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Emacs 26.1 released

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Re: Emacs 26.1 released

#71

Post by innagadadavida »

lvh wrote: post #28
gaius wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that RMS refuses to endorse What's his rationale?

Mostly because they'd add a feature on a non-free platform (macOS) that is otherwise missing from a free platform. Notably, color emoji have worked fine forever on macOS, and were then _intentionally broken_ (when I say broken I mean the UI blocked for about ten seconds and then finally either displays a placeholder or something similarly less featureful). The reason for this is because Linux font rendering can't get…

Instead of blocking these features, won’t it be better to go fix he free platform? What he is doing only promotes mediocre free software to propagate that will only make user switch to other non-free alternatives - Vsnet and sublime are taking away many emacs users.

Re: Emacs 26.1 released

#72

Post by skissane »

jordigh wrote: post #40
gaius wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that RMS refuses to endorse What's his rationale?

That Emacs should not give an advantage to non-free operating systems. Now, because Emacs is free software, this doesn't prevent anyone such as Yamamoto to go and modify Emacs. Rms doesn't want his officially-sanctioned version to have Mac-only improvements, but he also defends the GPL which allows other people to do so. Rms isn't going to go and tell Yamamoto to take down his fork or anything (but he probably will t…

Couldn't one way out of the impasse be to enhance GNUstep to implement the macOS APIs/features which Yamamoto's fork uses? RMS doesn't want to add features only supported on proprietary platforms, but so long as one free software platform supports the same feature, that should answer RMS' objection.

Re: Emacs 26.1 released

#73

Post by TeMPOraL »

avar wrote: post #49
LukeShu wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lest someone misread this and think that Emacs hasn't had an update in 2 years: That says "major release". The previous release was the 25.3 minor release in September 2017.

And least anyone misunderstand your comment and misses the big picture, those are all in principle minor bugfix (although with some new features). The release you're referring to has maybe 20 lines of non-autogenerated code changed, and was "an emergency release to fix a security vulnerability in Emacs". By and large new Emacs features only get released every 2-4 years. If you write any non-trivial Emacs code you're…

It's a mature, solid platform, it can't just "move fast and break things".

> and if you're contributing to Emacs you can expect other users to have your feature in the in their hands by the time your newborn is old enough to walk around and argue with you.

Lest someone misread that and comes away with a misconception about the big picture - that's true if you're contributing to Emacs proper. I.e. you're writing C and Emacs Lisp code which is meant to be included for release with the main project.

99% of the things you can dream of adding to Emacs can be done in Elisp, and shared with other people immediately. Since Emacs is a stable platform, you probably won't have to worry about the underlying API breaking until your current newborn is old enough to start asking where children come from.

Re: Emacs 26.1 released

#74

Post by gkya »

innagadadavida wrote: post #71
lvh wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly because they'd add a feature on a non-free platform (macOS) that is otherwise missing from a free platform. Notably, color emoji have worked fine forever on macOS, and were then _intentionally broken_ (when I say broken I mean the UI blocked for about ten seconds and then finally either displays a placeholder or something similarly less featureful). The reason for this is because Linux font rendering can't get…

Instead of blocking these features, won’t it be better to go fix he free platform? What he is doing only promotes mediocre free software to propagate that will only make user switch to other non-free alternatives - Vsnet and sublime are taking away many emacs users.

RMS isn't the god of all free software. A GNOME desktop is composed of hundreds of bits of software, and it encompasses many unrelated individuals, at least three big orgs (GNOME, GNU, FreeDesktop/SytemD people), and carries a baggage of decades of history. You can't say, in such a situation, unlike what Apple and Microsoft do to their users many times, that the new way is this and everybody has to just eat it up.

WRT users switching, let them do. One thing I'd really fear would be Emacs becoming just another attention whore of a piece of software. Not only, but also, options and competition are very nice things to have. VSCode is not that interesting to me, but I really like Sublime Text; I can easily suggest it to anybody instead of Emacs if they are not into the idea of using a highly- and live-customisable and very composable environment and want sth. that just works.

Re: Emacs 26.1 released

#75

Post by gkya »

jordigh wrote: post #69
gkya wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is the repo: https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac Skimming the readme, I see that it's almost entirely mac specific and mostly UX. I can't say they are completely useless but nothing really vital, except the features inherited from Carbon, which seem useful (I really like the concept of AppleScript, i.e. all programs responding to a single programming interface; I guess DBus is supposed to do sth. similar on…

If anyone else is confused, "sth" is an abbreviation for "something" that was popularised in some countries by dictionaries for non-native English speakers. It's common in continental Europe and the Middle East but obscure in English-speaking countries; "smth", and "sthg" are other common abbreviations that also came from bilingual dictionaries.

Wow, interesting. FWIW, English is my L2 indeed, but I picked that "sth" up from the Internet, and thought that it was some sort of internet slang abbreviation. Thanks for the TIL!

Re: Emacs 26.1 released

#77

Post by h1d »

jordigh wrote: post #54
rekado wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not you. The defaults are pretty hostile, in my opinion. It took me three attempts over many years to fall in love with Emacs. I'm now using Emacs for everything: shell, git, email, file browser, window manager, IRC, slack, as a pdf reader, ... oh, and to edit text files. My advice is to keep using it. When you notice that something is really weird, run `M-x package-list-packages` to see if someone has already w…

> The defaults are pretty hostile, in my opinion. They're mostly old. So I guess they might be hostile to the young. I actually dislike some of the newer things like transient-mark-mode. I don't want all of that highlighting just because I have a selection region, and was quick to disable it when they enabled it to make it more "modern": http://inversethought.com/hg/dotemacs/file/f029c55c6221/dote...

Being young isn't the reason for feeling it hostile. Old ones just got used to it when it was the best they had back then.

I've been using vim for 15 years or something but its default is insanely hostile that the default hotkeys aren't even funny. You'd even feel wet that you can save a file with just 2 keys under Windows in Notepad compared to 4 keys that's not exactly intuitive until your muscle remembers it or modify it to something sane. (I use a single 'space' under command mode to save.)

Re: Emacs 26.1 released

#78

Post by mercer »

wging wrote: post #27
e40 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first just makes my titlebar white, not transparent. The second doesn't seem to do anything. I'm using the updated binary from emacsformacosx.com.

You may need to restart emacs after adding those lines to your config. Creating a fresh frame also seems to work, if you use daemon mode.

Restarting did the trick for me (also emacsformacosx.com).

Re: Emacs 26.1 released

#79

Post by mercer »

jordigh wrote: post #69
gkya wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is the repo: https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac Skimming the readme, I see that it's almost entirely mac specific and mostly UX. I can't say they are completely useless but nothing really vital, except the features inherited from Carbon, which seem useful (I really like the concept of AppleScript, i.e. all programs responding to a single programming interface; I guess DBus is supposed to do sth. similar on…

If anyone else is confused, "sth" is an abbreviation for "something" that was popularised in some countries by dictionaries for non-native English speakers. It's common in continental Europe and the Middle East but obscure in English-speaking countries; "smth", and "sthg" are other common abbreviations that also came from bilingual dictionaries.

It bothers me a tiny bit that 'sth' is a thing, because it seems so unnecessary to me (outside of perhaps T9 style texting?). I imagine it generates more confusion than it saves effort, considering the word's relative (in)frequency.

But I am also fascinated that this a apparently a thing :).

Re: Emacs 26.1 released

#80

Post by lawn »

mayankkaizen wrote: post #32

I am not a programmer but have been learning programming since last 2 years. Only yesterday, I installed emacs and spent half an hour on it. Even opened a tutorial to learn the basics. But I got irritated pretty soon and gave it up. Now I am thinking about people who use it like a pro. How the hell did they master this beast?

> How the hell did they master this beast?

Didn't give up.

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