GNU Coughs Up Emacs 22 After Six Year Wait

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.

Nobody cares. We're all using VI now.

Re:Nobody Cares.

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.

You're so lucky

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

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

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

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

One of the improvements for v22 is in the macro handling. F3 now starts recording, F4 ends recording, and F4 again runs the last recorded macro. Easier to remember than the old shortcuts (which still work), and perhaps more useful for an Emacs novice. There's other changes to the macro handling as well; it's even sweeter than it was before.

Re:Another keyboard shortcut

especially if you're a rectangle.

Re:We were always using VI

You most likely meant http://www.emacswiki.org/ [emacswiki.org].

Re:We were always using VI

Agreed. I Think it actually is a change you do out of necessity. When you find the need to edit at the same time +5 php files, php.ini, httpd.conf, a few very complex SQL sentences, and at the same time test those SQLs, those PHPs, restart services, and tail a few logfiles, all while checking e-mail, Emacs comes as a natural solution.

Re:We were always using VI

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

Now maybe that they're done with that, they'll finish Hurd.

If you have Emacs, you don't need Hurd.

obligatory

...but I hear it's still missing a text editor. :(

vi-mode for Emacs, the code

> Well... it's got a vi mode.

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

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

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

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 ...

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

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 re

Re:Nobody Cares.

Great, where can I download a boot disk?

You shouldn't boot emacs right away

I'd wait a bit before booting emacs. It is said that emacs is a very nice operating system, but it lacks a good editor.

Re:Nobody Cares.

Emacs vs. vi?? They both suck!!

Re:Nobody Cares.

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.

Anti-aliased / subpixel rendered fonts on linux

Use the unicode2 branch from emacs CVS, not this release. Hopefully emacs 23 won't take as long as emacs 22. 8-(

Re:Anti-aliased / subpixel rendered fonts on linux

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!

Don't forget

Release early, release often. Don't end up like Emacs.

Re:Don't forget

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.

Feature Rich

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

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!

Re:Feature Rich

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

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

He didn't say "hot"

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"

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

the hot asian girlfriend writes your code, silly.

Y'know...

Some day it's going to achieve sentience... Don't say I didn't warn you.

 

So EMACS really is like an operating system...

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

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

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.

Re:Obligatory flamebait

So we can now call emacs for "Eight Megabyes And Ceased Swapping"?

I love the headline

As a long time vi user I can say this is the best thing that has been coughed up since the hairball my cat expelled last week.

On the upside, matching our carpet to the color of the catfood has turned out to be a brilliant strategy so far.

Number One

So easy to use, no wonder it's number one!

Ok, but does it include...

...a good editor?

/me ducks

For those of you....,

For those of you who have been holding your breath you may now exhale.