What’s New In Emacs 24.4

http://www.masteringemacs.org/articles/2013/12/29/whats-new-in-emacs-24-4/

by lispython • 13 years ago

126 51 13 years ago

jph• 13 years ago

Thank you for the news!

My personal favorite UI item: C-x TAB (indent-rigidly) now makes it faster/easier to multiple-indent, much like Sublime.

And for development: the Lisp debugger’s e command now includes the lexical environment.

ubernostrum3• 13 years ago

This would be a lot more useful if the person writing the blog hadn't copied release notes in one character set into their blog entry in another character set. Tons and tons and tons of borked characters which make it very difficult to actually read what's going on.

teddyh• 13 years ago

He also did not escape angle brackets, so for instance “typing <left>, <right>, <S-left>, and <S-right> adjusts” from the original becomes “typing , , , and adjusts” in the text.

mickeyp7• 13 years ago

I've fixed this now.

mickeyp7• 13 years ago

I'm not seeing the character set issue at all. Both Wordpress and Emacs are set to UTF-8.

ubernostrum3• 13 years ago

Here's an imgur album:

http://imgur.com/a/ehla9

Despite your comment saying you've fixed it, I'm still seeing this in Firefox, Chrome and Safari (OS X). No amount of fiddling with character sets client-side seems to fix it.

Lot of it seems to be punctuation and ligature characters getting borked. Some still seems to be escaping issues. Some I don't even know.

dredmorbius• 13 years ago

ProTip: the iconv utility (part of flinch, so yes, it's installed on Linux / Mac) is quite helpful for fixing this.

Fixing linewrap issues would also be useful.

jpace121• 13 years ago

I like how both emacs and vim continue to make improvements, while still maintaining a lot of the features that make them great.

asdfs2• 13 years ago

Something I've heard about is integrating Guile into Emacs. Will Guile become the primary language for Emacs with Emacs Lisp as an option, or will Emacs Lisp remain the "default" choice, with Guile for those who want it? And does anyone know what sort of timeline we're looking at before Guile support is released?

ams6110• 13 years ago

Current status seems to be summarized here.

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

melling• 13 years ago

Seems to be going quite slowly. However, I would think getting a good Scheme implementation as the Emacs default is probably the single most important feature. All Emacs is, after all, is a Lisp interpreter.

espadrine• 13 years ago

Take this with a grain of salt, but I believe that Emacs Lisp will be implemented on top of Guile. More precisely, ELisp code will be compiled to Guile bytecode (which runs on a register VM[1]), which should make ELisp code run faster.

As a result, Guile and ELisp code will be able to play together.

[1] http://wingolog.org/archives/2013/11/26/a-register-vm-for-gu...

davexunit3• 13 years ago

This is indeed the case. Elisp will be another language running on the Guile VM.

broodbucket• 13 years ago

So glad electric-indent-mode is enabled by default. That was the only thing I absolutely needed to make a .emacs config for when using a foreign computer for a little while.

Interesting to see how good multi-monitor support is. Good changes, anyway.

rmk2• 13 years ago

I disabled electric-indent-mode, because it really doesn't get along well with org-mode in my experience. I only really use it for select languages, but otherwise tend to disable it globally.

mickeyp7• 13 years ago

My hope -- and I have yet to try it in anger in 24.4 -- is that these annoying issues are fixed.

dded• 13 years ago

Interesting to see how good multi-monitor support is.

I used Emacs for 13 years on VMS workstations, all of which used separate X displays for each monitor. Multiple-X-display support was added to Emacs in version 19.3x, but Emacs on VMS [1] was stuck on an older version (19.28?) for a very long time. So I longed for, but lacked, any multi-monitor use with Emacs for a long time. I take it for granted today.

[1] That Emacs was available on VMS at all was due to the efforts of Richard Levitte--one of the unsung heros of FLOSS in my mind. The system interface stuff worked quite well on VMS.

johnwalker• 13 years ago

The developers have sent out this survey with emacs 24.4 requesting that users provide some information about vanilla packages. This might also be of interest to people looking for fun extensions to play with.

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

Adrock• 13 years ago

I did a quick write-up of the top packages from the survey with brief descriptions of what they are and links to their respective Emacs Wiki pages:

http://adereth.github.io/blog/2013/12/08/most-frequently-ena...

endlessvoid94• 13 years ago

Great news for beginners of Emacs who mistakenly use Emacs in a terminal instead of in a window manager.

I use emacs on purpose in the terminal. Is he being sarcastic here?

thirsteh3• 13 years ago

Ditto. Can't stand the UI.

throwaway_yy2Di• 13 years ago

It's just a basic menubar for new users; two lines in .emacs and it won't bother you again:

    (menu-bar-mode 0)
    (tool-bar-mode 0)
    (scroll-bar-mode 0) ; also possibly annoying

__david__3• 13 years ago

I like GUI Emacs because you get more colors. 256 isn't enough for beautiful, subtle shades.

asdfs2• 13 years ago

He specified "beginners", where I think a GUI makes sense. I know I found it somewhat helpful.

vinkelhake• 13 years ago

I interpreted it as beginners who mistakenly use Emacs in a terminal, possibly not knowing that there's a GUI mode as well. I don't think he means that running Emacs in a terminal is a mistake in itself.

But who knows...

to3m• 13 years ago

I suspect you're right. It's not hard to find numerous stack overflow questions clearly posed by people trying to learn emacs, who've mistakenly run the terminal version - and who now, as they say, have two problems.

But even for more experienced emacs users I'd argue that the terminal version probably is a mistake. Think of it as akin to eating out-of-date food: even if the only other option is starvation, it still probably won't taste very nice, and it could even make you ill.

About all you can say about terminal emacs it is that (unlike vim) it does at least use the familiar emacs keys... provided you can remember that the meta key probably doesn't work. Along with some (random) set of key chords that involve shift. Sometimes by playing with your terminal program's options you can change which half of the keyboard shortcuts are broken.

Still, I'm sure some people like it, and they shouldn't listen to me. It takes all sorts.

midas007• 13 years ago

The title needs changing to future tense because it implies 24.4 has been released.

mouchahaha• 13 years ago

emacs is awsome

mijuty_hello• 13 years ago

it is

kaffeinecoma• 13 years ago

    New hooks focus-in-hook, focus-out-hook.
    These are normal hooks run when an Emacs frame gains or 
    loses input focus.

Cool. I think the lack of such a hook is what was preventing an implementation of "save all buffers" when the user clicks outside the window, something commonly used in IDEs.

jeremiep• 13 years ago

Prelude also adds hooks to save a buffer every time it loses focus. It also triggers when the point is placed by a mouse click.

Very useful!

mcguire• 13 years ago

yow.el is obsolete; use fortune.el or cookie1.el instead.

I guess everyone older than I am has died off.

What’s New In Emacs 24.4

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