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GNU is Not Unix Upgrades

The Future of Emacs 570

An anonymous reader writes "If you've not heard much about Emacs development in recent years, you might be surprised to find that it is has been very active. Emacs 22 will have many new features such as support for Mac OS X and Cygwin; mouse wheel support and many new modes and packages. It can also be built with Gtk+ widgets and supports drag and drop for X. The NEWS file details all the changes. Although its very stable, don't expect to see it released any time shortly because according to RMS, the Emacs developers haven't been fixing bugs quickly enough. Those who have followed Emacs for long enough might see a different pattern."
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The Future of Emacs

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  • by SilverspurG ( 844751 ) * on Monday December 12, 2005 @09:19AM (#14237806) Homepage Journal
    according to RMS, the Emacs developers haven't been fixing bugs quickly enough
    Time can be expensive for some people.
  • by Ph33r th3 g(O)at ( 592622 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @09:20AM (#14237809)
    Emacs 22 will have many new features such as support for Mac OS X and Cygwin

    Since we're talking about Emacs here, it would be good to clarify whether Emacs will be running under OS X and Cygwin or the other way around.

  • by mrRay720 ( 874710 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @09:21AM (#14237815)
    It's no wonder so many open source projects never make it as far as a v1 release - emacs is stealing all of the version numbers!

    22!!
    • Re:No wonder... (Score:5, Informative)

      by ianezz ( 31449 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @09:46AM (#14237934) Homepage
      It's no wonder so many open source projects never make it as far as a v1 release - emacs is stealing all of the version numbers!

      Technically, it's Emacs 1.22, but the leading 1 has been dropped ages ago (no major incompatibilities, just new features...).

      • Re:No wonder... (Score:5, Informative)

        by justzisguy ( 573704 ) * on Monday December 12, 2005 @10:53AM (#14238422)
        Not to mention that they skipped more version numbers than most mature programs could ever hope to obtain. Quoth the wiki [wikipedia.org]:
        The first widely-distributed version of GNU Emacs was 15.34, which appeared in 1985. (Versions 2 through 12 never existed. Earlier versions of GNU Emacs had been numbered "1.x.x", but sometime after version 1.12 the decision was made to drop the "1", as it was thought the major number would never change. Version 13, the first public release, was made on March 20, 1985.
    • Still far from the goal: 42
      Think Deeper, Emacs!
    • Re:No wonder... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by jonadab ( 583620 )
      > It's no wonder so many open source projects never make it as far as a v1 release -
      > emacs is stealing all of the version numbers! 22!!

      Don't put exclamation marks on numbers like that; you'll confuse the math geeks, and 22 is a large enough version number as it stands, without taking the factorial of the factorial.

      However, Emacs 22 is actually an abbreviation. It's really 0.22, of course, because Emacs also has yet to reach a 1.0 release. To reach a 1.0 release, Emacs would have to be essentially

  • If you've not heard much about Emacs development in recent years, you might be surprised to find that it is has been very active.

    Wow - I just thought it was full.

  • by cfavader ( 754724 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @09:24AM (#14237831) Homepage
    Emacs 22 will have many new features such as support for Mac OS X and Cygwin

    Wait, so I can use my Emacs operating system on top my Windows operating system?

    I'm still waiting for them to release an emacs that runs on the metal, without an inferior (read: not written in lisp) OS in the middle.
  • Till it has a clippy...

    Give me clippy!

     
  • A POLL!!! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    WE need a poll!
    Really, we do!
    slashpoll:

    1. VI
    2. EMACS
    3. Cmdr. Taco's notepad
  • Cvs version (Score:5, Informative)

    by petteri_666 ( 745343 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @09:33AM (#14237869)
    Debian unstable has weekly snapshots of cvs emacs.
    http://packages.debian.org/unstable/editors/emacs- snapshot [debian.org]
    I have been using it for some time now and it works like a charm.
  • Times are changeing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by unoengborg ( 209251 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @09:33AM (#14237870) Homepage
    Even though emacs is a very good editor and development platform that for a long time have filled the purpose of being a swiss army knife for the software developer, I think its days of glory are over.

    Sure there will be emacs for many years to come, but I guess that Eclipse will more and more play that role for the generation of developers that grew up with graphical user interfaces. More and more programming languages gets supported by Eclipse, and the support of the existing ones seam to get better and better, and the community around it are getting stronger and stronger.

    Even so, its nice to see that old goodies like emacs are still supported and continue to evolve.

    • by CyricZ ( 887944 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @09:44AM (#14237915)
      I know a number of developers who develop on older hardware. They do that in order to produce software that runs very well on more modern hardware.

      Now, they're not using hardware that's all that outdated. We're talking 400-500 MHz Intel or AMD based systems. They're still quite usable as development systems. That is, of course, unless you want to use Eclipse.

      I was talking to one such developer who said he used EMACS for his Java development just because it ran far better on his system than Eclipse did. While Eclipse may be a good platform for some, it still does lack in the area of performance and the efficient use of resources.

      • by alienw ( 585907 )
        Are those actual professional programmers, or are they hobbyists who are too lazy to learn Eclipse? That thing saves so much time and frustration that I can't imagine not using it. If he wants to make sure it runs well on old hardware, it's not that hard to keep an old box around. I'd rather make sure it runs on new hardware, though. By the time that software gets released, most of the 500MHz boxes will be in the dumpster.

        Besides, I've used Eclipse on my (completely obsolete) 600MHz box. It's not the f
    • Eclipse is great when I want to be productive. When I'm using eclipse, I have to close my mail client and my web browser and all the myriad of other distracting applications. The bloat(understatement) is a feature not a bug.
    • I've tried using Eclipse. First, it's slow. When you have to start an alternative OS (i.e. Java) in order to run your app, that's to be expected. It's also very big, for much the same reason. These things lead it to feel very clunky.

      But, once I get past all that, it feels more like Eclipse gets in my way than helps me. It suffers the "Here, let me manage everything for you! You're going to do it all this way I expect, right?" problem that all IDEs suffer.

      Lastly, I don't (and won't, it's a dreadfully

    • From my perspective as an end-user, Unicode and bidirectionality support are the most glaring omissions of both Emacs and XEmacs. Mule development has moved slower than a mule's pace and, frankly, I'm tired of waiting. I think that, by the eve of 2006, there is little excuse for not getting these things done or putting them high on the priority list. Along with CJK and LGC (latin, greek, and cyrillic, Arabic script is one of the three most important script systems in use and in importance.

      To be fair, there
  • by digitaldc ( 879047 ) * on Monday December 12, 2005 @09:33AM (#14237871)
    "We are already out about more bugs faster than we are fixing them, and the cause is simple: we are not working enough on fixing them."

    Or, it could possibly be that they are discovering bugs faster than they can fix them. But it is hard to tell, it could be that they just aren't fixing them. But I am not sure. What was the problem again?
    • by Bogtha ( 906264 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @11:00AM (#14238480)

      Or, it could possibly be that they are discovering bugs faster than they can fix them.

      Bugs aren't sinister things that magically creep into software when you aren't looking. With software that has been stable for a long time, such as EMACS, you can generally substitute the phrase "introducing bugs" where you see the phrase "discovering bugs".

      The complaint isn't that there's some kind of deadline that the bug stompers have been ignoring, it's that people are working on new features instead of fixing the problems they already have. Which seems like a fairly reasonable thing to point out.

      The whole Slashdot story can basically be summed up as "RMS says: You've been adding bugs - now go fix them!" Which is what any maintainer has to do from time to time, but I'm sure the Slashdot hordes are going to have a field day flaming him for it.

    • Basically, the release criterion for Emacs 22, as set by RMS, is to fix all the bugs that the Emacs developers know of. No other software project nowadays (gcc, firefox, etc.) has this kind of criterion. It's been pointed out to RMS, several times, that Emacs 22, when it is shipped, *will* contain bugs; and that the only bugs that ought to be worked on close to a release are critical regressions. He has rejected this idea, which is why the Emacs 22 codebase is pretty much stuck in a pre-release state, possi
  • I just bought my dad an iMac, and was looking around for an emacs build for it.

    Any ideas on an ETA?
    • by Anonymous Coward
      I've just bought my dad a new Ferrari, and was looking around for a snow plow for it. Any ideas?
  • Why emacs? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by 91degrees ( 207121 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @09:43AM (#14237912) Journal
    What's so great about it that people insist on using it rather than any other editor? Seems all of the features are available for just about any other editor, and most of themare a lot easier to configure, and more compliant with UI guidelines.
    • by strider44 ( 650833 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @09:54AM (#14237987)
      Have you ever been writing a document then suddenly thought "Gee I'd love to play chess at the moment"? With another editor you'd be stuffed - you'd probably have to open another program or something, but not with Emacs.

      With Emacs you could be editing your document while chatting on IRC and checking your email, and you wouldn't even need another program. I heard with the new version it will make you tea and give you a massage. I know it already comes with a kitchen sink: apt says so.
      • by geophile ( 16995 )
        Have you ever been writing a document then suddenly thought "Gee I'd love to play chess at the moment"? With another editor you'd be stuffed - you'd probably have to open another program or something, but not with Emacs.

        Doesn't work for me. I tried to play, but emacs declined a game:

                M-x chess [no match]
    • Re:Why emacs? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Phillip2 ( 203612 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @09:58AM (#14238013)
      Emacs has a fairly sharp learning curve. But once you have got there
      it's still one of the quickest editors out there. The user interface
      is very fast to interact with.

      It's also very functional, doing most of what you want and quite a few
      things that you have never imagined. It's also not an IDE--it's a general
      purpose editing environment.

      Finally, it's very configurable, and all of the files that configure
      it are transparent. This means that my emacs setup works on different
      operating systems and I can sync the set up between different machines with
      the same program that I use for all my synchronisation needs.

      I used to spend 90% of my day in emacs. More recently, I've been microsofted;
      I have to use outlook for email (which is really, really horrible), and write
      more word docs than latex. I really miss being emacs. My wrists are starting
      to give in already.

      Phil
    • Well, I'd like to see another editor with which I can read mail, news, rss-feeds or which builts wikis or which has superior LaTeX support [gnu.org]. And this are only my needs.

      Which UI guidelines? Text editor UI guidelines? Care to provide a link?

      I don't know about Emacs, but XEmacs fits nicely into Windows' GUI. Better than both on Linux.

      • You know, I'm a fan of emacs, but doesn't this everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach go against the Unix philosophy of making lots of small interoperable tools that do one thing really well?
        • by chthonicdaemon ( 670385 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @10:22AM (#14238187) Homepage Journal
          You know, I'm a fan of emacs, but doesn't this everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach go against the Unix philosophy of making lots of small interoperable tools that do one thing really well?

          But you see, that is why emacs is so great, because all of these 'features' are not 'built into' emacs, but in fact emacs lisp programs that extend the basic editing functionality. The core emacs abilities are key to editing: supply a place for the text to be displayed (buffers), supply easy ways to switch between multiple files being edited (this may be slight overkill -- perhaps a window manager should be used for this, or some terminal switching type program, but getting the kill ring to come across those would be hard), supply a good arsenal of editing commands at a low level, and supply the ability to change the action mapped to any key. All the rest is on top of this core. A lot of the functionality is even sourced from other commands (like ediff -- uses diff).

          I think it was Eric Raymond who said that all the time that went into snazzy interfaces and GUI support in other programs was spent on editing text in emacs. It shows -- if you want to edit text, use a dedicated text editor.

          That being said, I think the main reason for Tetris in emacs is "because it's there" -- on some geek level it seems quite cool to me.
          • by ScottForbes ( 528679 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @11:12AM (#14238556) Homepage
            I think it was Eric Raymond who said that all the time that went into snazzy interfaces and GUI support in other programs was spent on editing text in emacs.
            You're thinking of Neal Stephenson [cryptonomicon.com]:
            I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. It was created by Richard Stallman; enough said. It is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful. It is colossal, and yet it only edits straight ASCII text files, which is to say, no fonts, no boldface, no underlining. In other words, the engineer-hours that, in the case of Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text. If you are a professional writer--i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed--emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish.
    • Re:Why emacs? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by chthonicdaemon ( 670385 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @10:11AM (#14238112) Homepage Journal
      To a large extent, I use emacs because it is the only editor I have worked with that offers the comprehensive support for LaTeX that I need. The AucTeX [gnu.org] environment has an absolutely amazing grasp of how the LaTeX process works and what support structures are required to speed development with extensive keyboard support. Of course, once you start using Emacs you start realising that it is really nice to be able to transpose characters, change case, transpose lines, have a working kill ring and amazing code editing support.

      I have not found an editor that does as much to help me get my code on the screen in such an unobtrusive way. Because each major mode is not just a set of highlighting and indenting rules, but indeed a little customised editor, you get thousands of hours worth of tweaking for indenting code, adding helpful hints, language-specific doodads (the FORTRAN mode has special support for moving blocks and locating variables), etc, all with very little cost in terms of screen real estate. And did I mention good keyboard support? And the fact that the editor and keybindings stay the same in Windows, Linux and Mac OS X -- I'l take that above 'interface guidelines' any day[1].

      I think the high integration of a good programming language (emacs lisp is quite good at doing what it does) also makes all of these things easier and more natural to develop, as a set of handy scripts easily transitions into a major mode.

      I am constantly plagued by the idea that someone, somewhere is doing something more efficiently than I am, so I experiment with editors constantly. I have tried more than I can remember. If you have a good recommendation, reply on this thread, but for me the question has always come back to 'why _not_ emacs?'.

      [1] I also think that interface guidelines are heavily weighted toward the inexperienced user -- emacs has a high learning curve, but like many professional tools, it pays back once you have learned to use it. Many people (like me) find it clunky to have to wade through seven levels of menus to find a feature when I could have just used M-x obscure-feature-name.
    • Re:Why emacs? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ianezz ( 31449 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @10:17AM (#14238153) Homepage
      What's so great about it that people insist on using it rather than any other editor?

      1. It runs on any platform out there, and in the exact same way. Learn Emacs once, use it forever;
      2. while it is somewhat long to learn, you do just everything without needing to move your hands from the keyboard, and without needing to watch the screen. I can't stress this point enough;
      3. it's higly customizable (really: M-x customize, and have a look for yourself);
      4. provides specialized modes for basically every language out there;
      5. being a Lisp machine, it's just natural to extend it, starting with little ad-hoc ELisp snippets, which sometimes turn into whole ELisp packages;
      6. it has been out there for almost 30 years, refined year by year by generations of users. There is a lot of know-how and good sense in it.

      The only other editors I'd consider would be Vim (because if Emacs is lightweight by today's standards, Vim is even lighter -- but then, there's also Zile [sourceforge.net]), and JEdit (because it is the only one that comes close in functionality).

      • Re:Why emacs? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Eivind Eklund ( 5161 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @10:24AM (#14238203) Journal
        Also, using Emacs will give you significant time off, as your wrists get pounded by the Ctrl-Meta- combos all the time, and you end up with RSI.

        Or at least it did for me. Emacs has probably given me at least a year of time off (taken in small pieces and with some extra pain added in.) Apart from that (and the load time), it is a brilliant editor.

        Eivind (now a vim-user.)

    • ...I tried Emacs, but I didn't seem to have enough fingers.
  • by TuringTest ( 533084 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @09:46AM (#14237935) Journal
    The main problem I see with Emacs is its terrible learning curve. Given the competing IDEs now available, I can't see any future for it unless it radicaly simplify the process needed to master the program. Drag'n'drop and mouse wheel support? That's not enough - I'd even say that they're against the traditional Emacs keyboard-only workflow.

    The only future I can see to the Emacs style of working is in projects like Archy [wikipedia.org] or Quicksilver [wikipedia.org], which completely redefine the particular tasks while keeping its strengths.
  • Mind-Boggling... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by StressGuy ( 472374 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @09:49AM (#14237943)
    Emacs and Vi have both been around for a very long time. Back in the mid-late 80's, I remember taking some computational math and fluid dynamics classes. Part of the projects involved writing FORTRAN code and the professors used Vi. As a result, documentation was readily available so, I used Vi as well. Of course, Emacs was there too but the documentation was not as available. Frankly, just shutting the command line version of Emacs down took some research. Anyway, there was a palpable elitism among the Emacs crowd which I always assumed to be more due to them using the "un-official" and more complex editor. As for myself, I didn't care, the editor was the means to the end, not the end in itself.

    Nowadays, Emacs (and XEmacs) have nice GUI's in front of them that greatly simplify their use. I use XEmacs on my Windows box (through Cygwin) at work and Emacs on my Ubuntu and SuSE Linux boxen at home. I still use Vi (Vim nowadays) when I need to quickly pop into the command line and do a config file edit, but I program in (X)Emacs. I know there is some sort of friction between the Emacs and XEmacs camp but that's not my concern. I use them both and I like them both.

    It's very bizarre that, 20 some odd years later, the Emacs/Vi war still rages on. For me, the editor is the means to the end and always will be. Heck, with Ubuntu, I'm starting to use gedit more and more.
    • In the late eighties I was a grad student in the late eighties doing computational chemistry on Unix boxes. I had to use vi, it was what my supervisor used and I hated it, compared to the nice easy editors like simedit we used on the DOS boxes. When a decade later I sarted with Linux at home i decided to use Emacs instead of vim. I became quite an Emacs zealot. Then I realized I was only able to use Emacs in the GUI version on X when I had to do some recovery work on the console.

      I have know gone back t

    • ...use gedit more and more....

      Or Kate. Split views and projects.

      Or best of all, Leo. Don't know why Leo is so underappreciated, its a fabulous package.
    • by dptalia ( 804960 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @10:15AM (#14238139) Journal
      was always "vi or emacs?" Since I was interviewing Unix developers, the answer could tell me a lot about them. The people with blank looks who didn't even know you were talking about editor were never asked back.
  • For those who can read Russian here's a discussion about [X]Emacs here: http://rsdn.ru/Forum/?mid=1322168 [rsdn.ru]

    PS: I'm currently developing my own IDE (called FlexIDE) because _none_ of UNIX IDEs (and this includes Emacs and ViM) is good enough for me...
  • Emacs 22 will have many new features such as support for Mac OS X

    I thought all macs came with OS X.
    .
    .
    .
    .
    .
    .
    .
    .
    .
    Yes, I'm kidding.
  • by tezza ( 539307 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @09:58AM (#14238016)
    I use emacs everyday. I use Eclipse almost every day with emacs key bindings.

    I don't see any line item bugs for "Make Emacs like Eclipse". There should be.

    Eclipse [eclipse.org] kills emacs. Emacs will be relegated to a super niche market if it does not borrow some of the techniques of Eclipse.

    Eclipse has many more than the following advantages:
    Programming domain issues have been thought out. Code gen follows some patterns, and eclipse makes far better use of them that emacs
    -- Such advantages as click on a variable to go to its instantiation.
    -- Underlining errors
    -- sure you CAN spend hours trawling for the modules to do the same for emacs, but that sucks, and yields variable results.
    A unified project space is opened up by default. You can see all your files.
    -- It takes a while to work out where Speedbar is under emacs and it sucks. Even if it sucks it should be opened by default, like *scratch*

    I'm happy to use Emacs everyday. But the reason I use it is:

    I finally have a .emacs I'm happy with
    You can run it well over ssh
    It has emacs keybindings [duh, but important]

    These are not enough reasons to bring new emacs users into the project. What do we do if RMS is hit by a bus or the existing emacsers eventually die of old age? Emacs people need to form and take ownership of sub projects around certain problem domains. e.g. Go HERE for Perl Emacs and HERE for XML editing. At the moment all you have is a loose coalition of Perl.com et alia articles.

    • by kzinti ( 9651 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @11:04AM (#14238502) Homepage Journal
      I've used Emacs for fifteen years, and XEmacs almost as long. I have code (ps-print) in the baseline versions of both. I love Emacs because it made me productive like no other editor did. There are two factors in this equation:

      First, I can use Emacs without taking my hands from the keyboard, ever. I can compile, debug, run a shell - you name it, I can do it without having to reach for the mouse.

      Second, it is customizable in the extreme. Everything from key bindings to highlighting is driven by Elisp and regular expressions. Don't like the way something works? You can quickly and easily change it by rebinding a lisp function; most importantly, you can make these mods on the fly, without having to run a separate compile step, without having to restart the editor.

      That said, I'm impressed with Eclipse. It has some amazingly good features in it; I particularly like the way I can highlight any variable, and instantly see its declaration, inheritance chain, implementing class, etc. We have some of those things, sorta-kinda, in Emacs with tags, but they're not as smooth and slick as Eclipse.

      Eclipse has some weak points too. It suffers from Visual Studio envy. Its syntax highlighting is inflexible. Everything about Eclipse is too mouse-oriented - I have to reach for the mouse WAAAY too often for my liking. Emacs-ish bindings are available, but I find them more trouble than they're worth. (I forget why at the moment; I tried the Emacs bindings some months ago, and ended up switching back.)

      What I'd like to see is an editor that combines the best of Emacs and Eclipse. You'd never have to take your hands from the keyboard. You'd get the attractive UI of Eclipse without the Visual envy. You'd get an editor that makes you more productive and happy than any other.

      (Is something like this dream in Emacs's future? I haven't read TFA, but I rather doubt it.)
      • I've used Emacs for fifteen years, and XEmacs almost as long.

        I've used vi for twenty.

        First, I can use Emacs without taking my hands from the keyboard, ever. I can compile, debug, run a shell - you name it, I can do it without having to reach for the mouse.

        Ditto for vi.

        Second, it is customizable in the extreme. Everything from key bindings to highlighting is driven by Elisp and regular expressions. Don't like the way something works? You can quickly and easily change it by rebinding a lisp function; mo

        • Not to turn this into another vi-vs-emacs flamefest, but what the hell...

          I can compile, debug, run a shell - you name it, I can do it without having to reach for the mouse.

          Ditto for vi.


          Can vi(m) run a shell in an editable buffer, or are you just talking about the :shell command? If the former, I'd like to know how to do it - it would be handy to use that when I'm on a system that lacks Emacs. The problem with :shell on vi is that you have to terminate the shell to get back to vi, and that you can't copy buf
    • I don't see any line item bugs for "Make Emacs like Eclipse". There should be.
      Eclipse kills emacs.
      I'm sorry, but I don't think even emacs could be bloated up as much as a bog-standard eclipse run, let alone one with plenty of plugins installed. Maybe eclipse kills emacs, but that's only through making the machine run out of swap space...
    • Actually, I think that you are missing the major advantage
      that Eclipse has over Emacs, which is that it's written in Java. While
      I like lisp, and think it's a very nice language, there is a problem
      with library support (for Emacs-Lisp, rather than Lisp in general). Writing
      packages for Emacs is quite hard. When you get down to it, this means that
      the rate at which new and usable packages come out in slower than it
      needs to be. And there are fewer people who are able to fix the bugs with
      it.

      Having said that, the i
      • by Bob Uhl ( 30977 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @05:17PM (#14241602)
        Actually, I think that you are missing the major advantage that Eclipse has over Emacs, which is that it's written in Java.

        That's an advantage?!? Most believe that it's a liability. Sure, as you point out, nowadays Lisp programmers (particularly elisp programmers) are fewer and further between, and hence libraries harder to find. But Lisp is almost universally acknowledged to be a superior language to Java, and offers features essential to writing a programmable text editor. And elisp really isn't that hard; it is different, but the learning curve is fairly shallow: one can easily go from customising variables to writing functions to customising keybindings to writing whole modes.

        True, emacs is an acquired taste, but like most such it's worth the effort to acquire.

    • Click to go to instantiation? Fist, I guess we don't have to wonder what language you write in...

      Second, who wants to click? Try Meta-. next time you're in emacs. (You do build etags, right?)

      Underlining errors? Sure, or color them differently, or whatever you'd like. Works just fine.

      The other thing about Eclipse is, what do you do when you want to edit something that isn't one of the limited things Eclipse has support for? Not all text files are code, and even the ones that are aren't always in a language E
  • by gmuslera ( 3436 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @09:59AM (#14238021) Homepage Journal
    With such title i thinked the article would be something like:
    • 2007- Emacs become an operating system
    • 2010-Emacs gets renamed to Multivac
    • 200000000- Emacs answers the question "how to reverse the entropy"
  • Why does emacs still live in the antediluvian world of dynamic scoping, unoptimized tail calls and stop-the-world garbage collection? Why does it include a lisp interpreter when pluggable interpreters are a dime a dozen? They should port the whole thing to common lisp, or to a modern compiling scheme like bigloo or chicken.
  • I wonder when we'll get that on xemacs [xemacs.org]...
  • Hype (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Syberghost ( 10557 ) <`moc.tsohgrebys' `ta' `tsohgrebys'> on Monday December 12, 2005 @10:22AM (#14238186)
    The headline makes it sound like Emacs is in some kind of danger. I think it's probably one of the programs with the least likelihood of going away, ever; almost everybody who uses it is qualified to maintain it and reluctant to stop using it. Emacs will be around as long as keyboards.

    I still won't use it, but it'll be around.
  • by water-and-sewer ( 612923 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @10:37AM (#14238287) Homepage

    Despite the trollish title of this post, I'm essentially an emacs fan. I am a writer, not a coder, and prefer the command line over GUI. I am the author of the Woodnotes Guide to Emacs for Writers (HTML) [therandymon.com] (PDF Version [therandymon.com]) and a bunch of books and papers. [therandymon.com].

    But I find myself using emacs less and less frequently. My first complaint is getting emacs and my Linux console to work correctly with diacritical marks. I know that's a function not only of emacs but also the packagers of my distribution, plus a deplorable lack of easily-installed console fonts that contain those glyphs. But regardless of whose fault it is, this problem makes it hard for me to get my work done the way I want to.

    I also need to program lots of small macros for very specific text editing features while writing a book that requires a silly markup format unique to the industry. Emacs was simply too hard to program for me to be able to implement it. Instead, I found Jedit [jedit.org], which easily facilitated things like switching between soft and hard wrap, keystroke macros, and some features I now find indispensable, like search and replace across all documents in a directory.

    It's not that emacs doesn't or can't implement these features, it's that it doesn't do so easily. I wrote up a little page [therandymon.com] about the macros and jedit features I use most frequently. It would be extremely difficult to publish similar instructions for emacs because of the greater difficult inherent in installing, using, and sharing macros.

    I still use emacs, but I use it for emailing, in conjunction with Mutt, the world's best email client. And for writing, I tend to stick to Jedit. Best of luck to emacs, which I still like, but I think for people like me the world has progressed and emacs is of limited use.

  • by Nerdposeur ( 910128 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @10:40AM (#14238306) Journal
    I have never understood the name Emac. iMac, ok; maybe the "i" stands for "interactive," or "internet."

    But "e," as in "email" or "e-commerce," means "electronic." So what you've got here is an electronic Mac? Well geez, how do all the other kinds work? Are they a mass of cogs and springs on the inside?
    • by masklinn ( 823351 ) <slashdot,org&masklinn,net> on Monday December 12, 2005 @11:26AM (#14238659)

      EMACS used to stand for Editor Macros.

      Because when it was first released (by the end of the 70s), EMACS was in fact a TECO macros package, result of the unification of several TECO macro packages such as TMACS and TECMACS.

      The "modern" Emacs, as an independant program (and not a bunch of TECO macros) built upon Lisp, came a few years later, taking inspiration from Multics Emacs and EINE (Eine Is Not Emacs) and ZWEI (Zwei Was Eine Initially) which opened the way for Emacs being written in Lisp (you should read the Multics Emacs [multicians.org] article BTW, it's extremely interresting). GNU Emacs "a we know it" was first released with v13.0 in 1985.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 12, 2005 @11:19AM (#14238596)
    I should start off by saying that up until very recently, Emacs has been my main editor. I work on Mac OS X and Linux primarily, and have used Emacs for quite some time. Emacs has worked on OS X for awhile already (either under the Carbon variants that exist, or via X, or via the terminal), so in that regard the article is somewhat misleading.

    What I like most about Emacs is that it has the best support for non-mainstream programming languages of any editor, ever. Period. I program in more than a dozen languages (C, C++, Java, Haskell, OCaml, SML, AliceML, Oz, Erlang, Scala, Scheme, Common LISP, Python, Perl, Ruby, APL, etc.), and many of those languages either have no support in other editors, or very poor support if they do. Emacs is the only editor that has at least *decent* support for all of them, and in a way that allows me to maintain a fairly similar style of usage across different languages. In other words, I get to keep my basic functionality and editor customizations relatively the straightforward and things just work pretty well no matter what task I am currently doing. On top of that, extending Emacs functionality to make certain tasks easier is pretty simple, even if you don't know much in the way of elisp. Most of the time, you can simply dig up a snippet of functionality off emacswiki.org. But adding stuff yourself isn't difficult, and the ability to evaluate elisp code inside of emacs itself speeds up the process of writing more complex functionality.

    However, it's not all roses. Despite the power of emacs, the reality is that emacs is arcane and outdated as hell. The ugliest manifestations of this arrive in a few different ways:

    1) One of them is the ad-hoc way in which emacs is customizable. Emacs basically just runs elisp scripts at run time, and whatever sort of state changing computations that are contained in those scripts reflect themselves in the editor you are eventually presented with. This is a fine idea on a small scale. On a large scale, it's bad. For one thing, it makes extending the editor in specific fashions, with complex features, much more difficult to do in a maintainable way. Essentially, there's little in the way of structure to help maintain conceptual integrity here. It's easy for things to break when you start to combine complex functionality from different pieces of code (usually manifested as modes or something similar) in ways not forseen by their respective authors beforehand. The other end of this, which falls in line with the maintainability problem, is the fact that this approach makes code reuse more difficult. Extensions to the editor in the form of elisp scripts are usually a one-off affair, and are not typically made to be particularly modular. You see the result of this in major-modes which largely accomplish the same tasks, but never share any of the same code. This is common not only in the modes for different programming languages (say they might all support a REPL, but in a slightly different way), but also with modes for other purposes.

    2) Unicode support. Emacs is getting much better here in more recent times, but it's far from perfect. Unicode support is difficult to setup on Emacs in a way that is easy to use and works predictably. I have had more experience here on Mac OS X with emacs, so admittedly it's possible that the situation isn't as bad on other platforms. However, true, well integrated Unicode has been late in coming to Emacs because of the legacy of design in the way Emacs has traditionally handled text manipulation and fonts.

    3) Display. Emacs text display is starting to show its age. I don't pretend to understand exactly how text display and font handling works in Emacs, but I understand that it is based on legacy designs. Manipulation of the display in text through emacs, with stuff like region highlighting or font locking, is nowhere near as flexible as what is possible in text views for editors in more modern frameworks that follow a design more akin to presentation through styles (
  • Uh huh (Score:5, Funny)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @11:31AM (#14238698)
    "Although its very stable, don't expect to see it released any time shortly because according to RMS, the Emacs developers haven't been fixing bugs quickly enough."

    Yeah, it's really too bad they don't work quite as fast as those Hurd guys.

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