
What’s New In Emacs 24 - fogus
http://www.masteringemacs.org/articles/2011/12/06/what-is-new-in-emacs-24-part-1/
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yason
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
> 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
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.

~~~
pnathan
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
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
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.

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kaens
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.

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mickeyp
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
Just out of curiosity, were you using a caching plugin, such as WP Super
Cache?

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eslaught
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>

------
unit_testing
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'?

~~~
aiscott
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>) 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>)
which is a startup scripts kit.

I'm still not sold on emacs yet, but I am giving it time.

~~~
ryane
I've been using Evil for a couple of months and love it. I switched from
Viper+vimpulse and haven't missed a beat. It works really well and was easier
to setup. Any VIM user considering Emacs should give it a shot - the best of
both worlds, really.

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

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CJefferson
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
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.

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

