"Feline Herd" Offers Easier Package Management For Emacs

First time accepted submitter chris.kohlhepp writes "The Emacs editor just got consolidated package management with "Feline Herd", offering 2000+ packages under one roof. No struggle with convoluted keyboard shortcuts — only easy GUI navigation via toolbar buttons! Every conceivable programming language is handled. Cuts the Emacs learning curve to a minimum for learners."

Re:An Honest Question:

[Anonymous Coward]

Emacs with packages like ProofGeneral, agda-mode, tuareg-mode, haskell-mode, SLIME and so on is the most convenient (or sometimes the only) frontend to some of the finest programming languages and theorem provers. On top of that there's org-mode for everything else from managing notes, writing big documenets, doing spreadsheet stuff and the like. I often call Emacs the Eclipse for the rest of us. It's not so much a mere editor but a platform to build interfaces to other tools on.

Not that people who only care about their own use cases would be particularly impressed by what other people do with Emacs. Me, I don't care. I get my work done in Emacs, thank you very much.

Re:"divergent package manager paradigms"

[Phillip2]

The different factions do different things. ELPA is server based, but works with a raw Emacs. el-get gets files in a number of ways, but I suspect that git checkouts are the most common. But you need git installed.

I suspect it will come together a bit more eventually though.

Phil

"Feline Herd?"

[Tarlus]

I believe the proper term is "clowder."

Re:Yawn

[BrokenHalo]

It comes as no surprise that the first post is a bump to vi(m), and I (for one), don't really care that much. Whatever rocks your boat, say I.

But the GUIfication of emacs is sad. The beauty of emacs is that as a text editor, it runs happily in console mode as well as in X11.

I came across an instance not long ago when having installed a server system (i.e. without X11) from binaries, I fired up emacs to edit a config file, and it spat errors due to missing gtk libraries. That really pissed me off.

The good news is that TECO [wikipedia.org], the direct ancestor to emacs still exists. The thing about TECO (Tape Editor/COrrector) is that although the wetware address space needs to be quite large to remember all those line-transmission-noise commands, if you use it a lot for a month or two, your muscle memory kicks in automatically. There is no menu, no GUI, no cruft, just a lean, fast and really scriptable editor that gets the job done.