5 ms·

What’s New In Emacs 24

109 points by fogus 15y ago

kaens 15y ago
Just a note for anyone using 23 and waiting with bated breath: I've been building emacs from trunk on a regular basis, and using it as my primary editor, for about a year now. It's very stable -- I have so far had to find out about a breakage once, and it was already solved by the time I encountered it. It's way nicer than the last major release. Give it a go.
yason 15y ago
I wait for new Emacs versions like I waited for Christmas when I was a small kid. And I don't peek into the development branches, I want to take time and enjoy the changes upon the release of the next major version. Each new Emacs version shows little on the surface which you might expect from a software suite that has had everything and the kitchen sink since the 90's, but in the inside there's an ongoing morphosis into something greater, that quietly reveals itself version by version if only you take the time to study not only what's new but how the new things work. Then suddenly, say, five years later, a new usage paradigm emerges seemingly out of nothing eventhough Emacs has had the bits and pieces in for many revisions already. This is just fascinating. For example, the various completion subroutines have slowly converged into a more solid, generic completion subsystem. And best of all, you have the source code to play with. If Emacs is nearly an operating system then it's kind of nearly a software Lisp machine.
- muuh-gnu 15y ago
  > If Emacs is nearly an operating system then it's kind of nearly a software Lisp machine. Which is why it is such a pity that they are still putting so much valuable work into fighting Elisp instead of having a full fledged CL with a native compiler under the hood. The FSF even has two own, GPL'ed CL implementations, CLISP and GCL, but because of RMS' hatred of CL, let them bitrot and never really cared to use them for anything.
  - xyzzyz 15y ago
    Too much useful work is already done in elisp. If emacs maintainers were going to move to CL, they'd have to make sure that nothing breaks, otherwise it would almost surely result in fork.
    - kroger 15y ago
      Specially when there's an effort to use guile (scheme) in emacs: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs
    - muuh-gnu 15y ago
      > Too much useful work is already done in elisp. I'm not contesting that, just saying that it is a pity (from the perspective of the wealth of the overall Lisp ecosystem) that all this valuable work has been done in Elisp and not in Common Lisp. Moving to Guile will probably take several years, and even if it really works some day, it will be just another insular Emacs-only solution, because nobody else is using Guile. It wont benefit the overall Lisp ecosystem in any way.
    - pnathan 15y ago
      I wonder if there'd be a way to create an interop mode, which might look something similar to the way they are handling the lexical vs dynamic scoping. That way authors could transition from elisp to common lisp.
      - LukeShu 15y ago
        There's already an effort to do this using Scheme, it's just not ready for this release. Is CL really that much better than Scheme?
        pnathan 15y ago
        Not from a language-theoretic standpoint. From a pragmatic standpoint, all standard-conforming Common Lisp code runs on a conformant implementation. Schemes often tend to diverge (and they have 6 different Rn standards). So I think CL is 'better' than Scheme, for that value of better.
- bch 15y ago
  > If Emacs is nearly an operating system then it's kind of nearly a software Lisp machine. Correct or not, I've tended to think of Emacs as an LVM ([e]Lisp Virtual Machine) for years. The "bloated kitchen sink" argument holds little sway with me any more than saying that OpenBSD is a bloated kitchen sink because it can run a lot of software too. Emacs happens to be an awesome Batteries Included LVM.
- hapless 15y ago
  > If Emacs is nearly an operating system then it's kind of nearly a software Lisp machine. This is not an accident. GNU Emacs was probably intended to be the first step towards a complete lisp system for GNU, akin to zmacs on symbolics. The free software manifesto mentions lisp several times http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html
unit_testing 15y ago
I'd love to take this opportunity to dive into Emacs, but the past few times I've tried, it's felt like my keyboard was fighting against me. For those of you using Emacs on a Macbook (or an Apple keyboard), which key do you use for 'alt'?
- tjr 15y ago
  Esc
- raju 15y ago
  I use the "Apple" key ... Put this in your .emacs file (setq mac-option-modifier 'super ) (setq mac-command-modifier 'meta ) I also use the System preferences to map the Caps-Lock key to Ctrl - A lot easier especially since a lot of keyboards tend to move the CTRL key around
  - adestefan 15y ago
    The worst are the Thinkpad keyboards that have Fn where the left Ctrl should be. This is the sole reason I started to use Caps Lock for Ctrl and now I'm in love with it.
    - gnuvince 15y ago
      That's my favorite feature of Thinkpads: that means I cannot damage my pinkie any further :)
- chrismealy 15y ago
  option
- ihodes 15y ago
  I use 'option', also labeled 'alt' on my keyboard. You can set it to act as 'meta' via your preferences. Use iTerm 2.
- aiscott 15y ago
  I use option like the others have said. I am like you, diving into Emacs; in my case purely for the swank/slime lisping environment. It's been pretty difficult as I am a dyed in the wool VIM user. Someone on HN recommended the Evil plugin (http://gitorious.org/evil/pages/Home http://gitorious.org/evil/pages/Home) for an approximation of VIM movement and other bindings. It surprisingly works pretty well. It's letting me remain productive while I slowly adapt to the emacs key-bindings over time. I am using emacs-prelude as well (https://github.com/bbatsov/emacs-prelude https://github.com/bbatsov/emacs-prelude) which is a startup scripts kit. I'm still not sold on emacs yet, but I am giving it time.
mickeyp 15y ago
Sorry about the site outage; my little linode 512 instance took a pounding :) I've moved it to a larger one. I hope that'll do!
- kroger 15y ago
  Just out of curiosity, were you using a caching plugin, such as WP Super Cache?
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - mickeyp 15y ago
    Yes, I was. And it was caching just fine. But too many hits makes Apache gobble up all the ram on the machine.
docgnome 15y ago
Sadly one of the things I was most looking forward to didn't make it into 24. Threading T_T
CJefferson 15y ago
I would really like to edit LaTeX in emacs (people always tell me how great the latex emacs packages are). Given I am on Mac OS X, can someone give me a way to way to get to a "all the shiny bells and whistles" emacs with latex editing? I tried this a few months ago and got stuck behind packages, package managers, macro packages which are for various versions of emacs. I was never sure if I'd actually got things loaded.
- lutorm 15y ago
  My impression is that if you install TexLive and Aquamacs, you are pretty much set. If you also install Skim, you've got a nice synctex setup. You might need to tell aquamacs that you are using skim etc, but this is explained either on the aquamacs or skim faqs.
- aerique 15y ago
  This isn't a really helpful reply since I still have to set it up myself, but I noticed Homebrow has got Auctex although it needs to install the full TeX distribution as well.
look_lookatme 15y ago
Really wish I could get PCRE search and replace...
eslaught 15y ago
Adding a package manager to the vanilla distribution is, in my opinion, the biggest change in this release. This is going to make finding and installing great elisp packages so much easier, especially for new users. http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ELPA http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ELPA
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
gnuvince 15y ago
To Ubuntu users who don't want to wait for the official release, you can use this frequently updated PPA to install Emacs 24: https://launchpad.net/~cassou/+archive/emacs https://launchpad.net/~cassou/+archive/emacs

109 points by fogus 15y ago

kaens 15y ago

Just a note for anyone using 23 and waiting with bated breath: I've been building emacs from trunk on a regular basis, and using it as my primary editor, for about a year now. It's very stable -- I have so far had to find out about a breakage once, and it was already solved by the time I encountered it. It's way nicer than the last major release. Give it a go.

yason 15y ago

I wait for new Emacs versions like I waited for Christmas when I was a small kid. And I don't peek into the development branches, I want to take time and enjoy the changes upon the release of the next major version. Each new Emacs version shows little on the surface which you might expect from a software suite that has had everything and the kitchen sink since the 90's, but in the inside there's an ongoing morphosis into something greater, that quietly reveals itself version by version if only you take the time to study not only what's new but how the new things work. Then suddenly, say, five years later, a new usage paradigm emerges seemingly out of nothing eventhough Emacs has had the bits and pieces in for many revisions already. This is just fascinating. For example, the various completion subroutines have slowly converged into a more solid, generic completion subsystem. And best of all, you have the source code to play with. If Emacs is nearly an operating system then it's kind of nearly a software Lisp machine.

muuh-gnu 15y ago
> If Emacs is nearly an operating system then it's kind of nearly a software Lisp machine. Which is why it is such a pity that they are still putting so much valuable work into fighting Elisp instead of having a full fledged CL with a native compiler under the hood. The FSF even has two own, GPL'ed CL implementations, CLISP and GCL, but because of RMS' hatred of CL, let them bitrot and never really cared to use them for anything.
- xyzzyz 15y ago
  Too much useful work is already done in elisp. If emacs maintainers were going to move to CL, they'd have to make sure that nothing breaks, otherwise it would almost surely result in fork.
  - kroger 15y ago
    Specially when there's an effort to use guile (scheme) in emacs: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs
  - muuh-gnu 15y ago
    > Too much useful work is already done in elisp. I'm not contesting that, just saying that it is a pity (from the perspective of the wealth of the overall Lisp ecosystem) that all this valuable work has been done in Elisp and not in Common Lisp. Moving to Guile will probably take several years, and even if it really works some day, it will be just another insular Emacs-only solution, because nobody else is using Guile. It wont benefit the overall Lisp ecosystem in any way.
  - pnathan 15y ago
    I wonder if there'd be a way to create an interop mode, which might look something similar to the way they are handling the lexical vs dynamic scoping. That way authors could transition from elisp to common lisp.
    - LukeShu 15y ago
      There's already an effort to do this using Scheme, it's just not ready for this release. Is CL really that much better than Scheme?
      - pnathan 15y ago
        Not from a language-theoretic standpoint. From a pragmatic standpoint, all standard-conforming Common Lisp code runs on a conformant implementation. Schemes often tend to diverge (and they have 6 different Rn standards). So I think CL is 'better' than Scheme, for that value of better.
bch 15y ago
> If Emacs is nearly an operating system then it's kind of nearly a software Lisp machine. Correct or not, I've tended to think of Emacs as an LVM ([e]Lisp Virtual Machine) for years. The "bloated kitchen sink" argument holds little sway with me any more than saying that OpenBSD is a bloated kitchen sink because it can run a lot of software too. Emacs happens to be an awesome Batteries Included LVM.
hapless 15y ago
> If Emacs is nearly an operating system then it's kind of nearly a software Lisp machine. This is not an accident. GNU Emacs was probably intended to be the first step towards a complete lisp system for GNU, akin to zmacs on symbolics. The free software manifesto mentions lisp several times http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html

unit_testing 15y ago

I'd love to take this opportunity to dive into Emacs, but the past few times I've tried, it's felt like my keyboard was fighting against me. For those of you using Emacs on a Macbook (or an Apple keyboard), which key do you use for 'alt'?

tjr 15y ago
Esc
raju 15y ago
I use the "Apple" key ... Put this in your .emacs file (setq mac-option-modifier 'super ) (setq mac-command-modifier 'meta ) I also use the System preferences to map the Caps-Lock key to Ctrl - A lot easier especially since a lot of keyboards tend to move the CTRL key around
- adestefan 15y ago
  The worst are the Thinkpad keyboards that have Fn where the left Ctrl should be. This is the sole reason I started to use Caps Lock for Ctrl and now I'm in love with it.
  - gnuvince 15y ago
    That's my favorite feature of Thinkpads: that means I cannot damage my pinkie any further :)
chrismealy 15y ago
option
ihodes 15y ago
I use 'option', also labeled 'alt' on my keyboard. You can set it to act as 'meta' via your preferences. Use iTerm 2.
aiscott 15y ago
I use option like the others have said. I am like you, diving into Emacs; in my case purely for the swank/slime lisping environment. It's been pretty difficult as I am a dyed in the wool VIM user. Someone on HN recommended the Evil plugin (http://gitorious.org/evil/pages/Home http://gitorious.org/evil/pages/Home) for an approximation of VIM movement and other bindings. It surprisingly works pretty well. It's letting me remain productive while I slowly adapt to the emacs key-bindings over time. I am using emacs-prelude as well (https://github.com/bbatsov/emacs-prelude https://github.com/bbatsov/emacs-prelude) which is a startup scripts kit. I'm still not sold on emacs yet, but I am giving it time.

mickeyp 15y ago

Sorry about the site outage; my little linode 512 instance took a pounding :) I've moved it to a larger one. I hope that'll do!

kroger 15y ago
Just out of curiosity, were you using a caching plugin, such as WP Super Cache?
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- mickeyp 15y ago
  Yes, I was. And it was caching just fine. But too many hits makes Apache gobble up all the ram on the machine.

docgnome 15y ago

Sadly one of the things I was most looking forward to didn't make it into 24. Threading T_T

CJefferson 15y ago

I would really like to edit LaTeX in emacs (people always tell me how great the latex emacs packages are). Given I am on Mac OS X, can someone give me a way to way to get to a "all the shiny bells and whistles" emacs with latex editing? I tried this a few months ago and got stuck behind packages, package managers, macro packages which are for various versions of emacs. I was never sure if I'd actually got things loaded.

lutorm 15y ago
My impression is that if you install TexLive and Aquamacs, you are pretty much set. If you also install Skim, you've got a nice synctex setup. You might need to tell aquamacs that you are using skim etc, but this is explained either on the aquamacs or skim faqs.
aerique 15y ago
This isn't a really helpful reply since I still have to set it up myself, but I noticed Homebrow has got Auctex although it needs to install the full TeX distribution as well.

look_lookatme 15y ago

Really wish I could get PCRE search and replace...

eslaught 15y ago

Adding a package manager to the vanilla distribution is, in my opinion, the biggest change in this release. This is going to make finding and installing great elisp packages so much easier, especially for new users. http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ELPA http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ELPA

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

gnuvince 15y ago

To Ubuntu users who don't want to wait for the official release, you can use this frequently updated PPA to install Emacs 24: https://launchpad.net/~cassou/+archive/emacs https://launchpad.net/~cassou/+archive/emacs