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GNU Emacs 24.1 released

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31–40 of 79 posts

Re: GNU Emacs 24.1 released

#31
post #19

This means that I can finally try out Emacs Prelude [1]. Fantastic! I've been wanting to check it out for a while, but I haven't been brave enough to run a non-stable release of GNU Emacs. http://batsov.com/prelude/

Non-stable is a relative term. Emacs daily development snapshots are more stable than the stable releases of most other software.

I can vouch for this, I've been running on daily for the last 2 years and have rarely encountered a game stopping issue.

Re: GNU Emacs 24.1 released

#32
post #11
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is pretty radical. More info from the manual: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Usi... from http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Lex... - Such code is also much more friendly to concurrency, which we want to add to Emacs in the near future. Exciting times ahead ...

Indeed, will be nice when something blocking in one window doesn't lock up the whole emacs process.

Yes, ohhh, yes, I want that!

Re: GNU Emacs 24.1 released

#33
post #19

This means that I can finally try out Emacs Prelude [1]. Fantastic! I've been wanting to check it out for a while, but I haven't been brave enough to run a non-stable release of GNU Emacs. http://batsov.com/prelude/

What functionality does prelude provide? Unless I'm missing something, the website suggests that you can find out by "reading the source."

I had a similar experience once with the emacs starter kit [1]. Though it's a noble effort and probably does have a ton of great features, there are some problems: you pretty much get all or nothing (ESK split it out into a "core" and "per-language" set of libraries but still, there's a lot of stuff) and it's hard to tell which things are emacs builtin and what is customizable. If you disagree with a customization you're SOL; I knew enough about emacs to know that some things had been customized, and I didn't like them, but it was nigh impossible to find out where they were customized and how to turn them off.

It reminds me of the libraries vs frameworks discussion [2]. Emacs works well with libraries (with little elisp functions counting as "mini-libraries"), and the ESK/prelude seem like frameworks.

I'm not trying to pick on these toolkits in particular. They are probably a good way to start out with emacs--I know that the ESK provides a bunch of features to make it more "friendly" out of the box for someone who is coming from something like TextMate.

Most "old-school" emacs people I know have their own .emacs that have accumulated over years and years of trying to solve specific problems or customize that one thing that's annoyed the crap out of them for a while. My .emacs is not pages and pages, but it does have some good stuff in it.

What I'd love to see (and maybe I'm inviting myself to do this) would be a tool (maybe ELPA is this tool, though It's hard to know) which allows you to search for, browse, and install elisp snippets to help you out. ELPA is good for bigger libraries (i.e. major modes) but not for "how do I create an unfill-paragraph function?"

[1] https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2762280

Re: GNU Emacs 24.1 released

#35
I've been using the pretests for a while now, and the built in package manager has been an absolute joy to work with.

If I were to begin writing extensions, I'd also probably enjoy the lexical scoping a lot more.

Re: GNU Emacs 24.1 released

#38

Woah, emacs lisp now has lexical scoping

It's opt-in, otherwise most packages would break. To enable it per-file use a file-local variable: ;;; -*- lexical-binding: t -*-

How ironic. Wouldn't it make much sense to enable it per lexical scope?

Or as Perl did it (18 years ago) with a new keyword, so that you can use both dynamic and lexical variables in the same file? Best of both worlds.

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