Whats New in Emacs 24

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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/

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.

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

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

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

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