 24.1. 24.4 makes it safe to use, by allowing packages to be digitally signed.
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It couldn't.
Emacs was one of the very first things to understand what you code, to be able to do semantic highlighting and real refactoring, and also the very first to have what you call "Language Injections" in IntelliJ. But these were largely left untouched for like 10 years, already dead when I was learning it, and today all these are nothing more than proof of concept and parts of its glorious history that might worth a place in museum.
Until the core developers have better vision of text editor more tha
An integrated web browser? (Score:2, Funny)
Systemd had that since release 215.
Still no decent source browser integration (Score:3)
I've used Emacs for more than 20 years, but cannot justify that any more; the source browsing integration of modern IDEs is just too nice and the editing goodness that is Emacs is just not enough.
Re:Still no decent source browser integration (Score:4, Informative)
There are quite a few ways (too many, which is an Emacs flaw) of achieving Source Browsing. ECB is a nice example, if you like the full windows environment. Mostly, though, I use ido.el and projectile. It's very quick. Indeed, the ability to move between files with extreme rapidity is one of the things that keeps me on Emacs.
The core of Emacs is very stable, and you get used to do things in certain ways. At times, you need to shake things about a bit and investigate new packages. While this comes with a cost, the benefit of Emacs is that the old ways still work. You won't get forced into a new way of working with each new release, if you are happy with the old.
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Oh, thanks for the tip. I'm using ECB...sort of. I'm mostly just using helm to search through all my files and trying to force semantic to parse through my humongous project and not screw up the class referencing. :/
Projectile looks interesting--I'll give it a shot. Any other stuff you like? :)
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ECB has not been updated since 2009... and it was very slow & buggy when I used it last. It is based on cscope which has little support for C++/Java.
What I don't get is: commercial text editors like Visual Slickedit have had fabulous source browsing capabilities for more than 15 years. Another example is sublime text. Why is this not a priority for the emacs devs, whom I would assume are hardcore programmers?
Start rant here (Score:4, Interesting)
Of all the indenting schemes they could have chosen, they chose the one that is the most inconsistent.
Generally here are some common indentation schemes:
Tabs only
Spaces only
Tabs for indent level, spaces for alignment
Which one do you think emacs uses by default? None of the above.
No, emacs uses spaces for indenting 4 spaces, and tabs for indenting 8 spaces.
This means that if you write a function whose name is at indentation level 0, the braces will be indented by 2 spaces.
The code will be indented by 4 spaces. If you then start an if statement, the code in the if statement will be indented not by 8 spaces, but by 1 tab.
This is completely braindead and breaks completely if you ever over one of those files in an editor with tabs configured differently.
At least with the other approaches you can still open the file in an other editor and have the indentation levels make some kind of sense.
Re:Start rant here (Score:4, Insightful)
Like so many things in emacs, this is probably easy to fix if only you spoke lisp ;)
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Like so many things in emacs, this is probably easy to fix if only you spoke lisp ;)
I can't thpeak lithp becauthe I have a lithp.
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Well, stating the obvious here, but my tongue in cheek remark was meant to highlight the fact that Emacs is wonderful if you happened to have spent the 70s in an AI lab, but if you are illisperate, the usefulness goes down significantly.
This was not a suggestion that you actually go out and learn lisp so you can make your text editor work.
(Although, as an emacs user, if you invest in learning some basics of the language it pays off big dividends, fast)
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Options -> Customize Emacs -> Browse Customizations Groups
Emacs -> Editing -> Indent -> Indent Tabs Mode
press Option
In the new buffer...
press toggle
press Set for current session
press Save for future sessions
Surely that's no worse than what I've had to do to make various IDEs usable.
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It seems to me that using TAB to indent is always a bad idea except in language where they are strictly needed.
There are actually 2 ways to indent using TAB:
(1) by giving each TAB a fixed width
(2) by jumping to the next alignment column (as in libreoffice, word)
The second method makes sense for regular text using proportionnal fonts but not for code.
The first method is the most common and the reason why codes idented that way often look bad in emacs is because it interprets TAB
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Emacs also allows you to add local configuration variable inside each file to customize its behavior.So if you do not want to change tab-width globally, just add the following to each C/C++ file indented using a tab-width of 4:
This works for almost all major modes using their respective comments
PS: Slashdot insists for removing newline from the code above. More exemples are in https://www.gnu.org/software/e... [gnu.org]
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Emacs, like every other text editor I've ever seen, actually does (2). A tab character always indents to the next tab stop. By default, there is a tab stop every 8 characters. When all your tabs are at the start of a line, as is typical in a programming environment, the effect may look the same as (1), but try typing the following key sequence in Emacs, or any other editor which you think does (1), and see what the result is:
TAB x ENTER
SPACE TAB x
Yes, you are doing it all wrong (Score:1)
Tabs are 8 spaces. In terminal windows and editors that don't misbehave like, gess what, Notepad, the code looks nice.
I used to prefer that style, because it is the better trade off between readability and bandwidth. Bandwith still matters, if you do not want to uglify HTML.
Then there are all the braindead people, editors, browsers, wo don't understand this simple fact and paint the sky in a tone of pink and argue with the ones that till think it is blue.
So now I dont use tabs anymore. No arguments needed.
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Even typewriters do it right. Redefining the tab width is like redefining PI to 3 like Linus said [kernel.org].
Re: Yes, you are doing it all wrong (Score:2)
What? I fist, Linus is a bit of an opinionated idiot on many things. Secondly, you've never used a typewriter.
They literally had stops you could place anywhere on the carriage. The tab key lifted the movement ratchet so that the carriage would slide to the left under the power of a large spring. The carriage would stop when it hit a tab stop (a metal tab). Without settable stops, it would have been really hard to do tables properly.
Even really really really old typewriters had tab stops. It was a fairly ear
Re:Start rant here (Score:4, Informative)
(setq-default indent-tabs-mode nil) .emacs file.
in your
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Anarcobra description of what is happening is probably quite accurate (at least for some styles) but the problem is that he tries to give a complex interpretation to a simple behavior: What is actually happening in emacs is that everything is indented using spaces (of various numbers depending of the choosen style and context) and every sequence of 8 spaces (as controled by tab-width) is replaced by a TAB (unless indent-tabs-mode is nil).
If you wrongly believe that the indentation algorithm has rules to sel
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Or if you work on projects with different coding styles, use a .dir-locals.el file:
PS: where's the help link that tells you what "allowed HTML tags" are for Slashdot comments? I'm sure there used to be one, and I'm sure you used to be able to format code properly.
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systemd (Score:2)
Using emacs to edit code (Score:2)
Using emacs to edit code is like using Eclipse to edit a text file. :P
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Awww, the poor butthurt emacs fans can't take a joke.
What a shock. I mean really, I'm stunned.
People with no sense of humour seem to abound at slashdot lately.
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Maybe slashdot needs a <joke> tag so all you wankers can tell the difference.
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Someone made fun of your mediocre operating system with the crappy editor
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It also needs a <stupid joke> tag.
Times have changed (Score:2)
So I wouldn't be surprised if emacs does lose out to lighter rival editors that better suit the quick-fix pattern. All the power and flexibility and add ons that emacs has built up (and which weigh it dow
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And since that was an issue with Emacs around 20 years ago, emacsclient exists, to load the file into an already running instance of Emacs, but otherwise act as a console editor is expected to (hanging aro
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Everyone knows that Ed is the standard text editor [c2.com].
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joe - Joe's Own Editor
Description
JOE is a powerful ASCII-text screen editor. It has a "mode-less" user interface which is similar to
many user-friendly PC editors. Users of Micro-Pro's WordStar or Borland's "Turbo" languages will
feel at home. JOE is a full featured UNIX screen-editor though, and has many features for editing
Re:do one thing and do it well (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm shocked (shorting out usb ports need fixing) I haven't seen this posted... I guess if it doesn't say systemd that rhetoric doesn't apply.
Because the people who don't like emacs don't use it. No one builds software with emacs as a dependency and then tried to get every Linux environment to use it as a core dependency.
Emacs is a good citizen. It is cross-platform, stable, and easily replaceable. Unlike it-that-must-not-be-named.
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You mean VI, the notepad for Unix?
VI is another fine tool. Portable, easily replaced, a good citizen. It-that-must-not-be-named is certainly not VI.
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Soooo.... what's its name?
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vi is pretty much the best example to push in the face of systemd apologists.
vi is default in every distribution, nobody bats an eye.
systemd tries to do the same and everybody lose their mind.
The reason is simple. You don't have to deal with vi at all if you don't choose so. And if you really really do not like it...
# aptitude search vi | grep ^i ... ...
i vim-common
i vim-tiny
# aptitude purge vim-tiny vim-common
The following packages will be REMOVED:
vim-common{p} vim-tiny{p}
0 packages upgr
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Because the people who don't like emacs don't use it. No one builds software with emacs as a dependency and then tried to get every Linux environment to use it as a core dependency.
True, although GNU info [xkcd.com]... er, sorry, GNU info [wikipedia.org] had a good college try at inflicting the emacs help system on the world.
Tried emacs years ago (Score:2)