
Emacs 23 is very near - thunk
http://emacs-fu.blogspot.com/2009/07/emacs-23-is-very-near.html
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dryicerx
D-Bus support will open a whole new box of possibilities, I can't wait. Time
to start hacking away writing a Pidgin <-> Emacs interface.

 _M-x butterfly_ as well.

~~~
dave_au
I've been using the dbus support with the CVS snapshot for a while now - it's
nice.

So far I've only been using it to control workrave and to bring up compilation
messages with the system notification handler for long running compiles.
Still, I've been liking it a lot.

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rincewind
so what does M-x butterfly do?

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gjm11
See <http://xkcd.com/378/> .

(Which actually says C-x M-c M-butterfly, but that doesn't make much sense.)

~~~
jsonscripter
There's no way it actually does that. What does it _actually_ do?

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jcl
[http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/lisp/misc.el...](http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/lisp/misc.el#n110)

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socratees
I was SO eagerly waiting for anti-aliasing on emacs. Now it should be awesome.

~~~
dimitar
I for one don't really like it or need it. My emacs looks great with the
bitmap font I'm using - terminus.

The new packages in the standard distribution are great thought.

~~~
mapleoin
Yeah, I'm using terminus now, too. It's awesome! I went through a great deal
of pain to get emacs 23 and try out some new fonts, but then discovered
terminus and now it's relatively useless :)

~~~
jsonscripter
I personally don't like terminus, so this anti-aliasing is great for Deja Sans
Mono :)

~~~
mapleoin
that's what I was using before ;) To be honest I switched to Terminus when I
bought a new laptop with 1680x1050 on 15'' and I wanted to fit more text on
the screen. Terminus is really great at small sizes. For everything else
there's Deja Vu.

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thunk
The development snapshots have been perfectly usable for a while now, but this
is news nonetheless.

It's purdy with droid sans.

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discojesus
"M-x butterfly (see [[%20<http://xkcd.com/378/]>[ <http://xkcd.com/378/]])>

I'm still waiting for M-x kill-it-with-fire.

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jrockway
How about:

    
    
        (defun kill-it-with-fire ()
          (interactive)
          (loop for b in (buffer-list) do (kill-buffer b)))

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discojesus
looks like a good first start, but how do we add the _fire_?

~~~
jrockway

        (with-current-buffer b 
            (ignore-errors (delete-file (buffer-file-name)))
            (kill-buffer))

~~~
discojesus
oh yes.

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andreyf
No static bound variables in elisp? :(

D-Bus sounds exciting - does anyone know if there's any chance this will allow
emacs to interface with firebug?

~~~
wingo
You mean lexically bound variables perhaps? There is lexical-let from 'cl, but
that's not the same thing.

OTOH Guile's elisp compiler does compile lexical bindings efficiently. It's a
complementary tack to the lexbind branch of Emacs proper.

~~~
capablanca
Suppose the compiler is done.. what wouild be the difficulties for using it on
Emacs (apart from convincing rms)?

~~~
wingo
Getting the C shims right, and ensuring that it really implements elisp as
emacs does -- to the point that elisp programmers can't tell the difference.
The C question is much more difficult, though.

The goal is for Guile in Emacs to be the obvious, no-brainer choice. Hopefully
that will be the case, but there is some hacking yet to be done.

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Estragon
I tried switching to emacs 23, but the vc.el integration left much to be
desired, for svn and CVS, and I switched back. (Yes, I know, why am I still
using CVS, but there you go.)

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kzar
Ooo I can't wait

~~~
jrockway
Just compile the CVS version and use that, then? That's what many of us have
been doing for years -- Emacs 23's exciting new features are mostly very old
news :)

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BearOfNH
In Emacs 22 about the largest file I can edit is 27MB. From the lack of hype I
take it Emacs 23 won't improve on that. This is on 32-bit WinXP, sadly.

It's a heck of a lot easier to pore thru a huge trace file with an intelligent
editor. Instead, I get to use Notepad.

~~~
mulander
I have no problems with large files - using Emacs 23 from
<http://www.ourcomments.org/Emacs/EmacsW32.html>.

The file on the screenshot is ~156MB took several seconds to load but after
that all operations on it are instant.

<http://img199.imageshack.us/img199/9108/emacslargefile.png>

The blacked out parts are work related - sorry.

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amichail
Emacs is overkill and has very poor default key bindings.

Windows has notepad++, which is an excellent free editor.

On the Mac I use Aquamacs Emacs, which is ok, but I would still prefer
something like notepad++. (For coding I use the xcode editor.)

~~~
jrockway
How does this relate to the article?

~~~
amichail
It's time for people to move on from Emacs. Development effort would be better
spent on lightweight editors that complement modern IDE editors (e.g., the
Java editor in Eclipse).

~~~
GeneralMaximus
Most Emacs users love Emacs because of the amount of customization it offers,
not because of the keybindings. In fact, I've never seen an Emacs user who
hasn't customized his keybindings.

I don't get what you mean by "moving on". Just because people started writing
Emacs 30 years ago does not mean the code is crufty and old. Both Emacs and
Vim work well with all modern desktop environments on all major operating
systems. I don't see why anyone should be "moving on".

You might love your IDE, but many people hate them. Some of us don't like
bloated software with features we don't need or use.

(I'm a Vim user, BTW :) )

~~~
amichail
But emacs is bloated software. Eclipse at least gives you amazing
functionality. Have you actually tried the Java editor in Eclipse?

~~~
jrockway
Do you know anything about emacs? There is actually not that much bloat.

There is code to support each platform and windowing system emacs runs on.
There is support for managing buffers, and other very primitive editor
functionality like that. Then there is the Lisp VM and associated data
structures ("Lisp_Object") to glue everything together. On top of that are
some primitive functions ("and", "cdr", etc.), along with some primitive
editing functions ("next-line") implemented in C. That's about it; the rest is
all Emacs Lisp code that you can simply choose not to run. (Yes, some gets
compiled right into the Emacs binary to speed startup, but you can skip that.)

Sure, you can argue that many emacs extensions (hello, Gnus) are bloat. But
you can just pretend it doesn't exist; nobody is forcing you to use anything.
Plain emacs is a very simple toolkit for building your own editor. Emacs with
simple.el (and friends) is still a very simple, but rich, text editor. As you
add packages, you add functionality and complexity... but you can choose what
to add, Emacs is infinitely malleable and does not care what you do to it.

I am not too familiar with Eclipse, but I doubt that it is simpler than Emacs.

~~~
amichail
I'm interested in an editor that works the way I like with minimal
customization required. Notepad++ is like that. Emacs isn't.

~~~
yason
There's a difference between editing text files and editing text. In the
former, all you need is some mechanism to type, delete, and move text. In the
latter, you want to work with the contents itself in a huge number of ways.

There's no such things as an editor that works the way you like unless you
only have very basic text editing needs. This is where people generally resort
to Notepad or Word.

In the other case you really want a good editor that fits both your fingers
and thinking, and that's where you had better write the editor yourself. It is
at this stage when many people have figured out that starting with Emacs is
the easiest path.

