9 ms·

Emacs 25.2 released

136 points by amiralul 9y ago

orschiro 9y ago
Emacs and VIM are probably those two software pieces that to me look like from another era that I have not lived through and thus cannot get my head around.
- systems 9y ago
  try orgmode, way better than anything else
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- lottin 9y ago
  They're very old... but at the same time they kind of look from the future. Cool stuff.
adtac 9y ago
Wow, the Emacs website is really pretty. But I like vim's one too - I feel they symbolize the internal ideals: vim being lean and small with just the essentials (at just 230 kB) while Emacs is more fully loaded (930 kB).
- yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
  > fully loaded (930 kB) I get that you meant it in comparison to 230k, but in the modern world I find it hilarious that a 930k website is being called (essentially) heavy. If only...
- bobsam 9y ago
  mg is even smaller and has emacs bindings
  - billsmithaustin 9y ago
    And Eclipse is even bigger.
    - bobsam 9y ago
      Okay, you win.
- gkya 9y ago
  Well rather vim wants to be a text text editor while Emacs a computing environment with text editing as the central thing/main interface.
  - jaccarmac 9y ago
    Indeed. I'm constantly tempted to try switching to a lighter, more editing-centric editor, but the kitchen sink is just too useful. Finally got around to trying EXWM this morning and was amused by the fact that I can run Steam in an Emacs buffer :D.
    - iambvk 9y ago
      I am using EXWM everyday for more than a year. It has hugely improved my Emacs workflows and productivity. I would put it on par with Magit :) It still has few rough edges, so may not be for everybody.
      - jaccarmac 9y ago
        Care to elaborate on some of the rough edges so I can try to avoid them? I've heard bad things about Chrome and almost locked myself out of my WM by using pinentry; Not sure what other gotchas there are.
        sedachv 9y ago
        Not the original poster but here are two issues I currently have with EXWM (have been using it exclusively for about two months now): 1. If Emacs hangs/pauses, the window manager hangs/pauses. Can't really do anything in X so have to switch to a virtual console. 2. GIMP stopped bringing up working file dialogs. I think it is some EXWM configuration change I made. You might also have issues with tooltips/popups depending on your EXWM configuration.
        iambvk 9y ago
        My biggest issue is w.r.t multiple outputs (xrandr). It works as expected, but requires decent customization effort -- which I think is not for everybody.
thomasdziedzic 9y ago
Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14169797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14169797
- sunilkumarc 9y ago
  I wonder how HN allowed posting a duplicate article!
  - Jtsummers 9y ago
    When articles don't get much traction, dupes seem to be permitted by the algorithms. One post had a comment and another had 13, so it makes sense to let it through. I don't know the actual implementation, but this is what I've observed.
- tlikonen 9y ago
  And the thread you linked is itself a duplicate of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14167469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14167469
- amiralul 9y ago
  Whoops. My apologies.
nxrabl 9y ago
Since the link posted leads to the Emacs home page, the changes made are here: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/news/NEWS.25.2 https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/news/NEWS.25.2
gkya 9y ago
This is (mostly) a bugfix release. Emacs 26 will have some major goodies, threads being one.
- reilly3000 9y ago
  That's awesome! I hate blocking when I'm checking email.
  - chriswarbo 9y ago
    I used to use Gnus, which is really bad for blocking (I used to run it in a separate Emacs instance). Mu4e is pretty good in this respect: it offloads most of the mailbox processing work to the `mu` command, which it runs asynchronously. I fetch my email with a system service, external to Emacs.
    - cygned 9y ago
      I have a bunch of IMAP and exchange accounts. Any chance I can use them in Emacs? Last time I checked only POP3 was supported.
      - gkya 9y ago
        Gnus does do IMAP. Receiving from multiple accounts is easy, though sending from multiple accounts take a bit of work. IDK about excange.
      - sedachv 9y ago
        I am a mail account hoarder (9 so far and more coming) and offlineimap together with mu4e is the best email client for multiple IMAP accounts across multiple mail servers. For sending mail I have message-mode and smtpmail.el (both come with Emacs) set up to handle composing and replying across the multiple email addresses. I also set up smtpmail to queue mail and run in a sub-process - this gives gmail-like "undo sending this email" functionality, ability to compose and reply to messages off line, and most importantly does not block the parent Emacs process when sending email, while providing better error and progress output. Planning to write a blog post about this configuration, but in the meantime I am happy to share privately - vsedach@gmail.com
microcolonel 9y ago
As an Emacs user, I still don't get why they have the menu bar and tool bar, they have always been harder to use than the other methods of interaction, and most people don't discover much through them anyway since the menu bar is so cluttered. Nonetheless, very happy with it once I put in my relatively small config.
- mjw1007 9y ago
  The right-hand side of the menu bar can be helpful in application-like modes (like gnus or M-x list-packages). I agree you might as well turn it off otherwise and regain the space.
- sfilargi 9y ago
  > As an Emacs user, I still don't get why they have the menu bar and tool bar For new users and people who run emacs by mistake or to just check it out maybe? But I agree with you, these days disabling toolbar and menu bar is my first action when configuring a new emacs environment.
- jaccarmac 9y ago
  When I first started using Emacs I found the menu bar useful for discovering features I had no idea existed. I quickly became fluent with the keyboard UI and can use that to explore the editor now, but it taught me not to underestimate menus. They might not be particularly useful, but they helped me find a few hidden gems.
  - metaobject 9y ago
    The first thing I put in a new config is to turn off menu-bar-mode, scroll-bar-mode, and tool-bar-mode. I find they take up too much screen real estate.
    - jaccarmac 9y ago
      Don't get me wrong, I do exactly the same thing. I'm just against removing them wholesale since I think they are valuable aids to a user who doesn't know about creating a config at all yet.
nagvx 9y ago
Has there been any update to the status of GuileEmacs? I have read that it aims to be "the future of Emacs", but I rarely see mention of Guile from the Emacs community.
- Mediterraneo10 9y ago
  It isn't the Emacs devs who are really asking for GuileEmacs. Rather, it’s Guile fans who are proposing to integrate a software they love into Emacs for mutual benefit. While the Emacs devs don't a priori reject such a thing, they naturally insist that the Guile-based Emacs be a mature, stable and faster piece of software before it is considered for the mainline, and that just hasn’t happened because only a handful of people are working on it.
- jpfr 9y ago
  This is the branch to watch for guile-elisp: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guile.git/log/?h=wip-elisp http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guile.git/log/?h=wip-elisp Last thing I heard was that Guile-Elisp (and by consequence Guile-Emacs) is working, but very slow. That can be fixed but requires work. Also, Emacs internally uses a different string representation from Guile. This makes the transition between languages tough and some more glue is required. IMHO Guile-Emacs is "nearly there". I.e. with just a little more work it could have enough momentum and attract developers to be on the trajectory of becoming the default elisp implementation in the long term. Having the new Guile 2.2 VM drive Emacs would definitely improve things. And the C-codebase could become considerably smaller and cleaner.
- grey-sunshine 9y ago
  Guile community probably wants guileemacs to be the future, but I think it would be only natural for emacs community to think otherwise.
  - pmoriarty 9y ago
    I'm part of the emacs community, and not part of the Guile community (though I am a fan of Scheme, just not Guile in particular, Chicken Scheme is more my speed) and I think a Guile-based emacs would be a huge step forward, and can't wait for it to Guile to be fully integrated and all the outstanding issues to be ironed out. I really can't understand the objections from some people in Emacs land, except for those that would prefer a Common Lisp-based Emacs, but that's not what we've got. We've got Guile, and while that might not be as great as Common Lisp (in their eyes, not mine, for me Scheme is preferable), it's still a lot better than elisp. Rejecting Guile and sticking with elisp just makes no sense to me at all. Keep in mind that having emacs be based on Guile does not mean that all the elisp emacs packages have to be jettisoned. They will still run as elisp under Guile, and you can continue writing scripts in elisp and have them continue to run under a Guile-based emacs.
agumonkey 9y ago
fun, archlinux already updated the package.
lindbergh 9y ago
For those on MacOS, I suggest this port of emacs : https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac/ https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac/ It's basically the same as the distribution from http://emacsformacosx.com http://emacsformacosx.com, but it supports various enhancements made for mac, eg. resize text size with trackpad, smooth buffer scrolling and SVG support, which is quite convenient when used with the jupyter notebook interface and producing plots. See for instance : http://imgur.com/gallery/vEI2z http://imgur.com/gallery/vEI2z.
- stinkytaco 9y ago
  For compatibility with various emacs add-ons and hooks (like org-capture), I find the one that comes with Homebrew to be the best.
  - drunkpotato 9y ago
    I've been using the Emacs that comes from homebrew with the spacemacs plugin (system? Total conversion?). Not a perfect integration when it comes to images but I stick to text and it's been great.
  - dangom 9y ago
    Exactly. brew install emacs --with-imagemagick@6 --with-dbus --with-mailutils --with-gnutls --with-cocoa --with-ctags --with-librsvg --with-modules --devel
    - krakensden 9y ago
      Do people use dbus on macOS/OS X? How does Emacs integrate with it?
      - dangom 9y ago
        I don't know. Probably not. The reason I install with dbus support is to avoid having packages that rely on it not working, should a package ever rely on it (maybe mu4e notifications? idk). Take imagemagick, for example, you can still display images with Emacs without it, but you can't resize them.
cryptarch 9y ago
Is there a gentle way of picking up Emacs? I've been trying Spacemacs with Evil mode on (I'm a regular Vim user), and I can kind of manage to use it for day-to-day editing and running Make, but it feels like I'm about to be eaten by snakes because I now have to deal with three additional meta key-combos (alt-x, C-c and space-m) in addition to the one I had for i3 (now banished from alt to Win) and I also have to learn escape codes to use my terminal and use them a lot to Vim on remote hosts over SSH.
- notalaser 9y ago
  First, at the risk of pissing off fellow emacs-ers -- if you're already a regular Vim user, why not stick to it? It's a great editor, and I know a lot of people who use it and are just as productive as I am with emacs. Plus, if anyone ever needs to use their computer, you won't get weird looks when you tell them Caps Lock is Control on your keyboard... Anyway, if you absolutely want to learn something else, I'd suggest going the other way 'round, really: start with something minimal and work your way up from there. For the first 1-2 years, I think, I've used Emacs as little more than a glorified Notepad clone (in fact, I even used it with cua-mode). I think my .emacs file was barely ten lines long. I was transitioning to Emacs from nedit, an old-ish Unix editor with a Motif UI that was getting increasingly difficult to digest and kept crashing and had trouble with Unicode and man I'm old... anyway, all I really needed it to do was let me write text and paint it in pretty colors sometimes. I then sort of picked up its features one by one, as I needed them. The keybindings came first, because it was weird the arrow keys for motion and the other keys for everything else. Then I got a larger monitor and I could fit more than two windows on it and I installed window-mode so that I could switch between windows with M-1, M-2 and so on. (Please remember this was 2005 or 2006 or something, a 21" CRT was a big deal for me...) That's pretty much how I picked up everything else: first big C project was how I picked up xrefactory, then xcscope. First time I had to do big merges was how I picked up ediff, and so on. The best thing about having something as scriptable and customizable as emacs is being able to make it work exactly the way you want it. Making it work exactly the way someone else wants it sort of defeats the purpose, I mean, any editor already works the way someone else wants it. Edit: ah, yes, to address some of your pain points: - Remote editing: look into something called tramp-mode. It's not perfect, and I, for one, use it sparingly, but it may fit your use case. - Weird key combinations: I'm not sure what to say other than "you get used to them". It may be worth looking into how i3 deals with this stuff, too. I no longer use a tiling WM, but when I used ratpoison, it fit near Emacs pretty well -- I bound C-t to Ratpoison's prefix key, and just didn't use C-t for anything in Emacs. But then again, Ratpoison (and its successort, scrotwm) were both written by Emacs enthusiasts, and used similar key sequences. If you're curious about anything else, ask away :-)
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

136 points by amiralul 9y ago

Emacs and VIM are probably those two software pieces that to me look like from another era that I have not lived through and thus cannot get my head around.

systems 9y ago
try orgmode, way better than anything else
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
lottin 9y ago
They're very old... but at the same time they kind of look from the future. Cool stuff.

adtac 9y ago

Wow, the Emacs website is really pretty. But I like vim's one too - I feel they symbolize the internal ideals: vim being lean and small with just the essentials (at just 230 kB) while Emacs is more fully loaded (930 kB).

yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
> fully loaded (930 kB) I get that you meant it in comparison to 230k, but in the modern world I find it hilarious that a 930k website is being called (essentially) heavy. If only...
bobsam 9y ago
mg is even smaller and has emacs bindings
- billsmithaustin 9y ago
  And Eclipse is even bigger.
  - bobsam 9y ago
    Okay, you win.
gkya 9y ago
Well rather vim wants to be a text text editor while Emacs a computing environment with text editing as the central thing/main interface.
- jaccarmac 9y ago
  Indeed. I'm constantly tempted to try switching to a lighter, more editing-centric editor, but the kitchen sink is just too useful. Finally got around to trying EXWM this morning and was amused by the fact that I can run Steam in an Emacs buffer :D.
  - iambvk 9y ago
    I am using EXWM everyday for more than a year. It has hugely improved my Emacs workflows and productivity. I would put it on par with Magit :) It still has few rough edges, so may not be for everybody.
    - jaccarmac 9y ago
      Care to elaborate on some of the rough edges so I can try to avoid them? I've heard bad things about Chrome and almost locked myself out of my WM by using pinentry; Not sure what other gotchas there are.
      - sedachv 9y ago
        Not the original poster but here are two issues I currently have with EXWM (have been using it exclusively for about two months now): 1. If Emacs hangs/pauses, the window manager hangs/pauses. Can't really do anything in X so have to switch to a virtual console. 2. GIMP stopped bringing up working file dialogs. I think it is some EXWM configuration change I made. You might also have issues with tooltips/popups depending on your EXWM configuration.
      - iambvk 9y ago
        My biggest issue is w.r.t multiple outputs (xrandr). It works as expected, but requires decent customization effort -- which I think is not for everybody.

thomasdziedzic 9y ago

Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14169797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14169797

sunilkumarc 9y ago
I wonder how HN allowed posting a duplicate article!
- Jtsummers 9y ago
  When articles don't get much traction, dupes seem to be permitted by the algorithms. One post had a comment and another had 13, so it makes sense to let it through. I don't know the actual implementation, but this is what I've observed.
tlikonen 9y ago
And the thread you linked is itself a duplicate of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14167469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14167469
amiralul 9y ago
Whoops. My apologies.

nxrabl 9y ago

Since the link posted leads to the Emacs home page, the changes made are here: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/news/NEWS.25.2 https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/news/NEWS.25.2

gkya 9y ago

This is (mostly) a bugfix release. Emacs 26 will have some major goodies, threads being one.

reilly3000 9y ago
That's awesome! I hate blocking when I'm checking email.
- chriswarbo 9y ago
  I used to use Gnus, which is really bad for blocking (I used to run it in a separate Emacs instance). Mu4e is pretty good in this respect: it offloads most of the mailbox processing work to the `mu` command, which it runs asynchronously. I fetch my email with a system service, external to Emacs.
  - cygned 9y ago
    I have a bunch of IMAP and exchange accounts. Any chance I can use them in Emacs? Last time I checked only POP3 was supported.
    - gkya 9y ago
      Gnus does do IMAP. Receiving from multiple accounts is easy, though sending from multiple accounts take a bit of work. IDK about excange.
    - sedachv 9y ago
      I am a mail account hoarder (9 so far and more coming) and offlineimap together with mu4e is the best email client for multiple IMAP accounts across multiple mail servers. For sending mail I have message-mode and smtpmail.el (both come with Emacs) set up to handle composing and replying across the multiple email addresses. I also set up smtpmail to queue mail and run in a sub-process - this gives gmail-like "undo sending this email" functionality, ability to compose and reply to messages off line, and most importantly does not block the parent Emacs process when sending email, while providing better error and progress output. Planning to write a blog post about this configuration, but in the meantime I am happy to share privately - vsedach@gmail.com

microcolonel 9y ago

As an Emacs user, I still don't get why they have the menu bar and tool bar, they have always been harder to use than the other methods of interaction, and most people don't discover much through them anyway since the menu bar is so cluttered. Nonetheless, very happy with it once I put in my relatively small config.

mjw1007 9y ago
The right-hand side of the menu bar can be helpful in application-like modes (like gnus or M-x list-packages). I agree you might as well turn it off otherwise and regain the space.
sfilargi 9y ago
> As an Emacs user, I still don't get why they have the menu bar and tool bar For new users and people who run emacs by mistake or to just check it out maybe? But I agree with you, these days disabling toolbar and menu bar is my first action when configuring a new emacs environment.
jaccarmac 9y ago
When I first started using Emacs I found the menu bar useful for discovering features I had no idea existed. I quickly became fluent with the keyboard UI and can use that to explore the editor now, but it taught me not to underestimate menus. They might not be particularly useful, but they helped me find a few hidden gems.
- metaobject 9y ago
  The first thing I put in a new config is to turn off menu-bar-mode, scroll-bar-mode, and tool-bar-mode. I find they take up too much screen real estate.
  - jaccarmac 9y ago
    Don't get me wrong, I do exactly the same thing. I'm just against removing them wholesale since I think they are valuable aids to a user who doesn't know about creating a config at all yet.

nagvx 9y ago

Has there been any update to the status of GuileEmacs? I have read that it aims to be "the future of Emacs", but I rarely see mention of Guile from the Emacs community.

Mediterraneo10 9y ago
It isn't the Emacs devs who are really asking for GuileEmacs. Rather, it’s Guile fans who are proposing to integrate a software they love into Emacs for mutual benefit. While the Emacs devs don't a priori reject such a thing, they naturally insist that the Guile-based Emacs be a mature, stable and faster piece of software before it is considered for the mainline, and that just hasn’t happened because only a handful of people are working on it.
jpfr 9y ago
This is the branch to watch for guile-elisp: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guile.git/log/?h=wip-elisp http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guile.git/log/?h=wip-elisp Last thing I heard was that Guile-Elisp (and by consequence Guile-Emacs) is working, but very slow. That can be fixed but requires work. Also, Emacs internally uses a different string representation from Guile. This makes the transition between languages tough and some more glue is required. IMHO Guile-Emacs is "nearly there". I.e. with just a little more work it could have enough momentum and attract developers to be on the trajectory of becoming the default elisp implementation in the long term. Having the new Guile 2.2 VM drive Emacs would definitely improve things. And the C-codebase could become considerably smaller and cleaner.
grey-sunshine 9y ago
Guile community probably wants guileemacs to be the future, but I think it would be only natural for emacs community to think otherwise.
- pmoriarty 9y ago
  I'm part of the emacs community, and not part of the Guile community (though I am a fan of Scheme, just not Guile in particular, Chicken Scheme is more my speed) and I think a Guile-based emacs would be a huge step forward, and can't wait for it to Guile to be fully integrated and all the outstanding issues to be ironed out. I really can't understand the objections from some people in Emacs land, except for those that would prefer a Common Lisp-based Emacs, but that's not what we've got. We've got Guile, and while that might not be as great as Common Lisp (in their eyes, not mine, for me Scheme is preferable), it's still a lot better than elisp. Rejecting Guile and sticking with elisp just makes no sense to me at all. Keep in mind that having emacs be based on Guile does not mean that all the elisp emacs packages have to be jettisoned. They will still run as elisp under Guile, and you can continue writing scripts in elisp and have them continue to run under a Guile-based emacs.

agumonkey 9y ago

fun, archlinux already updated the package.

lindbergh 9y ago

For those on MacOS, I suggest this port of emacs : https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac/ https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac/ It's basically the same as the distribution from http://emacsformacosx.com http://emacsformacosx.com, but it supports various enhancements made for mac, eg. resize text size with trackpad, smooth buffer scrolling and SVG support, which is quite convenient when used with the jupyter notebook interface and producing plots. See for instance : http://imgur.com/gallery/vEI2z http://imgur.com/gallery/vEI2z.

stinkytaco 9y ago
For compatibility with various emacs add-ons and hooks (like org-capture), I find the one that comes with Homebrew to be the best.
- drunkpotato 9y ago
  I've been using the Emacs that comes from homebrew with the spacemacs plugin (system? Total conversion?). Not a perfect integration when it comes to images but I stick to text and it's been great.
- dangom 9y ago
  Exactly. brew install emacs --with-imagemagick@6 --with-dbus --with-mailutils --with-gnutls --with-cocoa --with-ctags --with-librsvg --with-modules --devel
  - krakensden 9y ago
    Do people use dbus on macOS/OS X? How does Emacs integrate with it?
    - dangom 9y ago
      I don't know. Probably not. The reason I install with dbus support is to avoid having packages that rely on it not working, should a package ever rely on it (maybe mu4e notifications? idk). Take imagemagick, for example, you can still display images with Emacs without it, but you can't resize them.

cryptarch 9y ago

Is there a gentle way of picking up Emacs? I've been trying Spacemacs with Evil mode on (I'm a regular Vim user), and I can kind of manage to use it for day-to-day editing and running Make, but it feels like I'm about to be eaten by snakes because I now have to deal with three additional meta key-combos (alt-x, C-c and space-m) in addition to the one I had for i3 (now banished from alt to Win) and I also have to learn escape codes to use my terminal and use them a lot to Vim on remote hosts over SSH.

notalaser 9y ago
First, at the risk of pissing off fellow emacs-ers -- if you're already a regular Vim user, why not stick to it? It's a great editor, and I know a lot of people who use it and are just as productive as I am with emacs. Plus, if anyone ever needs to use their computer, you won't get weird looks when you tell them Caps Lock is Control on your keyboard... Anyway, if you absolutely want to learn something else, I'd suggest going the other way 'round, really: start with something minimal and work your way up from there. For the first 1-2 years, I think, I've used Emacs as little more than a glorified Notepad clone (in fact, I even used it with cua-mode). I think my .emacs file was barely ten lines long. I was transitioning to Emacs from nedit, an old-ish Unix editor with a Motif UI that was getting increasingly difficult to digest and kept crashing and had trouble with Unicode and man I'm old... anyway, all I really needed it to do was let me write text and paint it in pretty colors sometimes. I then sort of picked up its features one by one, as I needed them. The keybindings came first, because it was weird the arrow keys for motion and the other keys for everything else. Then I got a larger monitor and I could fit more than two windows on it and I installed window-mode so that I could switch between windows with M-1, M-2 and so on. (Please remember this was 2005 or 2006 or something, a 21" CRT was a big deal for me...) That's pretty much how I picked up everything else: first big C project was how I picked up xrefactory, then xcscope. First time I had to do big merges was how I picked up ediff, and so on. The best thing about having something as scriptable and customizable as emacs is being able to make it work exactly the way you want it. Making it work exactly the way someone else wants it sort of defeats the purpose, I mean, any editor already works the way someone else wants it. Edit: ah, yes, to address some of your pain points: - Remote editing: look into something called tramp-mode. It's not perfect, and I, for one, use it sparingly, but it may fit your use case. - Weird key combinations: I'm not sure what to say other than "you get used to them". It may be worth looking into how i3 deals with this stuff, too. I no longer use a tiling WM, but when I used ratpoison, it fit near Emacs pretty well -- I bound C-t to Ratpoison's prefix key, and just didn't use C-t for anything in Emacs. But then again, Ratpoison (and its successort, scrotwm) were both written by Emacs enthusiasts, and used similar key sequences. If you're curious about anything else, ask away :-)

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]