

What's New in Emacs (Part 2) - nyellin
http://www.masteringemacs.org/articles/2011/12/12/what-is-new-in-emacs-24-part-2/

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nyellin
The most exciting part is at the end:

 _Code can now use lexical scoping by default instead of dynamic scoping. The
`lexical-binding’ variable lets code use lexical scoping for local variables.
It is typically set via file-local variables, in which case it applies to all
the code in that file._

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arthur_debert
There are tons of goodies in there, and the author is doing a hell of a
service to Emacs users.

That said, a part of my can't but sigh... Now we have new completion & new
electric pairs. How is that going to propagate to other modes? Just the
thought of new the work involved in diagnosing which mode is using what, and
how to adapt for it gives me the chills.

The package manager looks nice, but how can it handle stuff hosted on a git
rep? How are changes show? Without all of this sorted out, it's usefulness is
severely diminished.

~~~
mickeyp
The completion mechanism is actually the same as what it has always been.
`completion-at-point' is Emacs's generic completion framework, and what
they've done is replace all those mode-specific hatchet jobs with the more
generic one. As for the electric stuff, that's the same story: every mode had
its own way of doing it. I used (and still do, not migrated yet!) skeletons
for my electric pairing as it did a really good job of handling all the edge
cases (you're in a word, you're at a bracket already, etc.)

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gwern
> C-y in Isearch is now bound to isearch-yank-kill, instead of isearch-yank-
> line.

Thank you.

> New commands `count-words-region’ and `count-words’.

No more M-| wc? Another thanks.

In general, I'm really glad to see the Emacs developers standardizing and
catering to the rest of the world - a lot of these things are things that
annoy me subconsciously or consciously, but not enough to figure out how to
fix in my .emacs.

~~~
mickeyp
Make sure you read the caveat I wrote as what counts as a "word" depends on
the mode.

~~~
gwern
I usually am counting in markdown-mode, so I doubt there are any major
gotchas.

------
mickeyp
Aww, damnit. It's down again. I really need to ditch Apache or learn how to
not make it take down my 1.8 GB ram Linode instance.

~~~
hartror
Wordpress is pretty easy to get going with Nginx. Took me a couple of hours
(max) to switch from Apache on my linode box.

