

Whats New in Emacs 24 - pdelgallego
http://sachachua.com/blog/2010/12/whats-new-in-emacs-24/

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redsymbol
Emacs is one of those software systems I'm really grateful for. My life is
significantly better because I'm in a world where it exists - "better" meaning
more joyful, more positively productive, and more enabled to be of service
(since I use it for writing articles and opensource software, etc. Not to
mention the code behind my company, so it's even helping me create jobs.)

~~~
psadauskas
I really, really want to use Emacs. I like the ideas, I like the addons, I
like the lispiness. What I can't get over, though, is the pinky contortions
and multiple chords required to accomplish things in the editor itself.

I'm not a big fan of vimscript, and the addons seem more clunky, but being
able to hit a single key, rather than a chord, or series of chords, to
accomplish the basic text manipulations, makes it really hard for me to stop
using vim and use emacs for more than a few days.

~~~
redsymbol
I can understand! I actually also use vim a whole lot, which is absolutely
wonderful as well. For the pinky/chords thing in emacs, I've be able to adapt
by actually using other fingers quite a bit (shifting my hand so I can hold
control with my ring or even pointer); and I really don't use multichord
combos that much, usually using longer sequences instead (e.g. for indent-
region, I hit Esc, then type C-\ rather than typing Alt-Ctrl-\ .) Fortunately
this has worked well for me and my hands over time.

~~~
w1ntermute
> I've be able to adapt by actually using other fingers quite a bit

I actually use the part of my palm directly underneath my pinky to hit the
Ctrl key. It works quite well on a ThinkPad keyboard (for my hand shape/size,
anyway).

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nagnatron
A standard package system is THE feature of Emacs 24.

~~~
zitterbewegung
I have been using the package manager and it is a much better way to install
programs in emacs than the old way of modifying your .emacs and specifying a
load path. It works very well. I wish more people would upload packages to the
main repository but putting this in emacs 24 will probably accelerate this.

~~~
wfarr
Emacs 24 by default uses the GNU package archive, which is limited to software
they want on it.

However, `package.el` defines an alist of `package-archives` which you can add
entries to. My hope is that then someone will end up creating a less
restrictive package archive to complement the offerings in the GNU one.

Nathan Weizenbaum, of Haml fame, has done some work on a project for creating
Emacs Lisp package archives and an accompanying front-end here:
<http://code.google.com/p/marmalade/>

~~~
rmaccloy
It's just an integration of ELPA (<http://tromey.com/elpa/>) which has been
around for quite a while. According to the mailing lists Tom Tromey will
continue to maintain his archive in parallel. I'm not sure what licensing
restrictions he has but I'm fairly sure you don't have to assign copyright as
per FSF projects.

------
krobertson
"With the increasing popularity of distributed version control systems such as
bzr"

That is the first time I've seen anyone use Bazaar as an example of a DVC that
is gaining in popularity.

~~~
BCM43
It's the one the emacs uses.

~~~
rbanffy
Isn't it also used by Canonical's Launchpad?

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windsurfer
Yes. If you've tried it, you may agree that bzr is to git as Ubuntu is to
Debian.

~~~
rbanffy
I never went beyond the basics with both git and bzr, so, they both look the
same from here.

In no small measure, I am happy I never gave them a serious problem to solve.

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eeperson
[http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-
devel/2010-03/msg002...](http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-
devel/2010-03/msg00272.html)

Does anyone know if the concurrency and lexbind features are still planned to
be part of Emacs 24?

~~~
docgnome
I really hope so. Mostly concurrency.

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jbellis
<http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsReleaseDates>

What changed to go from releases every 4-7 years, to releases every 1-2 years?

~~~
rbanffy
It's really hard to find features missing from Emacs after 23 releases.

~~~
gcr
No kidding! Emacs 23 even added support antialiased text for heavens sake. Who
needs such a useless feature?

~~~
rbanffy
Emacs always had anti-aliased text if you used it within a terminal that had
it.

I never missed anti-aliased text that much - there are plenty of good fonts
that render well without it. Now that it has, it looks much better. However,
the idea of giving up its power in order to get pretty fonts with a lesser
editor is ludicrous.

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danh
Emacs 24 also has a new minor mode, electric-pair-mode, that auto-inserts
matching parens à la Textmate. Quite useful.

~~~
rbanffy
Knowing Emacs, it can probably be convinced to generate all kinds of brackets,
HTML tags and so on, based on what major mode is running.

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gsivil
Interesting post. It would be nice if someone could link to a site or blog
with more details and/or discussion about the new features in Emacs 24.

~~~
danh
Here is the entire list of new stuff:

<http://repo.or.cz/w/emacs.git/blob_plain/HEAD:/etc/NEWS>

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sigzero
Nothing really "killer" though Bidi is nice. I just setup emacs (trying to
learn it to compare to Vim) the other day on my Mac.

~~~
hasenj
I wish vim gets the bidi support as well.

It gets it automatically on a terminal that supports it (such as konsole) but
having it sort of built in would be nice.

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zoul
Seriously, there are still some features left to be new in Emacs? :-)

~~~
sammyo
strong-ai-mode

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rbanffy
that and strong-ai-load-brain-state for loading brain dumps of great
programmers to do pair-programming with.

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Bud
Does anyone else feel like they are living in a pretty hilarious future realm
when they see there's something called "Emacs 24" in the world?

In 2150, will we be using "Emacs 395"?

Maybe I should get my old vt100 out of the closet and see if it still works.

~~~
dedward
In 2150, roughly 139 years from now, assuming a major release every 2 years,
we should be on emacs 93 or therabouts.

As long as we still use text entry for programming, we'll still be using
emacs.... it will keep up with the times.

~~~
Bud
What if we use text entry...but not from our fingers?

~~~
gimpf
Then we won't need to remap caps-lock anymore.

