Whats New in Emacs 24

http://sachachua.com/blog/2010/12/whats-new-in-emacs-24/

by pdelgallego • 16 years ago

82 44 16 years ago

gsivil• 16 years ago

Interesting post. It would be nice if someone could link to a site or blog with more details and/or discussion about the new features in Emacs 24.

danh2• 16 years ago

Here is the entire list of new stuff:

http://repo.or.cz/w/emacs.git/blob_plain/HEAD:/etc/NEWS

sigzero• 16 years ago

Nothing really "killer" though Bidi is nice. I just setup emacs (trying to learn it to compare to Vim) the other day on my Mac.

hasenj• 16 years ago

I wish vim gets the bidi support as well.

It gets it automatically on a terminal that supports it (such as konsole) but having it sort of built in would be nice.

nagnatron• 16 years ago

A standard package system is THE feature of Emacs 24.

zitterbewegung• 16 years ago

I have been using the package manager and it is a much better way to install programs in emacs than the old way of modifying your .emacs and specifying a load path. It works very well. I wish more people would upload packages to the main repository but putting this in emacs 24 will probably accelerate this.

wfarr• 16 years ago

Emacs 24 by default uses the GNU package archive, which is limited to software they want on it.

However, `package.el` defines an alist of `package-archives` which you can add entries to. My hope is that then someone will end up creating a less restrictive package archive to complement the offerings in the GNU one.

Nathan Weizenbaum, of Haml fame, has done some work on a project for creating Emacs Lisp package archives and an accompanying front-end here: http://code.google.com/p/marmalade/

kleiba3• 16 years ago

I never thought putting two or three lines of elisp code in my .emacs file for every package was such a big deal. Actually, as much as I love apt-get on my linux box, I also like the (perceived) feeling of control when I modify my load-path and add a (require) or an (autoload).

I never had the feeling that I need a package manager to handle my external packages. Thinking about that now I guess it's because the packages I use share little to no interdependencies. I'd say that it's the latter where a package system has a really strong point.

But anyway, I'm looking forward to the new feature. I could image it'll be fun to browse a package directory and just randomly try new extensions out, just to see if I like them and be able to get rid of them as easily as I've installed them.

Cool.

danh2• 16 years ago

Emacs 24 also has a new minor mode, electric-pair-mode, that auto-inserts matching parens à la Textmate. Quite useful.

rbanffy7• 16 years ago

Knowing Emacs, it can probably be convinced to generate all kinds of brackets, HTML tags and so on, based on what major mode is running.

jbellis• 16 years ago

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsReleaseDates

What changed to go from releases every 4-7 years, to releases every 1-2 years?

abrahamsen• 16 years ago

My guess: New maintainers:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2008-02/msg021...

I like the new policy, which seems to be one potentially disrupting new technology per major release. Previously, major releases tried to do too much at once, which lead to some very unstable and sometimes alienating .0 releases.

rbanffy7• 16 years ago

It's really hard to find features missing from Emacs after 23 releases.

gcr• 16 years ago

No kidding! Emacs 23 even added support antialiased text for heavens sake. Who needs such a useless feature?

redsymbol2• 16 years ago

Emacs is one of those software systems I'm really grateful for. My life is significantly better because I'm in a world where it exists - "better" meaning more joyful, more positively productive, and more enabled to be of service (since I use it for writing articles and opensource software, etc. Not to mention the code behind my company, so it's even helping me create jobs.)

kleiba3• 16 years ago

Seconded. Even after years of using Emacs, I still have to stop for a moment every now and then and think: holy shit, what a motherflippin' piece of software!

...and I get really happy :-)

psadauskas• 16 years ago

I really, really want to use Emacs. I like the ideas, I like the addons, I like the lispiness. What I can't get over, though, is the pinky contortions and multiple chords required to accomplish things in the editor itself.

I'm not a big fan of vimscript, and the addons seem more clunky, but being able to hit a single key, rather than a chord, or series of chords, to accomplish the basic text manipulations, makes it really hard for me to stop using vim and use emacs for more than a few days.

p_nathan• 16 years ago

You can avoid somewhat of that with some considered keymappings.

For instance, I remap Control to Alt a ton in emacs. It's very easy for me to thumb-key instead of pinky-key. YMMV, depending on keyboard and hand-size.

alec• 16 years ago

Try viper and/or vimpulse. It doesn't get you all the way to vim, but it gets most of the important stuff.

abecedarius• 16 years ago

The Kinesis contour keyboard moves the modifier keys to under your thumbs. Makes a huge difference for Emacs. It makes for a significant amount of retraining, though, too, and vim might still be for you.

redsymbol2• 16 years ago

I can understand! I actually also use vim a whole lot, which is absolutely wonderful as well. For the pinky/chords thing in emacs, I've be able to adapt by actually using other fingers quite a bit (shifting my hand so I can hold control with my ring or even pointer); and I really don't use multichord combos that much, usually using longer sequences instead (e.g. for indent-region, I hit Esc, then type C-\ rather than typing Alt-Ctrl-\ .) Fortunately this has worked well for me and my hands over time.

jcw• 16 years ago

As a vim user, I very much lament the fact that there's no good way to run an interactive shell or REPL in vim. The screen hack, Conque, the vim-shell patch, etc., don't match Emacs' REPL functionality.

mattrepl• 16 years ago

I'm surprised no one else has said it, but just remap your Caps lock to Ctrl. You can then use your pinky or ring finger, as you prefer.

Bud2• 16 years ago

Does anyone else feel like they are living in a pretty hilarious future realm when they see there's something called "Emacs 24" in the world?

In 2150, will we be using "Emacs 395"?

Maybe I should get my old vt100 out of the closet and see if it still works.

dedward• 16 years ago

In 2150, roughly 139 years from now, assuming a major release every 2 years, we should be on emacs 93 or therabouts.

As long as we still use text entry for programming, we'll still be using emacs.... it will keep up with the times.

Bud2• 16 years ago

What if we use text entry...but not from our fingers?

rbanffy7• 16 years ago

Emacs 395 would be much nicer than Visual Studio 2150 or an Eclipse named after a small asteroid that hasn't been discovered yet (because, by then, all rounded-body names will have been used)

krobertson• 16 years ago

"With the increasing popularity of distributed version control systems such as bzr"

That is the first time I've seen anyone use Bazaar as an example of a DVC that is gaining in popularity.

BCM43• 16 years ago

It's the one the emacs uses.

rbanffy7• 16 years ago

Isn't it also used by Canonical's Launchpad?

zoul• 16 years ago

Seriously, there are still some features left to be new in Emacs? :-)

sammyo• 16 years ago

strong-ai-mode

rbanffy7• 16 years ago

that and strong-ai-load-brain-state for loading brain dumps of great programmers to do pair-programming with.

eeperson• 16 years ago

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2010-03/msg002...

Does anyone know if the concurrency and lexbind features are still planned to be part of Emacs 24?

docgnome• 16 years ago

I really hope so. Mostly concurrency.

Whats New in Emacs 24

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