Emacs 23.2 released

Kicking off the usual flamewar, eh?

Says you. I've been using Emacs for 20 years now, and I have no desire to use any other text editor for code development.

Vim is fine for the quick file edit, but I can't stand the moronic horror show that is CUA.

To me, it is only a sign that something Ubuntu is currently doing is a bit controversial. Controversies lead to inflamed discussions, which tend to get a large number of comments.

Even if the original post had nothing to do with the controversial topic, the discussion will drift towards it. This can explain why a discussion about wallpapers will suddenly start discussing window decorations, for instance. Even completely unrelated posts like one about a new release of Emacs can end up drifting towards it!

New releases of Emacs or Slackware, on the other hand, are a bit boring. Yeah, new release, with new features, but it still works as good as it worked in the past several releases. Not much to discuss. A side effect of being "old, traditional, trusting pieces of software", I guess.

>What is the fate of those old, traditionnal, trusting pieces of software that are the history of Linux?
To work well and so be uncontentious.

You can always use marking to come back to some position:

* Set a mark in current buffer (C-ESC)
* Scroll down/up o go where you'd like (even to different buffers).
* Then recover marked position (C-x C-x or C-x C-SPC)

Hmm. Your mention of gedit as an alternative makes me wonder if your trials of emacs consisted of using it in the way one would use gedit.

That would be missing almost all its utility.

Emacs use is meant to be a constant process of improvement. You can use it just for gedit-style editing, but you should notice shortcuts ever now and again, and these accumulate until you end up doing very advanced things without having put in much effort. The documentation is excellent.

I'm using emacs eight years now. I still haven't learned to write lisp (well, I can write a few lines), and I wouldn't call myself an advanced emacs user, but I can't imagine how I'd get a week's work done in a week if I had to edit text with gedit.

It's funny, I tried to use the mark features to jump back and forth in files under emacs in the days of slow terminals and modem connections. You could not afford to wait to scroll around, but did things like jump to a line number or search to a keyword you remembered. Sometimes the mark got cleared and I never bothered to learn the logic, but instead just remembered keywords to get back to my origin. I also habitually worked on files where most of the active editing was at the top or bottom, so I could just jump to the file ends easily.

These days, I almost always run emacs under X, and open multiple frames as needed. I love the fact that I can open multiple views on the same buffer, each with its own cursor. In this model, I would find it very strange for the cursor to ever be out of view on the frame. I also enable middle-mouse panning so I can fling the text around rapidly on super fast X terminals. However, recent emacs have sprung a new annoyance for me, often toggling itself between line-wrap and horizontal panning mode without my request it, if I happen to move the mouse not quite right on a long text line. I wish I could lock that setting so it stays in wrapped display mode even if I am sloppy panning vertically...

I am addicted to the Thinkpad keyboard with the trackpoint embedded in the keyboard, so I can use the mouse to drive my multi-window emacs sessions without taking my hands away from the main keyboard area. I use the mouse to access buffer menus and change focus rather than the emacs commands... in fact I don't even remember the emacs keys needed to move between buffers or windows anymore. I got the same keyboard in a USB model to use on my desktop systems, and feel vaguely disabled at any other computer without these!

In vim, you press control-O to return to a previous cursor position. vim has a pretty large stack of previous cursor positions, so you can jump around quite a bit.

control-I is kind of the "redo" to control-O's "undo."

And of course, you can set marks using m-<mark> and jump to them with `-<mark>.

Actually, try a little experiment in vim. Position your cursor somewhere and press control-F a few times to do page down. The cursor will follow you, as you note. Now do control-O followed by control-I. The cursor ends up where it was prior to your page down operations. Apparently when the cursor moves due to page down / page up operations it doesn't create a new entry on the cursor position stack.

So basically vim already has the functionality that you're looking for-- more or less.

Similar reaction as yours.

I'm a Vim user myself, but as much as I like Vi as a concept, the implementation itself is lacking. For example auto completion is slow.

People hyping Emacs or Vim are really in love with the concepts, but they're really not looking at the details. Both Emacs and Vim have lots of implementation warts, most of which have been solved by modern editors ages ago...

>I guess I'll never tolerate this editor, no matter how advanced it is, and won't understand the hype, because:

Because it does not adhere to the UNIX model. It probably does things well, but it does not do one thing, for all definitions of one.

If you use a computer to do your job, and your job involves a lot of text editing, then you're spending most of the day doing it. If you don't want to learn anything in order to do so, you must lead a really sterile working life.

I use emacs to get my job done, and it gets it done most admirably. I am no more interested in the looks or "out of the box experience" of my editor than, say, a park ranger in those of his car, shoes or binoculars.

This is an excellent comment, thanks!

The one thing you left out is that emacs did not previously include project management features.
I haven't set up CEDET yet, so I don't know how well that's been covered, but I'm looking forward to trying it?

Absolutely. Because it includes frontends to about everything.