GNU Emacs 24.1 released

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2012-06/msg00164.html

by alexott • 14 years ago

325 73 14 years ago

lists.gnu.org

Xyzodiac2• 14 years ago

So does that mean it's officially stable? This is great news.

ConstantineXVI• 14 years ago

Yep.

    The current stable release is 24.1.[0]

[0] http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/

Xyzodiac2• 14 years ago

Fantastic, thanks :)

carterschonwald• 14 years ago

Woah, emacs lisp now has lexical scoping

intranation• 14 years ago

It's opt-in, otherwise most packages would break.

To enable it per-file use a file-local variable:

  ;;; -*- lexical-binding: t -*-

perlgeek• 14 years ago

How ironic. Wouldn't it make much sense to enable it per lexical scope?

Or as Perl did it (18 years ago) with a new keyword, so that you can use both dynamic and lexical variables in the same file? Best of both worlds.

conanite• 14 years ago

Yes, this is pretty radical. More info from the manual:

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Usi...

from http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Lex... -

Such code is also much more friendly to concurrency, which we want to add to Emacs in the near future.

Exciting times ahead ...

ams6110• 14 years ago

Indeed, will be nice when something blocking in one window doesn't lock up the whole emacs process.

Garbage• 14 years ago

New features:

- New packaging system and interface (M-x list-packages) for downloading and installing extensions. A default package archive is hosted by GNU and maintained by the Emacs developers.

- Support for displaying and editing bidirectional text, including right-to-left scripts such as Arabic and Hebrew.

- Support for lexical scoping in Emacs Lisp.

- Improvements to the Custom Themes system (M-x customize-themes).

- Unified and improved completion system in many modes and packages.

- Support for GnuTLS (for built-in TLS/SSL encryption), GTK+ 3, ImageMagick, SELinux, and Libxml2.

This looks great. :)

ruediger2• 14 years ago

Complete list http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/NEWS.24.1

Aethaeryn• 14 years ago

You can also find out about the important changes from:

  C-h r m antinews RET

This provides a changelog in the opposite direction, which is entertaining:

  For those users who live backwards in time, here is information about
  downgrading to Emacs version 23.4.  We hope you will enjoy the greater
  simplicity that results from the absence of many Emacs 24.1 features.

-----

It can be found online here:

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Ant...

kcbanner• 14 years ago

Great news!

Deutscher• 14 years ago

Does anyone know if/when it will be available via Ubuntu Software Center or some PPA? I am on Ubuntu 12.04.

ruediger2• 14 years ago

There is a PPA for the snapshot

https://launchpad.net/~cassou/+archive/emacs

http://emacs.naquadah.org/ (Debian)

drstrangevibes2• 14 years ago

oh frabjous day!

sliceof314• 14 years ago

Callooh! Callay!

munchor• 14 years ago

Awesome release! I've been waiting for this for a long time now. It will be in Arch Linux's repositories in a few hours.

The package system is awesome, no more hassle installing plugins and extensions!

Great job GNU, thank you!

mih• 14 years ago

Any idea when the precompiled Windows version will be released? Currently there seems to be no build http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/emacs/windows/

alexott2• 14 years ago

usually it takes not so much time (2-3 days) to release windows version

mdaniel• 14 years ago

This might not be appropriate for your situation, but I have found it surprisingly easy to build emacs from git by using MinGW/MSYS. If you need the exact command line, send me email or reply here and I'll post it when I get back to the office on Monday.

The only non-trivial steps I had to take were to track down the "dev" msys packages for jpeg, png and xpm libraries. I do not link my nightly builds against gnutls, just to set expectations [my experience with non-native security stuff on windows leads me to avoid that headache; YMMV].

barik2• 14 years ago

For what it's worth, the Windows binaries are now available: http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/emacs-24.1-bin-i386.zip

barik2• 14 years ago

This means that I can finally try out Emacs Prelude [1]. Fantastic!

I've been wanting to check it out for a while, but I haven't been brave enough to run a non-stable release of GNU Emacs.

http://batsov.com/prelude/

eschulte• 14 years ago

Same for the Literate Emacs24 Starter Kit (shameless plug by the maintainer). https://github.com/eschulte/emacs24-starter-kit

stephenlee• 14 years ago

Wow, great job. Thanks!

rcthompson3• 14 years ago

Non-stable is a relative term. Emacs daily development snapshots are more stable than the stable releases of most other software.

Ixiaus• 14 years ago

I can vouch for this, I've been running on daily for the last 2 years and have rarely encountered a game stopping issue.

metaguri• 14 years ago

What functionality does prelude provide? Unless I'm missing something, the website suggests that you can find out by "reading the source."

I had a similar experience once with the emacs starter kit [1]. Though it's a noble effort and probably does have a ton of great features, there are some problems: you pretty much get all or nothing (ESK split it out into a "core" and "per-language" set of libraries but still, there's a lot of stuff) and it's hard to tell which things are emacs builtin and what is customizable. If you disagree with a customization you're SOL; I knew enough about emacs to know that some things had been customized, and I didn't like them, but it was nigh impossible to find out where they were customized and how to turn them off.

It reminds me of the libraries vs frameworks discussion [2]. Emacs works well with libraries (with little elisp functions counting as "mini-libraries"), and the ESK/prelude seem like frameworks.

I'm not trying to pick on these toolkits in particular. They are probably a good way to start out with emacs--I know that the ESK provides a bunch of features to make it more "friendly" out of the box for someone who is coming from something like TextMate.

Most "old-school" emacs people I know have their own .emacs that have accumulated over years and years of trying to solve specific problems or customize that one thing that's annoyed the crap out of them for a while. My .emacs is not pages and pages, but it does have some good stuff in it.

What I'd love to see (and maybe I'm inviting myself to do this) would be a tool (maybe ELPA is this tool, though It's hard to know) which allows you to search for, browse, and install elisp snippets to help you out. ELPA is good for bigger libraries (i.e. major modes) but not for "how do I create an unfill-paragraph function?"

[1] https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2762280

technomancy4• 14 years ago

Author of the Starter Kit here.

For what it's worth, I've come around to this viewpoint. I rewrote ESK for version 2, and the emphasis was on packaging as much functionality in independent packages as possible. So as of v2, the Starter Kit is mostly just about providing a default set of packages and turning on a few flags that it's just crazy to leave off (like ido). But this way more of the functionality is available to everyone, not just users of ESK.

Anyway, it certainly needs more documentation, but these days I recommend the Starter Kit more as a source of inspiration than something people should just use outright, at least if they're not in a hurry.

ndrake• 14 years ago

Check out el-get:

"Short Story: el-get allows you to install and manage elisp code for Emacs. It supports lots of differents types of sources and is able to install them, update them and remove them, but more importantly it will init them for you."

https://github.com/dimitri/el-get

KC8ZKF• 14 years ago

Ugh. The guy maps a bunch of global keybindings, including hippie-expand and ibuffer, loads a low contrast color scheme as default, but still has the temerity to write:

"I firmly believe that the one true way to use Emacs is by using it the way it was intended to be used [...] That's why I've disabled all movement commands with arrows - to prevent you from being tempted to use them."

sunni• 14 years ago

Yeah, it's batshit insane

alexott2• 14 years ago

At the end of http://wikemacs.org/wiki/GNU_Emacs_24 page, there are links to posts that describe changes in new version

st3fan• 14 years ago

So what is your favorite new feature?

chc• 14 years ago

Having ELPA built in is really nice. If I'd had a package manager back when I was first learning Emacs, I think I would have resented it a lot less. And even now, having it available without fiddling with anything will be such a nicety.

unhammer3• 14 years ago

I'm looking forward to trying ELPA (my .emacs.d is so full of stuff I've not yet gotten around to trying it).

bi-di support is also really nice, I've been copypasting into other programs until now.

Also always nice to get a new org-mode version (though I'm never quite sure whether using org makes me more productive, or whether playing with new org features makes me procrastinate more).

Favourite feature that makes you go O_o : "`nato-region' converts text to NATO phonetic alphabet."

fungo• 14 years ago

wait for long time, really great!

onedognight2• 14 years ago

Precompiled binaries for Emacs 24.1 are already available for OS X at http://emacsformacosx.com/ .

__david__3• 14 years ago

You caught that quick! It only finished compiling a few minutes ago... (I generally kick off the release builds manually)

gnufied• 14 years ago

Last I checked your builds didn't had `ns-toggle-fullscreen`. Is that still the case?

EDIT: Looks like emacsforosx does not compile Emacs with support for above command. Will you consider it? I totally understand distributing plain vanilla version though!

teoruiz• 14 years ago

I'm getting a connection refused for http://emacsformacosx.com/

jimm2• 14 years ago

I had trouble with that release. I haven't tried any others yet (or tried compiling from source). The problem: after loading my init files (https://github.com/jimm/elisp) and loading a file there is something seriously wrong: the file isn't displayed properly (I'm not seeing the top of the file) and the mouse and keyboard don't let me navigate around the file. It so broken I had to re-install 23.4.

Maybe it's something in my init files, but I have not yet had time to figure out what's causing the problems.

jimm2• 14 years ago

I've traced it down to font selection. When I change the font to a larger size (Monaco or Menlo) then the top of the contents of the frame is off the screen, "above" the Mac menu bar. Strangely, Courier New works correctly with larger font sizes.

I tried the suggestion elsewhere on this page about setting font and fontset together, but that didn't fix the problem.

gcv3• 14 years ago

It's really easy to compile your own binary (if you have Xcode or the new separate compiler from Apple). Grab the source, "./configure --with-ns && make install", and Emacs.app appears in the nextstep/ subdirectory of the source tree.

vamega• 14 years ago

I've been using the pretests for a while now, and the built in package manager has been an absolute joy to work with.

If I were to begin writing extensions, I'd also probably enjoy the lexical scoping a lot more.

aashu_dwivedi• 14 years ago

the only time i hate the packaging system [apt] is when a new version of some software is released

technomancy4• 14 years ago

It should be in nix shortly: http://nixos.org/nix

Nix and apt are very complementary to each other; apt has all the stable never-breaks stuff, and nix has all the latest new code. And when you pull in something too new that breaks, you can roll it back trivially.

jmount3• 14 years ago

OSX build seems to work really well:

./configure --with-gif=no --with-ns make make install

rickhutcheson• 14 years ago

Note to anyone attempting to build this on OS X: If you're getting strange errors when running make, ensure that you don't have the Mono framework installed as well. If you do, move it out of the way ( from /Library/Frameworks/Mono.framework to some other directory) before you try to install. After the install, move it back.

throwdown2• 14 years ago

I'm getting this:

checking host system type... i386-apple-darwin11.3.0 configure: error: Emacs hasn't been ported to `i386-apple-darwin11.3.0' systems. Check `etc/MACHINES' for recognized configuration names.

jmount3• 14 years ago

Ouch, sorry others are having trouble. Mine happened to work- but I don't know a lot about controlling the build config.

And the formatting didn't survive pasting. Should have been: ./configure --with-gif=no --with-ns; make; make install

throwdown2• 14 years ago

I built it from the sources in the emacs-24 branch without a problem. For some reason only the tarball sources threw up that config error. Strange.

pnathan• 14 years ago

As a note;

./configure --with-ns; make; make install, then copy to Applications.

gcv3• 14 years ago

There's a slightly annoying regression (to Emacs 22, behavior, I believe) in the Mac version. Some Unicode characters (like —, “, and ”) cause the line to expand in height slightly. Does anyone know of a fix?

drothlis2• 14 years ago

If you modify the default font, you also have to change the default "fontset", because merely changing the default font doesn't install it as the font for unicode characters.

I use:

    (set-face-attribute 'default nil :family "Menlo" :height 120)
    (set-fontset-font "fontset-default" 'unicode "Menlo")

gcv3• 14 years ago

Perfect. Thank you so much. Guess I don't know as much about Emacs as I thought. :)

cbp• 14 years ago

Someday there will be a version where the new feature will be an actually useful wiki :p

neic• 14 years ago

There is a “next generation, better structured and improved wiki” at http://wikemacs.org/

jmount3• 14 years ago

And it doesn't see control modifiers when used through Lion OSX screen sharing (seems a lot like this bug: http://xquartz.macosforge.org/trac/ticket/180 ).

drstrangevibes2• 14 years ago

any decent mode for java yet? :-\

GNU Emacs 24.1 released

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