LWN: Comments on "Pre-testing Emacs 22"

Pre-testing Emacs 22

beoba — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 19:33:36 +0000

Note to author: Using the term "your editor" to refer to the author of an article about text editors leads to confusion.

I like both kinds of editor & Emacs Pinky Solutions

shapr — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 16:28:23 +0000

I haven't touched the arrow keys, and I use C-v and M-v in place of pgup and pgdn. The only cases where I really miss pgup and pgdn are when I'm using aptitude.

Any suggestions for improving this keymap?

Difference in startup speed.

nix — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 21:00:33 +0000

But you have to install *everything* on a Linux box, or how does it get
there? It's not as if we have a `core' like the BSDs.

(In any case the argument is nearly-inverted on Solaris boxes, which tend
to get XEmacs as a matter of course on development platforms because Sun's
flagship development environment has XEmacs integration.)

Pre-testing Emacs 22

nix — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 20:56:01 +0000

Aha.

(And if you want to live in a straitjacket, Emacs has a psychiatrist. It's
stuffed with dead useful features like that. A minesweeper game, too, and
a window manager. Just what you want in your text editor: if it crashes X
goes down with it!)

Pre-testing Emacs 22

anandsr21 — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 10:21:03 +0000

I guess most Emacs users use Vi also for quick editing, or where Emacs does not exist. I should learn Tramp though, maybe I will be able to avoid using Vi in most places.

Difference in startup speed.

anandsr21 — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 09:59:24 +0000

The fact that you have to install it, is no good. The reason I use Vi for quick editing is because I can depend on it to be there. If I have to work substantially more then I will think of installing something, and in this case why not go with the real thing.

QEmacs -- another fast emacs alternative

pink18 — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 10:37:55 +0000

49KB. The killer feature for me, compared to other clones, is that vertical split mode works (out of the box).

http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemacs/

Switching to Emacs

ronaldcole — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 00:43:16 +0000

I would second this. XEmacs just handles X better than vanilla Emacs.

Pre-testing Emacs 22

akapoor — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 13:40:44 +0000

No mention of the fact that emacs now can take lisp-expressions as part of M-x {query}-replace-regex (this alone might be the single most important reason for upgrade).

Can still go better...

akapoor — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 13:29:22 +0000

Check out the _latest_ emacs incarnation i.e. with the emacs-unicode-2 branch. It supports anti-aliased-fonts. More info is available here:

http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/XftGnuEmacs

Emacs speed

giraffedata — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 20:13:56 +0000

The new GNU Emacs does feel a little faster and more responsive, somehow.

That's great to hear. The last two times I upgraded (to 20 and to 21), I had to abandon the new release because it was too slow. I don't ask for much -- just that the scrolling keep up with my keyboard repeat (20/second). I eventually got a faster CPU and dumped Emacs 19, but the system where I do much of my editing still can't handle 21.

I've always wondered what additional work Emacs was doing for me in scrolling down one line in the more advanced version -- it couldn't be anything worth buying a new computer over. And I wonder if I can turn it off.

Emacs, Vi, and Sodomy

giraffedata — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 20:05:08 +0000

Your editor must confess that he has never quite understood what motivates these battles; one person's choice of editor should not really be a problem for somebody else.

Then he must be truly mystified by the battles over laws against sodomy and recreational drug use.

Pre-testing Emacs 22

vmole — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 19:40:27 +0000

Make it 4 of us -- that's more than a club, that's a movement!

VIPER == best of both worlds

zooko — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 19:27:42 +0000

Dear Our Editor:

Give VIPER mode a try. It'll prevent you from joining the ranks of Emacs users (including many of the Emacs developers) who have permanently crippled hands from chording, and it'll let you basically get the best of both worlds.

vi vs emacs flamewars

mikov — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 19:22:54 +0000

It works! You may have just created one more Emacs fan ! :-)

vi vs emacs flamewars

cyd — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 16:53:10 +0000

It's also included by default in Emacs 22: M-x cua-mode RET or Options->C-x/C-c/C-v cut and paste (CUA)

Switching to Emacs

vonbrand — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 16:47:32 +0000

Perhaps you should give XEmacs a try...

Can still go better...

RelentlessWeevilHowl — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 05:07:03 +0000

> About the fonts, I started using JMK fonts in Emacs and though they are not
> anti-aliased, they did improve the appearance considerably.

Note that Debian's xfonts-jmk package includes ISO-10646-1 variants for 6x13, 8x15 and 10x20. This was done by glomming the similarly sized ISO-10646-1 "misc" fonts onto the original definitions. (The changelog also mentions some other tweaks.)

vi vs emacs flamewars

RelentlessWeevilHowl — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 05:01:35 +0000

> Here is a trivial feature that, as far as I can tell, they are both
> missing: marking text with shift+arrows.

You can get that from CUA mode for Emacs: http://www.cua.dk/cua.el

vi vs emacs flamewars

mikov — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 04:36:34 +0000

One point that our esteemed editor may be missing in his observation on
the vi vs Emacs flame wars, is that there is a non-insignificant number of
people who dislike both vi and Emacs :-) (deploying anti-flame
shielding...) This is virtually anybody who did not learn to program under
Unix.

For years now I have been deliberately forcing myself to use vim for
absolutely every task which doesn't require major editing - e.g.
configurations, small scripts, etc. I have to admit it still makes me want
to scream and break my keyboard. It also made adopt the terrible habit of
constantly and needlessly hitting Esc even when I am using other editors.

Subjectively Emacs does look a lore more workable, but the fact remains
that to me both Emacs and Vi have that 70-s feel to them.

Here is a trivial feature that, as far as I can tell, they are both
missing: marking text with shift+arrows. The logic tells me
that using control combinations may be more ergonomic than using the
arrows, but I doubt I will ever be able to stop using them ... I am
spoiled for ever - subjectively the best editor I ever used was Microsoft
Visual C 4. (Note that it isn't about the GUI - I actually prefer to run
an editor in a text terminal)

Pre-testing Emacs 22

N0NB — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 04:31:33 +0000

My point wasn't that KDE and Emacs are incompatible. I was making an obscure point in reference to the article's mention that Version 22 includes *two* IRC clients along with a spreadsheet to go with the existing mail and news and other functions. Thus my point about already having one DE that I use and not needing another.

Sheesh! Some of you guys take all of the fun out of posting...

But, I march to the beat of my own drummer. Which is why I switched to Linux full time long before there were any thoughts of IPOs or companies releasing some proprietary program as "open source". I won't be joining the vi or Emacs camps anytime soon (yes, I've tried each in the past, I just wish I could avoid vi as successfully as I can avoid Emacs) as I have found what works best for me.

The great thing about Free Software is that one need not live in a straight jacket.

Pre-testing Emacs 22

cyd — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 02:52:51 +0000

In Emacs, you can do M-x wordstar-mode RET. This turns on wordstar-like key bindings.

Pre-testing Emacs 22

nix — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 00:50:18 +0000

You also get all the things you asked about with Emacs (with, I think,
brief-mode).

You don't have to `remember' modes: for the most part they fly into
existence when you need them (make-mode when you load a makefile, cc-mode
when you load C code, info-mode when you read info, various gnus modes
when you're reading news).

And, um, I can't imagine what made you think that KDE and Emacs are in any
way incompatible. Emacs is an *editor*: you can use it as an editor and
use the desktop's features for e.g. terminal emulators, or live in it and
hardly ever venture out, it's up to you. (I do both: at work I live
entirely in XEmacs and hardly ever look at anything else: at home I use
konsoles and graphical media viewers and RSS aggregators and the like.)

I like both kinds of editor & Emacs Pinky Solutions

nix — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 00:47:26 +0000

Nifty keymap, and as a Maltron user I see the point of it: but, um, how do
you use the cursor keys, pgup, pgdown, and so on? I don't see any sign
that you've remapped *them* anywhere else...

Pre-testing Emacs 22

goeran — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 23:04:59 +0000

That makes at least three of us! Maybe we could start a club! :-)

Can still go better...

captrb — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 22:16:32 +0000

I also use Eclipse a great deal, but I *must* use emacs for serious source editing. I hit F5 (refresh files) a thousand times a day. There was a plugin that connected Emacs to Eclipse using beanshell and JDE, but it is not compatible with the latest Eclipse.

About the fonts, I started using JMK fonts in Emacs and though they are not anti-aliased, they did improve the appearance considerably.

alias emacs='emacs-snapshot-gtk -fn -jmk-neep-medium-r-normal-*-*-140-*-*-c-*-iso8859-15 -bg white -fg black'

p.s. i always edit my .emacs using VIM :-)

Difference in startup speed.

oak — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 19:30:09 +0000

And like any self-respecting programmer's text editor, Jed is
programmable (with Slang). I don't understand how Linus can
use an editor (microemacs) that isn't programmable... :-)

I use Vi, Emacs and some GUI text editors in addition to Jed.
Long ago my original reason for starting using Emacs (on 8 Mhz
/ 4MB machine) was its regex-replace feature (at that time
my main text editor was Mutt (programming language) editor).

Cool stuff

rfrancoise — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 19:26:33 +0000

Note: auto-compression-mode is enabled by default in Emacs 22.

Unicode?

liljencrantz — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 19:22:58 +0000

I am by no means an advanced Unicode (or emacs) user, but I've had no problems with UTF-8 in emacs 21. It's easy to convert a file to a different character set, copy-and-paste between buffers with different character sets work, and emacs shouts at me if I try to save a file in a character set that doesn't have mappings for all the characters in the buffer, etc.

The only major annoyance I've found is that double wide Unicode characters, e.g. Kanji, don't always work properly when running emacs in terminal (non-graphical) mode.

Pre-testing Emacs 22

N0NB — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 19:15:48 +0000

I'm not a professional developer although I do a bit of coding from time to time. Mostly I am a hobbyist/home user and have excised both Emacs and vi and friends from my systems.

For quick editing of config files and such I use Midnight Commander. Yes, it's editor is clunky, but no worse than vi, plus it does feature syntax highlighting on recognized file types.

For any other work I use FTE which fits my approach to editing very well. These are among the first two apps that I install. No mode switching, no protheletizing, just results.

While Emacs 22 sounds impressive, I already run KDE, so I don't need another DE. Secondly, I want an editor that edits without having to remember modes, allows the use of the mouse or keyboard to select text, and supports the basic Wordstar keystrokes for movement and text operations. I get that with FTE.

I like both kinds of editor & Emacs Pinky Solutions

shapr — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 18:55:24 +0000

I'm also a user of both kinds of editor, though I mostly live in xemacs and use tramp for some vim tasks.

Also, there's a solution to the emacs pinky problem: Don't use fingers for chording! (I express it as, "I am not a koala.")

I own a kinesis contoured keyboard and I remapped it such that all modifier keys are under my thumbs. I also remapped home & pgup -> Super and End & PgDn -> Hyper for extra emacs modifier goodness.

My ~/.emacs ends up including about 1500 lines of elisp some of which I've written myself and some downloaded from emacswiki.org and other good sources. (Jef Raskin's Humane Interface ideas are great, see DiskKey, KillKey, etc)

Tetris

jzbiciak — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 18:55:21 +0000

I think it's more like removing features based on their perceived ability to bring unwanted lawsuits, regardless of the merit of those lawsuits.

Can still go better...

charris — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 16:54:47 +0000

Looks like it Emacs still doesn't support anti-alias fonts like Bitstream Vera fonts... I love Emacs but this is really a shame.

That is the one single reason that prompted me to switch to gvim after using emacs for several years. I *hates* ugly fonts.

Pre-testing Emacs 22

flewellyn — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 15:50:06 +0000

As someone who has written term papers in both Vim and Emacs, I like them both. I find my usage patterns similar to our editor's: vim for small jobs, Emacs for day to day coding.

Tetris

flewellyn — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 15:47:01 +0000

Why should a distributor be able to decide what features your programs have, based on his or her personal preferences? Oi.

This, obviously, is why I'm a Gentoo user.

Difference in startup speed.

pflugstad — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 15:37:43 +0000

Or use Jed (http://www.jedsoft.org/jed/) and get vi startup speed with many emacs features. It's typically one of the first things I install on any system I'm administering.

Pre-testing Emacs 22

cyd — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 15:27:00 +0000

> I quickly discovered that something in the menu-nesting code makes emacs
> crash, so I abandonded further testing for now.

If you don't report the bug, it won't be fixed when you come back to it later. Please report the bug (to the Emacs devs, not to LWN.net).

Pre-testing Emacs 22

rfunk — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 14:32:44 +0000

When the Emacs 22 test release was announced, I tried the Debian package
of emacs-snapshot-gtk. I quickly discovered that something in the
menu-nesting code makes emacs crash, so I abandonded further testing for
now.

However, it did get me taking another look at GNU Emacs after using
Xemacs for a few years. And I've discovered that GNU Emacs 21 (with
sufficient customization/configuration) works better for me than XEmacs
21, so I've switched back to GNU.

Oh, and I'm happy to see that I have the same emacs vs. vi habits as our
esteemed editor. Though I sometimes like to use zile on servers to get a
bit of the emacs experience without losing the speed of vi.

Tetris

corbet — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 14:24:22 +0000

Ah...the version of emacs I work with most was packaged by a distributor with a well-known aversion to Tetris-like games. Should have thought of that. Sure enough, on another box running a different distribution, Tetris is present in emacs 21. The v22 version looks nicer though...

Can still go better...

nix — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 13:41:48 +0000

(Aside: the development release of XEmacs supports Xft and anti-aliased fonts. The improvement in appearance from that one change alone is quite remarkable.)