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."
They're getting paid how much? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:They're getting paid how much? (Score:3, Funny)
Anyone can complain. Few take the responsibility for fixing the problem.
Re:They're getting paid how much? (Score:5, Funny)
RMS is too busy fixing bugs in GNU HURD.
Re:They're getting paid how much? (Score:3, Informative)
Support for OS X and Cygwin (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Support for OS X and Cygwin (Score:2)
Re:Support for OS X and Cygwin (Score:2)
Re:Support for OS X and Cygwin (Score:2)
old computer jokes (Score:4, Funny)
Well only if you insist.
You know what the acronym emacs stands for?
That's right
Escape
Meta
Alt
Control
Shift
Re:old computer jokes (Score:3, Funny)
Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping.
Yes... once upon a time 8 megabytes was a lot of memory.
No wonder... (Score:4, Funny)
22!!
Re:No wonder... (Score:5, Informative)
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)
Re:Still far... (Score:3, Funny)
Think Deeper, Emacs!
Re:Still far... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:No wonder... (Score:3, Interesting)
> 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
Active development? New features? (Score:2, Funny)
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.
Emacs OS on Windows OS? (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Re:Emacs OS on Windows OS? (Score:5, Interesting)
http://common-lisp.net/project/movitz/ [common-lisp.net]
Re:Emacs OS on Windows OS? (Score:3, Informative)
"LiCE is the GNU Emacs clone I'm building."
It runs on movitz (image available for download, if you want to run it yourself). I guess it'd be easier to extend LiCE than to port FSF Emacs to a non-C-based OS. Or porting McCLIM to work on movitz(+ framebuffer), which, in addition to enabling movitz to run Climacs, would also open up other programs.
Emacs will not be finished (Score:2, Funny)
Give me clippy!
Re:Emacs will not be finished (Score:2)
Why else would someone use vi? (Score:2)
A POLL!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
Really, we do!
slashpoll:
1. VI
2. EMACS
3. Cmdr. Taco's notepad
Be reasonable. (Score:2)
Cvs version (Score:5, Informative)
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/editors/emacs
I have been using it for some time now and it works like a charm.
Times are changeing (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Times are changeing (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Times are changeing (Score:3, Insightful)
Besides, I've used Eclipse on my (completely obsolete) 600MHz box. It's not the f
Re:Times are changeing (Score:4, Informative)
The funny thing is that people developping under Emacs can tell you exactly the same. And they'll tell the truth too, Emacs modes are extremely powerful on top of allowing you to write in pretty much any language from a single editor with the same efficiency.
Re:Times are changeing (Score:5, Funny)
Most studies did indeed discover that 5Gb RAM was a bare minimum to run Eclipse.
eclipse is the most productive application (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Times are changeing (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Arabic, unicode and bidi (Score:3, Interesting)
To be fair, there
Re:Times are changeing (Score:3, Informative)
Really!?! I worked at a mid-sized speech synthesis/recognition software company a few years ago, and did some pretty heavy work with Emacs under Solaris and a bit under Linux. I had my Sun Type 5 keyboard set up with all sorts of elisp macros attached to the extra column of keys on the let. *Sigh* I miss that keyboard :-)
We also used gcc, gprof, gmake, gdb, heavily. Gcc and MSVC were the two sup
work harder, now please (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Re:work harder, now please (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:work harder, now please (Score:3, Insightful)
Great timing! (Score:2)
Any ideas on an ETA?
Re:Great timing! (Score:2, Funny)
Why emacs? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why emacs? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Why emacs? (Score:3, Funny)
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)
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
Re:Why emacs? Because it's greast (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Why emacs? Because it's greast (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why emacs? Because it's greast (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Why emacs? Because it's greast (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why emacs? Because it's greast (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why emacs? (Score:4, Interesting)
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)
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)
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.)
As the saying goes... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Why emacs? (Score:3, Informative)
Better yet, learn to use Emacs in viper-mode.
Will new generations learn Emacs? (Score:4, Interesting)
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)
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.
Re:Mind-Boggling... (Score:3, Interesting)
I have know gone back t
Re:Mind-Boggling... (Score:2)
Or Kate. Split views and projects.
Or best of all, Leo. Don't know why Leo is so underappreciated, its a fabulous package.
My favorite Interview question (Score:5, Interesting)
[X]Emacs is obsolete! (Score:2)
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...
Obligatory... (Score:2)
I thought all macs came with OS X.
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Yes, I'm kidding.
Emacs vs Eclipse: A losing battle (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Emacs vs Eclipse: A losing battle (Score:5, Interesting)
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.)
4LL L33T H4X0RZ UZ3 VIM! (Score:3, Funny)
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
Re:4LL L33T H4X0RZ UZ3 VIM! (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Emacs vs Eclipse: A losing battle (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Emacs vs Eclipse: A losing battle (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Emacs vs Eclipse: A losing battle (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Emacs vs Eclipse: A losing battle (Score:3)
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
Future of Emacs (Score:5, Funny)
Port to common lisp or scheme already (Score:2)
CygWin and Mouse Wheel, huh? (Score:2)
Hype (Score:4, Insightful)
I still won't use it, but it'll be around.
Emacs slowly less relevant (Score:5, Informative)
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.
What does the E stand for? (Score:3, Funny)
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?
Re:What does the E stand for? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Emacs is nice, but conceptually dated... (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Emacs is nice, but conceptually dated... (Score:3, Insightful)
Some operations really can take long enough (complex regexps in large datasets, or connecting to a dead nntp server, for example) that you'd really like to be getting on with something else while you wait, and you can't.
Still, there's lots of things I'd like to be kept.
Uh huh (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, it's really too bad they don't work quite as fast as those Hurd guys.
Not their fault! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:No, thanks! (Score:3, Funny)
real men use ed
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:No, thanks! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:No, thanks! (Score:4, Insightful)
Emacs is not (mainly) a text editor, it's an IDE for integrating the whole programming process.
gvim (Score:2)
-everphilski-
Re:Mouse wheel support (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Mouse wheel support (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Mouse wheel support (Score:2)
I totally agree. There's been support for mouse wheels for a long time in many X-windows apps. But how would someone using "the evil platform" ever take OSS(*) seriously when reading this kind of news?
(*) Oh, since this is GNU Emacs: s/OSS/Free Software/
Re:Mouse wheel support (Score:2)
Real men use three button mice :)
Re:Mouse wheel support (Score:2, Interesting)
You can keep your windows editors ... wait, how many of them are there? Notepad and wordpad? At least I've got a nice selection with just a basic Linux install.
Not trolling but this works both ways. Install Windows, need to use an editor, so use one. Rather than evaluate which one of X editors I'd prefer to use.
Just to demonstrate why a lack of choice might be a good thing, which is better: vi or emacs?
Re:Just two things to say (Score:2)
last week
Re:What I really want is (Score:2, Informative)
Re:another Obligatory comment (Score:2)
Re:another Obligatory comment (Score:2)
I miss incremental search (currently borken in GTK SciTE), but not much else.
Re:mouse wheel support (Score:2, Informative)
Re:church of vi (Score:2)
Re:church of vi (Score:3, Insightful)
It's more personal than that (Score:5, Interesting)
When Lucid came to him with Emacs changes, it must have been kinda like if Microsoft started submitting multi-megabyte patch sets for the Linux kernel.
Re:It's more personal than that (Score:3, Insightful)
RMS hated commercial software, really hated commercial software. Good things came out of it as well as the bad attitude that produced the emacs fork. He's a human being not a cardboard hero - accept the good stuff and recognise the bad stuff like putting linux down for years ("linux, what's that?" in several interviews and telling the gcc folks not to put in linux work because that would hurt the hurd) and then coming out with implied ownership by his group for