Emacs 27.2

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2021-03/msg00008.html

by lelf • 5 years ago

245 111 5 years ago

lists.gnu.org

sigmonsays• 5 years ago

what is the release cadence of emacs?

nathell• 5 years ago

I think there isn't an official one, but since 2016 there's been a major version released approximately every two years, and a minor version every couple of months.

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/history.html

unixhero• 5 years ago

That's pretty solid!

ddavis• 5 years ago

While a set-in-stone release schedule doesn't exist, there is _a lot_ of development activity (emacs-devel is a very busy mailing list). 99.9% of the time it's safe to use the bleeding edge head of the repository if you want to use the latest stuff.

disgruntledphd2• 5 years ago

except in the few months following a major release (at least for me)

kragen2• 5 years ago

https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/etc/NEWS.2... says, "This is a bug-fix release with no new features." But I don't understand what the bugs were.

nicklecompte• 5 years ago

Check the Changelog for that: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/master/...

kragen2• 5 years ago

Thanks!

b5n• 5 years ago

From the OP:

For the complete list of changes and the people who made them, see the various ChangeLog files in the source distribution.

rataata_jr3• 5 years ago

Anyone running the jit Emacs? Can't wait for it. I did try compiling it from source for my linux setup. Would love to see it on windows.

prussian• 5 years ago

I am. I honestly don't notice much of a difference, but at the same time I keep seeing deferred compilation warnings for plugins I have added via straight.el

I've been using https://github.com/flatwhatson/guix-channel to manage it. I don't recommend trying the Pure GTK+ stuff yet though; some context menus don't seem to work. Specifically, treemacs rename seems broken with PGTK.

TacticalCoder2• 5 years ago

Anyone running the jit Emacs?

I'm running the "native-comp" (libgccjit) branch daily since months and months now: not a single problem here and I've got quite a "heavy" config (thousands of lines of custom config and all the usual suspects: magit / org-mode / lsp / cider etc.).

I did try compiling it from source for my linux setup.

And it worked? Worked on the first try for me (on the Debian distro).

I was somehow expecting lots of problems (because it's one heck of a change) but it really all just compiled and worked perfectly fine.

rataata_jr3• 5 years ago

I followed this tutorial from mastering emacs blog iirc. I built it inside docker. I think it worked on the first try for me as well. I didn't use it much since it was in docker.

hypersoar• 5 years ago

I've been using it for a few months on wsl and it's been great. I'm using the Nix package and have run into only a couple of minor issues.

rataata_jr3• 5 years ago

That's a good idea, will finally try nix package manager on windows.

iib2• 5 years ago

I have compiled straight from source on the feature/native-comp branch, and it works noticeably much faster. I am actually scared of going back to the regular Emacs, as I may find it way too slow.

I am not sure how much it is from native Emacs, as when I did this, I also enabled all the other recommended optimizations from lsp (increasing the gc threshold early in the config, installing and compiling with native json support etc.)

As far as I know, the latest branch has all the necessary flags enabled, so you can just do

    ./autogen.sh && ./configure --with-nativecomp --with-xwidgets --with-json && make -j4 && make install

after you installed the dependencies and cloned the Emacs repo (--with-nativecomp may actually be set to default now in this branch). You also need a very recent version of gcc, as the libgccjit is somewhat new, and it may err on the compilation process.

taeric11• 5 years ago

I also enable march=native for the compile. My guess is it is mostly placebo, but I feel it helps.

indy• 5 years ago

It looks like the configure option has been renamed to

    --with-native-compilation

on the feature/native-comp branch (and it has to be specified otherwise it defaults to no)

rurban• 5 years ago

Running the native-comp + wayland copr on fc32 for about a year, whithout any problem. About 3x faster.

https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/deathwish/emacs-pgtk...

TeMPOraL5• 5 years ago

Over half a year now, as a daily driver. Personally on Ubuntu, at work on WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) - which I then x-forward to an VcXsrv on Windows.

Works pretty much flawlessly, and it's much snappier on some of the workloads I put it through - like big collections of big Org Mode files, or viewing (and fontifying) large files.

lsllc• 5 years ago

Yes, it's pretty solid running Doom Emacs. There's a handy macOS build script/helper:

https://github.com/jimeh/build-emacs-for-macos

The author curates a list of "known good" commits to the feature/native-comp branch so you don't waste your time with bad builds:

https://github.com/jimeh/build-emacs-for-macos/issues/6

bambataa• 5 years ago

I've just tried it on macOS, built by this tool: https://github.com/jimeh/build-emacs-for-macos

Unfortunately it keeps locking up my entire computer so might not be a goer just yet.

Decabytes2• 5 years ago

I've used Emacs for almost 5 years now and it has served me well. In the beginning it was frustrating and confusing, but now that I understand it, it's the way I naturally interact with code on my computer. The fact that so many gnu tools have movement similar to Emacs means that I can quickly become more effective in them. The fact that my work Macbook allows me to do some rudimentary movement with C-a, C-e, C-f, C-n brings me joy.

Emacs rewards me for learning it better, and when I think about what it does, and is capable of doing, I'm just in awe. I highly recommend reading Mastering Emacs if you would like to become a more effective Emacs user.

After using it for years I can say my single biggest gripe with Emacs is its performance. Elisp is powerful but slow, and has many warts. The developments with GccEmacs excites me, and there is still GuileMacs. As a more experienced user Emacs frustrates me because at times I demand too much of it. And when that happens, I try to temper that frustration with the understanding that the program is 36 years and 5 days old to the day, and has outlived many other pieces of software. Computers looked different in 85 than they did today, and the fact that I have saved truly days of programming time due how effective it makes me cannot be overlooked.

I want Emacs to continue to improve. I want it to get even better than it already is, but I am so grateful for the people who have made it what it is today.

tharne2• 5 years ago

I prefer vim as an editor, but in terms of being a unique and fascinating piece of software, emacs wins hands down. There's something really cool about the fact that you can't easily answer the question, "What is emacs similar to?", because it's such a total sui generis.

prewett• 5 years ago

Viper mode could give you the best of both worlds, depending on what you like about vim. If it's the key navigation, viper has you covered.

luismbo• 5 years ago

It's similar to a Lisp Machine.

ashton314• 5 years ago

As mentioned under another reply, take a look at evil-mode. Near-perfect vim compatibility as far as I can tell. Best of both worlds in my opinion!

taeric11• 5 years ago

I'm curious what sort of performance you are hit by. For me, it is mainly org source buffers that I did not flag as async.

That and tramp not working too well over crappy internet. :(

throwanem2• 5 years ago

Tramp works a lot more reliably if you customize where Emacs puts your backups and autosaves, such that they're stored locally instead of remotely. The Emacs wiki has details on how to do that: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/BackupDirectory

Decabytes2• 5 years ago

I work in the medical field, which requires me to view large xml files and multi patient csv files with years of patient history. The CSVs contain embedded pdf strings that are long strings of bytes in the file. Emacs struggles to copy and paste, and move around in the large CSVs.

For the large XML files, I have to switch to fundamental mode, because it struggles to highlight everything, and sometimes the xmls are pure ass and are basically all on one line. I've written a python script that will prettify the xml because emacs locks up when I try to do that. My colleagues just tell me to use sublime text.

anaerobicover• 5 years ago

On the performance/stability of Elisp front, I just heard about remacs, which is a fork that's starting by porting all the C to Rust: https://github.com/remacs/remacs

Still in early stages, but I think that's one to keep an eye on.

jsilence• 5 years ago

Most recent change is 7 months ago. I would not hold my breath.

tsimionescu2• 5 years ago

I'd be much more interested in one of the CL rewrites, which could (1) run all of the elisp as efficient compiled Common Lisp, and (2) extend the customizability ot the deepest layers of Emacs.

Unfortunately, most seem to be relatively dead from what I've seen.

foobarbaz33• 5 years ago

The rust re-write is not intended to bring performance benefits. Currently the Rust version is a massive downgrade in performance relative to the C nativecomp branch.

TeMPOraL5• 5 years ago

Definitely go for GccEmacs (feature/native-comp) branch if you haven't yet. Despite being experimental, it's pretty much stable. I've been running it for over half a year as a daily driver, and seen zero issues (but much performance improvements!). Similar stories abound on-line.

Wish something be done about proper threading support, but I understand it's a herculean task at this point.

(For those unfamiliar, GccEmacs is a parallel branch of Emacs that uses libgccjit to compile ELisp straight to native code. It does it transparently - compiling in the background and then substituting bytecode-compiled functions for native-compiled.)

chriswarbo4• 5 years ago

Wish something be done about proper threading support, but I understand it's a herculean task at this point.

I would agree about adding concurrency and parallelism; but threading is very much a WorseIsBetter approach, which I certainly wouldn't like to use directly.

Co-routines or futures would seem a better fit for Lispy semantics. Actors seem too different and heavyweight, but I'd still prefer them to threading!

Smithalicious2• 5 years ago

I use pre-release Emacs with the nativecomp branch ("gccemacs") and Doom. Starts in 2.1 seconds and it's blazing fast. Definitely the best thing to come to Emacs for me in a long time, very exciting.

I can't wait for it to hit release so everybody can play with it!

wiz21c• 5 years ago

I have built gccemacs a week ago. I didn't see much difference in speed and it breaks wanderlust... Are there things to know to get the speed (and yes, I've checked it was enabled during ./configure :-)) ?

whobar• 5 years ago

Any warts when using it with Doom? I only recently switched from vim to Doom, and I love it, but it can be a bit laggy when using it with some of the C/C++ IDE features turned on.

newusertoday• 5 years ago

are binaries available somewhere, i tried compiling it about year ago but quit after struggling with few dependencies.

agumonkey2• 5 years ago

gccemacs works remarkably fine for such a big change, it does bite my poor x201 hard on the compiling phase (we're now as modern as lein clojure bootstrap :cough:) but it does bring speed improvements already.

davidw2• 5 years ago

Going on 25 years with Emacs. Lots of other things I've changed over the years, but still happy with Emacs and Postgres.

lovelyviking• 5 years ago

I wish to use Emacs, but those keyboard shortcuts do not make any sense for me.

Is there a way to have emacs with custom shortcuts as a ready package where I can modify those shortcuts before digging in with all the rest.

I do not mind keyboard shortcuts in gneeral and use them all the time, it's just those in Emacs are hard to learn/remember knowing that I wish to change them anyway .

I am looking for the way to set those by myself but it seems I need to learn a lot before I can do it and thus it blocks me from moving forward with exploring Emacs deeper.

wyuenho2• 5 years ago

and... flickering is back on the NS port.

abzug2• 5 years ago

Alan Third (the NS maintainer) said on reddit that "It's too big and invasive a change for Emacs 27."[1]

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/mc82yk/flickering_em...

wyuenho2• 5 years ago

Too bad. I wish they could just stop breaking things.

ilovecaching• 5 years ago

Not to start a holy war, but what are the advantages of emacs over vim these days? I'm considering switching to emacs just to have learned both.

znpy• 5 years ago

The scripting language isn't total crap, for starters.

There's a huge amount of tools (package) that enable additional features.

It's easy to interface with other stuff.

selectnull• 5 years ago

I can so recommend this.

I've switched to emacs few years ago for the same reason and spent about a year using it. Although I've switched back to vim afterwards, having spent time with emacs was fun and not a waste of time.

Have a leap of faith, find the advantages of one (or the other) for yourself. If you don't like at any time for any reason just switch back: after all, it all text files you're editing.

ducharmdev• 5 years ago

You can have the best of both worlds using spacemacs in evil mode. Essentially gives you emacs with a lot of community-selected plugins, but with vim keybindings.

As a vim user, there's just certain tools emacs provides to which there's no vim equivalent (or the vim implementation is lacking). Like org mode for example: I've yet to come across something outside of the emacs ecosystem that does a good job of replicating org mode. Maybe jupyter notebooks come close in some ways, but AFAIK the org mode experience is fairly unique to emacs.

elpatoisthebest• 5 years ago

Take my answer with a grain of salt because I have much more experience with vim and I have used emacs only off and on for a couple years, and I only use it as an "IDE" of sorts.

So, how I experience them, they aren't exactly competitors in a direct sense.

When I use vim in the terminal, I treat my workflow in a particular way. I use tmux to have windows for multiple projects (usually I run 2 or more microservices in my day to day). I use TUIs like lazygit, and I rely heavily on command line tools to build, compile, and do most of the daily things. I am familiar with those and it's basically like the whole terminal is my IDE in some ways. For note taking and idea management, I use vimwiki within vim.

Using Emacs is different for everyone's specific use cases, but the way I have tried to use it as an IDE for golang, node, and some react. Emacs seems to prefer integrating your workflow INTO emacs rather than just having emacs be a single part of your workflow. (I'm simplifying too much, I think)

Evil mode gives me literally every single vim command I ever have used in my entire life. I am a heavy vim user, but I am not an extreme power user. I use macros, regex, and other simple vim stuff. All of it is perfectly fine in evil mode as I use it. But feature parity isn't a great reason to switch from vim IMO.

-The first thing that really is a huge improvement is org mode to capture anything in the code I am looking at that I don't have time to address. Like capturing a weird piece of code or something that might have a bug state, org capture, make a note of it and I can come right back to it later when I have free time.

- Everyone touts magit. I love magit, BUT if I'm being honest with myself, lazygit is nearly just as good...and if you've been using git commands fine for any amount of time, it's more of a nicety than a MUST have. I don't view magit as "the killer app" that other do, but I admit that I really like it and use it heavily whenever I use emacs.

- Elisp is amazing compared to vimscript. That's pretty much that whole bullet point.

There are more things, but it might depend on your personal workflow and the kind of work you do.

I recommend dipping your toes in using DOOM emacs (or spacemacs, but I didn't like that one as much) and getting a feel for emacs. You might find that you like it, you might find that you prefer your current vim & terminal based workflow better.

I'm somewhere between the worlds. I really keep coming back to emacs because of 1) Org mode 2) Csv mode (Sounds silly, but I do a LOT of csv parsing in my life) 3) elisp hacking & scratch mode.

klibertp• 5 years ago

NOTE: This is advice for programmers: if you're not a coder, it won't make any sense for you.

If you are a programmer, though, and you're going to learn Emacs, learn it along with Emacs Lisp and Elisp development tools.

One definite advantage of doing that is experiencing the "plugin" development environment done right. If you ever scripted Vim, or any other program other than the web browser, you're in for a fun ride. really The "plugins" in Emacs are, surprisingly, full-blown programs. When writing them, you can evaluate any part of the code and see the results immediately. You have access to a source-level debugger and two profilers out of the box. Every function you use is documented, and accessing that documentation is trivial. You can "go to definition" of any variable and function, including primitives written in C (if you compiled Emacs yourself and have the sources on disk). You can modify, extend, or override any function anywhere with advices. The language itself is also interesting: it's multi-paradigm. You can write code in procedural, functional, and OOP styles. The OOP implementation is based on generic functions and multimethods/multiple dispatch - unless you worked with Clojure or Julia, you're unlikely to have encountered that before. The quote/unquote-based macros are powerful, and even if you don't use them, you can benefit from them, for example, by using a library providing pattern-matching/destructuring (like pcase or -let).

And you get all of that just for writing plugins for an editor. Let that sink in. The tooling and language, which, though a bit clunky sometimes, rivals professional IDEs and languages like Kotlin, just for writing extensions. Seeing all of this after trying - and failing - to write a simple Vim plugin with VimL and Lua was a mind-blowing experience.

It's also an advantage - to get back to your question - which explains the massive amount of Elisp programs and plugins out there. Well worth experiencing.

neolog3• 5 years ago

In some sense, they're not in the same category. The old joke "Emacs is a great operating system, it just needs a good text editor" is basically true.

If you like vim, try Doom Emacs or Spacemacs.

If I were going for pure text editing today I might want something like https://kakoune.org/ whose selection->action pattern seems better than Vim's action->selection pattern.

okamiueru• 5 years ago

I'm a little confused. If doom emacs is good, wouldn't the emacs experience when just disabling evil (vi-bindings), and thus having regular emacs workflow not also be pretty good?

hamburga• 5 years ago

In case you're eager to upgrade (I never am, that's the point with Emacs![1]) here's the description of the changes:

"Emacs 27.2 is a bug-fix release, with no new features with respect toEmacs 27.1."

[1] Excellent Steve Yegge post describing how much Emacs cares about stability and backwards-compatibility: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...

brightball• 5 years ago

I tried Emacs after reading so much about it lately...but I don’t understand how people use it. The sheer volume of key combinations always in play to do things makes my hands hurt.

It made me see the appeal of some of those concave keyboards.

widdershins• 5 years ago

I'm just getting into Emacs (~4 months) and I'd say that I have probably ~40 key-commands memorized. I M-x search for everything else and I still find it to be an excellent experience. I'm building my config and muscle memory very slowly, but enjoying every minute.

DocTomoe• 5 years ago

That's me, two years ago, when I made the switch from vi.

In the end, the key combinations are something to learn - but the productivity increase makes them worth learning. And for the handcramp thing: Realize that you have two control, and two meta keys on a standard keyboard.

neolog3• 5 years ago

Many people find it helpful to swap ctrl with capslock.

samus• 5 years ago

I'm currently trying out a circular swap of left ctrl -> left super, left super -> left alt, left alt -> left ctrl. The goal is the same: now the thumb just curls a little bit more to reach ctrl.

Edit: my preferred keyboard layout has levels, and the Caps Lock key is a level shifter, which makes me prefer not pushing it down to Left Ctrl.

auganov• 5 years ago

Super and Hyper (Right Alt and Right Pritnscreen for me).

I never use any C-c bindings. C-* & M-* already have decent defaults, so all my frequently used stuff is s-* and H-*. Some of the less frequent stuff might be H-s-*, C-s-* or M-s-* [0]. Everything else I can just call from M-x. Don't see the point of using keybindings for stuff you only need a few times a day. On the flipside the stuff where keybindings make sense should have the simplest possible one.

[0] It may seem daunting but there's usually some symmetry in the way I define them. One letter tends to do different but somewhat related things with different modifiers. For example s-x is eval defun, H-x is eval s-exp at point, s-z is eval defun and pprint, H-x is eval at point and pprint. H-s-x is eval at point and replace. C-k is kill-line so s-k is kill sexp. M-f is forward-word so s-f is forward-sexp.

in9• 5 years ago

as a vim user, how could I learn Emacs? I know of Evil mode, but how easy is it to have some stuff just like I have in vim (such as custom text objects, vim-surround, etc..).

acoard3• 5 years ago

Look at Doom Emacs. It's pre-configured to work out of the box for modern dev.

There are also some good guides on YouTube by DistroTube, if you prefer to learn that way.

https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr_iBj91eeI

wiswindsurf• 5 years ago

I started using emacs in the early 1980s. Just found out I could use it on my cell phone. Never thought I would be using it on a phone I can carry around. I just have to carry a magnifying glass to see the text with my aging eyes...

Emacs 27.2

Related Stories