10 ms·

Emacs 26.1 released

231 points by deng 8y ago

dman 8y ago
24 bit color support on terminal!!
lambda 8y ago
> Flymake has been completely redesigned Hmm, I just switched to flycheck. Is it worth checking out this new flymake?
- dgellow 8y ago
  I expect that it will take some time for people to create backends for the new flymake. In my opinion it's too early to switch back.
- wyuenho 8y ago
  No. Flycheck is the 7th most downloaded emacs package and the 3rd most popular package that's not a library. It's directly behind helm and magit. You can't just replace something like this with a thin stroke. The only reason flymake was rewritten was because the emacs devs couldn't get flycheck into emacs core, which IMHO is for the best. emacs releases is just too slow.
avar 8y ago
For those unfamiliar with GNU Emacs version numbers, they always start at X.1, not X.0, so this is the first major release after 25.1 released in September 2016.
- LukeShu 8y ago
  Lest someone misread this and think that Emacs hasn't had an update in 2 years: That says "major release". The previous release was the 25.3 minor release in September 2017.
  - avar 8y ago
    And least anyone misunderstand your comment and misses the big picture, those are all in principle minor bugfix (although with some new features). The release you're referring to has maybe 20 lines of non-autogenerated code changed, and was "an emergency release to fix a security vulnerability in Emacs". By and large new Emacs features only get released every 2-4 years. If you write any non-trivial Emacs code you're only targeting the major releases, and if you're contributing to Emacs you can expect other users to have your feature in the in their hands by the time your newborn is old enough to walk around and argue with you. It's one of the remaining free software projects that really takes its time with releases. 1. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/history.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/history.html
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      It's a mature, solid platform, it can't just "move fast and break things". > and if you're contributing to Emacs you can expect other users to have your feature in the in their hands by the time your newborn is old enough to walk around and argue with you. Lest someone misread that and comes away with a misconception about the big picture - that's true if you're contributing to Emacs proper. I.e. you're writing C and Emacs Lisp code which is meant to be included for release with the main project. 99% of the things you can dream of adding to Emacs can be done in Elisp, and shared with other people immediately. Since Emacs is a stable platform, you probably won't have to worry about the underlying API breaking until your current newborn is old enough to start asking where children come from.
josteink 8y ago
For the uninitiated, .1 means actual first release. So this is the first official release of Emacs 26.
marolafm 8y ago
TRAMP support for gdrive! That sounds amazing
deng 8y ago
A few more (personal) highlights from the release: * New minor mode 'pixel-scroll-mode' provides smooth pixel-level scrolling. * The networking code has been reworked so that it's more asynchronous than it was (DNS resolution and TLS negotiation do not block Emacs main thread). * Emacs no longer prompts about editing a changed file when the file's content is unchanged. Instead of only checking the modification time, Emacs now also checks the file's actual content before prompting the user. * A new submode of 'html-mode', 'mhtml-mode', is now the default mode for html files. This mode handles indentation, fontification, and commenting for embedded JavaScript and CSS. * Improved CSS mode * Intercepting hotkeys on Windows 7 and later now works better.
- stevekemp 8y ago
  mhtml-mode sounds interesting, I've been using http://web-mode.org/ http://web-mode.org/ to get the same handling of nested CSS/JS in HTML-files.
- da4c30ff 8y ago
  Also better look and feel[1] for Mac (including dark mode) users with (add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(ns-transparent-titlebar . t)) (add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(ns-appearance . dark)) [1]: https://imgur.com/aRdxPk0 https://imgur.com/aRdxPk0
  - e40 8y ago
    The first just makes my titlebar white, not transparent. The second doesn't seem to do anything. I'm using the updated binary from emacsformacosx.com.
    - wging 8y ago
      You may need to restart emacs after adding those lines to your config. Creating a fresh frame also seems to work, if you use daemon mode.
      - mercer 8y ago
jaimehrubiks 8y ago
Do any of you know if tramp does still freeze if remote prompt´s ´text´ has special characters? this is a bug that used to bother me last year.
mrybczyn 8y ago
There isn't a windows compile available yet 8( -- yes, i don't have a choice at work.
- nodivbyzero 8y ago
  https://sourceforge.net/p/emacsbinw64/wiki/Build%20guideline%20for%20MSYS2-MinGW-w64%20system/ https://sourceforge.net/p/emacsbinw64/wiki/Build%20guideline...
- indy 8y ago
  While it's not the absolute latest version, I've installed emacs 26.1 from https://github.com/m-parashar/emax64/releases https://github.com/m-parashar/emax64/releases So far it's working flawlessly on Windows 10
- unsignedint 8y ago
  Perhaps try RC binary until the release is ready? https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/pretest/windows/ https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/pretest/windows/
  - unsignedint 8y ago
    Adding as of 31st, the above has a real 26.1 candidate to be promoted to main site in a few days.[0] [0]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2018-05/msg00825.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2018-05/msg00...
- phillord 8y ago
  Should be available in a day or two. If you are desperate, the RC1 is available on alpha.gnu.org
gkya 8y ago
I suggest to anyone serious w/ Emacs to follow the master branch. I have been compiling once a week since almost a year and did not experience any breakage. My routine is fetch, see the output from "git diff HEAD..FETCH_HEAD -- etc/NEWS | less", pull --ff, compile and install. The benefit being you don't get a whole bunch of news when you update to a major version, but get there gradually; and also the master has the newer features. They keep that branch really stable.
- na85 8y ago
  I similarly encourage any Mac users who are serious about emacs to use Mitsuharu Yamamoto's fork, which adds several usability improvements that RMS refuses to endorse and is just generally a better experience on Mac. Mainline GNU Emacs feels clunky and obsolete by comparison.
  - gaius 8y ago
    that RMS refuses to endorse What's his rationale?
    - ww520 8y ago
      NIH?
    - chuchana 8y ago
      That Mac-only features would promote (the closed source) Mac OS X, if I remember correctly.
    - lvh 8y ago
      Mostly because they'd add a feature on a non-free platform (macOS) that is otherwise missing from a free platform. Notably, color emoji have worked fine forever on macOS, and were then _intentionally broken_ (when I say broken I mean the UI blocked for about ten seconds and then finally either displays a placeholder or something similarly less featureful). The reason for this is because Linux font rendering can't get color emoji right.
azkae 8y ago
Scrolling with the trackpad seems way better by default, no more mouse-wheel-scroll-amount/mouse-wheel-progressive-speed hacks !
eslaught 8y ago
Does anyone know if the concurrency support has made it into TRAMP yet? I recently switched to sshfs because I couldn't stand having TRAMP block my editor while saving remote files.
andyidsinga 8y ago
this is pretty cool: > TRAMP has a new connection method for Google Drive
e12e 8y ago
For those more familiar with emacs; what happened with the idea of moving to guile scheme? Is it done? Abandoned?
- rekado 8y ago
  It is not an idea that is supported by the whole Emacs community. It is an idea that is supported by the Guile community and RMS. Work has been done to make Guile Emacs work, but it is still slow (as it doesn't seem to compile elisp before running it) and somewhat experimental. It really just needs someone to make it work more reliably and then demonstrate that it is a desirable thing not just in theory but in practise. Nothing short of doing the work would be sufficient to convince the most active Emacs developers. The person who had been doing most of the work on Guile Emacs isn't currently making progress on this end, so other interested people are welcome to participate in the effort. (I'm a Guiler and Emacs user and strongly support the idea of letting Emacs sit on top of the Elisp implementation in Guile.)
  - AlexeyBrin 8y ago
    > It is not an idea that is supported by the whole Emacs community. One problem is portability, Emacs Guile means alienating Windows users. Guile does not run on Windows. As it is now, I can use same Emacs on my home Mac system, on my work Windows 10 computer and on various Linux servers.
    - rekado 8y ago
      > Guile does not run on Windows This hasn't always been this way, though, as far as I know. It is also not an insurmountable obstacle, but it is one of many small things that make Emacs developers worry. Another problem that makes Guile Emacs somewhat less attractive is the difference in string handling. Emacs deals well with improperly encoded strings (because that's what people throw at it), whereas Guile prefers to either deal with byte streams or properly encoded strings. Shuffling strings back and forth between an Elisp and a native Guile representation is not very attractive.
krylon 8y ago
Completely OT, but I remember when building Emacs was like "there goes my afternoon". On my current desktop (which is kind of snazzy, I admit), it takes less than 30 seconds wall clock time. This is one aspect of The Future(tm) I definitely appreciate. ;-)
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  You have one mother of a desktop there. Or, you're not doing a clean build :). For me, full clean make takes AFAIR something like 10 to 20 minutes. i5-2400, 12GB RAM, SSD drive. Still, totally worth it :). I've been running Emacs 26 for 2 months now.
  - kurlberg 8y ago
    You are compiling it with "make -j 8" (or -j 4), right?
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Oh. Thanks!
- phillord 8y ago
  Build from the source tarball, or a bootstrap build? For me, I can't get the later much below 10 minutes and often much longer.
  - krylon 8y ago
    My desktop is a Ryzen 1700, 8 cores, 16 threads. So I run "make -j16". =D $ make -j16 make -j16 156,14s user 9,37s system 714% cpu 23,166 total
mayankkaizen 8y ago
I am not a programmer but have been learning programming since last 2 years. Only yesterday, I installed emacs and spent half an hour on it. Even opened a tutorial to learn the basics. But I got irritated pretty soon and gave it up. Now I am thinking about people who use it like a pro. How the hell did they master this beast?
- jlouis 8y ago
  Steeep learning curve. Baby steps and don't give up. Make judgement after a month or two. Key point is you can program it to do what you prefer.
  - reitanqild 8y ago
    Also: not for everyone. I keep hearing people mentioning vim and emacs but I have a strong suspicion that if people spent the same time that they now spend learning and customizing vim and emacs learning a more modern IDE or advanced editor they'd be even more effective (except when they need to edit over ssh). Personally I use Visual Studio Code all day now. But I've also been happy with Netbeans, IntelliJ, eclipse and Sublime. I rarely have to use a mouse or touchpad, it's all alt-tab, wait-a-second, alt-tab, edit, ctrl-s, ctrl-p type parts of a filename, ctrl-arrowkeys, F2 enter new name for a variable or field etc etc. I've done one honest attempts at learning emacs (and I kind of enjoyed it) + lots of involuntary training on vim (yes, I prefer it to nano).
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      > if people spent the same time that they now spend learning and customizing vim and emacs learning a more modern IDE or advanced editor they'd be even more effective (except when they need to edit over ssh) Or except if they need to blog. Or manage repositories. Or manage tasks. Or read e-mail. Or... The thing with Emacs is that it offers you an universal, consistent interface for everything text. That includes code, but also prose, notes, tasks, repositories, file systems, etc. The interface itself is also hugely extensible (with lots of packages readily available through built-in package manager), and all that extensibility works for everything. IMO, spending more time in a typical IDE will make you a more effective programmer. But it doesn't extend beyond programming. When you do something else, you have to switch tools. In this way, spending time on Emacs has a better payoff, because the scope is both deeper and broader.
nanna 8y ago
Any advice for installing 26.1 alongside a debian repo 25.1.1 build?

Emacs 26.1 released

231 points by deng 8y ago

dman 8y ago

24 bit color support on terminal!!

lambda 8y ago

> Flymake has been completely redesigned Hmm, I just switched to flycheck. Is it worth checking out this new flymake?

dgellow 8y ago
I expect that it will take some time for people to create backends for the new flymake. In my opinion it's too early to switch back.
wyuenho 8y ago
No. Flycheck is the 7th most downloaded emacs package and the 3rd most popular package that's not a library. It's directly behind helm and magit. You can't just replace something like this with a thin stroke. The only reason flymake was rewritten was because the emacs devs couldn't get flycheck into emacs core, which IMHO is for the best. emacs releases is just too slow.

avar 8y ago

For those unfamiliar with GNU Emacs version numbers, they always start at X.1, not X.0, so this is the first major release after 25.1 released in September 2016.

LukeShu 8y ago
Lest someone misread this and think that Emacs hasn't had an update in 2 years: That says "major release". The previous release was the 25.3 minor release in September 2017.
- avar 8y ago
  And least anyone misunderstand your comment and misses the big picture, those are all in principle minor bugfix (although with some new features). The release you're referring to has maybe 20 lines of non-autogenerated code changed, and was "an emergency release to fix a security vulnerability in Emacs". By and large new Emacs features only get released every 2-4 years. If you write any non-trivial Emacs code you're only targeting the major releases, and if you're contributing to Emacs you can expect other users to have your feature in the in their hands by the time your newborn is old enough to walk around and argue with you. It's one of the remaining free software projects that really takes its time with releases. 1. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/history.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/history.html
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    It's a mature, solid platform, it can't just "move fast and break things". > and if you're contributing to Emacs you can expect other users to have your feature in the in their hands by the time your newborn is old enough to walk around and argue with you. Lest someone misread that and comes away with a misconception about the big picture - that's true if you're contributing to Emacs proper. I.e. you're writing C and Emacs Lisp code which is meant to be included for release with the main project. 99% of the things you can dream of adding to Emacs can be done in Elisp, and shared with other people immediately. Since Emacs is a stable platform, you probably won't have to worry about the underlying API breaking until your current newborn is old enough to start asking where children come from.

josteink 8y ago

For the uninitiated, .1 means actual first release. So this is the first official release of Emacs 26.

marolafm 8y ago

TRAMP support for gdrive! That sounds amazing

deng 8y ago

A few more (personal) highlights from the release: * New minor mode 'pixel-scroll-mode' provides smooth pixel-level scrolling. * The networking code has been reworked so that it's more asynchronous than it was (DNS resolution and TLS negotiation do not block Emacs main thread). * Emacs no longer prompts about editing a changed file when the file's content is unchanged. Instead of only checking the modification time, Emacs now also checks the file's actual content before prompting the user. * A new submode of 'html-mode', 'mhtml-mode', is now the default mode for html files. This mode handles indentation, fontification, and commenting for embedded JavaScript and CSS. * Improved CSS mode * Intercepting hotkeys on Windows 7 and later now works better.

stevekemp 8y ago
mhtml-mode sounds interesting, I've been using http://web-mode.org/ http://web-mode.org/ to get the same handling of nested CSS/JS in HTML-files.
da4c30ff 8y ago
Also better look and feel[1] for Mac (including dark mode) users with (add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(ns-transparent-titlebar . t)) (add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(ns-appearance . dark)) [1]: https://imgur.com/aRdxPk0 https://imgur.com/aRdxPk0
- e40 8y ago
  The first just makes my titlebar white, not transparent. The second doesn't seem to do anything. I'm using the updated binary from emacsformacosx.com.
  - wging 8y ago
    You may need to restart emacs after adding those lines to your config. Creating a fresh frame also seems to work, if you use daemon mode.
    - mercer 8y ago

jaimehrubiks 8y ago

Do any of you know if tramp does still freeze if remote prompt´s ´text´ has special characters? this is a bug that used to bother me last year.

mrybczyn 8y ago

There isn't a windows compile available yet 8( -- yes, i don't have a choice at work.

nodivbyzero 8y ago
https://sourceforge.net/p/emacsbinw64/wiki/Build%20guideline%20for%20MSYS2-MinGW-w64%20system/ https://sourceforge.net/p/emacsbinw64/wiki/Build%20guideline...
indy 8y ago
While it's not the absolute latest version, I've installed emacs 26.1 from https://github.com/m-parashar/emax64/releases https://github.com/m-parashar/emax64/releases So far it's working flawlessly on Windows 10
unsignedint 8y ago
Perhaps try RC binary until the release is ready? https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/pretest/windows/ https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/pretest/windows/
- unsignedint 8y ago
  Adding as of 31st, the above has a real 26.1 candidate to be promoted to main site in a few days.[0] [0]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2018-05/msg00825.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2018-05/msg00...
phillord 8y ago
Should be available in a day or two. If you are desperate, the RC1 is available on alpha.gnu.org

gkya 8y ago

I suggest to anyone serious w/ Emacs to follow the master branch. I have been compiling once a week since almost a year and did not experience any breakage. My routine is fetch, see the output from "git diff HEAD..FETCH_HEAD -- etc/NEWS | less", pull --ff, compile and install. The benefit being you don't get a whole bunch of news when you update to a major version, but get there gradually; and also the master has the newer features. They keep that branch really stable.

na85 8y ago
I similarly encourage any Mac users who are serious about emacs to use Mitsuharu Yamamoto's fork, which adds several usability improvements that RMS refuses to endorse and is just generally a better experience on Mac. Mainline GNU Emacs feels clunky and obsolete by comparison.
- gaius 8y ago
  that RMS refuses to endorse What's his rationale?
  - ww520 8y ago
    NIH?
  - chuchana 8y ago
    That Mac-only features would promote (the closed source) Mac OS X, if I remember correctly.
  - lvh 8y ago
    Mostly because they'd add a feature on a non-free platform (macOS) that is otherwise missing from a free platform. Notably, color emoji have worked fine forever on macOS, and were then _intentionally broken_ (when I say broken I mean the UI blocked for about ten seconds and then finally either displays a placeholder or something similarly less featureful). The reason for this is because Linux font rendering can't get color emoji right.

azkae 8y ago

Scrolling with the trackpad seems way better by default, no more mouse-wheel-scroll-amount/mouse-wheel-progressive-speed hacks !

eslaught 8y ago

Does anyone know if the concurrency support has made it into TRAMP yet? I recently switched to sshfs because I couldn't stand having TRAMP block my editor while saving remote files.

andyidsinga 8y ago

this is pretty cool: > TRAMP has a new connection method for Google Drive

e12e 8y ago

For those more familiar with emacs; what happened with the idea of moving to guile scheme? Is it done? Abandoned?

rekado 8y ago
It is not an idea that is supported by the whole Emacs community. It is an idea that is supported by the Guile community and RMS. Work has been done to make Guile Emacs work, but it is still slow (as it doesn't seem to compile elisp before running it) and somewhat experimental. It really just needs someone to make it work more reliably and then demonstrate that it is a desirable thing not just in theory but in practise. Nothing short of doing the work would be sufficient to convince the most active Emacs developers. The person who had been doing most of the work on Guile Emacs isn't currently making progress on this end, so other interested people are welcome to participate in the effort. (I'm a Guiler and Emacs user and strongly support the idea of letting Emacs sit on top of the Elisp implementation in Guile.)
- AlexeyBrin 8y ago
  > It is not an idea that is supported by the whole Emacs community. One problem is portability, Emacs Guile means alienating Windows users. Guile does not run on Windows. As it is now, I can use same Emacs on my home Mac system, on my work Windows 10 computer and on various Linux servers.
  - rekado 8y ago
    > Guile does not run on Windows This hasn't always been this way, though, as far as I know. It is also not an insurmountable obstacle, but it is one of many small things that make Emacs developers worry. Another problem that makes Guile Emacs somewhat less attractive is the difference in string handling. Emacs deals well with improperly encoded strings (because that's what people throw at it), whereas Guile prefers to either deal with byte streams or properly encoded strings. Shuffling strings back and forth between an Elisp and a native Guile representation is not very attractive.

krylon 8y ago

Completely OT, but I remember when building Emacs was like "there goes my afternoon". On my current desktop (which is kind of snazzy, I admit), it takes less than 30 seconds wall clock time. This is one aspect of The Future(tm) I definitely appreciate. ;-)

TeMPOraL 8y ago
You have one mother of a desktop there. Or, you're not doing a clean build :). For me, full clean make takes AFAIR something like 10 to 20 minutes. i5-2400, 12GB RAM, SSD drive. Still, totally worth it :). I've been running Emacs 26 for 2 months now.
- kurlberg 8y ago
  You are compiling it with "make -j 8" (or -j 4), right?
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Oh. Thanks!
phillord 8y ago
Build from the source tarball, or a bootstrap build? For me, I can't get the later much below 10 minutes and often much longer.
- krylon 8y ago
  My desktop is a Ryzen 1700, 8 cores, 16 threads. So I run "make -j16". =D $ make -j16 make -j16 156,14s user 9,37s system 714% cpu 23,166 total

mayankkaizen 8y ago

I am not a programmer but have been learning programming since last 2 years. Only yesterday, I installed emacs and spent half an hour on it. Even opened a tutorial to learn the basics. But I got irritated pretty soon and gave it up. Now I am thinking about people who use it like a pro. How the hell did they master this beast?

jlouis 8y ago
Steeep learning curve. Baby steps and don't give up. Make judgement after a month or two. Key point is you can program it to do what you prefer.
- reitanqild 8y ago
  Also: not for everyone. I keep hearing people mentioning vim and emacs but I have a strong suspicion that if people spent the same time that they now spend learning and customizing vim and emacs learning a more modern IDE or advanced editor they'd be even more effective (except when they need to edit over ssh). Personally I use Visual Studio Code all day now. But I've also been happy with Netbeans, IntelliJ, eclipse and Sublime. I rarely have to use a mouse or touchpad, it's all alt-tab, wait-a-second, alt-tab, edit, ctrl-s, ctrl-p type parts of a filename, ctrl-arrowkeys, F2 enter new name for a variable or field etc etc. I've done one honest attempts at learning emacs (and I kind of enjoyed it) + lots of involuntary training on vim (yes, I prefer it to nano).
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    > if people spent the same time that they now spend learning and customizing vim and emacs learning a more modern IDE or advanced editor they'd be even more effective (except when they need to edit over ssh) Or except if they need to blog. Or manage repositories. Or manage tasks. Or read e-mail. Or... The thing with Emacs is that it offers you an universal, consistent interface for everything text. That includes code, but also prose, notes, tasks, repositories, file systems, etc. The interface itself is also hugely extensible (with lots of packages readily available through built-in package manager), and all that extensibility works for everything. IMO, spending more time in a typical IDE will make you a more effective programmer. But it doesn't extend beyond programming. When you do something else, you have to switch tools. In this way, spending time on Emacs has a better payoff, because the scope is both deeper and broader.

nanna 8y ago

Any advice for installing 26.1 alongside a debian repo 25.1.1 build?