12 ms·

Emacs 25.1 released

277 points by tlikonen 10y ago

aban 10y ago
Great news and congrats to everyone involved! Among the highlights of this release is Xwidgets, which allows embedding GTK+ widgets inside Emacs buffers. One such widget is WebKitGTK+, a full-featured port of WebKit for use in GTK+ apps. As a consequence of this you can now browse the internet and maybe watch some YouTube inside Emacs [0]. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/4srze9/watching_youtube_inside_emacs_25/ https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/4srze9/watching_yout...
- kfrz 10y ago
  Only yesterday I discovered I could play an adventure game in emacs. Then I discovered a bunch of layers and modes that were awesome. I haven't begun to scratch the surface, but if I buy a new Nexus 6P can I just flash Emacs on it?
  - nine_k 10y ago
    A shortcut to dial a number from within an org mode phonebook would be perfect :)
    - S4M 10y ago
      With Twilio that should actually be possible.
  - kaushalmodi 10y ago
    You do not need to flash anything. It's already available on Android phones even without root. I use it on unrooted Nexus 6p. Google "Termux emacs".
    - 56quarters 10y ago
      +1 for Termux. I started using it purely for the novelty of running emacs on my phone (a moto x pure) and it's a great piece of software. It's even open source! https://github.com/termux/termux-app https://github.com/termux/termux-app
      - blatant 10y ago
        How do you use it? I couldn't imagine using Emacs with a software keyboard.
        paulfitz 10y ago
        Volume up and down are used as modifiers. Sounds crazy but it works.
        kaushalmodi 10y ago
        If using software keyboard, Hacker Keyboard works great! Otherwise, the Logitech K380 Multi-Device Bluetooth Keyboard ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0148NPH9I/ref=cm_sw_r_other_apa_lVF3xbR5D4ZM7 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0148NPH9I/ref=cm_sw_r_other_apa_l... ) is great.
  - pvdebbe 10y ago
    Have you asked your M-x doctor about it yet? ;)
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - justinhj 10y ago
    A great way to discover things in emacs is the unmemorable command `finder-list-keywords` which gives you a menu of all the features in emacs by category
- ezjones 10y ago
  1. Isn't embedding a browser like this a security risk? 2. Can we now move M-x customize to gtk widgets?
  - wtetzner 10y ago
    Would it be any more of a security risk than using a stand-alone browser?
    - nine_k 10y ago
      Standalone browsers make a lot of special efforts to isolate pages from one another. Does embedding have the same guarantees?
      - Jasper_ 10y ago
        Yes. WebKitGTK+2 uses isolated renderer/host processes.
  - artlogic 10y ago
    When you say "move M-x customize to gtk widgets", which text based would you replace with GTK widgets? Customize certainly doesn't initially seem as friendly as a traditional preferences dialog, but I would be hesitant to lose the "it's all text" navigability and consistency.
    - ezjones 10y ago
      Having a friendlier, good looking "Preferences" based on gtk would help newcomers. We could keep customize too but a new panel with simple familiar look would help a lot of people to get into emacs.
  - gkya 10y ago
    Emacs is not only on GTK. I doubt any indispensable core components will depend on xwidgets unless it can embed each toolkit emacs can use. Further, customize is used on the terminal emulator and on the framebuffer too, having it require X is not feasible.
- pvdebbe 10y ago
  I wonder if those widgets require GTK support in Emacs. I compile a plain X support for my emacs only, because with GTK it doesn't stay up for months without crashing. I had an emacs server with 180 day uptime the other day. Maybe on my work machine that is Windows anyway, I can try this out. :>
  - truncate 10y ago
    I would like to use Emacs on terminal, but few of keybindings don't work well based on terminal to terminal. For example, last three months I got a Mac for work, and on iTerm "C-/" didn't work for Undo, or some keybindings starting with "Meta". I guess that could be solved by configuring terminal properly with key sequences, but I just ended up using GTK (but well the GTK version crashed whenever I closed one of the multiple frame open). On linux, so far it has worked flawlessly for me.
    - wtallis 10y ago
      I'm by no means an Emacs expert or even power user, but I've found Aquamacs to be pretty good for OS X. It's stable and seems to strike a good balance between integrating with native UI functionality and the Emacs way of doing things.
    - notalaser 10y ago
      You don't have to use the terminal, and I assume OP isn't, either. Emacs still supports Athena and Motif widgets, among others, if you don't mind the looks. I'm still on the GTK2 port, largely because I got sick of troubleshooting every GTK application after every GTK release. If you're on OS X, it's probably worth checking out Aquamacs, too.
  - e40 10y ago
    Yes, it does. Gtk3.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
tlikonen 10y ago
Character folding in searches is likely useful: simple letters like "a" also match "á", "à", "ä"; quote char " also matches “ and ” and so on. (setq search-default-mode #'char-fold-to-regexp)
- copperx 10y ago
  That's awesome.
  - wtbob 10y ago
    > That's awesome. That's emacs. Seriously, emacs is pure distilled awesome. I honestly don't know why anyone uses anything else, or writes code for anything else.
- mablap 10y ago
  Ah, that's cool, but as I often write in French and I'm trying to learn how to write proper Spanish, I appreciate the default-off.
gkya 10y ago
Emacs VC mode has a bug where all listed files in the vc-dir buffer are shown with their basenames for at least Git and CVS repositories, and for CVS it renders the mode unusable. I made a patch but I guess they're waiting my paperwork (copyright assignment) to arrive so it couldn't make it for this release. Here is the patch: https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=24082 https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=24082 for whoever uses vc-git and vc-cvs. It's in the last message there.
- kaushalmodi 10y ago
  But please get through with the paperwork. That way your patch can be applied to the master branch, and it will be available in emacs 25.2.
  - gkya 10y ago
    I posted it already but we have a bank holiday in my country (12 days!, finishes this monday).
agumonkey 10y ago
btw, windows binary build https://sourceforge.net/projects/emacsbinw64/files/release/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/emacsbinw64/files/release/ (from 2h ago)
- copperx 10y ago
  Is Emacs all that useful on Windows where even the most basic Unix commands aren't available? Is M-x grep even available? Or does Emacs require a Cygwin / Ubuntu Subsystem?
  - agumonkey 10y ago
    Depends, if you need OS interaction you'll need a posix-like subsystem indeed[1]. But first I write mostly lisp (ml, js and python) and I just can't live without paredit and second emacs extensibility is a drug to me now. Everytime I have to use anything else I feel crippled. [1] I installed msys2 which is less crufty than cygwin.
    - mappu 10y ago
      Msys2 by design restricts the available packages to those useful for compiling software for Windows. The emacs package is in their separate mingw repository, which means the produced binary is a Windows program and does not understand the posix environment at all (i.e. no /proc/, /dev/ etc). Cygwin is an OS that runs on top of windows - all cygwin programs are windows programs but not all windows programs are cygwin programs. The emacs package for cygwin can fopen() /proc/ and /dev/, use the linux socket API, and in general follow the linux makefile more closely.
  - ww520 10y ago
    Emacs is very useful on Windows. There are different packages run the Unix command tools on Windows. M-x grep works just fine.
  - Koshkin 10y ago
    GnuWin32 complements emacs quite nicely. (It is an extensive set of natively built GNU utilities - no emulation is required.)
syastrov 10y ago
Congrats on the release. But I'm wondering, why not provide the PGP signatures for the code over HTTPS instead of HTTP?
- SEMW 10y ago
  Does it matter? If your connection gets MITM'd and someone changes the .sig files, they'll no longer validate against GNU's code-signing public key (which you may already have, or if not, the link to download it is https (https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-keyring.gpg https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-keyring.gpg). (Unless of course that person has GNU's private key, but in that case you've lost before you started) (Incidentally, if you just change the url from http to https (or use the EFF's https-everywhere addon) it works fine, the server does support it)
  - fnj 10y ago
    Yes, it matters. https is not perfect, but it is 99% less vulnerable than http.
    - cyphar 10y ago
      I think you should read what GP said again. To repeat: there's no point in downloading a PGP signature over SSL -- if you have the signing key locally (which you can get over HTTPS). Because you use crypto to verify the signature and if someone MITMs you then the keys won't match. The reason why most people use HTTP for distribution (including many GNU/Linux distributions) is because mirror sites generally don't have HTTPS, and so you would have to require everyone to connect to your main server (which increases bandwidth and latency costs).
Koshkin 10y ago
Having been using emacs on and off, both on Windows and Linux, and having found it being useful on some occasions, I somehow can't help thinking of it as more of a historical artifact than a toolset I would want to use on a daily basis. Being a very powerful personal computing environment and kinda fun to use, to me emacs still falls short in the ways that, for instance, UNIX command line interface with its simple single-purpose utilities never did. I am not even talking about the need to remember a gazillion of context-dependent key bindings, because with the command-line utilities you also have to remember the correct switches. I guess, this may be the case of needing to make a choice; but, if I am ever to be forced to actually make one, I'd probably settle rather for something like a full-blown desktop environment, or, should I find myself in front of a text terminal, Midnight Commander (whose built-in text editor now even offers syntax highlighting, for those who like it).
- yeowMeng 10y ago
  Shells and /_/nix philosophy are a 4th generation query and data munging language with seamless extensibility. Emacs is an perhaps the most ambitious implementation of a layer above shells and /_/nix philosophy. The problem I have with Emacs is the surface area feels infinitly large and some features can be buggy. I choose to use both.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- microcolonel 10y ago
  At risk of coming off as flippant or mean, I think you completely missed the point. It is a productive and stable editor environment which runs in various ways across all major computer platforms. It has a veritable mountain of established extension code, modes for performing tasks outside of software development, and portable configuration. The keybindings are considerably more consistent than the alternatives, and if you don't remember them you can always use the in-built searchable help system, or try to tab complete it in the M-x prompt. These things are not 'historical', they are the things which have been so permanent that after thirty years they are still useful.
- agumonkey 10y ago
dman 10y ago
XWidget support is really good. Finally have C++/Opengl docs showing in the browser inline in emacs and now that the browser is inline, theres no reason to leave emacs anymore.
dleslie 10y ago
Emacs being able to load shared/dynamic libraries is huge; it means we'll be able to load so files from a user's home directory, or the standard lib paths, and use foreign functions to extend Emacs. And with XWidgets... Well, now you could write an OpenGL game that uses an OpenAL audio layer and displays in an Emacs frame, all in elisp. Because, why not?
- rurban 10y ago
  Interesting, I wrote such an emacs FFI about 15 years ago, but RMS was fundamentally opposed to it. Gtk-emacs was then based on a smaller scale FFI, but a more generic exposed FFI was still devilish. I wanted to use a proper AutoLISP environment then.
  - cm3 10y ago
    Since the dynlib support probably uses GPL3 headers and runtime symbols, I doubt the result can be licensed anything but GPL3, so I'm not sure what RMS would complain about. This is also the reason why LLVM's ld.gold support is a plugin IIRC, because it has to include a binutils header (/usr/include/plugin-api.h, which is weirdly generic name for such a thing to exist in /usr/include).
  - gkya 10y ago
    RMS is no longer a maintainer of GNU Emacs.
    - dleslie 10y ago
      Which has been a boon; Emacs 24 and 25 have moved at an incredible pace.
    - gnufx 10y ago
      And he wasn't 15 years ago. He also didn't provide legal advice.
  - gnufx 10y ago
    I don't remember any discussion of that 15 years ago, but there's a difference between some sort of general FFI and loadable modules of this sort that rms rejected on Moglen's legal advice. (Disappointingly, as the design was intended to make the copyright situation clear in a legal case.) I don't know why the 2002 implementation was reimplemented (without credit and apparently without understanding it properly).
100k 10y ago
Somewhat related: I am starting a new job soon and I want to get Emacs setup "right" this time. I've been using Aquamacs for the last several years, but I'm wondering if there is a better way to use Emacs on the Mac these days? As part of this, I want to get my .emacs under version control and shared between computers so I have the same settings everywhere. Is there a good way to do that with Emacs packages installed through MELPA/ELPA?
- 0xCMP 10y ago
  I like brew installing `emacs-mac`[0] which installs a port run by a developer in Japan. My favorite feature of it (among other amazing osx specific changes) is the sub-pixel scrolling support in emacs. When you setup your `init.el` you can call `(package-install x)` and if the package is already installed it'll do nothing but just make sure it's there. If you wanted the whole thing figured out ahead of time I recommend using Spacemacs[1] [0]: https://github.com/railwaycat/homebrew-emacsmacport https://github.com/railwaycat/homebrew-emacsmacport [1]: http://spacemacs.org http://spacemacs.org
  - 100k 10y ago
    Thanks! Did not know about package-install, that's very helpful. Spacemacs looks cool. I have so many years of emacs keybindings that I'd have to turn that off, but I really like the look of what they're building.
    - pzone 10y ago
      I ported over a few years of custom keybindings and other config to Spacemacs. It was not too difficult, basically you can just tell Spacemacs to load whatever.el at startup. Eventually I switched to evil-mode and I rarely use most of my old keybindings, but I still keep them around!
- cheez 10y ago
  Check out spacemacs
- brunoqc 10y ago
avar 10y ago
For the uninitiated: Emacs major releases start at X.1, not X.0. So this is the first 25.X release, not some minor version release. The last major version, 24.1, was released in June 2012, so this represents over 4 years of development.
cm3 10y ago
Full changelog: https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/emacs-25.1/etc/NEWS https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/emacs-25.1/etc/NE...
hellofunk 10y ago
I used to use Xcode for all my work. Then I had to write Clojure for a couple years, and only used Emacs. When I got back to writing native code, I went back to Xcode and ironically felt like I had slipped into the distant past. So I switched to CLion, the latest bells-and-whistles IDE for C++. But all my custom Emacs code was too powerful an adversary for even CLion and I am back to using Emacs full-time for C and C++. One caveat: I now use vim-mode in Emacs ("evil") which really has taken my Emacs experience to a new level.
- pvinis 10y ago
  I have been trying to replace Xcode with Emacs, but the biggest problem I don't know how to solve, has been Cocoa/ObjC/clang autocomplete. If I could have that work like Xcode, I could probably switch tomorrow.
  - hellofunk 10y ago
    I too tried to get autocomplete going in Emacs, and that is the biggest challenge. However, I quickly realized that autocomplete is overrated. I am no less productive without it. In fact, the "snippet" module for Emacs has allowed me to be a lot more productive by generating keystrokes that complete common language idioms for me quickly. In C++, for example, using push_back is very common, and an autocomplete could help with this simple function call, but my snippet goes further and does so more quickly with fewer keystrokes. Autocomplete even on a major IDE on a fast machine can sometimes still take an extra second to pop up. I can type faster than that, and I can certain snippet a lot faster than that. Other things like all the different ways to write for loops (the types of iteration) I have snippetized so I can quickly generate the loop I need, which goes much further than autocomplete would.
mjhoy 10y ago
The emacs ecosystem has really changed how I work. I manage all of my email now in `mu4e`. I manage all of my notes, writing, TODOs, time tracking, invoicing in `org-mode`. For interacting with git, `magit` is simply amazing. The most important thing is how everything works together. There is the obvious window, frame and buffer management, the kill ring, the searching across all open buffers. Less obvious is that while looking at email I can hit a few keys to create a TODO, schedule it for a particular date that will show up in my agenda, and will link back to that same email (which I can now move out of my inbox). Or, in my programming notes file, I can link to a specific commit for a project I'd like to come back to later. And, the best part, which I've only barely scratched the surface of: everything is programmable. I can write an emacs lisp function to automate almost any part of my workflow.
- tptacek 10y ago
  That mail workflow is good, and I use it too, but not in Emacs; most of the task management tools for OSX can link back to a specific email. Are there other good reasons to use mu4e? I'm an Emacs person, but not yet an "I do my email in Emacs" person.
  - bluejekyll 10y ago
    I think you more mean, "I'm not an 'Emacs is my Operating System' person". There are many people who use Emacs as their OS, its never been appealing to me, because I like the richness of other tools. There is a question though, are OSes doing enough to make the integrated experience like Emacs something that's done system wide? I think Apple comes close to providing the set of things you want, but it still feels tacked onto the top, rather than more deeply integrated.
    - ncouture 10y ago
      It's a great question and a comparison I try to exercise regularly against different Emacs components I use. From someone who never touched OS X, how would you compare its system-wide software integration with Emacs?
ziggrat 10y ago
Interesting stuff going on in this thread. I use Emacs for everything except for Mail, since i never liked wanderlust, should try some other mail reader. But i just realised there is some great functionality from this thread i never knew existed like 'which-key', org-mode(wanted to use this from long) etc.
- cmiles74 10y ago
  There's also a decent notmuch mode that is pretty good at reading and organizing mail. https://notmuchmail.org/notmuch-emacs/ https://notmuchmail.org/notmuch-emacs/
daylightyotei 10y ago
I'm still a novice emacs user, and a kind-of-longtime vim user, heres my "journey" 2010~2011: learn vim because I wanted to slack off studying for exams 2012: addicted to vim keybindings at this point, tell people 'I can't use other editors without "proper" vim keybindings' 2012: also discover tmux, because i wanted the ability to use vim keybindings and copy things in/out of shell 2012-2016: dabble with emacs sproadically, put off every time due to my vim keybinding addiction. tried evil mode during this time, and to my limited knowledge of emacs, things like C-u not working (scroll up half a page in vim) tick me off and in different modes the vim keybindings would suddenly disappear which was annoying 2016.04: discover spacemacs, try again, things work quite magically. in addition modes like org-mode are working as I expect (no random de-binding of evil-mode), discover new modes like magit and projectile-helm which keep me in (spac)emacs. also supports screen splitting with (:vsp, :sp) which is great. one thing i really like about emacs is i still use the shell (awk/sed/ag/etc) for a lot of tasks, and since i can use the shell inside an emacs buffer, copying-pasting out of them are incredibly easy, replacing my tmux usage. next step for me is to get more proficient in emacs (i hope i can read emails, do simple browsing, etc) and then hopefully setup emacs from scratch for an exercise instead of relying on spacemacs to do everything for me
- Ar-Curunir 10y ago
  Regarding the shell inside emacs buffer: neovim can do this too now.
- e19293001 10y ago
  I was once a vim user for a year and switched to emacs to look at its advantage from vim. Keybindings gave me so much pain to adjust and took my brain for a month to completely absorb the keybindings. And even did 'alias vim=$(which emacs)' to force my self to use emacs. I did not try evil-mode thinking that won't resolve my vim addiction. Now I still happily use emacs for 2 years everyday and never get back to vim except for some circumstance that I am forced to use vim on other computers.
  - progman 10y ago
    > Keybindings gave me so much pain Why didn't you define your custom keys with global-set-key in Emacs Lisp? This is one of the first things an Emacs novice should learn and do.
kozikow 10y ago
Let's start a thread with "little cheries" you found in emacs! Focus on things that you found after years of usage and you regret not noticing before. Given Emacs scope age it's sometimes easy to miss some very cool stuff. What's more, lots of things on Internet are outdated. I will start: - elscreen - you can configure it to get tmux-lookalike inside emacs. My config: https://gist.github.com/kozikow/58b46c45a2c24406dc7cde3f18610433 - hydra - create mini-menus in the mini buffer. Quick and reduces amount of shortcuts you need to remember. See previous point for example. - apropos/helm-apropos - search across all variables/functions/commands at once. - imenu/helm-semantic-or-imenu : get overview of all definitions in current file, including classes or functions. Works in majority of languages without special setup.
- sooheon 10y ago
  Magit gets a lot of deserved love on the internet, but I think abo-abo (the author of hydra, which you listed) is quietly leading a kind of revolution in emacs usage. His trifecta of packages lispy (edit at the speed of thought in lisps), swiper/ivy (a simple and powerful interface to every facet of your editor), and hydra are the main reasons I use emacs over vim.
  - kozikow 10y ago
    lispy - I use smartparens, it have mostly similar feature set. Smartparens advantage over paredit (and it seems lispy) is that it focuses on giving good support for editing parantheses groups in any language. E.g. you can use it to edit C++ expressions. See my post: https://kozikow.com/2016/06/18/smartparens-emacs-package-is-super-awesome/ https://kozikow.com/2016/06/18/smartparens-emacs-package-is-... swiper/ivy - I am already hardly locked in into helm. Even if some competing packages are more powerful (e.g. I used icicles at some point) or faster (e.g. ivy) due to big community helm have lots of community-contributed, helm-optimised packages. Type M-x install-package helm- vs ivy-.
    - sooheon 10y ago
      lispy/smartparens: FWIW, I use both. If you think they have a similar feature set, you haven't looked at lispy closely enough. It is more about making lisp editing operations frictionless, than it is just pair management. Check out the simple overview[1], and maybe some demos[2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BverGxP41cE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BverGxP41cE [2] https://github.com/abo-abo/lispy#demos https://github.com/abo-abo/lispy#demos swiper/helm: this is more of a personal choice, I agree. Having given both a fair shake, I find ivy more easily extensible, and I prefer the simpler look. As for the community support, there has yet to be something for only helm that I've missed in the various counsel functions.
pacomerh 10y ago
Is Emacs a monolith?. I haven't used this editor but from what I read people like it because they do everything there. Is this true?. If so, it doesn't sound like a good idea to me. Anyone has more insight of the goods and bads about Emacs.
- pmontra 10y ago
  Don't worry about to having to trash all of your tools. I only edit in emacs, I do everything else in a browser, thunderbird, terminal, etc, but I know that if I want I could do in it all the things other people described. I'm not sure if it's worth it so I don't. Furthermore it takes time to learn.
- throwanem 10y ago
  Some people do everything there. They tend to be very vocal. Others just edit text with it. They tend not to be. Most are somewhere in between. We usually try not to be too annoying. From the perspective of usage, while Emacs has a great deal of functionality, you need not use any of it that you don't want to. Indeed, Emacs is so shy and retiring about all it can do that you really need not even know about anything beyond text editing, unless you decide you want to. The main drawback from my perspective has been interoperability. Org mode is brilliant, but when everybody else uses Evernote or OneNote, Org can't be the only thing you use unless you want to be that guy. And using Emacs at all makes you likely enough to be seen as "that guy" anyway that it's worth not living up to the stereotype. I wish I were joking when I say that, in adult life, I've been the object of far more unfriendly regard as a result of my choice of text editor than as a result of my homosexuality, which I've never really been at particular pains to hide. It is easier, in the modern tech industry, to be gay, than to be an Emacs user. That's not Emacs' fault or that of its users, but it is real, and perceptions matter; if you're averse to the occasional funny look, this may be worth taking into account in your consideration of whether to try the editor.
- justinhj 10y ago
  I've been using emacs for over 10 years. I use it for the things it is good at, and other tools for what they are good at. In practical terms I use emacs for complex or repetitive editing tasks, org-mode for planning and lists, budget my finances using a my own emacs code, edit and work with Clojure and Common Lisp, writing blogs. What I don't use it for: email/browsing - the web works better for me. Scala/Java - IntelliJ. Python - PyStorm. file management and git - bash shell is fine.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jaequery 10y ago
If you are on OSX, I can't stress enough how important it is to swap opt with cmd. Not sure if there's a better one but I use cmdkeyhappy for that.
- sjm 10y ago
  With the emacs-mac-port by Mitsuharu Yamamoto (available on railwaycat's homebrew tap) you can set this in Emacs with (setq mac-command-modifier 'meta).
  - jaequery 10y ago
    True, but it's also very useful to have the same key bindings while using terminal too!
samuel1604 10y ago
It's surprising to see so much popularity in mu4e in this threads when no one mention Gnus, I am too much 'hardwired' in gnus and don't think i have the 'courage' to try something else but someone would know how does it compare ?
bhrgunatha 10y ago
I highly recommend Mickey Petersen's annotated review of Emacs releases, based on the NEWS file. [1] I also recommend his book, Mastering Emacs [2]. I learned so much from that book. It's great for both beginners and medium/long term users. I'm mostly an autodidact so I rarely buy technical books, but I wanted to support his efforts based on reading his blog before it was published. [1] https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/whats-new-in-emacs-25-1 https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/whats-new-in-emacs-25... [2] https://masteringemacs.org/book https://masteringemacs.org/book
ceasos 10y ago
perfect reason/time/trigger to revisit/clean my dotfiles closet :) though preference is over emacs25-git :D

277 points by tlikonen 10y ago

aban 10y ago

Great news and congrats to everyone involved! Among the highlights of this release is Xwidgets, which allows embedding GTK+ widgets inside Emacs buffers. One such widget is WebKitGTK+, a full-featured port of WebKit for use in GTK+ apps. As a consequence of this you can now browse the internet and maybe watch some YouTube inside Emacs [0]. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/4srze9/watching_youtube_inside_emacs_25/ https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/4srze9/watching_yout...

kfrz 10y ago
Only yesterday I discovered I could play an adventure game in emacs. Then I discovered a bunch of layers and modes that were awesome. I haven't begun to scratch the surface, but if I buy a new Nexus 6P can I just flash Emacs on it?
- nine_k 10y ago
  A shortcut to dial a number from within an org mode phonebook would be perfect :)
  - S4M 10y ago
    With Twilio that should actually be possible.
- kaushalmodi 10y ago
  You do not need to flash anything. It's already available on Android phones even without root. I use it on unrooted Nexus 6p. Google "Termux emacs".
  - 56quarters 10y ago
    +1 for Termux. I started using it purely for the novelty of running emacs on my phone (a moto x pure) and it's a great piece of software. It's even open source! https://github.com/termux/termux-app https://github.com/termux/termux-app
    - blatant 10y ago
      How do you use it? I couldn't imagine using Emacs with a software keyboard.
      - paulfitz 10y ago
        Volume up and down are used as modifiers. Sounds crazy but it works.
      - kaushalmodi 10y ago
        If using software keyboard, Hacker Keyboard works great! Otherwise, the Logitech K380 Multi-Device Bluetooth Keyboard ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0148NPH9I/ref=cm_sw_r_other_apa_lVF3xbR5D4ZM7 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0148NPH9I/ref=cm_sw_r_other_apa_l... ) is great.
- pvdebbe 10y ago
  Have you asked your M-x doctor about it yet? ;)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- justinhj 10y ago
  A great way to discover things in emacs is the unmemorable command `finder-list-keywords` which gives you a menu of all the features in emacs by category
ezjones 10y ago
1. Isn't embedding a browser like this a security risk? 2. Can we now move M-x customize to gtk widgets?
- wtetzner 10y ago
  Would it be any more of a security risk than using a stand-alone browser?
  - nine_k 10y ago
    Standalone browsers make a lot of special efforts to isolate pages from one another. Does embedding have the same guarantees?
    - Jasper_ 10y ago
      Yes. WebKitGTK+2 uses isolated renderer/host processes.
- artlogic 10y ago
  When you say "move M-x customize to gtk widgets", which text based would you replace with GTK widgets? Customize certainly doesn't initially seem as friendly as a traditional preferences dialog, but I would be hesitant to lose the "it's all text" navigability and consistency.
  - ezjones 10y ago
    Having a friendlier, good looking "Preferences" based on gtk would help newcomers. We could keep customize too but a new panel with simple familiar look would help a lot of people to get into emacs.
- gkya 10y ago
  Emacs is not only on GTK. I doubt any indispensable core components will depend on xwidgets unless it can embed each toolkit emacs can use. Further, customize is used on the terminal emulator and on the framebuffer too, having it require X is not feasible.
pvdebbe 10y ago
I wonder if those widgets require GTK support in Emacs. I compile a plain X support for my emacs only, because with GTK it doesn't stay up for months without crashing. I had an emacs server with 180 day uptime the other day. Maybe on my work machine that is Windows anyway, I can try this out. :>
- truncate 10y ago
  I would like to use Emacs on terminal, but few of keybindings don't work well based on terminal to terminal. For example, last three months I got a Mac for work, and on iTerm "C-/" didn't work for Undo, or some keybindings starting with "Meta". I guess that could be solved by configuring terminal properly with key sequences, but I just ended up using GTK (but well the GTK version crashed whenever I closed one of the multiple frame open). On linux, so far it has worked flawlessly for me.
  - wtallis 10y ago
    I'm by no means an Emacs expert or even power user, but I've found Aquamacs to be pretty good for OS X. It's stable and seems to strike a good balance between integrating with native UI functionality and the Emacs way of doing things.
  - notalaser 10y ago
    You don't have to use the terminal, and I assume OP isn't, either. Emacs still supports Athena and Motif widgets, among others, if you don't mind the looks. I'm still on the GTK2 port, largely because I got sick of troubleshooting every GTK application after every GTK release. If you're on OS X, it's probably worth checking out Aquamacs, too.
- e40 10y ago
  Yes, it does. Gtk3.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]

tlikonen 10y ago

Character folding in searches is likely useful: simple letters like "a" also match "á", "à", "ä"; quote char " also matches “ and ” and so on. (setq search-default-mode #'char-fold-to-regexp)

copperx 10y ago
That's awesome.
- wtbob 10y ago
  > That's awesome. That's emacs. Seriously, emacs is pure distilled awesome. I honestly don't know why anyone uses anything else, or writes code for anything else.
mablap 10y ago
Ah, that's cool, but as I often write in French and I'm trying to learn how to write proper Spanish, I appreciate the default-off.

gkya 10y ago

Emacs VC mode has a bug where all listed files in the vc-dir buffer are shown with their basenames for at least Git and CVS repositories, and for CVS it renders the mode unusable. I made a patch but I guess they're waiting my paperwork (copyright assignment) to arrive so it couldn't make it for this release. Here is the patch: https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=24082 https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=24082 for whoever uses vc-git and vc-cvs. It's in the last message there.

kaushalmodi 10y ago
But please get through with the paperwork. That way your patch can be applied to the master branch, and it will be available in emacs 25.2.
- gkya 10y ago
  I posted it already but we have a bank holiday in my country (12 days!, finishes this monday).

agumonkey 10y ago

btw, windows binary build https://sourceforge.net/projects/emacsbinw64/files/release/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/emacsbinw64/files/release/ (from 2h ago)

copperx 10y ago
Is Emacs all that useful on Windows where even the most basic Unix commands aren't available? Is M-x grep even available? Or does Emacs require a Cygwin / Ubuntu Subsystem?
- agumonkey 10y ago
  Depends, if you need OS interaction you'll need a posix-like subsystem indeed[1]. But first I write mostly lisp (ml, js and python) and I just can't live without paredit and second emacs extensibility is a drug to me now. Everytime I have to use anything else I feel crippled. [1] I installed msys2 which is less crufty than cygwin.
  - mappu 10y ago
    Msys2 by design restricts the available packages to those useful for compiling software for Windows. The emacs package is in their separate mingw repository, which means the produced binary is a Windows program and does not understand the posix environment at all (i.e. no /proc/, /dev/ etc). Cygwin is an OS that runs on top of windows - all cygwin programs are windows programs but not all windows programs are cygwin programs. The emacs package for cygwin can fopen() /proc/ and /dev/, use the linux socket API, and in general follow the linux makefile more closely.
- ww520 10y ago
  Emacs is very useful on Windows. There are different packages run the Unix command tools on Windows. M-x grep works just fine.
- Koshkin 10y ago
  GnuWin32 complements emacs quite nicely. (It is an extensive set of natively built GNU utilities - no emulation is required.)

syastrov 10y ago

Congrats on the release. But I'm wondering, why not provide the PGP signatures for the code over HTTPS instead of HTTP?

SEMW 10y ago
Does it matter? If your connection gets MITM'd and someone changes the .sig files, they'll no longer validate against GNU's code-signing public key (which you may already have, or if not, the link to download it is https (https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-keyring.gpg https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-keyring.gpg). (Unless of course that person has GNU's private key, but in that case you've lost before you started) (Incidentally, if you just change the url from http to https (or use the EFF's https-everywhere addon) it works fine, the server does support it)
- fnj 10y ago
  Yes, it matters. https is not perfect, but it is 99% less vulnerable than http.
  - cyphar 10y ago
    I think you should read what GP said again. To repeat: there's no point in downloading a PGP signature over SSL -- if you have the signing key locally (which you can get over HTTPS). Because you use crypto to verify the signature and if someone MITMs you then the keys won't match. The reason why most people use HTTP for distribution (including many GNU/Linux distributions) is because mirror sites generally don't have HTTPS, and so you would have to require everyone to connect to your main server (which increases bandwidth and latency costs).

Koshkin 10y ago

Having been using emacs on and off, both on Windows and Linux, and having found it being useful on some occasions, I somehow can't help thinking of it as more of a historical artifact than a toolset I would want to use on a daily basis. Being a very powerful personal computing environment and kinda fun to use, to me emacs still falls short in the ways that, for instance, UNIX command line interface with its simple single-purpose utilities never did. I am not even talking about the need to remember a gazillion of context-dependent key bindings, because with the command-line utilities you also have to remember the correct switches. I guess, this may be the case of needing to make a choice; but, if I am ever to be forced to actually make one, I'd probably settle rather for something like a full-blown desktop environment, or, should I find myself in front of a text terminal, Midnight Commander (whose built-in text editor now even offers syntax highlighting, for those who like it).

yeowMeng 10y ago
Shells and /_/nix philosophy are a 4th generation query and data munging language with seamless extensibility. Emacs is an perhaps the most ambitious implementation of a layer above shells and /_/nix philosophy. The problem I have with Emacs is the surface area feels infinitly large and some features can be buggy. I choose to use both.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
microcolonel 10y ago
At risk of coming off as flippant or mean, I think you completely missed the point. It is a productive and stable editor environment which runs in various ways across all major computer platforms. It has a veritable mountain of established extension code, modes for performing tasks outside of software development, and portable configuration. The keybindings are considerably more consistent than the alternatives, and if you don't remember them you can always use the in-built searchable help system, or try to tab complete it in the M-x prompt. These things are not 'historical', they are the things which have been so permanent that after thirty years they are still useful.
agumonkey 10y ago

dman 10y ago

XWidget support is really good. Finally have C++/Opengl docs showing in the browser inline in emacs and now that the browser is inline, theres no reason to leave emacs anymore.

dleslie 10y ago

Emacs being able to load shared/dynamic libraries is huge; it means we'll be able to load so files from a user's home directory, or the standard lib paths, and use foreign functions to extend Emacs. And with XWidgets... Well, now you could write an OpenGL game that uses an OpenAL audio layer and displays in an Emacs frame, all in elisp. Because, why not?

rurban 10y ago
Interesting, I wrote such an emacs FFI about 15 years ago, but RMS was fundamentally opposed to it. Gtk-emacs was then based on a smaller scale FFI, but a more generic exposed FFI was still devilish. I wanted to use a proper AutoLISP environment then.
- cm3 10y ago
  Since the dynlib support probably uses GPL3 headers and runtime symbols, I doubt the result can be licensed anything but GPL3, so I'm not sure what RMS would complain about. This is also the reason why LLVM's ld.gold support is a plugin IIRC, because it has to include a binutils header (/usr/include/plugin-api.h, which is weirdly generic name for such a thing to exist in /usr/include).
- gkya 10y ago
  RMS is no longer a maintainer of GNU Emacs.
  - dleslie 10y ago
    Which has been a boon; Emacs 24 and 25 have moved at an incredible pace.
  - gnufx 10y ago
    And he wasn't 15 years ago. He also didn't provide legal advice.
- gnufx 10y ago
  I don't remember any discussion of that 15 years ago, but there's a difference between some sort of general FFI and loadable modules of this sort that rms rejected on Moglen's legal advice. (Disappointingly, as the design was intended to make the copyright situation clear in a legal case.) I don't know why the 2002 implementation was reimplemented (without credit and apparently without understanding it properly).

100k 10y ago

Somewhat related: I am starting a new job soon and I want to get Emacs setup "right" this time. I've been using Aquamacs for the last several years, but I'm wondering if there is a better way to use Emacs on the Mac these days? As part of this, I want to get my .emacs under version control and shared between computers so I have the same settings everywhere. Is there a good way to do that with Emacs packages installed through MELPA/ELPA?

0xCMP 10y ago
I like brew installing `emacs-mac`[0] which installs a port run by a developer in Japan. My favorite feature of it (among other amazing osx specific changes) is the sub-pixel scrolling support in emacs. When you setup your `init.el` you can call `(package-install x)` and if the package is already installed it'll do nothing but just make sure it's there. If you wanted the whole thing figured out ahead of time I recommend using Spacemacs[1] [0]: https://github.com/railwaycat/homebrew-emacsmacport https://github.com/railwaycat/homebrew-emacsmacport [1]: http://spacemacs.org http://spacemacs.org
- 100k 10y ago
  Thanks! Did not know about package-install, that's very helpful. Spacemacs looks cool. I have so many years of emacs keybindings that I'd have to turn that off, but I really like the look of what they're building.
  - pzone 10y ago
    I ported over a few years of custom keybindings and other config to Spacemacs. It was not too difficult, basically you can just tell Spacemacs to load whatever.el at startup. Eventually I switched to evil-mode and I rarely use most of my old keybindings, but I still keep them around!
cheez 10y ago
Check out spacemacs
brunoqc 10y ago

avar 10y ago

For the uninitiated: Emacs major releases start at X.1, not X.0. So this is the first 25.X release, not some minor version release. The last major version, 24.1, was released in June 2012, so this represents over 4 years of development.

cm3 10y ago

Full changelog: https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/emacs-25.1/etc/NEWS https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/emacs-25.1/etc/NE...

hellofunk 10y ago

I used to use Xcode for all my work. Then I had to write Clojure for a couple years, and only used Emacs. When I got back to writing native code, I went back to Xcode and ironically felt like I had slipped into the distant past. So I switched to CLion, the latest bells-and-whistles IDE for C++. But all my custom Emacs code was too powerful an adversary for even CLion and I am back to using Emacs full-time for C and C++. One caveat: I now use vim-mode in Emacs ("evil") which really has taken my Emacs experience to a new level.

pvinis 10y ago
I have been trying to replace Xcode with Emacs, but the biggest problem I don't know how to solve, has been Cocoa/ObjC/clang autocomplete. If I could have that work like Xcode, I could probably switch tomorrow.
- hellofunk 10y ago
  I too tried to get autocomplete going in Emacs, and that is the biggest challenge. However, I quickly realized that autocomplete is overrated. I am no less productive without it. In fact, the "snippet" module for Emacs has allowed me to be a lot more productive by generating keystrokes that complete common language idioms for me quickly. In C++, for example, using push_back is very common, and an autocomplete could help with this simple function call, but my snippet goes further and does so more quickly with fewer keystrokes. Autocomplete even on a major IDE on a fast machine can sometimes still take an extra second to pop up. I can type faster than that, and I can certain snippet a lot faster than that. Other things like all the different ways to write for loops (the types of iteration) I have snippetized so I can quickly generate the loop I need, which goes much further than autocomplete would.

mjhoy 10y ago

The emacs ecosystem has really changed how I work. I manage all of my email now in `mu4e`. I manage all of my notes, writing, TODOs, time tracking, invoicing in `org-mode`. For interacting with git, `magit` is simply amazing. The most important thing is how everything works together. There is the obvious window, frame and buffer management, the kill ring, the searching across all open buffers. Less obvious is that while looking at email I can hit a few keys to create a TODO, schedule it for a particular date that will show up in my agenda, and will link back to that same email (which I can now move out of my inbox). Or, in my programming notes file, I can link to a specific commit for a project I'd like to come back to later. And, the best part, which I've only barely scratched the surface of: everything is programmable. I can write an emacs lisp function to automate almost any part of my workflow.

tptacek 10y ago
That mail workflow is good, and I use it too, but not in Emacs; most of the task management tools for OSX can link back to a specific email. Are there other good reasons to use mu4e? I'm an Emacs person, but not yet an "I do my email in Emacs" person.
- bluejekyll 10y ago
  I think you more mean, "I'm not an 'Emacs is my Operating System' person". There are many people who use Emacs as their OS, its never been appealing to me, because I like the richness of other tools. There is a question though, are OSes doing enough to make the integrated experience like Emacs something that's done system wide? I think Apple comes close to providing the set of things you want, but it still feels tacked onto the top, rather than more deeply integrated.
  - ncouture 10y ago
    It's a great question and a comparison I try to exercise regularly against different Emacs components I use. From someone who never touched OS X, how would you compare its system-wide software integration with Emacs?

ziggrat 10y ago

Interesting stuff going on in this thread. I use Emacs for everything except for Mail, since i never liked wanderlust, should try some other mail reader. But i just realised there is some great functionality from this thread i never knew existed like 'which-key', org-mode(wanted to use this from long) etc.

cmiles74 10y ago
There's also a decent notmuch mode that is pretty good at reading and organizing mail. https://notmuchmail.org/notmuch-emacs/ https://notmuchmail.org/notmuch-emacs/

daylightyotei 10y ago

I'm still a novice emacs user, and a kind-of-longtime vim user, heres my "journey" 2010~2011: learn vim because I wanted to slack off studying for exams 2012: addicted to vim keybindings at this point, tell people 'I can't use other editors without "proper" vim keybindings' 2012: also discover tmux, because i wanted the ability to use vim keybindings and copy things in/out of shell 2012-2016: dabble with emacs sproadically, put off every time due to my vim keybinding addiction. tried evil mode during this time, and to my limited knowledge of emacs, things like C-u not working (scroll up half a page in vim) tick me off and in different modes the vim keybindings would suddenly disappear which was annoying 2016.04: discover spacemacs, try again, things work quite magically. in addition modes like org-mode are working as I expect (no random de-binding of evil-mode), discover new modes like magit and projectile-helm which keep me in (spac)emacs. also supports screen splitting with (:vsp, :sp) which is great. one thing i really like about emacs is i still use the shell (awk/sed/ag/etc) for a lot of tasks, and since i can use the shell inside an emacs buffer, copying-pasting out of them are incredibly easy, replacing my tmux usage. next step for me is to get more proficient in emacs (i hope i can read emails, do simple browsing, etc) and then hopefully setup emacs from scratch for an exercise instead of relying on spacemacs to do everything for me

Ar-Curunir 10y ago
Regarding the shell inside emacs buffer: neovim can do this too now.
e19293001 10y ago
I was once a vim user for a year and switched to emacs to look at its advantage from vim. Keybindings gave me so much pain to adjust and took my brain for a month to completely absorb the keybindings. And even did 'alias vim=$(which emacs)' to force my self to use emacs. I did not try evil-mode thinking that won't resolve my vim addiction. Now I still happily use emacs for 2 years everyday and never get back to vim except for some circumstance that I am forced to use vim on other computers.
- progman 10y ago
  > Keybindings gave me so much pain Why didn't you define your custom keys with global-set-key in Emacs Lisp? This is one of the first things an Emacs novice should learn and do.

kozikow 10y ago

Let's start a thread with "little cheries" you found in emacs! Focus on things that you found after years of usage and you regret not noticing before. Given Emacs scope age it's sometimes easy to miss some very cool stuff. What's more, lots of things on Internet are outdated. I will start: - elscreen - you can configure it to get tmux-lookalike inside emacs. My config: https://gist.github.com/kozikow/58b46c45a2c24406dc7cde3f18610433 - hydra - create mini-menus in the mini buffer. Quick and reduces amount of shortcuts you need to remember. See previous point for example. - apropos/helm-apropos - search across all variables/functions/commands at once. - imenu/helm-semantic-or-imenu : get overview of all definitions in current file, including classes or functions. Works in majority of languages without special setup.

sooheon 10y ago
Magit gets a lot of deserved love on the internet, but I think abo-abo (the author of hydra, which you listed) is quietly leading a kind of revolution in emacs usage. His trifecta of packages lispy (edit at the speed of thought in lisps), swiper/ivy (a simple and powerful interface to every facet of your editor), and hydra are the main reasons I use emacs over vim.
- kozikow 10y ago
  lispy - I use smartparens, it have mostly similar feature set. Smartparens advantage over paredit (and it seems lispy) is that it focuses on giving good support for editing parantheses groups in any language. E.g. you can use it to edit C++ expressions. See my post: https://kozikow.com/2016/06/18/smartparens-emacs-package-is-super-awesome/ https://kozikow.com/2016/06/18/smartparens-emacs-package-is-... swiper/ivy - I am already hardly locked in into helm. Even if some competing packages are more powerful (e.g. I used icicles at some point) or faster (e.g. ivy) due to big community helm have lots of community-contributed, helm-optimised packages. Type M-x install-package helm- vs ivy-.
  - sooheon 10y ago
    lispy/smartparens: FWIW, I use both. If you think they have a similar feature set, you haven't looked at lispy closely enough. It is more about making lisp editing operations frictionless, than it is just pair management. Check out the simple overview[1], and maybe some demos[2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BverGxP41cE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BverGxP41cE [2] https://github.com/abo-abo/lispy#demos https://github.com/abo-abo/lispy#demos swiper/helm: this is more of a personal choice, I agree. Having given both a fair shake, I find ivy more easily extensible, and I prefer the simpler look. As for the community support, there has yet to be something for only helm that I've missed in the various counsel functions.

pacomerh 10y ago

Is Emacs a monolith?. I haven't used this editor but from what I read people like it because they do everything there. Is this true?. If so, it doesn't sound like a good idea to me. Anyone has more insight of the goods and bads about Emacs.

pmontra 10y ago
Don't worry about to having to trash all of your tools. I only edit in emacs, I do everything else in a browser, thunderbird, terminal, etc, but I know that if I want I could do in it all the things other people described. I'm not sure if it's worth it so I don't. Furthermore it takes time to learn.
throwanem 10y ago
Some people do everything there. They tend to be very vocal. Others just edit text with it. They tend not to be. Most are somewhere in between. We usually try not to be too annoying. From the perspective of usage, while Emacs has a great deal of functionality, you need not use any of it that you don't want to. Indeed, Emacs is so shy and retiring about all it can do that you really need not even know about anything beyond text editing, unless you decide you want to. The main drawback from my perspective has been interoperability. Org mode is brilliant, but when everybody else uses Evernote or OneNote, Org can't be the only thing you use unless you want to be that guy. And using Emacs at all makes you likely enough to be seen as "that guy" anyway that it's worth not living up to the stereotype. I wish I were joking when I say that, in adult life, I've been the object of far more unfriendly regard as a result of my choice of text editor than as a result of my homosexuality, which I've never really been at particular pains to hide. It is easier, in the modern tech industry, to be gay, than to be an Emacs user. That's not Emacs' fault or that of its users, but it is real, and perceptions matter; if you're averse to the occasional funny look, this may be worth taking into account in your consideration of whether to try the editor.
justinhj 10y ago
I've been using emacs for over 10 years. I use it for the things it is good at, and other tools for what they are good at. In practical terms I use emacs for complex or repetitive editing tasks, org-mode for planning and lists, budget my finances using a my own emacs code, edit and work with Clojure and Common Lisp, writing blogs. What I don't use it for: email/browsing - the web works better for me. Scala/Java - IntelliJ. Python - PyStorm. file management and git - bash shell is fine.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

jaequery 10y ago

If you are on OSX, I can't stress enough how important it is to swap opt with cmd. Not sure if there's a better one but I use cmdkeyhappy for that.

sjm 10y ago
With the emacs-mac-port by Mitsuharu Yamamoto (available on railwaycat's homebrew tap) you can set this in Emacs with (setq mac-command-modifier 'meta).
- jaequery 10y ago
  True, but it's also very useful to have the same key bindings while using terminal too!

samuel1604 10y ago

It's surprising to see so much popularity in mu4e in this threads when no one mention Gnus, I am too much 'hardwired' in gnus and don't think i have the 'courage' to try something else but someone would know how does it compare ?

bhrgunatha 10y ago

I highly recommend Mickey Petersen's annotated review of Emacs releases, based on the NEWS file. [1] I also recommend his book, Mastering Emacs [2]. I learned so much from that book. It's great for both beginners and medium/long term users. I'm mostly an autodidact so I rarely buy technical books, but I wanted to support his efforts based on reading his blog before it was published. [1] https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/whats-new-in-emacs-25-1 https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/whats-new-in-emacs-25... [2] https://masteringemacs.org/book https://masteringemacs.org/book

ceasos 10y ago

perfect reason/time/trigger to revisit/clean my dotfiles closet :) though preference is over emacs25-git :D