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What’s new in Emacs 28.1?

masteringemacs.org

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Re: What’s new in Emacs 28.1?

#91

Post by deagle50 »

rcconf wrote: post #78

I miss Emacs, but I moved to Visual Studio Code. I used Emacs for over 8 years so releases like this use to make me so happy. On the bright side, I still use Emacs bindings in Visual Studio Code. Maybe I should spin up Emacs again and give it another shot on my new M1 (maybe it can do the auto complete stuff faster now.)

Yes you should!

`brew install d12frosted/emacs-plus/emacs-plus@29 --with-native-comp --with-no-frame-refocus` is easy as pie and gets you the latest build with native comp and smooth trackpad scrolling.

Re: What’s new in Emacs 28.1?

#93

Post by jonpalmisc »

I almost wish I never tried Emacs. Ignorance is bliss, and Emacs ruined all other text editors for me.

There are absolutely areas that others do better, but the self-documenting “living program” nature is too much to give up; everything you ever need to know or do is a few keystrokes away.

Re: What’s new in Emacs 28.1?

#94

Post by achikin »

pen2l wrote: post #54
rayiner wrote: post #17

I was an Emacs user back in my software writing days, but I thought I had left it behind when I became a lawyer. Over the past month or two however I’ve moved more and more of my workflow over to Emacs. I started with using Org Mode and PDF tools for note taking and reviewing PDFs and task management: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30492373 . More recently I switched my email over to mu4e: https://www.emacswiki…

Are you using viper or evil-mode often (or some other thing which gives emacs vi bindings, I think there are a couple)? Because navigating text with emacs gives me the emacs pinky, I'm wondering how folks deal with that. Transposed cpslck with ctrl?

I set the key left to the spacebar (usually Alt or Cmd) to act as Ctrl in Emacs, so I can press it with my left thumb. This can be done in the Emacs config like this

  (setq mac-control-modifier 'command)
  (setq mac-command-modifier 'control)
  (setq mac-option-modifier 'meta)
  (setq mac-control-modifier 'super)

Re: What’s new in Emacs 28.1?

#95

Post by epicide »

bennyp101 wrote: post #19
ilovecaching wrote: post #5

It amazes me that developers pick closed source Jetbrains and Microsoft spyware for the program they rely on to make a living when Emacs and Vim/Neovim get better by leaps and bounds every year. Emacs has packages that VSCode can only dream of having and with Emacs distributions or really just lsp-mode you can have a full fledged IDE with 0 fiddling. I recently did some digging into the editor usage of noteworthy pro…

"you can have a full fledged IDE with 0 fiddling" - that is 100% not a thing that has ever happened to me whenever I go and look at emacs/vim! Modal editing is not really something that is needed anymore, and a lot of people don't have time to learn a new language just to move about in their IDE - just click the mouse button ...

I agree that neither vim nor emacs are "0 fiddling" [0]. However,

> Modal editing is not really something that is needed anymore

Honestly, I'm not sure it was ever "needed", but that's not really the point IMO.

It's hard for me to think about editing text in any way other than how Vim handles it. Part of that is admittedly just familiarity, but I think there's also something to the idea of treating strings as more than just arrays of characters. Once you start thinking about your text and code as nouns of various sizes and granularity [0], losing those feels cumbersome.

In order to achieve the latter, you either need modality or a huge number of control hotkeys. Vim takes the former approach while Emacs (and IDEs) takes the latter.

So yes, you can achieve the "crowning feature" of Vim (IMO) without modality, but I don't see modality itself as being a pro or a con as much as a design choice. If you don't prefer it, more power to you.

> and a lot of people don't have time to learn a new language just to move about in their IDE - just click the mouse button ...

This also works the other way. I don't want to have to learn where all the buttons are in $IDE just to move my text about. Thankfully, many IDEs include a Vim mode or plugin for it, but those are never quite the same.

Every tool has some level of learning curve. If you want it to be more flexible, powerful, and to get the most out of it, that learning curve is gonna be steeper. That goes for both IDEs with their buttons and Vim with its modal commands.

For something that you might use for hours on end every single day for professional work, putting in some time to learn it pays dividends. For both Vim and IDEs.

[0]: In vim parlance, this is effectively what "movements" operate on. They sort of define these objects via implication.

Re: What’s new in Emacs 28.1?

#96

Post by gspr »

NeutralForest wrote: post #85
gspr wrote: post #84

Knowledgeable Emacs folks in this thread: Does anyone know the status of Wayland-native Emacs? It's my last X/XWayland application, and it looks terrible on high-DPI displays.

The pure GTK branch has been merged into master and I use right now with KDE (and Wayland). I had to adjust the font size but other than that, I didn't meet any issue.

That's amazing news! Does that mean one can expect this feature in Emacs 29?

Edit: I just noticed that LWN has a news entry that explains just this – https://lwn.net/Articles/890405/ (short answer: yes).

Re: What’s new in Emacs 28.1?

#97

Post by JNRowe »

gjvc wrote: post #13

The native compilation part is the highlight. Could someone who knows about these things explain the difficulty Debian has in getting emacs 28 in -unstable ? (currently on 27 according to https://packages.debian.org/unstable/emacs )

It has only just been released. You can compare the release dates¹ to the package dates² to see how long it tends to take to be packaged and migrate.

¹ https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsReleaseDates

² https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/emacs

Re: What’s new in Emacs 28.1?

#98

Post by cjbgkagh »

rayiner wrote: post #22
bennyp101 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"you can have a full fledged IDE with 0 fiddling" - that is 100% not a thing that has ever happened to me whenever I go and look at emacs/vim! Modal editing is not really something that is needed anymore, and a lot of people don't have time to learn a new language just to move about in their IDE - just click the mouse button ...

Emacs isn’t a modal editor!

I refer to it as a chorded editor. Of course there is viper mode.

Re: What’s new in Emacs 28.1?

#99

Post by FR10 »

jonpalmisc wrote: post #93

I almost wish I never tried Emacs. Ignorance is bliss, and Emacs ruined all other text editors for me. There are absolutely areas that others do better, but the self-documenting “living program” nature is too much to give up; everything you ever need to know or do is a few keystrokes away.

Indeed, I started with VIM when I was in uni and things were kinda slow. After a few weeks/months I was very happy with it and it truly felt as a productivty booster. (I switched between VSCode with vim keybindings and Neovim). Then, for last year's AoC I wanted to explore Lisp, so after weeks of trying out sbcl and running it thru the terminal I finally tried Doom Emacs. And for me too, its been a journey, its a "text editor" that truly exemplifies what a good 40yo+ piece of software should be.

Re: What’s new in Emacs 28.1?

#100

Post by BeetleB »

pen2l wrote: post #54
rayiner wrote: post #17

I was an Emacs user back in my software writing days, but I thought I had left it behind when I became a lawyer. Over the past month or two however I’ve moved more and more of my workflow over to Emacs. I started with using Org Mode and PDF tools for note taking and reviewing PDFs and task management: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30492373 . More recently I switched my email over to mu4e: https://www.emacswiki…

Are you using viper or evil-mode often (or some other thing which gives emacs vi bindings, I think there are a couple)? Because navigating text with emacs gives me the emacs pinky, I'm wondering how folks deal with that. Transposed cpslck with ctrl?

> Because navigating text with emacs gives me the emacs pinky,

I had RSI issues early in my career (not Emacs related), and learned some tricks that come handy with Emacs.

Your keyboard has two control keys. Use both of them. In particular, use the "opposite" one. If you want to press C-c, use the right Control key with your right hand. If you want to press C-l, use the left control key with your left hand. This way you're distributing the work with both hands and are not twisting your hands into weird shapes trying to get both buttons with one hand.

And also: Once you do this, no reason to insist on using your pinky to hit Control. I often use my thumb as well.

I never got the Emacs pinky.

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