Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

The undo system is confusing if you are accustomed to undo/redo in practically every other piece of software, but it does make sense (in its own kind of way). See the documentation for the undo commmand[1]. Emacs undo is powerful albeit with more cognitive load to use.

I have occasionally had to take over the controls for new emacs users while pair programming because the undo, while logical and consistent, doesn’t work as it does in other software. Each consecutive sequence of undo commands, once interrupted by any command that is not an undo is considered itself to be an atomic undoable change. This means that there is no need for a redo command, just stop undoing and the last undo sequence can be undone. Because emacs has a large undo limit you can keep undoing even past sequences of undos back to the original edit points of the file’s history.

That probably made no sense if you haven’t already mastered it, but another way to think of it is that edits and undos produce a branching tree of all the history of changes being made to the file. The entire tree of changes can be navigated with one command (undo) because that command makes a traversal of the tree, kind of like a post-order tree traversal. This is sufficiently confusing in practice that seeing the nanigation through the tree via the popular undo-tree emacs package helps a lot. I use the undo-tree command when I want to get to a version of the file not on the current main line of edits.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Un...

Anyone know when the Windows builds will be available for download?

I got it from here: http://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/pretest/windows/

It works flawlessly. I just dropped it (26.1) in on top of my existing setup and had to do nothing else and I'm working away on it right now.

When I was downloading at least, I had to download it and the dependencies separately. The README says there should be a unified zip-file but it wasn't there at the time.

Had some issues with Windows 10 refusing to merge the directories from the deps package so had to drop to a cygwin shell but it actually worked quite well even without the deps.

Basically "Undos" become actions that you can later "Undo". It's very weird. I accept that it means you never loose a change but it does feel a bit like boiling the ocean to produce some salt ... that said, it's an "alternative approach" that does have its merits. I like that about emacs, it challenges your assumptions and makes you think! As much concept art as a tool in itself.