
GNU Emacs 24.1 released - alexott
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2012-06/msg00164.html
======
Garbage
New features:

\- New packaging system and interface (M-x list-packages) for downloading and
installing extensions. A default package archive is hosted by GNU and
maintained by the Emacs developers.

\- Support for displaying and editing bidirectional text, including right-to-
left scripts such as Arabic and Hebrew.

\- Support for lexical scoping in Emacs Lisp.

\- Improvements to the Custom Themes system (M-x customize-themes).

\- Unified and improved completion system in many modes and packages.

\- Support for GnuTLS (for built-in TLS/SSL encryption), GTK+ 3, ImageMagick,
SELinux, and Libxml2.

This looks great. :)

~~~
ruediger
Complete list <http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/NEWS.24.1>

~~~
Aethaeryn
You can also find out about the important changes from:

    
    
      C-h r m antinews RET
    

This provides a changelog in the opposite direction, which is entertaining:

    
    
      For those users who live backwards in time, here is information about
      downgrading to Emacs version 23.4.  We hope you will enjoy the greater
      simplicity that results from the absence of many Emacs 24.1 features.
    

\-----

It can be found online here:

[http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Ant...](http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Antinews.html)

------
carterschonwald
Woah, emacs lisp now has lexical scoping

~~~
conanite
Yes, this is pretty radical. More info from the manual:

[http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Usi...](http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Using-
Lexical-Binding.html)

from
[http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Lex...](http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Lexical-
Binding.html) -

 _Such code is also much more friendly to concurrency, which we want to add to
Emacs in the near future._

Exciting times ahead ...

~~~
ams6110
Indeed, will be nice when something blocking in one window doesn't lock up the
whole emacs process.

~~~
unhammer
YES! E.g. try running emacs on $host and run bbdb; go to some other machine
and ssh ~/.bbdb $host:~/.bbdb; then ssh $host emacsclient. Now it's
unresponsive until you walk over on your feet to $host and answer the revert-
or-not question :(

------
barik
This means that I can finally try out Emacs Prelude [1]. Fantastic!

I've been wanting to check it out for a while, but I haven't been brave enough
to run a non-stable release of GNU Emacs.

<http://batsov.com/prelude/>

~~~
metaguri
What functionality does prelude provide? Unless I'm missing something, the
website suggests that you can find out by "reading the source."

I had a similar experience once with the emacs starter kit [1]. Though it's a
noble effort and probably _does_ have a ton of great features, there are some
problems: you pretty much get all or nothing (ESK split it out into a "core"
and "per-language" set of libraries but still, there's a lot of stuff) and
it's hard to tell which things are emacs builtin and what is customizable. If
you disagree with a customization you're SOL; I knew enough about emacs to
know that some things had been customized, and I didn't like them, but it was
nigh impossible to find out where they were customized and how to turn them
off.

It reminds me of the libraries vs frameworks discussion [2]. Emacs works well
with libraries (with little elisp functions counting as "mini-libraries"), and
the ESK/prelude seem like frameworks.

I'm not trying to pick on these toolkits in particular. They are probably a
good way to start out with emacs--I know that the ESK provides a bunch of
features to make it more "friendly" out of the box for someone who is coming
from something like TextMate.

Most "old-school" emacs people I know have their own .emacs that have
accumulated over years and years of trying to solve specific problems or
customize that one thing that's annoyed the crap out of them for a while. My
.emacs is not pages and pages, but it does have some good stuff in it.

What I'd love to see (and maybe I'm inviting myself to do this) would be a
tool (maybe ELPA is this tool, though It's hard to know) which allows you to
search for, browse, and install elisp snippets to help you out. ELPA is good
for bigger libraries (i.e. major modes) but not for "how do I create an
unfill-paragraph function?"

[1] <https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit> [2]
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2762280>

~~~
technomancy
Author of the Starter Kit here.

For what it's worth, I've come around to this viewpoint. I rewrote ESK for
version 2, and the emphasis was on packaging as much functionality in
independent packages as possible. So as of v2, the Starter Kit is _mostly_
just about providing a default set of packages and turning on a few flags that
it's just crazy to leave off (like ido). But this way more of the
functionality is available to everyone, not just users of ESK.

Anyway, it certainly needs more documentation, but these days I recommend the
Starter Kit more as a source of inspiration than something people should just
use outright, at least if they're not in a hurry.

~~~
gringomorcego
Thank you so much for ESK! It's really helped me get started in emacs. Also,
could you think about adding undo-tree as a default for ESK? I really feel
like that would be a worthy addition.

~~~
technomancy
Glad you like it. I think rather than further development on the Starter Kit,
effort would be better spent towards coming up with a good overview of the
ecosystem, documenting available packages and how they work together.

~~~
drothlis
And pushing improvements (like saner defaults, and documentation for some of
the under-documented built-in packages) upstream to Emacs itself.

For those reasonably comfortable with Emacs, I think you should build it from
source, and get into the habit of fixing tiny documentation problems as soon
as you come across them. Mind you, I have submitted a couple such patches to
the ido built-in help and they have languished un-noticed for 2 months.

P.S. Another thank-you here for the starter kit -- I no longer use it, but I
did for a year or so and it did teach me several features I wouldn't have
known about otherwise.

~~~
technomancy
Pushing upstream is absolutely the best way to get things more widely used,
but unfortunately changes to the defaults often get strong pushback from long-
time users. It's a very politicized process; if improving Emacs itself were
easier the Starter Kit never would have existed.

------
gcv
There's a slightly annoying regression (to Emacs 22, behavior, I believe) in
the Mac version. Some Unicode characters (like —, “, and ”) cause the line to
expand in height slightly. Does anyone know of a fix?

~~~
drothlis
If you modify the default font, you also have to change the default "fontset",
because merely changing the default font doesn't install it as the font for
unicode characters.

I use:

    
    
        (set-face-attribute 'default nil :family "Menlo" :height 120)
        (set-fontset-font "fontset-default" 'unicode "Menlo")

~~~
gcv
Perfect. Thank you so much. Guess I don't know as much about Emacs as I
thought. :)

------
onedognight
Precompiled binaries for Emacs 24.1 are already available for OS X at
<http://emacsformacosx.com/> .

~~~
__david__
You caught that quick! It only finished compiling a few minutes ago... (I
generally kick off the release builds manually)

~~~
gnufied
Last I checked your builds didn't had `ns-toggle-fullscreen`. Is that still
the case?

EDIT: Looks like emacsforosx does not compile Emacs with support for above
command. Will you consider it? I totally understand distributing plain vanilla
version though!

~~~
__david__
No, I don't want to support a bunch of little patches on top of emacs.

But it's frustrating for me, too, because I want the feature as much as anyone
else. I've been making do with "(setq ns-auto-hide-menu-bar t)" which is
_close_ to the desired behavior, especially when combined with maxframe [1].
It still has the window's title bar, so it's not exactly there.

[1] <https://github.com/rmm5t/maxframe.el> I use it like this (where super is
the command key):

    
    
      (defun toggle-frame-maximization ()
        (interactive)
        (if (frame-parameter nil 'mf-maximized) (restore-frame) (maximize-frame)))
      (define-key global-map [(super return)] 'toggle-frame-maximization)

------
munchor
Awesome release! I've been waiting for this for a long time now. It will be in
Arch Linux's repositories in a few hours.

The package system is awesome, no more hassle installing plugins and
extensions!

Great job GNU, thank you!

------
Deutscher
Does anyone know if/when it will be available via Ubuntu Software Center or
some PPA? I am on Ubuntu 12.04.

~~~
ruediger
There is a PPA for the snapshot

<https://launchpad.net/~cassou/+archive/emacs>

<http://emacs.naquadah.org/> (Debian)

------
mih
Any idea when the precompiled Windows version will be released? Currently
there seems to be no build <http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/emacs/windows/>

~~~
barik
For what it's worth, the Windows binaries are now available:
<http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/emacs-24.1-bin-i386.zip>

------
cbp
Someday there will be a version where the new feature will be an actually
useful wiki :p

~~~
neic
There is a “next generation, better structured and improved wiki” at
<http://wikemacs.org/>

------
jmount
And it doesn't see control modifiers when used through Lion OSX screen sharing
(seems a lot like this bug: <http://xquartz.macosforge.org/trac/ticket/180> ).

------
vamega
I've been using the pretests for a while now, and the built in package manager
has been an absolute joy to work with.

If I were to begin writing extensions, I'd also probably enjoy the lexical
scoping a lot more.

------
alexott
At the end of <http://wikemacs.org/wiki/GNU_Emacs_24> page, there are links to
posts that describe changes in new version

------
Xyzodiac
So does that mean it's officially stable? This is great news.

~~~
ConstantineXVI
Yep.

    
    
        The current stable release is 24.1.[0]
    

[0] <http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/>

~~~
Xyzodiac
Fantastic, thanks :)

------
jmount
OSX build seems to work really well:

./configure --with-gif=no --with-ns make make install

~~~
jmount
Ouch, sorry others are having trouble. Mine happened to work- but I don't know
a lot about controlling the build config.

And the formatting didn't survive pasting. Should have been: ./configure
--with-gif=no --with-ns; make; make install

~~~
throwdown
I built it from the sources in the emacs-24 branch without a problem. For some
reason only the tarball sources threw up that config error. Strange.

------
st3fan
So what is your favorite new feature?

~~~
chc
Having ELPA built in is really nice. If I'd had a package manager back when I
was first learning Emacs, I think I would have resented it a lot less. And
even now, having it available without fiddling with anything will be such a
nicety.

------
aashu_dwivedi
the only time i hate the packaging system [apt] is when a new version of some
software is released

~~~
technomancy
It should be in nix shortly: <http://nixos.org/nix>

Nix and apt are very complementary to each other; apt has all the stable
never-breaks stuff, and nix has all the latest new code. And when you pull in
something too new that breaks, you can roll it back trivially.

------
kcbanner
Great news!

------
fungo
wait for long time, really great!

------
drstrangevibes
oh frabjous day!

~~~
sliceof314
Callooh! Callay!

------
drstrangevibes
any decent mode for java yet? :-\

