Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
Search

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Slashdot Log In

Log In

Create Account  |  Retrieve Password

GNU Coughs Up Emacs 22 After Six Year Wait

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Mon Jun 04, 2007 06:00 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.'"
+ -
story
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

GNU Coughs Up Emacs 22 After Six Year Wait 25 Comments More /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More
Loading... please wait.

  • Nobody Cares. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2007, @06:02PM (#19387961)
    Nobody cares. We're all using VI now.

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

      by creimer (824291) on Monday June 04 2007, @06:06PM (#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, @06:13PM (#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:5, Funny)

        by Mr. Underbridge (666784) on Monday June 04 2007, @08:43PM (#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:We were always using VI (Score:5, Informative)

          by SuperKendall (25149) on Monday June 04 2007, @07:59PM (#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:Nobody Cares. - my experience (Score:5, Interesting)

      by NovaSupreme (996633) on Monday June 04 2007, @07:09PM (#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:5, Insightful)

        by poor_boi (548340) on Monday June 04 2007, @08:58PM (#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:Nobody Cares. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by smitty_one_each (243267) * on Monday June 04 2007, @09:32PM (#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, @06:05PM (#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, @06:06PM (#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, @06:08PM (#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, @07:09PM (#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, @10:20PM (#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:5, Funny)

          by king-manic (409855) on Monday June 04 2007, @08:44PM (#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, @06:11PM (#19388075)
    Some day it's going to achieve sentience... Don't say I didn't warn you.

     

  • Obligatory flamebait (Score:5, Funny)

    by Alioth (221270) <dyls@alioth.net> on Monday June 04 2007, @06:12PM (#19388105) Homepage 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? :-)

  • OMG, what next?? (Score:5, Funny)

    by mobby_6kl (668092) on Monday June 04 2007, @06:53PM (#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.

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

      by Zaurus (674150) on Monday June 04 2007, @07:14PM (#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, @07:17PM (#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.

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 Geeknet, Inc.