Emacs 23 is very near | Hacker News Reader

Emacs 23 is very near

emacs-fu.blogspot.com

92 pointsthunk55 comments

D-Bus support will open a whole new box of possibilities, I can't wait. Time to start hacking away writing a Pidgin <-> Emacs interface.

M-x butterfly as well.

I've been using the dbus support with the CVS snapshot for a while now - it's nice.

So far I've only been using it to control workrave and to bring up compilation messages with the system notification handler for long running compiles. Still, I've been liking it a lot.

so what does M-x butterfly do?

See http://xkcd.com/378/ .

(Which actually says C-x M-c M-butterfly, but that doesn't make much sense.)

There's no way it actually does that. What does it actually do?

It says "amazing physics going on..." and then claims to have successfully flipped one bit.

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/lisp/misc.el...

I would much rather bind it to the most impressive you have written.

I was SO eagerly waiting for anti-aliasing on emacs. Now it should be awesome.

I for one don't really like it or need it. My emacs looks great with the bitmap font I'm using - terminus.

The new packages in the standard distribution are great thought.

Yeah, I'm using terminus now, too. It's awesome! I went through a great deal of pain to get emacs 23 and try out some new fonts, but then discovered terminus and now it's relatively useless :)

I personally don't like terminus, so this anti-aliasing is great for Deja Sans Mono :)

that's what I was using before ;) To be honest I switched to Terminus when I bought a new laptop with 1680x1050 on 15'' and I wanted to fit more text on the screen. Terminus is really great at small sizes. For everything else there's Deja Vu.

I have been using emacs-snapshot even since I started using emacs regularly purely for the anti-alisaing, it really does feel so much nicer.

The development snapshots have been perfectly usable for a while now, but this is news nonetheless.

It's purdy with droid sans.

"M-x butterfly (see [[%20http://xkcd.com/378/][ http://xkcd.com/378/]])

I'm still waiting for M-x kill-it-with-fire.

How about:

    (defun kill-it-with-fire ()
      (interactive)
      (loop for b in (buffer-list) do (kill-buffer b)))

looks like a good first start, but how do we add the fire?

    (with-current-buffer b 
        (ignore-errors (delete-file (buffer-file-name)))
        (kill-buffer))

oh yes.

No static bound variables in elisp? :(

D-Bus sounds exciting - does anyone know if there's any chance this will allow emacs to interface with firebug?

You mean lexically bound variables perhaps? There is lexical-let from 'cl, but that's not the same thing.

OTOH Guile's elisp compiler does compile lexical bindings efficiently. It's a complementary tack to the lexbind branch of Emacs proper.

Suppose the compiler is done.. what wouild be the difficulties for using it on Emacs (apart from convincing rms)?

Getting the C shims right, and ensuring that it really implements elisp as emacs does -- to the point that elisp programmers can't tell the difference. The C question is much more difficult, though.

The goal is for Guile in Emacs to be the obvious, no-brainer choice. Hopefully that will be the case, but there is some hacking yet to be done.

I tried switching to emacs 23, but the vc.el integration left much to be desired, for svn and CVS, and I switched back. (Yes, I know, why am I still using CVS, but there you go.)

Ooo I can't wait

(That sounded sarcastic in hindsight but it wasn't)

Just compile the CVS version and use that, then? That's what many of us have been doing for years -- Emacs 23's exciting new features are mostly very old news :)

Just do an aptitude install emacs-snapshot if you're on Ubuntu.

(Debian might have that package too, but I'm not sure.)

In Emacs 22 about the largest file I can edit is 27MB. From the lack of hype I take it Emacs 23 won't improve on that. This is on 32-bit WinXP, sadly.

It's a heck of a lot easier to pore thru a huge trace file with an intelligent editor. Instead, I get to use Notepad.

I have no problems with large files - using Emacs 23 from http://www.ourcomments.org/Emacs/EmacsW32.html.

The file on the screenshot is ~156MB took several seconds to load but after that all operations on it are instant.

http://img199.imageshack.us/img199/9108/emacslargefile.png

The blacked out parts are work related - sorry.

Well, that's just sad, since Notepad loads the whole file into memory.

Have you tried Notepad++ or UltraEdit? Colorization, smart handling of large files, etc.?

Emacs is overkill and has very poor default key bindings.

Windows has notepad++, which is an excellent free editor.

On the Mac I use Aquamacs Emacs, which is ok, but I would still prefer something like notepad++. (For coding I use the xcode editor.)

How does this relate to the article?

It's time for people to move on from Emacs. Development effort would be better spent on lightweight editors that complement modern IDE editors (e.g., the Java editor in Eclipse).

Most Emacs users love Emacs because of the amount of customization it offers, not because of the keybindings. In fact, I've never seen an Emacs user who hasn't customized his keybindings.

I don't get what you mean by "moving on". Just because people started writing Emacs 30 years ago does not mean the code is crufty and old. Both Emacs and Vim work well with all modern desktop environments on all major operating systems. I don't see why anyone should be "moving on".

You might love your IDE, but many people hate them. Some of us don't like bloated software with features we don't need or use.

(I'm a Vim user, BTW :) )

But emacs is bloated software. Eclipse at least gives you amazing functionality. Have you actually tried the Java editor in Eclipse?

How is emacs bloated? Size of emacs 22.1 (windows): 36MB Size of eclipse galileo (windows) 189MB

Emacs runs in 4M resident on this box... Eclipse is closer to 500M. That is bloat.

Do you know anything about emacs? There is actually not that much bloat.

There is code to support each platform and windowing system emacs runs on. There is support for managing buffers, and other very primitive editor functionality like that. Then there is the Lisp VM and associated data structures ("Lisp_Object") to glue everything together. On top of that are some primitive functions ("and", "cdr", etc.), along with some primitive editing functions ("next-line") implemented in C. That's about it; the rest is all Emacs Lisp code that you can simply choose not to run. (Yes, some gets compiled right into the Emacs binary to speed startup, but you can skip that.)

Sure, you can argue that many emacs extensions (hello, Gnus) are bloat. But you can just pretend it doesn't exist; nobody is forcing you to use anything. Plain emacs is a very simple toolkit for building your own editor. Emacs with simple.el (and friends) is still a very simple, but rich, text editor. As you add packages, you add functionality and complexity... but you can choose what to add, Emacs is infinitely malleable and does not care what you do to it.

I am not too familiar with Eclipse, but I doubt that it is simpler than Emacs.

I'm interested in an editor that works the way I like with minimal customization required. Notepad++ is like that. Emacs isn't.

There's a difference between editing text files and editing text. In the former, all you need is some mechanism to type, delete, and move text. In the latter, you want to work with the contents itself in a huge number of ways.

There's no such things as an editor that works the way you like unless you only have very basic text editing needs. This is where people generally resort to Notepad or Word.

In the other case you really want a good editor that fits both your fingers and thinking, and that's where you had better write the editor yourself. It is at this stage when many people have figured out that starting with Emacs is the easiest path.

Eclipse sometimes can't keep up with my typing. That's amazing, but not in a good way.

No comparison. Eclipse is a great integrated development environment: a relatively static (though extensible) application for writing applications.

Emacs is a lifestyle. Embrace it.

Eclipse is a great window environment. It only needs a good IDE.

People said similar things about Emacs (a great OS needing a decent text editor). Such statements mostly underestimate the tools in question unless this is just an intended reference to the Emacs quote.

> In fact, I've never seen an Emacs user who hasn't customized his keybindings.

Here's one. I only make 2 minor additions (no customizations) to the default key bindings. By now, the defaults are pretty much hardwired into my hands.

It's a sign of how true the original statement is that you consider "only adding 2 extra keybindings" to be essentially the same as "haven't customized your keybindings."

And what about people who program in C, C++, perl, python, erlang? How is that useful to them?

Or a new programming language that we haven't even heard of. Emacs (and Vi(m)) will typically have a programming editing mode long before v 1.0 of the lang comes out (c.f. clojure-mode)

The Haskell folks actually recommend you use Emacs for all your editing needs. The Emacs Haskell mode is supposed to be awesome (I've never used it, since I use Vim).

Extending Emacs or Vim to work seamlessly with your programming language is, IMO, a much smarter move than building an IDE from scratch.

Leksah is the Haskell IDE

http://leksah.org/

> ... runs on any platform where GTK+, gtk2hs and GHC can be installed ...

That's the problem. GTK doesn't work very well on the Mac, and (AFAIK) there's no GTK+ on Haiku. OTOH, Emacs works perfectly on both platforms :)

It doesn't -- it's someone forgetting the no flamebait rule.

Notepad++, really? If that isn't bait I don't know what is.

TextMate on OSX is a lot like notepad++ (but better). Re: emacs, I think complaining about default key bindings is like complaining about the color of a tennis racket's handle - it's a sign of n00b :-P

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