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GNU Coughs Up Emacs 22 After Six Year Wait

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Mon Jun 04, 2007 05:00 PM
from the hopefully-worth-waiting-for dept.
Software Programming IT Technology
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.'"
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  • Nobody Cares. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2007, @05:02PM (#19387961)
    Nobody cares. We're all using VI now.

    • Re:Nobody Cares. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by creimer (824291) on Monday June 04 2007, @05:06PM (#19388021) Homepage
      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 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SuperKendall (25149) on Monday June 04 2007, @05:13PM (#19388107)
      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:We were always using VI (Score:4, Interesting)

        by PopeRatzo (965947) * on Monday June 04 2007, @06:20PM (#19388913) Homepage Journal
        I've learned enough vi to get some work done, but I've never tried emacs. Is this new version any easier to figure out? The first time I had a Linux box, a knowledgeable friend set up emacs for me, but I just couldn't get it before my frustration-limit kicked in.

        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)

          by SuperKendall (25149) on Monday June 04 2007, @06:59PM (#19389369)
          It would be similar...

          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:5, Funny)

        by Mr. Underbridge (666784) on Monday June 04 2007, @07:43PM (#19389859)

        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:Nobody Cares. - my experience (Score:5, Interesting)

      by NovaSupreme (996633) on Monday June 04 2007, @06:09PM (#19388775)
      I've been a regular visitor to the church of Emacs and paying my weekly tribute to RMS on Sundays.

      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 .emacs has grown to have more than 1k lines.

      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 .emacs but the joy is not there.

      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)

        by alienmole (15522) on Monday June 04 2007, @06:28PM (#19389007)

        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!
        Too late - to paraphrase Agent Smith, you're already dead. If you decide to switch, emacs users will kill you. If you don't decide to switch, vi users will kill you. One of your lives had a future, but for some reason, you opened your mouth and picked the one that does not. Goodbye, Mr. NovaSupreme.

      • Re:Nobody Cares. - my experience (Score:5, Insightful)

        by poor_boi (548340) on Monday June 04 2007, @07:58PM (#19389999)
        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:Ah yes, the vi editor ... (Score:4, Informative)

            by massysett (910130) on Tuesday June 05 2007, @06:22AM (#19394273) Homepage
            In "vi" under older SunOS, even arrow keys didn't work! Who decided that h-j-k-l should be used instead of arrows !?!?

            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)

        by massysett (910130) on Monday June 04 2007, @10:02PM (#19391249) Homepage
        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 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.

    • Re:Nobody Cares. (Score:4, Funny)

      by joe_bruin (266648) on Monday June 04 2007, @06:55PM (#19389329) Homepage Journal
      Great, where can I download a boot disk?

        • Re:Nobody Cares. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by smitty_one_each (243267) * on Monday June 04 2007, @08:32PM (#19390425) Homepage Journal
          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.

  • Don't forget (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SnowZero (92219) on Monday June 04 2007, @05:05PM (#19387997)
    Release early, release often. Don't end up like Emacs.

  • Feature Rich (Score:5, Funny)

    by king-manic (409855) on Monday June 04 2007, @05:06PM (#19388009)
    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.

    • Re:Feature Rich (Score:5, Funny)

      by Mattintosh (758112) on Monday June 04 2007, @05:08PM (#19388035)
      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.

      Once that's implemented, the whole vi vs. Emacs thing is over.

      Hot asian girlfriend FTW!

      • He didn't say "hot" (Score:5, Funny)

        by SanityInAnarchy (655584) <ninja@slaphack.com> on Monday June 04 2007, @06:09PM (#19388767) Journal
        Emacs asian girlfriend will cook, clean, balance your checkbook, do your taxes, and never, ever complain... but she weighs 300 lbs.

        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)

          by dstar (34869) on Monday June 04 2007, @09:20PM (#19390913)
          MS Word asian girlfriend is actually nouveau riche white trash with tens of thousands of dollars worth of cosmetic surgery, but she's already done the entire city and she's got a collection of diseases that would make the CDC jealous.

        • Re:Feature Rich (Score:4, Funny)

          by Pharmboy (216950) on Monday June 04 2007, @06:15PM (#19388837) Journal
          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...

          But she would be open source, so you could change those features.

        • Re:Feature Rich (Score:5, Funny)

          by king-manic (409855) on Monday June 04 2007, @07:44PM (#19389879)
          Wait a minute, the specs didn't call for her to be hot... It just said 5'4" and Asian...

          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 :D

  • Y'know... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Colin Smith (2679) on Monday June 04 2007, @05:11PM (#19388075)
    Some day it's going to achieve sentience... Don't say I didn't warn you.

     
  • And it takes about as long for GNU to release a new version as it takes Microsoft to release Vista.

    But who shed more features before going gold?

  • Obligatory flamebait (Score:5, Funny)

    by Alioth (221270) <no@spam> on Monday June 04 2007, @05:12PM (#19388105) Journal
    Does it still (E)ventually (M)alloc (A)ll (C)ore (S)torage?

    Or is it just now Eight Hundred Megs And Constantly Swapping? :-)

      • Re:Obligatory flamebait (Score:4, Informative)

        by Baki (72515) on Monday June 04 2007, @07:00PM (#19389381)
        Many years ago they used to accuse emacs (not entirely unjustified) of using lots of memory, "Eight Megabyte And Constantly Swapping". However, emacs still uses 8MB (in fact when I start it in text mode there is only 6.2MB resident) whereas other editors, even simple ones, have overtaken emacs in this respect and use many times more.

        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.

  • Number One (Score:4, Funny)

    by MulluskO (305219) on Monday June 04 2007, @05:20PM (#19388207) Journal
    So easy to use, no wonder it's number one!

  • For those of you...., (Score:4, Funny)

    by Chineseyes (691744) on Monday June 04 2007, @05:25PM (#19388249)
    For those of you who have been holding your breath you may now exhale.

  • Using Emacs to edit a text file is like... (Score:4, Funny)

    by toadlife (301863) on Monday June 04 2007, @05:52PM (#19388601) Journal
    ...using a front-end loader to put out the cat.

  • OMG, what next?? (Score:5, Funny)

    by mobby_6kl (668092) on Monday June 04 2007, @05:53PM (#19388607)
    This must be the third horseman. Let's just hope the unimaginable doesn't happen, and GNU doesn't puke out Hurd. That would mean the end of us all.

  • I don't know who's a fault... (Score:4, Funny)

    by rthille (8526) <web-slashdot.rangat@org> on Monday June 04 2007, @05:55PM (#19388623) Homepage Journal

    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?

    • Re:NEW - DNF mode! (Score:4, Funny)

      by creimer (824291) on Monday June 04 2007, @05:09PM (#19388059) Homepage
      Yeah. You enter /DNF and your code gets converted into spaghetti code that will take years to untangle. That's why you need good backups. Alas, the Emacs team didn't maintain good backups and the code got hosed when this command was tested. That's why it took six years. ;)

    • Re:Any OS X builds? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Zaurus (674150) on Monday June 04 2007, @06:14PM (#19388829)
      Someone on a slashdot post or blog somewhere posted instructions on how to build and install carbon emacs from CVS. I've used it on my PowerBook, and two MacBook Pro's (Core Duo, then Core 2 Duo) with great success.

      Here's the instructions I saved:

      mkdir ~/tmp
      cd ~/tmp
      cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sv.gnu.org:/sources/emacs co emacs
      cd emacs ./configure --enable-carbon-app
      make bootstrap
      make
      sudo make install

      Then I put the following in my .bashrc so that I can easily launch it from the command-line. The best part is that when you launch it in the background with a file argument, emacs grabs focus when it comes up. The emacs that requires Apple's X11 would never come to the front on launch.

      alias emacs="/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emac s -g 110x40 --no-splash"

      (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.

    • Re:UNIX Philosophy (Score:5, Informative)

      by TheRaven64 (641858) on Monday June 04 2007, @06:17PM (#19388877) Homepage Journal
      EMACS was never based on the UNIX philosophy. EMACS comes from the Lisp Machines philosophy. In many ways, it is an attempt to re-create the old Lisp Machines.

      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.

      • Re:Anti-aliased / subpixel rendered fonts on linux (Score:4, Insightful)

        by be-fan (61476) on Monday June 04 2007, @10:01PM (#19391227)
        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!

    • 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.

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