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Whats New in Emacs 24

82 points| pdelgallego | 15 years ago |sachachua.com | reply

44 comments

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[+] redsymbol|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
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.

[+] kleiba|15 years ago|reply
Seconded. Even after years of using Emacs, I still have to stop for a moment every now and then and think: holy shit, what a motherflippin' piece of software!

...and I get really happy :-)

[+] nagnatron|15 years ago|reply
A standard package system is THE feature of Emacs 24.
[+] zitterbewegung|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] krobertson|15 years ago|reply
"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|15 years ago|reply
It's the one the emacs uses.
[+] jbellis|15 years ago|reply
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsReleaseDates

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

[+] rbanffy|15 years ago|reply
It's really hard to find features missing from Emacs after 23 releases.
[+] danh|15 years ago|reply
Emacs 24 also has a new minor mode, electric-pair-mode, that auto-inserts matching parens à la Textmate. Quite useful.
[+] rbanffy|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] sigzero|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
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.

[+] zoul|15 years ago|reply
Seriously, there are still some features left to be new in Emacs? :-)
[+] sammyo|15 years ago|reply
strong-ai-mode
[+] Bud|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
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.

[+] rbanffy|15 years ago|reply
Emacs 395 would be much nicer than Visual Studio 2150 or an Eclipse named after a small asteroid that hasn't been discovered yet (because, by then, all rounded-body names will have been used)