LWN: Comments on "Emacs 23.1 released"

VC enhancements

nix — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 21:29:32 +0000

Isn't that sort of repo-wide thing what magit is for?

VC enhancements

madscientist — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 18:24:35 +0000

Although this is a welcome improvement there's still a need for supporting "two stage commits" in VC. Git has this, with the staging area (nee index), but other SCM tools also have a concept of a private workspace or branch that's stored on the server (IOW, not just local files) that then need to be promoted or published to a more public branch/stream/whatever. I work with a tool (AccuRev) which has this explicitly (I'm working on updating our local VC support for AccuRev to Emacs 23 right now), but even tools which don't have it explicitly often implement it as a workflow. I wrote a complete changeset based environment for ClearCase back when I worked at a company that used that (just say no to UCM---ugh!!) and it used a ClearCase branch to track each changeset, so you checked in your changes there but then you need an extra command when you're done with the changest, to push it up to the next level.

I don't think there's any support in Git's VC mode for push for example.

Emacs 23.1 released

dann — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 20:11:27 +0000

To be fair, emacs-22.3 supported git too, but only at file level, no changesets.

Congratualtions Emacs Developers!

troglobit — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 19:54:21 +0000

This is great news! Big congratulations to the whole Emacs development team!

Personally I've been using the emacs-snapshot builds (for Debian) by Romain Francoise for quite some time now. So I've had the privilege of keeping up with the latest features as they were developed, without having to build it myself from CVS (or Git, or Bazaar repositories). It's quite impressive how much work has gone into this release.

See Romain's site for details, or try the Ubuntu packages from the Emacs Elisp PPA team.

Thanks!

Emacs 23.1 released

dskoll — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 14:30:20 +0000

Not mentioned in the announcement: the VC mode has been improved to better support modern VCS.

Yes! I was so happy to see git support in vc-mode! And being able to run ediff on different revisions is very nice.

Emacs 23.1 released

mjthayer — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 14:24:50 +0000

Sure, I'm not meaning to criticise the way people spend their own time :) Sorry if it sounded that way.

Emacs 23.1 released

cyd — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 14:12:20 +0000

The GNU project isn't a corporation, you know. People work on what they're interested in, not what they're told; so if Emacs didn't exist, people interested in text editing would be working on some other text editor instead. Hurd competes for hacker mindshare with Linux, not Emacs.

Emacs 23.1 released

mjthayer — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 08:21:52 +0000

Perhaps there is a grain of truth in it though? Something as complex as Emacs must be rather a drain on resources that might otherwise have gone on Hurd.

Emacs 23.1 released

flewellyn — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 08:09:19 +0000

That's an old one.

Emacs 23.1 released

dann — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 22:04:24 +0000

More details to what was in the announcement:

- Support for using X displays and text terminals in one session,
and for running as a daemon.

Running as a daemon (emacs --daemon) means that emacs stays running after you log out from the machine, and when connecting again you can open (using emacsclient) X11 frames and/or tty frames. The tty frames don't need to be on the same type of tty, you can have frames on a 256 color xterm, and 8 color xterm (these are black on white by default) and a linux console (white on black) and the colors used for syntax highlighting automatically adapt.

- Shift-selection.

You can use shift + arrow keys by default (it was possible before, but not by default) to select text. More, if you have something selected TAB, M-q, etc. will indent/fill that selection.

- Directory-local variables.

This means that you can add a .dir-locals.el at the top of your project tree to impose coding conventions for that tree regardless of the user's individual settings. For example if you hate tabs, you can set indent-tabs-mode to nil, and tabs will never be inserted. Etc. etc.

- there are more packages added than the listed ones, you should see the NEWS file

Not mentioned in the announcement: the VC mode has been improved to better support modern VCS.
You can apply the same VC operation to multiple files (and directories).
Showing logs, annotations (blame) and diffs is tighter integrated. For example you can see file (or changeset) diffs from the log view mode.
vc-dir (C-x v d) is a new implementation of the VC directory status, it allows to apply various operations on multiple files.
It is possible to extend VC to support features specific to each VCS.

Emacs 23.1 released

mjthayer — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 14:19:42 +0000

Perhaps Emacs is the reason that Hurd advances so slowly - the GNU project already have an operating system, so Hurd probably seems low priority.