Emacs 26.2 Released

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2019-04/msg00503.html

by lelf • 7 years ago

491 264 7 years ago

lists.gnu.org

triska• 7 years ago

Thank you so much for Emacs, and congratulations on the new release!

Emacs is reliable, fast and elegant, and a joy to use as a truly integrated environment for all kinds of tasks, including software development.

AceJohnny24• 7 years ago

I'm really happy to see Emacs move faster, and especially the integration of package management since version 25. The old beast is still kicking!

For what it's worth, I've actually been using on macOS the Mituharu branch [1], available in MacPorts as "emacs-mac-app". This version adds the [s]essential[/s] smooth-scrolling feature, and just in general seems to be slightly better integrated into macOS (except that it doesn't define the standard macOS keybindings, which I had to create manually. Ironic)

[1] https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac/

AceJohnny24• 7 years ago

Since it was painful to do, here's what I put in my .emacs to bring back macOS Cmd-keybindings in Mituharu's Emacs:

    ; Configure shortcuts if we're using Mituharu's Mac port of Emacs
    (when (eq window-system 'mac)
      (progn
        (message "Setting emacs-mac keybindings")
        (setq mac-option-modifier 'meta)
        ;supposedly setting this to 'nil gives them back to OS X, but that didn't work for me
        (setq mac-command-modifier 'super)
        (global-set-key (kbd "s-q") 'save-buffers-kill-emacs)
        ;I hate ⌘-w killing a window, too close to alt-w (copy). Deactivated
        ;(global-set-key (kbd "s-w" 'delete-frame)
        (global-set-key (kbd "s-a") 'mark-whole-buffer)
        (global-set-key (kbd "s-s") 'save-buffer)
        (global-set-key (kbd "s-d") 'isearch-repeat-backward)
        (global-set-key (kbd "s-f") 'isearch-forward)
        (global-set-key (kbd "s-g") 'isearch-repeat-forward)
        (global-set-key (kbd "s-z") 'undo)
        (global-set-key (kbd "s-x") 'kill-region)
        (global-set-key (kbd "s-c") 'kill-ring-save) ;ns has ns-copy-including-secondary, on mac- port, kill-ring-save works the same
        (global-set-key (kbd "s-v") 'yank)
        (global-set-key (kbd "s-y") 'yank) ;ns-paste-secondary
        (global-set-key (kbd "s-u") 'revert-buffer)
        ;(global-set-key (kbd "s-o") 'ns-open-file-using-panel) ;no good alternative
        ;(global-set-key (kbd "s-p") 'ns-print-buffer) ;no good alternative
        ;(global-set-key (kbd "s-h") 'ns-do-hide-emacs) ;done by default
        (global-set-key (kbd "s-j") 'exchange-point-and-mark)
        (global-set-key (kbd "s-k") 'kill-this-buffer)
        (global-set-key (kbd "s-l") 'goto-line)
        (global-set-key (kbd "s-n") 'make-frame)
        (global-set-key (kbd "s-m") 'iconify-frame)
        (global-set-key (kbd "s-`") 'other-frame)
        (global-set-key (kbd "s-,") 'customize)
        (global-set-key (kbd "s-'") 'next-multiframe-window)
      )
    )

roryokane4• 7 years ago

If you use Spacemacs, it can define a similar set of keybindings for you with its ‘osx’ layer (https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/tree/master/layers/%2B...). To enable that layer, open your Spacemacs dotfile with ‘SPC f e d’, then add ‘osx’ to the list within the ‘dotspacemacs-configuration-layers’ variable.

ddavis2• 7 years ago

I used Mitsuharu Yamamoto's emacs-mac distribution for some time (due to a suggestion I saw here on HN a while ago), but the upstream nextstep build (from the main GNU Emacs repository) actually feels a bit smoother/snappier to me, so I switched back a couple of months ago.

manish_gill• 7 years ago

Emacs is the one environment that I've been a fan of from afar. I recognize the brilliance and power of it, but a few things have always kept me away from using it on the Mac. And I've put in serious attempts, including going emacs-only, then a custom evil mode, then spacemacs -

- The server mode compatibility with the way Mac applications are set up. I'd ideally want an emacs server running in the background, and a client app open/close seamlessly whenever I'd like. What actually ends up happening is that I close the client windows but the app never "quits". So it's a zombie icon always hanging around my cmd+tab list.

- "Windows" (or Frames?) have generally not worked seamlessly for me. I've to always put in hacks in my config to ensure the emacs windows work like other apps do for mac. They're either too small and then size up when config is applied (which has some latency so it's noticeable when it happens), or they don't work at all.

- Font rendering. There is some minute rendering difference in the way the same fonts that renders on Vim/iTerm/Macvim/Sublime/VSCode/IntelliJ, but it's the worse by far on my emacs. :(

- All of these complaints are for the GUI mode tbh, which I prefer to use since I like to keep my terminal separate from my editor. Terminal-only emacs is something I tried a few years ago and I remember getting annoyed by keybinding issues etc.

Maybe all of the above are old issues that are no longer present, or maybe I was doing things the wrong way. It just never felt like it was a seamlessly integrated application on the Mac. I hope that has changed or will change. :)

bobbylarrybobby• 7 years ago

Issue #1 was annoying for me, so I hacked together the following solution: write an emacs function that detects situations where you feel emacs should quit (e.g., no windows left) and have it kill itself and the server when this happens. Then, write a launch agent to poll if the server is running and start it if not (pgrep is cheap enough that you can do this every few seconds). Finally, write an Automator app that will be your launch point for emacs, which receives files and opens them using the server.

It’s an annoying fix but when done right it feels exactly like emacs is a native app.

acomjean• 7 years ago

I use aquaemacs on Mac.

http://aquamacs.org

It’s a very impure emacs but I like it as it interstates in macOS well. (Drag file into icon and it opens. The cut/paste from Mac works well).

A lot of my emacs use is ssh into remote server based so I use that most of the time.

AceJohnny24• 7 years ago

- Font rendering.

Worth double-checking, but I think that's one area Mituharu's is better than standard Emacs. I definitely recall some font rendering issues with some past version.

As for your other points, they aren't resolved. FWIW, I work around them:

The server mode compatibility

I just have one long-running Emacs session. I have some colleagues who have experimented with using a launchd LaunchAgent to start emacs server in the background when they login. I haven't kept up with their results and I don't know if there are any side-effects.

"Windows" (or Frames?) have generally not worked seamlessly for me

Since I have a long-running session, this isn't much of a problem for me. That said, when I do start up Emacs on first login, it indeed takes upwards of 5 seconds to startup, including a window re-themeing and resizing. It's not great, but like I said, it's only once at startup for me. Furthermore, because I came from a tiling window manager on Linux (AwesomeWM), I required similar behavior on macOS. I use SizeUp [1] with shortcuts configured to move my windows to side/corners of the screen. It's far from being as good as a true tiling window manager, but I've had to be satisfied with what I can get.

[1] https://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/ (there are alternatives like Moom)

paultopia• 7 years ago

Oh yeah, the server mode thing makes me a little crazy. Whenever I want to reboot my Mac, I have to force-quit Emacs.

rcthompson• 7 years ago

I have written a "pseudo-daemon" mode for Mac that solves the server mode issue[1]. All it does is create a new frame and hide the application when you close the last frame, so next time you activate Emacs, the frame is un-hidden and it looks like it was just created. It works surprisingly well at emulating a daemon for such a simple hack.

[1] https://github.com/DarwinAwardWinner/mac-pseudo-daemon

andbberger• 7 years ago

spacemacs

na85• 7 years ago

All I need is a way to call elisp functions from the touch bar.

roryokane4• 7 years ago

You can define custom touch bar buttons with BetterTouchTool (https://folivora.ai/), and configure them to run a custom shell script. There is probably some way to call Emacs functions via shell script.

However, be warned, BTT’s interface is messy and the buttons it creates don’t look right unless you manually adjust the styling yourself. Also, macOS won’t show BTT’s buttons unless you either allow BTT to take over your whole Touch Bar, hiding Apple’s global buttons, or you expand the BTT toolbar beforehand, which must be closed before you next try to press the Esc key.

roryokane4• 7 years ago

To install that “emacs-mac” branch of Emacs with the Homebrew package manager, see the instructions on https://github.com/railwaycat/homebrew-emacsmacport. Homebrew’s built-in formula directory doesn’t include that version of Emacs, so that linked repo is a “tap” that defines a formula for it. From the README of that repo, these were the only commands I needed to run:

    brew tap railwaycat/emacsmacport
    brew cask install emacs-mac

merlincorey• 7 years ago

- In Dired, the 'Z' command on a directory name compresses all of its files.

Dired is so handy, but it does so much. Unless I were to use this feature often enough I fear I would never remember it was there and just break out to a terminal and `tar -zcf` manually.

I feel like something already exists for this, but it would be cool if there was a "Random Mode Tip of The Day" that one could invoke for discovery and practice of things like this.

laughingman26• 7 years ago

Nice feature for emacs home screen or scratch buffer to display a tip of the day ..

egh• 7 years ago

https://github.com/egh/emacs-totd or https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TipOfTheDay

Could be modified to show, e.g. dired commands as well.

Myrmornis• 7 years ago

I was about to write: "I agree, I think this is silly: one should just use a terminal for stuff like that".

However, Windows.

nine_k3• 7 years ago

Typing `?` helps. Anyway, M-x describe-mode (normally M-x desc-mo <Tab> is enough) will print a complete, if intimidatingly long, description of key bindings for the current buffer.

gkya2• 7 years ago

Use menus. The menus are really handy for discovery. Many I see disable them (the menu-bar-mode), but it doesn't take up more than about a line, and I go to it to discover what interesting bits a mode has or to find some functionality I use less often and forgot the keybinding to it. I do also use which-key-mode, and there is always M-x apropos & the completion, but menu is a nice companion to these stuff.

a_e_k• 7 years ago

I'm one who turns them off. When disabled, you can just hit C-down-mouse-3 (i.e., ctrl-right click) anywhere in a buffer to get the global menu in the form of a pop-up. That works well enough for me for the rare occasions when I want to go spelunking through the menu (mostly to find some obscure Calc op).

laughingman26• 7 years ago

As someone who recently saw the light, and converted to Emacs (spacemacs), I am absolutely delighted that its going strong.

Emacs is the most delightful software I have ever used. I could evolve a flexible todo management productivity workflow, start writing a journal and start writing new posts in a distraction free environment all using Org Mode in just two days. A complete win for someone who went back to paper (rather unsuccessfully) to organize to-dos after finding digital tools inflexible.

And for python development on remote machine, I get editing and autocomplete on remote systems out of the box (spacemacs) due to Tramp. I was like wtf, why didn't I start using this beautiful piece of software years back.

The way Emacs is a programmable platform really changes how I view what a good software should be. For instance, I was documenting a machine learning experiment in org mode file. I wanted to mention a metrics result generated as json by my machine learning code. I could just embed sh into the org file, execute it (on the remote machine without friction) and print result directly into the org file. I can trivially compare results in two files and record it back into org mode easily, even on a remote system.

It has made me think that we need more software which erases distinction of programming as something distinct from using software.

nextos• 7 years ago

Emacs is really nice because it's essentially a text-mode Lisp machine with lots of small packages that integrate really well with each other.

This contrasts with ncurses based CLI tools, which are little silos. And of course, most GUI applications.

In particular, I'm really fond of Org, Magit, Notmuch and PDF-Tools. I feel they are really nice additions to classic Emacs. Some old packages are really nice too. E.g. AucTeX, Gnus, Calc, Dired, Eshell... Although I feel Eshell and Gnus would really benefit from some refactorings.

And of course the myriad of programming modes.

I feel I don't need much more than Emacs, Firefox and a tiling window manager on top of some underlying OS (preferably Unix).

rayiner• 7 years ago

Holy crap. I had no idea pdftools was a thing. And interleve mode. Brilliant.

jes6• 7 years ago

I have been using GNU Emacs since the late 1980s. It has been my life's editor, so to speak. At 59 1/2, it seems unlikely that I will ever switch to another editor. It's served me well. I am grateful to the hackers that created it.

agumonkey4• 7 years ago

I wonder what kind of programs get to follow you for so many decades.

jes6• 7 years ago

For me, the only software that I have used consistently since that era (~1981 or so) would be UNIX and the C programming language. And to be honest, I don't write that much straight C anymore.

kickingvegas• 7 years ago

make is for better or worse, forever.

brlewis3• 7 years ago

Just bash, the command-line tools one uses from bash, LaTeX, and emacs/vim. I think git will stick around for decades even though its predecessors didn't.

theonething• 7 years ago

There's vi/vim of course.

int_19h2• 7 years ago

On Windows, some file managers are in this category. E.g. Far has been around for about 25 years now, and still has a cult-like following, especially in Eastern Europe / ex-USSR.

ImageMagick is another one that has been around for almost 30 years, and is the Swiss army knife of batch image processing on any platform.

Veen• 7 years ago

John McPhee has written using a customised version of Kedit since the early 80s.

https://www.kedit.com/index.html

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/01/14/structure

username223• 7 years ago

I haven't been using it quite that long, but still... It has served me well for decades, and I expect it to outlive me. How many coders can say they contributed to something like that?

rgrau• 7 years ago

Speaking about age and contributions. I turned 36 today and this emacs version is the first one that has some code of mine.

It's strange, but I feel extremely excited about this coincidence. :D

ddavis2• 7 years ago

I'm just under half your age and I hope to be using Emacs when I'm 59 1/2! I'm also grateful to everyone who has made Emacs as great as it is.

mercer• 7 years ago

Same here. For me it's org-mode that made me commit to it, but I might end up using it for many other things eventually (git, coding, etc.).

I'm mostly okay with code editors coming and going, but the one constant in my life has been project/task management, journalling, and personal information management in the broadest sense.

I just got tired of my tools either turning to shit, being deprecated, or not quite doing what I need them to do. Org Mode has been exactly what I've been looking for, and once I started using it seriously it became the thing I didn't know I wanted.

It's really comforting to me to know that I'll probably be able to use the same tool for the rest of my life, and that I can (and often already do) use it for many other things (Tramp, magit, coding in general).

mrspeaker2• 7 years ago

I only just understood Emacs about a year ago, despite being a nerd for at least 30 years. I like to think I don't have too many regrets in life - but I'm kicking myself for not realizing what Emacs was way back then - or at any of the times I've tried it out in the past (writing it off as "a text editor")!

Never too late though, and on the plus side I've now got decades of hidden Emacs goodies still to discover!

zikzak• 7 years ago

I am excited for you but that "journey of discovery" is way, way too addictive for me. I find myself chasing edge case requirements in my config rather than getting work done.

To each thier own, of course!

I still use Emacs when I ssh into my vps and, if I want primarily on Windows doing dev if Visual Studio, would likely use it for everything (as I did back when I was primarily on UNIX systems). Just writing this makes me think "maybe I'll install it on Windows on more time".

The core issue for me is context switching between Emacs and VS. Even with various keybinding tricks it is always awkward.

Best of luck on your journey with Emacs. Do it for me! :)

azinman22• 7 years ago

Just imagine when you discover vim!! :)

TypingStuff• 7 years ago

+1. I recall thinking it was a text editor with inferior key bindings to vim, and with a bunch of unnecessary weirdness.

I'm glad I took the time to investigate this discoverable interactive programmatic keyboard-oriented UI platform, that also happens to have a great editor (evil).

A uniquely empowering tool for programmers.

cmehdy• 7 years ago

Any suggestions to pick it up without wanting to give up due to convoluted shortcuts?

signa11• 7 years ago

may you please share your wisdom and insight here ? thank you kindly!

plg• 7 years ago

Most useful things you’ve discovered?

Best resources you’ve used to discover things?

845652311• 7 years ago

I'm 58 2/3, and GNU Emacs has been my daily driver since 1991.

vscode however will probably take over that role some time during the next 12 months.

rainygold• 7 years ago

Why vscode?

young_unixer• 7 years ago

Have you had RSI issues? Do you use it with the default keybindings?

I've tried it a few times but the default keybindings seem unnatural to me. Not that it's Emacs fault, considering the keyboards they used back then.

eartheaterrr• 7 years ago

I've been using Emacs Evil mode for years, and I find it much better than the better defaults.

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil

brlewis3• 7 years ago

I've been using the default keybindings for decades and never had RSI issues. The only time my wrist has started to bother me is when I use some other program that involves a lot of mouse motion.

jimbokun• 7 years ago

Step one: remap Caps Lock to Control.

antipaul• 7 years ago

I use defaults, even default control key*

*I use a macbook pro, and my thumb is used to hitting CMD-X, CMD-C, CMD-V, s what has happened is that I hit control with my thumb instead of pinky - I curl the thumb in and below my palm.

But I still love default keybindings, and what is lovely, is that many of the navigation keys are system wide on MacOS: ctrl-a, ctrl-e, etc.

Then CMD-C and CMD-V actually also work on emacs, so I sometimes use those too (I use https://emacsformacosx.com)

jes6• 7 years ago

I have not had any RSI issues.

I have seen a video about someone who hacked up a means to use Emacs via voice control. I may play with something like that myself. I doubt that using Emacs via a keyboard is really my bottleneck, though. So any hacks in that direction may be just for fun.

emmelaich• 7 years ago

I got painful wrists and hands when using Emacs intensively for coding. Viper mode helped but then I transitioned from development to sysadmin and did far less coding. So switched to vi because it was everywhere when Emacs wasn't.[0]

Now that Emacs is everywhere, I'm looking to going back and using evil-mode. We'll see how it goes. I find the customisation on Emacs far less hacky than vim.

[0] I used to grab tapes(!) from Uni to work and compile from source, on a fairly new / obscure architecture at the time.

dan-robertson3• 7 years ago

For a long time I was unaffected, until I started using emacs more. This was resolved by switching to an ergonomic keyboard where I put all the modifier keys on the thumbs which resolved this issue (but made single handed typing of eg C-V or single words a bit annoying)

agumonkey4• 7 years ago

here's a joke:

I use emacs all the time with all the half bad wrist positions and all and have no RSI. Not even CAPS LOCK -> CTRL trick.

For a MOOC I had to suff.. use Eclipse IDE. I don't like it but I didn't mind its keybindings. The morning after I had very nasty pain in my left hand. So I quickly got back into emacs to heal that rapid onset RSI.

olau• 7 years ago

You could try the Microsoft Comfort Curve 3000 keyboards. They are almost like ordinary keyboards, but the extra curving really helps with Emacs. And they're cheap.

I also have a Kinesis one that I used for some years. Those require some training.

truncate2• 7 years ago

Nice! It's been the best constant in my life for the past 6 years (well configs, plugins, and emacs evolved, but very smooth and usually with my pace).

I would, however, love to hear a bit more on how you felt about the future of Emacs in those 30 years. I dunno much history, but is there any contrast to the present where Atom/VSCode is kinda shipping shiny (and useful) stuff way faster meanwhile being very configurable.

onyva• 7 years ago

Absolutely.

ww520• 7 years ago

Emacs has served me well over the years. I have a consistent editing platform throughout the changes of languages and document formats. Saved me lots of time to jump right into new languages or new projects.

intrasight• 7 years ago

Same here. 54 years old. I've used Emacs since James Gosling was still hacking at CMU in the early '80s. Took me some time to finally stop using the Gosmacs key bindings :) 35 years of Emacs use and still going strong and learning new things!

emacsvimlover2• 7 years ago

Kudos to you. I have tried and failed miserably to learn emacs many times. The switch from vi seems to be really hard but I really like emacs and hope to become a pro user someday.

jes6• 7 years ago

I wish you productivity with whatever tool you find works best for you.

hwestiii• 7 years ago

Emacs has multiple vi emulation modes. I've been using emacs for going on 20 years, using the VIPER package, and I've never bothered to learn the emacs native key binding. Best of both worlds.

emacsvimlover2• 7 years ago

Can you give the n00b's any tips on how to master emacs while keeping it interesting?

jes6• 7 years ago

For me it's been helpful to sometimes take some time, look at the key bindings for a particular mode, and practice them. With some periodic investment in committing them to memory, I think your Emacs productivity will improve.

heartofgold• 7 years ago

For me personally: - I started out just learning navigation. How to move around within buffers, how to open multiple buffers and move around between buffers.

Then I learned several built in commands.

Years later I learned clojure, a lisp dialect. After learning it, and then looking back at emacs lisp (elisp), and a light bulb went on for me. You can write any elisp function you want, which has functions to manipulate text within buffers and much more. Using it you can create any kind of specialized editor function you can dream of, and you can call that function with "M-x function-name". If use use the function lots, then you can bind that function to a keystroke. (For example, if you wanted a completely custom function... to delete the current block of code, you could write an elisp function to go to move the point to the blocks beginning brace, set the mark, move to the matching brace, and then delete the region.)

There are several "modes" that define how buffers behave. A clojure mode will know how to highlight code and navigate around parenthesis. Magit-mode knows all kinds of commands for operating a git project, and org-mode knows commands to help facilitate note-taking.

alexhutcheson• 7 years ago

The built-in tour (C-h t) is pretty good and doesn't take too long.

Learn the various built-in help features, and use them. C-h C-h describes all the various help features.

Beyond that - force yourself to navigate via the keyboard only (no mouse, no arrow keys). You'll get more efficient and pick up shortcuts as you go.

kwoff• 7 years ago

If you can find someone who's mastered emacs to show you around, I think that would be a good start. I was fortunate in the mid-90's that such a person sat with me in a computer lab and showed me how much more powerful emacs was than I'd understood till that point.

vector_spaces2• 7 years ago

Fellow n00b here, but maybe a little further along in my emacs journey.

I started with Emacs as my first editor when I first was learning how to code a few years ago. I played with it for about a year, then left it for VSCode when I got a job as the projects at the time were heavily JS/TypeScript based, then slowly went back to Emacs as I started to feel frustrated at how painful it was to do certain things on VSCode that I knew would be lower-friction on an editor like Emacs or Vim.

This second time around it has helped me a lot to not feel like I need to rush to master it, taking time instead to focus on committing one or two commands to muscle memory every 10 days or so, and looking at other people's configuration files for inspiration. Studying these configs in particular [0], [1] helped me quite a bit, as they're nicely commented, big enough to have some useful stuff in them and get real work done, but small enough to understand fairly quickly. I also make it a point to not add stuff to my config that I don't understand and try to follow good practices around commenting and code organization

Being OK with navigating inefficiently but making a conscious effort to learn one or two commands to handle stuff that feels painful (kill line, jump to beginning of file, jump to end of file, jump to end of line, back-to-indentation) then modifying anything that doesn't feel natural.

Learning to find help inside emacs: C-h b to list all bindings in the current buffer, or discover-my-major [2] for a friendlier interface, or [3] (highly recommended) for displaying and filtering available bindings as you type them. Cheatsheet [4] for creating your own cheatsheets to note and recall commands you're working on learning.

Finally, taking advantage of the fact that you don't need to leave Emacs for certain things. For example, at work we use Trello, and I love being able to check Trello from inside Emacs via org-trello-mode. It's very nice to not have to context switch when coding. Not to mention Magit (super powerful git gui inside emacs) and Tramp mode (for editing files over ssh from the comfort of emacs).

Also, I've generally found people to be extremely helpful on #emacs on freenode IRC. I've learned a lot thru osmosis just observing conversation there :)

[0] https://github.com/jsks/dotfiles/tree/master/emacs/.emacs.d

[1] https://github.com/flyingmachine/emacs-for-clojure/

[2] https://framagit.org/steckerhalter/discover-my-major

[3] https://github.com/justbur/emacs-which-key

[4] https://melpa.org/#/cheatsheet

laughingman26• 7 years ago

For me, I knew touch typing (not a master but enough to not see the keyboard while typing), that combined with little experience in vim bindings (basic navigation hjkl, v) etc was enough to become really comfortable with spacemacs. Spacemacs's mnemonic bindings will make it easy for you to start having a muscle memory of bindings to do stuff like opening file tree, moving between windows, switching layouts, killing buffers (all essential for a good workflow in emacs).

franee• 7 years ago

Been a user for ~10years and I use emacs mainly as just as an editor.

Here's all the actual commands (very few) I use day to day --> https://gist.github.com/franee/5d188ce36f6c24181707907614d2c...

I use mainly the emacs starter kit and build from there.

I swapped Ctrl & Caps Lock two years ago due to wrist pain when doing development in a laptop.

h1d• 7 years ago

Have you ever compared it to other modern editors like IntelliJ and VS code? If so, any thoughts about productivity?

innocentoldguy2• 7 years ago

In my opinion, there is no comparison in productivity. Emacs and Vim both beat IntelliJ and VS Code hands down. Anytime you have to reach for the mouse for something you’re wasting time.

davidw• 7 years ago

Yeah, Emacs is one of the things I'm still using 20+ years on. Not a lot else I'm still using from those days.

spear• 7 years ago

Thirty years of Emacs here as well(1). I still use Gnus to read e-mail and Usenet, and my desktop calculator is a small frame that's running Calc.

(1) Well, technically, that includes several years of XEmacs in the middle, when GNU Emacs didn't look as good under X11.

_emacsomancer_6• 7 years ago

You can still use the Lucid/Athena toolkit in GNU Emacs if you ever get nostalgic for the look of XEmacs.

innocentoldguy2• 7 years ago

I really like Emacs, but its chording gives me RSI pain. I wish I could have stuck with it though. That’s great that you could.

laughingman26• 7 years ago

Give it a chance and try spacemacs (and then after using it for sometime maybe start building something from scratch if you think its too big). The eVil (vim) mode works out of the box and mnemonic bindings are easy to memorize.

andrenth3• 7 years ago

What’s a good resource for learning emacs for someone who’s been using vim for more than 20 years?

raphinou• 7 years ago

I've started to use spacemacs and like it (I'm also a long time vim user)

ballpark• 7 years ago

I'm not sure about resources, but there's a mode called evil mode that has vim bindings. That would be a good thing to google.

coliveira2• 7 years ago

My guess is that someone that has used vim for more than 20 years will never feel truly comfortable with emacs. I say this having started with emacs for a few years, and since switched to vim, now for almost 20 years.

tcoff912• 7 years ago

What about evil mode? Also spacemacs has evil bindings for all of its emacs packages.

IanS5• 7 years ago

Maybe try easing into it with evil?

Skunkleton2• 7 years ago

I'm not saying this is bad advice, but as a vim expert I have a hard time with emulations messing up my flow. IMO if you want to use emacs it is worth taking the hit and switching to a whole new set of keybindings.

rusk2• 7 years ago

Best bet is to just start from the beginning. My journey began with the emacs tour you get directed to the first time you start it up. With regards to muscle memory etc its a completely different animal to everything bar maybe the command line ...

tcoff912• 7 years ago

spacemacs! I was a long-time vim+tmux diehard and now i'm all about spacemacs. Org-mode and Magit are just too good to live without. There were a few hurdles when switching, mainly around auto-indent differences that were harder to configure with emacs. (dtrt-indent ftw, thank god for that). Also the regexes are different and not as good (i don't think emacs regexes do negative lookahead etc...) so some of the advanced substitution wizardry i used to do isn't quite as good.

But overall i prefer Spacemacs to vim for general development.

I recommend using the develop branch of spacemacs. It sometimes breaks but if there is something broken it gets fixed really fast, whereas if something is broken on master then it sometimes stays broken for a really long time.

andrenth3• 7 years ago

Are you using evil mode? It seems to be suggested by the spacemacs docs.

snazz4• 7 years ago

A bit of advice: Emacs can do so many things (there’s a web browser included out of the box), but that doesn’t mean you should use it for everything. Despite the fact that “applications” within Emacs are usually better integrated than those outside of it, they are oftentimes fairly buggy. Emacs has a horrible case of featureitis, so I try to limit my usage of the bundled features that aren’t well-maintained, of which there are many.

As many others have suggested, take a look at Evil, the best Vim emulation for any platform. Just ease your way into it by replacing Vim, then some other CLI programs, then figure out when to stop when the Emacs version is no better than what you were using before.

zaiste• 7 years ago

Be sure to check Doom [1] as well. It's Emacs for « a stubborn vimmer ». One of its goals is to be fast and hacker friendly. It's a smaller community than Spacemacs.

Also, the default theme is fantastic along with great defaults for key bindings.

[1] https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs

andrenth3• 7 years ago

I’ll check it out too, thanks!

rgoulter• 7 years ago

http://emacs.sexy/ points to a bunch of useful resources, including an Awesome Emacs which points to a bunch more. Tuhdo's tutorials feature a bunch of animated gifs about his use/setup, which is quite nice.

I haven't tried distributions like spacemacs or doom-emacs (which is lighter-weight than spacemacs, with fewer abstractions above emacs). I think emacs is software which benefits from being well understood by the user, to the extent of "if something breaks I can fix it".

yolo1• 7 years ago

Also check out https://cestlaz.github.io/stories/emacs/

bdarnell• 7 years ago

Here's the NEWS file for the curious: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/etc/NEWS?h=e...

josteink• 7 years ago

Thanks. Weird it not being linked directly in the post.

“ New variable 'xft-ignore-color-fonts'.

Default t means don't try to load color fonts when using Xft, as they often cause crashes. Set it to nil if you really need those fonts.”

I see they finally caved in (although in a quite pedantly trying not to way) and allowed use of color-fonts. Whee!

anoncake2• 7 years ago

Was the problem not that no free OS supported color fonts properly? Emacs does not belong to the Monochrome Font Foundation, after all. Disabling a feature because it causes crashes is not ideological.

anoncake2• 7 years ago

- Emacs is now compliant with the latest version 11.0 of the Unicode Standard.

http://blog.unicode.org/2019/03/announcing-unicode-standard-...

pnw_hazor2• 7 years ago

I had been away from emacs for almost 10 years since I stopped being a pro programmer. And even back then I wasn't really an emacs power-user. I just knew enough to be productive and slightly dangerous.

Recently, I reached my last nerve with MS Word and buckled down to ditch Word for emacs.

Today I do just about all my writing in emacs (markdown) and then generate word docx using pandoc at the end. Now, I use emacs all day everyday -- blessed. And I am more productive especially since I am actively pushing to keep increasing my power-user level.

fredsir• 7 years ago

You should check out org: https://orgmode.org/

black-tea6• 7 years ago

Writing markdown with emacs is a huge step up. Now you get to take another big step up when you use org-mode instead of markdown. I'm actually pretty envious.

bloopernova• 7 years ago

I use org-mode for todo items, but haven't been using emacs for long.

What does org-mode do with writing documents that is better than Markdown?

pnw_hazor2• 7 years ago

I use org-mode for note taking and some task tracking. My main doc writing setup is more like an ide setup.

markdown<->docx with pandoc lets me use a ref-doc.docx file that ensures all the styling I need for legal docs gets into the word doc. So you make a markdown file from the ref-doc.docx then edit the markdown file and convert to docx using the same ref-doc and everything in docx has the correct style, and stuff like line numbers and headers are preserved. Pretty sweet.

bbbobbb• 7 years ago

I wish I spent time learning how to use Emacs in the past to a degree where customizing my installation was faster than learning something else.

As I stand now, it seems really hard to justify to invest time into it when the benefits over using something very easy to work with (like JetBrains IDEs for Java or VS Code for Python) sound marginal.

I know experts can fly around in it and it looks amazing. Having a single point of entry for all kinds of things (ssh to VM, git, text editing, org mode, email...) sounds great, but it is so much work and it seems like I could always be spending time doing something immediately beneficial with the tools I already use. Not to mention that the end result might not even better for the given application (can I really hope to have easier time developing a Go app with Emacs and couple not-so-actively developed plugins than GoLand/VS Code?).

rusk2• 7 years ago

I think you’re best of sticking with Jetbrains IMO; if you’re using a highly structured language like java you may as well get the beenifits of a specialised environment.

For nearly everything else though emacs shines.

I see VS Code touted as an emacs alternative and while your muscle memory might suit it better can it truly give you the uniform fluid experience across pretty much any development enviromnwnt you might use?

black-tea6• 7 years ago

I am so glad that I took the time to learn emacs during my uni days more than ten years ago. I would see everyone else using absolutely awful IDEs that they never actually understood while I was learning how everything really worked and setting up emacs to make my life easier. Nowadays I see people struggling with slightly less bad tools like VSCode and they often ask me about emacs but they just don't have the time to learn it like I did. I probably wouldn't have the time now either.

And before the VSCode fanboys downvote me, the other day my colleague's VSCode instance was using more than 200GB of virtual memory. When I typed on his editor it was noticeably laggy. He told me it was normal. He had five files open. My emacs had been running for two weeks at that point and had about 200 files, 5 shells, 2 ssh sessions and 1 IRC client going on.

Seriously, guys. The reason why you like VSCode is the same reason we like emacs. Come and use the real thing.

celeritascelery• 7 years ago

200GB? Are you sure about that?

apace626• 7 years ago

I'm in the exact same boat. Every few months I spend some time learning Emacs. I'll hit a road block and go back to VSCode or PyCharm. Then I'll feel silly b/c I'm already super productive in those and just wasted time, but want Emacs to work. Few months later... repeat! Why emacs!?!?

confounded• 7 years ago

The thing you use daily will always be the most familiar. I’ve gone from your position, to the opposite; now the switching-costs of moving away from Emacs to an IDE put me off.

There do have to be real benefits to make it work. For me it was some very specific things I wanted to do for data analysis that weren’t possible in an IDE at the time, and the other benefits (org-mode, tramp etc.) just sort of compounded.

It’s certainly been a process though. And I wouldn’t have got here if I didn’t find fiddling with editors an enjoyable thing to do, while waiting for a database-query/drinking-buddy-to-leave-work/partner’s-Netflix-binge-to-conclude etc.

csdreamer7• 7 years ago

I used to feel the same way about Atom.

However, Atom has always had issues. Snippets are very limited due to design issues. Now a days I keep getting random js errors and the syntax highlighting stops working below a line I was working on.

Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub likely will hurt future community development of plugins since new programmers will assume the worst and develop for VSCode or move on.

Atom showed me how useful/important having an editor I could easily customize is. And the two above shows me how important having an editor with a strong independent community is. I am trying Emacs, but it is a struggle and Spacemacs keeps having random issues (and feels slower than Atom). So right now I am learning Vim with Vundle.

zelly• 7 years ago

At this point honestly it's an objectively worse decision to not use modern IDEs. (It's not a matter of taste anymore.) IDEs have gotten really good. If you only use Emacs or vim, you're literally putting yourself at a competitive disadvantage.

All the avante garde language extensions (Rust, D, etc.) support VS Code better than Emacs now. VS Code is where all the new ideas are tried first.

Asooka• 7 years ago

I've used both Visual Studio (not Code) and Vim and I have to say, the improvements over my Vim setup are pretty marginal for C++ code. Every time people come out saying you can't possibly be productive with Vim in <current year> it always feels a bit like they're projecting their own insecurities. All I really miss in Vim is good debugger integration, but so far I make do ok with plain gdb in a terminal. And this is a big enterprise codebase with ~150 developers working on it. It's perfectly ok to use whatever you like, I just don't see why you need to accuse perfectly good tools of inadequacy - you might end up turning away someone who would be most productive in vim/emacs vs IntelliJ or VS.

That said, VSCode has a lot of good ideas around tooling and I've been toying with the idea of looking into making a fork that replaces the editor component with an embedded NeoVim. I feel that would be the best of both worlds, but obviously a huge undertaking. There is already NyaoVim that implements a NeoVim gui as a web component.

telekid• 7 years ago

Emacs now has great support for Language Server Protocol, which provides you with basically all of the code intelligence that powers VS Code.

skummetmaelk• 7 years ago

Objectively? Yeah I don't think so.

mruts4• 7 years ago

Could you give an example of how an IDE could make you much more productive than emacs?

bitwize3• 7 years ago

That's exactly what I say about switching away from Emacs -- the new tools available aren't compelling enough to make me leave what I've been working easily in for 24 years now.

It sounds like you've found something that works. But if you find yourself with a hankering to take a long weekend, lock yourself in a hotel room like John Carmack, and devote that time to really learning Emacs, I encourage you to do so. It should prove quite rewarding.

sys_64738• 7 years ago

I've been using Emacs in some form since the Amiga build of uEmacs in 1985.

rudolfwinestock• 7 years ago

Did you hear about Vim when it showed up on Fred Fish disks?

By the way, I like your user name. How odd that I remember that command.

billfruit• 7 years ago

Is the multi threaded implementation, being talked about for some time part of this release? Sometimes the single threaded nature of emacs causes problems while running complex setups like cider, nrepl etc.

nine_k3• 7 years ago

There are several rewrites.

- Guile Emacs does not seem very alive: http://git.hcoop.net/?p=bpt/emacs.git

- Remacs, a Rust port, seems to be more alive: https://github.com/remacs/remacs Does not look usable as a daily driver, though.

I sometimes wish that Xi editor adopted an elisp port as one of the scripting engines. Not very likely, though; a suitable port does not exist in the first place so far.

steveklabnik2• 7 years ago

Remacs is supposed to be an in-place re-write, so it should be just as usable as upstream.

peterbecich• 7 years ago

Not from this release, but this is the most recent thing I've been able to find about concurrency:

This is also only the first step in bringing threading to Emacs Lisp. Right now there’s effectively a global interpreter lock (GIL), and threads only run one at a time cooperatively. Like with generators, the Python influence is obvious. In theory, sometime in the future this interpreter lock will be removed, making way for actual concurrency.

https://nullprogram.com/blog/2018/05/31/

kazinator• 7 years ago

Cooperative threads serialized with a global lock didn't originate with Python. In fact, the traditional Unix kernel was that way and so was Linux initially.

phillord2• 7 years ago

Emacs-26 has threads yes. How many packages use them at the current time I do not know. With nrepl, though, most of the problems are likely to get from the interaction with an external process which has been able to happen asynchronously for a long time. So, threading (or its lack) might not be the problem.

willtim• 7 years ago

Congratulations and a huge thank you to all those involved! Emacs is a truly remarkable piece of software. I started using it for text editing over 20 years ago, now I use it pretty much as an operating system!

codr7• 7 years ago

M-x replace-string, Orgmode and Slime.

I have yet to come across anything that compares, and I definitely prefer having Lisp built in to Python bolted on to the side.

Emacs used to be considered quite slow, but compared to the latest offerings its pretty snappy.

Never got it to work well in Windows, but that's not an issue for me anymore.

mruts4• 7 years ago

The best emacs mode I’ve ever used is org-mode. Inline LaTeX rendering, inline images, outlines, TODOs, it’s amazing. And when you add yasnippet in to the mix, it gets even better. I can write up math notes faster than someone could write it on a blackboard!

Emacs is probably the best piece of software I’ve ever used, and will use. I bet in 100 years, emacs will still be going strong. There’s really nothing it can’t do.

_emacsomancer_6• 7 years ago

Operating systems will come and go, and Emacs will remain.

jakeinspace2• 7 years ago

I'm so thankful that I stumbled upon emacs in my first year of undergrad. That discovery led me to the wonderful world of Lisp, and really impacted how I view software design and the development process. As a C/C++, Clojure, Verilog/VHDL, and org-mode tool, I can't imagine using anything else. Python is the only use case that I haven't been 100% satisfied with, although I don't think Pycharm or VS code offer anything more compelling to me (could be wrong).

ajross• 7 years ago

The world is so different now. In my first year of undergrad, you didn't "stumble" on emacs. It was the tool of the demigods that worked on the software you could only read about on usenet. Everyone knew emacs was best, if you could get your admin to install it. It's what we all dreamed of using some day.

So needless to say it was the first thing I tried when I got my shell account. I got stuck in it, couldn't figure anything out, and had to power cycle the terminal before sneaking away sheepishly.

But yeah, emacs is best, and I'm still using it now that I know how to exit.

black-tea6• 7 years ago

Do you use elpy for python? It's pretty good.

jakeinspace2• 7 years ago

I do, I just haven't found the project navigation and jumping to definitions/uses to be quite as complete as helm and gtags are for C/C++.

bitwize3• 7 years ago

Ah, Emacs -- the king of editors. IDEs come and go, but I've found nothing that has yet convinced me to leave the editor that got me started in Linux development during the 90s, in which I've done all of my best work ever since. Yes, I've tried VSCode -- several times. The difference between Emacs and VSCode is that one is an extensible editor, the other was built from the ground up to be shaped and morphed to match your workflow, no matter what that may be. Emacs Lisp is an always-on, instantaneous-feedback, comprehensive extension language -- and it's a Lisp, even if a flawed one. Emacs is also self-documenting and self-debugging, making extending it an easy part of using it. If you type M-. on any Elisp identifier, you will be taken straight to its definition -- even for C-implemented primitives of the Lisp VM (provided you have the Emacs sources and Emacs knows where they live). Emacs is thus open source in a more concretely real way than most open source software -- it makes examinjng its own source easy and even inviting.

The way things are going, I figure either Emacs will die or I will before I stop using it. I guess I'm a set-in-my-ways old-timer. So be it.

singingfish• 7 years ago

Picked up emacs in 1993 in a unix lab because it was the only thing that remotely made sense on these weird X-Windows systems. Was a good choice because I haven't had to learn anything new since. When I met RMS I thanked him for it.

dan-robertson3• 7 years ago

This is a reasonably small release, I don’t have anything to say about it so I will instead do what most other people in this thread have done and make a general comment about emacs:

I think emacs has a few simple advantages:

1. It’s based on a high quality extensible programming language which supports writing extensible programs. This makes implementing new features, new language features, or just modifying/fixing existing ones possible and usually easy.

2. The primitives/idioms (hooks,buffers,buffer-local-variables,markers,interactive functions,advice,keymaps,text properties) tended to be good choices that allow separate modes/programs within the editor to interact well with one another. They also allow easy extension/modification/fixing of the system. I think modules (although useful and maybe necessary) do not typically fit into this category.

3. Emacs realises the idea of a programming environment built into a user interface (ie one where it is easy to interact with the user in a way that is not stdin/out). I feel like this is often touted as an advantage of html/JavaScript but in emacs one already has all the other useful programs/libraries to base one’s own creations on. On the web one always has to start from scratch. On the other hand elisp does not have any GL/canvas interface (although you can write an svg (or worse) and display it).

4. The documentation tends to be pretty good and when the documentation fails

Emacs certainly has disadvantages too. One is setting it up, another is that it often breaks and it can be hard to get used to emacs. I personally am not bothered by these because I already know enough to not mind/struggle much fixing things. Another issue is ide features but I don’t really use languages with separate ides (unless you count languages where emacs is the ide) so I don’t mind this. Indeed I mostly don’t use any of the ide attempt features like projectile or the static code parsing/analysis

logicchains• 7 years ago

Another huge advantage: low resource use. I'm often running resource-hungry machine learning and dataprocessing jobs on my laptop (and Slack), and when ram usage gets high often VSCode or Jetbeans IDEs will just freeze up, often requiring a restart (especially C++ Intelllisense). I've switched to Emacs exclusively now for coding (C++, Python and Julia), and the productivity gains from having a rock-solid editor that never freezes or crashes more than outweight the reduced featureset. To be fair though this seems not entirely the IDEs' problem, as I used to encounter this problem less on Windows; Linux just seems particularly bad at providing a smooth desktop experience when RAM usage is high.

cjohansson• 7 years ago

Working a lot on battery powered laptops without any possibility of charging rules out Electron and Java based IDEs for me. Emacs works great for me.

EnzoKronus• 7 years ago

Es un buen editor. Actualmente uso distribuciones. ya que soy principiante. Uso https://github.com/seagle0128/.emacs.d y tambien probe prelude emacs.

ngngngng• 7 years ago

I'm a heavy user for a vim for the last few years. Is emacs worth checking out to potentially switch to? Or should I just stick with what I'm already productive with?

ageofwant• 7 years ago

You can have the best of both by installing evil-mode. Or try out http://spacemacs.org, which has evil as a default layer.

babarock• 7 years ago

Depends what you're looking for. If you want blazing fast text-editing, you're better off learning advanced vim features like jumps, macros, registers ...

If you care about integration with other text-based tools (like email, instant messaging, source control, code review, IRC, ...) then switching to emacs will transform your workflow.

There are a couple of emacs modes that stand out, and in my opinion make emacs worth it:

* Org-mode (https://orgmode.org): A note taking system * Magit (https://magit.vc/) the best git client I've ever used.

prirun• 7 years ago

I first used Emacs on a Prime minicomputer in the late 70's. It was ported to Prime by Dan Bricklan's Software Arts, Inc, of Visicalc fame. Still using it 41 years later.

For anyone curious, the Prime version of Emacs is running on a Prime emulator I set up. Telnet to em.prirun.org port 8002

JohnL42• 7 years ago

Me too! Except around 1982. :-)

Memories....

creamidea• 7 years ago

Congratulations :)

When I installed the emacs on MacOS by the step at https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/download.html#macos (`brew install emacs --with-cocoa`). I got an `Error: invalid options: --with-cocoa`

Finally, I found the solution here: https://emacs.stackexchange.com/a/47774/13172.

Now, I want to know who can modify this command at the official site.

PS: Homebrew 2.1.0 Homebrew/homebrew-core (git revision 024e26; last commit 2019-04-13) Homebrew/homebrew-cask (git revision 20182; last commit 2019-04-13)

JohnL42• 7 years ago

Holy cow, the olds came out of the woodwork. Good to see, because I'm one, too. 57, been using emacs since 1982 or so.

Mostly org-mode these days, plus whatever weird hobby language thing I'm doing (Haskell, now).

Swapping control & caps lock is essential. I got really painful RSI pain in my first pinky joint before I did that. Sounds silly until it happens.

And my config file.... :-)

roryokane4• 7 years ago

Beyond the “Highlights of this release include” section in the announcement, the full changelog for Emacs 26.2 is in this NEWS file: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/news/NEWS.26.2.

Emacs 26.2 Released

Related Stories