ciaran
|
Martedì, 05 Giugno 2007
|
about:
emacs
The GNU project
has released
Emacs 22. For the curious, now is a good time to try the World's greatest
software package. There is even
an Emacs tour for people
to take a look first.
Emacs development began in 1976 and has been active development ever since.
It was built for extensibility, and for thirty years, users have been
adding and smoothing the features that make their daily work easier. The
documentation for GNU Emacs is also amazing. As well as the comprehensive
manual, there is convenient per-function and per-variable information
available from within Emacs.
When I moved from ViM to Emacs in 2002, I was amazed that most of the mildly
complex tricks that I learned with ViM were coded into Emacs and available at
a key press. It's definitely the piece of software the contributes most to
the efficiency of my computer usage.
Version 22 doesn't have a killer feature, there are just jumper loads of
changes that make things more like you'd expect or more convenient, such as:
- The TRAMP packages for editing remote files transparently over FTP or SSH
etc. is included
- Now follows convention of 'left mouse click to follow link'.
- Can now handle 256 megabyte files on 32-bit machines.
C-x eee now executes the last macro 3 times, so you
don't have to C-x e C-x e C-x e- The new Kmacro package has added a load of other conveniences too.
- GTK+ gui support, although I don't use those features.
- Better interface defaults: syntax highlighting is on by default and the
colour scheme is much easier on the eyes.
- New longlines-mode for editing paragraph-style documents which don't start a
new line in the file for each line displayed on the screen.
- Consistent display of lists of messages with line numbers such as the
results of grep or html validation.
A list of notable changes can be seen
in the NEWS file.
There are new features for programmers, but I'm not one (any more). And there
is better support for editing files in Asian writing systems, and for users of
non-standard hardware and operating systems, but I can't comment on any of
those features either.
Tips and tricks for Emacs can be found on this independent
site: http://www.emacswiki.org/, and the Emacs article on Wikipedia is quite good. And
discussion of the release can be found
on LWN.net, Slashdot,
OSNews, etc.
--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
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