8 ms·

I've been going off like a broken record in the comment pages for these posts, since I'm such an Emacs fanatic. But I'll say it again, this release is great! Re

by webkike 12y ago

I've been going off like a broken record in the comment pages for these posts, since I'm such an Emacs fanatic. But I'll say it again, this release is great! Rectangular mark mode, better web browser -- Emacs hasn't stopped getting better

sillysaurus3 12y ago
Emacs has a web browser?
- nandhp 12y ago
  > Highlights of this release include: A built-in web browser (M-x eww)
- ephemeralgomi 12y ago
  It's had w3 for quite a while. 'eww' is new.
  - Derbasti 12y ago
    IIRC, w3 was an external program while eww is built entirely in elisp.
    - chriswarbo 12y ago
      w3 is written in ELisp and runs in Emacs http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/w3 http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/w3 w3m is an external program, which Emacs has a wrapper for http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/w3m http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/w3m
      - Derbasti 12y ago
        My apologies then, since I did not remember correctly. Thank you for enlightening!
  - ams6110 12y ago
    It's still text-mode though (it will show images inline). There was a project to integrate webkit into an emacs browser mode but not sure where that stands.
- davidw 12y ago
  It has sockets, so... pretty much anything you can do with those, you can do with Emacs. * Email (gnus) * NNTP (gnus) * IRC Come to mind offhand.
  - stinkytaco 12y ago
    Slightly off-topic, but is there still much NNTP use out there other than piracy related? I was a heavy NNTP user once upon a time, but all the public groups I once used seem to be overrun by spam and private ones seem to have gone in favor of email. I would expect there's a quite a few private servers out there to warrant continual updating in a program like emacs.
    - edavis 12y ago
      I use NNTP to follow a handful of development mailing lists via gmane.org.
    - callahad 12y ago
      I prefer to consume mailing lists via Gmane's NNTP gateway: http://gmane.org/ http://gmane.org/ It's a surprisingly nice experience. You can really easily pull archives, nntp clients tend to handle threading well, etc.
      - thristian 12y ago
        Relevant to this subthread, Gmane's maintainer is also the maintainer of Gnus, so the Gmane web UI is (I'm told) surprisingly familiar for Gnus users.
    - pjmlp 12y ago
      D development forums are NNTP, although there is a forum as well. I really prefer the keyboard navigation and all the niceties offered by Thunderbird than the web groups interface, each with its own set of allowed actions, mostly without keyboard navigation.
    - pyviennacl 12y ago
- onedognight 12y ago
  > Emacs has a web browser? At one point there were only two web browsers in the world, one was Mosaic (Mozilla is short for Mosaic Killer) and one was W3 (the emacs web browser).
  - gsnedders 12y ago
    Um, what about WorldWideWeb, the original NeXTSTEP browser/editor (by TimBL) which predates both of them?
  - hackuser 12y ago
    I don't think Mosaic was the original browser and I believe others predated Emacs, such as Lynx. Here's Wikipedia's version of events, for what it's worth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_web_browser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_web_browser
- troels 12y ago
  And a mail client. It's pretty much an operating system.
  - agumonkey 12y ago
    Someone please try the emacs as init with this release.
    - broodbucket 12y ago
      Someone's already tried this. http://www.informatimago.com/linux/emacs-on-user-mode-linux.html?repost http://www.informatimago.com/linux/emacs-on-user-mode-linux....
      - agumonkey 12y ago
        I know, this dates back from emacs 21.3. I wanted to know if someone had the time and skills to replicate the experiment with 24.4
      - flyrain 12y ago
        It's very interesting. It seems a neat solution. Anyone go further? Really work on it?
    - agumonkey 12y ago
      I tried to compile emacs statically but under archlinux I need to build ncurses (and probably others) statically too. Which is too much of a black art to me. Gonna try on debian since I believe they include static binairies in packages.
fafner 12y ago
Rectangular mark mode is really awesome. It makes working with rectangles a lot easier. It is now so well integrated into my workflow that I'm really annoyed when I have to use an older Emacs version.
- davexunit 12y ago
  I'm very excited to try it out. I knew about the web browser, but I didn't know about this until I read the release notes.
- shepard 12y ago
  Interesting - could you please provide some examples of how are you using rectangular mark mode? I have never used it before, so I'm clearly missing something cool here...
  - dietrichepp 12y ago
    Any time you're working with tabular data, or data that is aligned horizontally, it's helpful. For example, I might need to delete a prefix from a list of declarations. I often use macros for the same kinds of tasks, with each macro editing a line and putting the cursor on the next line afterwards.
    - chr 12y ago
      apply-macro-to-region-lines does not need macros to put the cursor on the next line. From the manual: The command C-x C-k r (apply-macro-to-region-lines) repeats the last defined keyboard macro on each line that begins in the region. It does this line by line, by moving point to the beginning of the line and then executing the macro.
    - gcv 12y ago
      Take a look at multiple cursor mode for this.
- craigching 12y ago
  It's funny, I started using Emacs around 1991 or '92 or so (at University), then I changed to Windows development in about '93 and switched my editor to BRIEF which had very nice columnar editing capabilities. I used BRIEF for a few years until I moved away from strictly Windows development so I moved back to Emacs. Columnar editing was something I missed so much! But now that I've been away from it, it's hard for me to recall what I used to use it for. Occasionally I do find that I wish I had it, but I remember feeling so crippled without it for a long time! So, can't wait to get back into it again now that it's available. I think it's one of those things that you start using it and find more and more things to do with it as time goes on. Just my $0.02 anyway.
RexRollman 12y ago
Is there a screenshot somewhere?
- stronglikedan 12y ago
  An older link, but: http://emacsredux.com/blog/2014/01/01/a-peek-at-emacs-24-dot-4-rectangular-selection/ http://emacsredux.com/blog/2014/01/01/a-peek-at-emacs-24-dot...
melling 12y ago
You know what Emacs is? It's a big Lisp interpreter. It was made to be extensible so that it could do anything. It could be your IDE, for example. http://cedet.sourceforge.net http://cedet.sourceforge.net The problem is that it isn't a good enough Lisp engine to be very good at anything beyond the great text editor, which it has been since the early 1980's. Avoiding the really hard problems and building a better emacs browser doesn't really help anyone. At some point, people will realize that the concept behind Emacs is great but could be better done in another high performance language. JavaScript in a browser? Clojure?
- webkike 12y ago
  What? Emacs isn't a big Lisp interpreter. It's a text editor that is extensible with Emacs Lisp. Sure it contains a Lisp interpreter, but saying that Emacs is only a Lisp interpreter implies that the entirety of the text editor is implemented in Lisp, which is clearly not the case. I use Emacs as a text editor, which means I use it to edit anything that has text. Granted that is a huge part of my computing needs. I don't want Emacs to be able to do anything. I already have an operating system and a text editor.
  - melling 12y ago
    Nope, it's mostly a Lisp interpreter. Stallman had to build some of the low-level stuff in C then he built the rest of the editor in Lisp. "We used the same idea here (in the hybrid technique), that most of the editor would be written in Lisp, but certain parts of it that had to run particularly fast would be written at a lower level" http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html That's the beauty of Emacs. Considering that he built it in the early 80s, you have to wonder if the whole thing couldn't be written Lisp today.
    - theoh 12y ago
      There's some kind of paradox here. You say it's mostly a lisp interpreter, but then, also, mostly editor functionality written in lisp. I'm not sure you can have it both ways...
mark_l_watson 12y ago
I agree - a great update. I especially like it when I am in -nw terminal mode and being able to use F10 to get access to the menu items I don't remember the shortcuts for.
qmr 12y ago
> better web browser Hah, seems like an argument for vim.
imakesnowflakes 12y ago
> better web browser... I couldn't get logins to bitbucket work with eww, because it seems it is not sending the referrer headers. I couldn't find any way to turn it on..

by webkike 12y ago

sillysaurus3 12y ago

Emacs has a web browser?

nandhp 12y ago
> Highlights of this release include: A built-in web browser (M-x eww)
ephemeralgomi 12y ago
It's had w3 for quite a while. 'eww' is new.
- Derbasti 12y ago
  IIRC, w3 was an external program while eww is built entirely in elisp.
  - chriswarbo 12y ago
    w3 is written in ELisp and runs in Emacs http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/w3 http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/w3 w3m is an external program, which Emacs has a wrapper for http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/w3m http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/w3m
    - Derbasti 12y ago
      My apologies then, since I did not remember correctly. Thank you for enlightening!
- ams6110 12y ago
  It's still text-mode though (it will show images inline). There was a project to integrate webkit into an emacs browser mode but not sure where that stands.
davidw 12y ago
It has sockets, so... pretty much anything you can do with those, you can do with Emacs. * Email (gnus) * NNTP (gnus) * IRC Come to mind offhand.
- stinkytaco 12y ago
  Slightly off-topic, but is there still much NNTP use out there other than piracy related? I was a heavy NNTP user once upon a time, but all the public groups I once used seem to be overrun by spam and private ones seem to have gone in favor of email. I would expect there's a quite a few private servers out there to warrant continual updating in a program like emacs.
  - edavis 12y ago
    I use NNTP to follow a handful of development mailing lists via gmane.org.
  - callahad 12y ago
    I prefer to consume mailing lists via Gmane's NNTP gateway: http://gmane.org/ http://gmane.org/ It's a surprisingly nice experience. You can really easily pull archives, nntp clients tend to handle threading well, etc.
    - thristian 12y ago
      Relevant to this subthread, Gmane's maintainer is also the maintainer of Gnus, so the Gmane web UI is (I'm told) surprisingly familiar for Gnus users.
  - pjmlp 12y ago
    D development forums are NNTP, although there is a forum as well. I really prefer the keyboard navigation and all the niceties offered by Thunderbird than the web groups interface, each with its own set of allowed actions, mostly without keyboard navigation.
  - pyviennacl 12y ago
onedognight 12y ago
> Emacs has a web browser? At one point there were only two web browsers in the world, one was Mosaic (Mozilla is short for Mosaic Killer) and one was W3 (the emacs web browser).
- gsnedders 12y ago
  Um, what about WorldWideWeb, the original NeXTSTEP browser/editor (by TimBL) which predates both of them?
- hackuser 12y ago
  I don't think Mosaic was the original browser and I believe others predated Emacs, such as Lynx. Here's Wikipedia's version of events, for what it's worth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_web_browser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_web_browser
troels 12y ago
And a mail client. It's pretty much an operating system.
- agumonkey 12y ago
  Someone please try the emacs as init with this release.
  - broodbucket 12y ago
    Someone's already tried this. http://www.informatimago.com/linux/emacs-on-user-mode-linux.html?repost http://www.informatimago.com/linux/emacs-on-user-mode-linux....
    - agumonkey 12y ago
      I know, this dates back from emacs 21.3. I wanted to know if someone had the time and skills to replicate the experiment with 24.4
    - flyrain 12y ago
      It's very interesting. It seems a neat solution. Anyone go further? Really work on it?
  - agumonkey 12y ago
    I tried to compile emacs statically but under archlinux I need to build ncurses (and probably others) statically too. Which is too much of a black art to me. Gonna try on debian since I believe they include static binairies in packages.

fafner 12y ago

Rectangular mark mode is really awesome. It makes working with rectangles a lot easier. It is now so well integrated into my workflow that I'm really annoyed when I have to use an older Emacs version.

davexunit 12y ago
I'm very excited to try it out. I knew about the web browser, but I didn't know about this until I read the release notes.
shepard 12y ago
Interesting - could you please provide some examples of how are you using rectangular mark mode? I have never used it before, so I'm clearly missing something cool here...
- dietrichepp 12y ago
  Any time you're working with tabular data, or data that is aligned horizontally, it's helpful. For example, I might need to delete a prefix from a list of declarations. I often use macros for the same kinds of tasks, with each macro editing a line and putting the cursor on the next line afterwards.
  - chr 12y ago
    apply-macro-to-region-lines does not need macros to put the cursor on the next line. From the manual: The command C-x C-k r (apply-macro-to-region-lines) repeats the last defined keyboard macro on each line that begins in the region. It does this line by line, by moving point to the beginning of the line and then executing the macro.
  - gcv 12y ago
    Take a look at multiple cursor mode for this.
craigching 12y ago
It's funny, I started using Emacs around 1991 or '92 or so (at University), then I changed to Windows development in about '93 and switched my editor to BRIEF which had very nice columnar editing capabilities. I used BRIEF for a few years until I moved away from strictly Windows development so I moved back to Emacs. Columnar editing was something I missed so much! But now that I've been away from it, it's hard for me to recall what I used to use it for. Occasionally I do find that I wish I had it, but I remember feeling so crippled without it for a long time! So, can't wait to get back into it again now that it's available. I think it's one of those things that you start using it and find more and more things to do with it as time goes on. Just my $0.02 anyway.

RexRollman 12y ago

Is there a screenshot somewhere?

stronglikedan 12y ago
An older link, but: http://emacsredux.com/blog/2014/01/01/a-peek-at-emacs-24-dot-4-rectangular-selection/ http://emacsredux.com/blog/2014/01/01/a-peek-at-emacs-24-dot...

melling 12y ago

You know what Emacs is? It's a big Lisp interpreter. It was made to be extensible so that it could do anything. It could be your IDE, for example. http://cedet.sourceforge.net http://cedet.sourceforge.net The problem is that it isn't a good enough Lisp engine to be very good at anything beyond the great text editor, which it has been since the early 1980's. Avoiding the really hard problems and building a better emacs browser doesn't really help anyone. At some point, people will realize that the concept behind Emacs is great but could be better done in another high performance language. JavaScript in a browser? Clojure?

webkike 12y ago
What? Emacs isn't a big Lisp interpreter. It's a text editor that is extensible with Emacs Lisp. Sure it contains a Lisp interpreter, but saying that Emacs is only a Lisp interpreter implies that the entirety of the text editor is implemented in Lisp, which is clearly not the case. I use Emacs as a text editor, which means I use it to edit anything that has text. Granted that is a huge part of my computing needs. I don't want Emacs to be able to do anything. I already have an operating system and a text editor.
- melling 12y ago
  Nope, it's mostly a Lisp interpreter. Stallman had to build some of the low-level stuff in C then he built the rest of the editor in Lisp. "We used the same idea here (in the hybrid technique), that most of the editor would be written in Lisp, but certain parts of it that had to run particularly fast would be written at a lower level" http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html That's the beauty of Emacs. Considering that he built it in the early 80s, you have to wonder if the whole thing couldn't be written Lisp today.
  - theoh 12y ago
    There's some kind of paradox here. You say it's mostly a lisp interpreter, but then, also, mostly editor functionality written in lisp. I'm not sure you can have it both ways...

mark_l_watson 12y ago

I agree - a great update. I especially like it when I am in -nw terminal mode and being able to use F10 to get access to the menu items I don't remember the shortcuts for.

qmr 12y ago

> better web browser Hah, seems like an argument for vim.

imakesnowflakes 12y ago

> better web browser... I couldn't get logins to bitbucket work with eww, because it seems it is not sending the referrer headers. I couldn't find any way to turn it on..