5 ms·

What’s New In Emacs 24.4

126 points by lispython 13y ago

jph 13y ago
Thank you for the news! My personal favorite UI item: C-x TAB (indent-rigidly) now makes it faster/easier to multiple-indent, much like Sublime. And for development: the Lisp debugger’s e command now includes the lexical environment.
ubernostrum 13y ago
This would be a lot more useful if the person writing the blog hadn't copied release notes in one character set into their blog entry in another character set. Tons and tons and tons of borked characters which make it very difficult to actually read what's going on.
- teddyh 13y ago
  He also did not escape angle brackets, so for instance “typing <left>, <right>, <S-left>, and <S-right> adjusts” from the original becomes “typing , , , and adjusts” in the text.
  - mickeyp 13y ago
    I've fixed this now.
- mickeyp 13y ago
  I'm not seeing the character set issue at all. Both Wordpress and Emacs are set to UTF-8.
  - ubernostrum 13y ago
    Here's an imgur album: http://imgur.com/a/ehla9 http://imgur.com/a/ehla9 Despite your comment saying you've fixed it, I'm still seeing this in Firefox, Chrome and Safari (OS X). No amount of fiddling with character sets client-side seems to fix it. Lot of it seems to be punctuation and ligature characters getting borked. Some still seems to be escaping issues. Some I don't even know.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - mickeyp 13y ago
      Sounds like a font or machine issue? I've never had any reports, ever, about this issue and my blog has been around for three years. I also tested it on my Android phone and it looks as fine as it ever does. In SCreenshot #1 where the two odd chracters appear around "indent-rigidly" - those characters are normal parentheses. Here is what Emacs reports the opening character to be: position: 13888 of 66844 (21%), column: 37 character: ( (displayed as () (codepoint 40, #o50, #x28) preferred charset: ascii (ASCII (ISO646 IRV)) code point in charset: 0x28 script: latin syntax: () which means: open, matches ) category: .:Base, <:Not at eol, a:ASCII, l:Latin, r:Roman to input: type "C-x 8 RET HEX-CODEPOINT" or "C-x 8 RET NAME" buffer code: #x28 file code: #x28 (encoded by coding system utf-8-unix) display: by this font (glyph code) xft:-microsoft-Consolas-normal-normal-normal-*-19-*-*-*-m-0-iso10646-1 (#x17F) Character code properties: customize what to show name: LEFT PARENTHESIS old-name: OPENING PARENTHESIS general-category: Ps (Punctuation, Open) decomposition: (40) ('(') There is an overlay here: From 13888 to 13889 face show-paren-match priority 1000
      - ubernostrum 13y ago
        Very odd. Seems like I might have a corrupt italic Constantia. Disabling the italic variants (forcing fake-italic rendering) immediately fixed this.
        mickeyp 13y ago
        Strange indeed. Mystery solved though. Thanks for the screenshots - they helped debug it!
    - mickeyp 13y ago
      Oh, and what I fixed were the missing angle brackets.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  ProTip: the iconv utility (part of flinch, so yes, it's installed on Linux / Mac) is quite helpful for fixing this. Fixing linewrap issues would also be useful.
jpace121 13y ago
I like how both emacs and vim continue to make improvements, while still maintaining a lot of the features that make them great.
asdfs 13y ago
Something I've heard about is integrating Guile into Emacs. Will Guile become the primary language for Emacs with Emacs Lisp as an option, or will Emacs Lisp remain the "default" choice, with Guile for those who want it? And does anyone know what sort of timeline we're looking at before Guile support is released?
- ams6110 13y ago
  Current status seems to be summarized here. http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs
  - melling 13y ago
    Seems to be going quite slowly. However, I would think getting a good Scheme implementation as the Emacs default is probably the single most important feature. All Emacs is, after all, is a Lisp interpreter.
    - __david__ 13y ago
      It's also one of the hardest features, since all Emacs is, after all, is a Lisp interpreter with a dialect that is incompatible with Scheme. :-)
    - davexunit 13y ago
      Emacs users and developers would continue to write Elisp. The difference is that Elisp would be running on the Guile VM, which will improve performance and bring some features that are currently missing from Emacs (threads, and some other stuff that I can't remember).
- espadrine 13y ago
  Take this with a grain of salt, but I believe that Emacs Lisp will be implemented on top of Guile. More precisely, ELisp code will be compiled to Guile bytecode (which runs on a register VM[1]), which should make ELisp code run faster. As a result, Guile and ELisp code will be able to play together. [1]: http://wingolog.org/archives/2013/11/26/a-register-vm-for-guile http://wingolog.org/archives/2013/11/26/a-register-vm-for-gu...
broodbucket 13y ago
So glad electric-indent-mode is enabled by default. That was the only thing I absolutely needed to make a .emacs config for when using a foreign computer for a little while. Interesting to see how good multi-monitor support is. Good changes, anyway.
- rmk2 13y ago
  I disabled electric-indent-mode, because it really doesn't get along well with org-mode in my experience. I only really use it for select languages, but otherwise tend to disable it globally.
  - mickeyp 13y ago
    My hope -- and I have yet to try it in anger in 24.4 -- is that these annoying issues are fixed.
- dded 13y ago
  > Interesting to see how good multi-monitor support is. I used Emacs for 13 years on VMS workstations, all of which used separate X displays for each monitor. Multiple-X-display support was added to Emacs in version 19.3x, but Emacs on VMS [1] was stuck on an older version (19.28?) for a very long time. So I longed for, but lacked, any multi-monitor use with Emacs for a long time. I take it for granted today. [1] That Emacs was available on VMS at all was due to the efforts of Richard Levitte--one of the unsung heros of FLOSS in my mind. The system interface stuff worked quite well on VMS.
johnwalker 13y ago
The developers have sent out this survey with emacs 24.4 requesting that users provide some information about vanilla packages. This might also be of interest to people looking for fun extensions to play with. http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/FrequentlyEnabledPackages_Emacs244_Survey http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/FrequentlyEnabledPackages_Ema...
- Adrock 13y ago
  I did a quick write-up of the top packages from the survey with brief descriptions of what they are and links to their respective Emacs Wiki pages: http://adereth.github.io/blog/2013/12/08/most-frequently-enabled-emacs-packages/ http://adereth.github.io/blog/2013/12/08/most-frequently-ena...
endlessvoid94 13y ago
> Great news for beginners of Emacs who mistakenly use Emacs in a terminal instead of in a window manager. I use emacs on purpose in the terminal. Is he being sarcastic here?
- thirsteh 13y ago
  Ditto. Can't stand the UI.
  - throwaway_yy2Di 13y ago
    It's just a basic menubar for new users; two lines in .emacs and it won't bother you again: (menu-bar-mode 0) (tool-bar-mode 0) (scroll-bar-mode 0) ; also possibly annoying
    - thirsteh 13y ago
      It's not so much the menubar--I've disabled that--but that I spend most of my time in ssh sessions, and I tend to re-launch emacs all of the time, to the extent that the start-up time of the GUI version bothers me.
      - dgtized 13y ago
        So launch it in tmux, and reconnect the next time you jump to that server. If you want faster start time you can also start emacs, run start-server, and then use emacsclient everywhere else to quickly open files from the commandline. In general though, opening and closing emacs all time is the wrong workflow to use with emacs.
        knz42 13y ago
        Note however you can't use emacs-server/emacsclient with the GUI over a SSH connection and tmux. With remote sessions and emacs you really have to choose between long start-up times and terminal-only editing.
midas007 13y ago
The title needs changing to future tense because it implies 24.4 has been released.
mouchahaha 13y ago
emacs is awsome
- mijuty_hello 13y ago
  it is
kaffeinecoma 13y ago
New hooks focus-in-hook, focus-out-hook. These are normal hooks run when an Emacs frame gains or loses input focus. Cool. I think the lack of such a hook is what was preventing an implementation of "save all buffers" when the user clicks outside the window, something commonly used in IDEs.
- jeremiep 13y ago
  Prelude also adds hooks to save a buffer every time it loses focus. It also triggers when the point is placed by a mouse click. Very useful!
mcguire 13y ago
> yow.el is obsolete; use fortune.el or cookie1.el instead. I guess everyone older than I am has died off.

126 points by lispython 13y ago

jph 13y ago

Thank you for the news! My personal favorite UI item: C-x TAB (indent-rigidly) now makes it faster/easier to multiple-indent, much like Sublime. And for development: the Lisp debugger’s e command now includes the lexical environment.

ubernostrum 13y ago

This would be a lot more useful if the person writing the blog hadn't copied release notes in one character set into their blog entry in another character set. Tons and tons and tons of borked characters which make it very difficult to actually read what's going on.

teddyh 13y ago
He also did not escape angle brackets, so for instance “typing <left>, <right>, <S-left>, and <S-right> adjusts” from the original becomes “typing , , , and adjusts” in the text.
- mickeyp 13y ago
  I've fixed this now.
mickeyp 13y ago
I'm not seeing the character set issue at all. Both Wordpress and Emacs are set to UTF-8.
- ubernostrum 13y ago
  Here's an imgur album: http://imgur.com/a/ehla9 http://imgur.com/a/ehla9 Despite your comment saying you've fixed it, I'm still seeing this in Firefox, Chrome and Safari (OS X). No amount of fiddling with character sets client-side seems to fix it. Lot of it seems to be punctuation and ligature characters getting borked. Some still seems to be escaping issues. Some I don't even know.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - mickeyp 13y ago
    Sounds like a font or machine issue? I've never had any reports, ever, about this issue and my blog has been around for three years. I also tested it on my Android phone and it looks as fine as it ever does. In SCreenshot #1 where the two odd chracters appear around "indent-rigidly" - those characters are normal parentheses. Here is what Emacs reports the opening character to be: position: 13888 of 66844 (21%), column: 37 character: ( (displayed as () (codepoint 40, #o50, #x28) preferred charset: ascii (ASCII (ISO646 IRV)) code point in charset: 0x28 script: latin syntax: () which means: open, matches ) category: .:Base, <:Not at eol, a:ASCII, l:Latin, r:Roman to input: type "C-x 8 RET HEX-CODEPOINT" or "C-x 8 RET NAME" buffer code: #x28 file code: #x28 (encoded by coding system utf-8-unix) display: by this font (glyph code) xft:-microsoft-Consolas-normal-normal-normal-*-19-*-*-*-m-0-iso10646-1 (#x17F) Character code properties: customize what to show name: LEFT PARENTHESIS old-name: OPENING PARENTHESIS general-category: Ps (Punctuation, Open) decomposition: (40) ('(') There is an overlay here: From 13888 to 13889 face show-paren-match priority 1000
    - ubernostrum 13y ago
      Very odd. Seems like I might have a corrupt italic Constantia. Disabling the italic variants (forcing fake-italic rendering) immediately fixed this.
      - mickeyp 13y ago
        Strange indeed. Mystery solved though. Thanks for the screenshots - they helped debug it!
  - mickeyp 13y ago
    Oh, and what I fixed were the missing angle brackets.
dredmorbius 13y ago
ProTip: the iconv utility (part of flinch, so yes, it's installed on Linux / Mac) is quite helpful for fixing this. Fixing linewrap issues would also be useful.

jpace121 13y ago

I like how both emacs and vim continue to make improvements, while still maintaining a lot of the features that make them great.

asdfs 13y ago

Something I've heard about is integrating Guile into Emacs. Will Guile become the primary language for Emacs with Emacs Lisp as an option, or will Emacs Lisp remain the "default" choice, with Guile for those who want it? And does anyone know what sort of timeline we're looking at before Guile support is released?

ams6110 13y ago
Current status seems to be summarized here. http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs
- melling 13y ago
  Seems to be going quite slowly. However, I would think getting a good Scheme implementation as the Emacs default is probably the single most important feature. All Emacs is, after all, is a Lisp interpreter.
  - __david__ 13y ago
    It's also one of the hardest features, since all Emacs is, after all, is a Lisp interpreter with a dialect that is incompatible with Scheme. :-)
  - davexunit 13y ago
    Emacs users and developers would continue to write Elisp. The difference is that Elisp would be running on the Guile VM, which will improve performance and bring some features that are currently missing from Emacs (threads, and some other stuff that I can't remember).
espadrine 13y ago
Take this with a grain of salt, but I believe that Emacs Lisp will be implemented on top of Guile. More precisely, ELisp code will be compiled to Guile bytecode (which runs on a register VM[1]), which should make ELisp code run faster. As a result, Guile and ELisp code will be able to play together. [1]: http://wingolog.org/archives/2013/11/26/a-register-vm-for-guile http://wingolog.org/archives/2013/11/26/a-register-vm-for-gu...

broodbucket 13y ago

So glad electric-indent-mode is enabled by default. That was the only thing I absolutely needed to make a .emacs config for when using a foreign computer for a little while. Interesting to see how good multi-monitor support is. Good changes, anyway.

rmk2 13y ago
I disabled electric-indent-mode, because it really doesn't get along well with org-mode in my experience. I only really use it for select languages, but otherwise tend to disable it globally.
- mickeyp 13y ago
  My hope -- and I have yet to try it in anger in 24.4 -- is that these annoying issues are fixed.
dded 13y ago
> Interesting to see how good multi-monitor support is. I used Emacs for 13 years on VMS workstations, all of which used separate X displays for each monitor. Multiple-X-display support was added to Emacs in version 19.3x, but Emacs on VMS [1] was stuck on an older version (19.28?) for a very long time. So I longed for, but lacked, any multi-monitor use with Emacs for a long time. I take it for granted today. [1] That Emacs was available on VMS at all was due to the efforts of Richard Levitte--one of the unsung heros of FLOSS in my mind. The system interface stuff worked quite well on VMS.

johnwalker 13y ago

The developers have sent out this survey with emacs 24.4 requesting that users provide some information about vanilla packages. This might also be of interest to people looking for fun extensions to play with. http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/FrequentlyEnabledPackages_Emacs244_Survey http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/FrequentlyEnabledPackages_Ema...

Adrock 13y ago
I did a quick write-up of the top packages from the survey with brief descriptions of what they are and links to their respective Emacs Wiki pages: http://adereth.github.io/blog/2013/12/08/most-frequently-enabled-emacs-packages/ http://adereth.github.io/blog/2013/12/08/most-frequently-ena...

endlessvoid94 13y ago

> Great news for beginners of Emacs who mistakenly use Emacs in a terminal instead of in a window manager. I use emacs on purpose in the terminal. Is he being sarcastic here?

thirsteh 13y ago
Ditto. Can't stand the UI.
- throwaway_yy2Di 13y ago
  It's just a basic menubar for new users; two lines in .emacs and it won't bother you again: (menu-bar-mode 0) (tool-bar-mode 0) (scroll-bar-mode 0) ; also possibly annoying
  - thirsteh 13y ago
    It's not so much the menubar--I've disabled that--but that I spend most of my time in ssh sessions, and I tend to re-launch emacs all of the time, to the extent that the start-up time of the GUI version bothers me.
    - dgtized 13y ago
      So launch it in tmux, and reconnect the next time you jump to that server. If you want faster start time you can also start emacs, run start-server, and then use emacsclient everywhere else to quickly open files from the commandline. In general though, opening and closing emacs all time is the wrong workflow to use with emacs.
      - knz42 13y ago
        Note however you can't use emacs-server/emacsclient with the GUI over a SSH connection and tmux. With remote sessions and emacs you really have to choose between long start-up times and terminal-only editing.

midas007 13y ago

The title needs changing to future tense because it implies 24.4 has been released.

mouchahaha 13y ago

emacs is awsome

mijuty_hello 13y ago
it is

kaffeinecoma 13y ago

New hooks focus-in-hook, focus-out-hook. These are normal hooks run when an Emacs frame gains or loses input focus. Cool. I think the lack of such a hook is what was preventing an implementation of "save all buffers" when the user clicks outside the window, something commonly used in IDEs.

jeremiep 13y ago
Prelude also adds hooks to save a buffer every time it loses focus. It also triggers when the point is placed by a mouse click. Very useful!

mcguire 13y ago

> yow.el is obsolete; use fortune.el or cookie1.el instead. I guess everyone older than I am has died off.