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I saw the the news that emacs 23.1 was released.

For a programmer, What are the big reasons to upgrade? I'm currently on 22.2.

None of the features listed really seem like must-haves for me. The most immediately interesting bit is that nXML is now integrated. I already have it though.

But I have to admit I don't know what is really behind "smarter minibuffer completion" or "per buffer text scaling".

Anyone have any tips or examples of what these things are?

Cheeso
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  • Better on SuperUser, no? Or is there a reason you feel this is programming rather than just editing related? – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten Jul 30 '09 at 17:10
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    emacs is a programmer's editor. On SO, there are questions about why upgrade to the latest visual studio, or the latest SVN. Why not questions about the editor? – Cheeso Jul 30 '09 at 17:30
  • emacs is an OS and a way of life, it does a lot more that edit code. The question as written would fit right in on SuperUser, the most compelling reason to upgrade might be an improvement in the news reader mode or other non-programming feature. Perhaps it should be specialized a bit if it is to stay here. – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten Jul 30 '09 at 18:57
  • mckee you need to relax a little. If it's a question about emacs on SO, the presumption is it's a programming-oriented question. Or do you REALLY want me to prefix the question with "from a programmer's perspective,..." – Cheeso Jul 30 '09 at 20:26

6 Answers6

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For me, the biggest reason is the support for anti-aliased fonts. And the --daemon support is nice.

Emacs-fu has a nice write-up of some of the features.

Trey Jackson
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M-x butterfly

alt text

Community
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Ryan Fox
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  • Not sure why anyone would downvote. Implementing a feature based on an XKCD cartoon is so cool. – justinhj Jul 30 '09 at 17:11
  • but wait, what does it really do? (I don't have v23). This cartoon is the only doc I found on M-x butterfly. – Cheeso Jul 30 '09 at 17:34
  • Nothing, really... It asks if you want to unleash the power of the butterfly. If you say yes, you get a little animation. If you say no, it loads the page for the xkcd comic I included in my answer. – Ryan Fox Jul 30 '09 at 17:43
  • silly silly silly. Not compelling. But then, perhaps I am just taking Emacs too seriously. :-) – hillu Jul 30 '09 at 17:52
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No one said anything about multi-tty support? I have one long (LONG!) emacs session opened somewhere, and I ssh'ed into that machine remotely and use that particular emacs session (with all the temporary buffers, everything setup the way I liked, groups of buffers opened, etc.). The benefit of course, is that I don't need to worry about saving temporary buffers (you do use those as scratch pad, don't you?), etc. when switching machines (from school to home, for example).

Also, with multi-tty support, you can open emacs with emacsclient -nw to substitute your occasional needs for vi for quick terminal edits. emacsclient -nw will open even faster than vi, and you will have access to your opened emacs session as a bonus. (Before emacs 23, emacsclient cannot run from the terminal).

polyglot
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"Improved Unicode support (the internal character representation is now based on UTF-8)." is a critical reason for me, but it no doubt depends on your work flow.

Some of the terms you are asking about were discussed in Set Emacs defaut font face per-buffer/mode and are also in the emacs wiki, e.g. http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SetFonts (under Changing Font Size - Buffer Text Resizing ).

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mas
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  • Yes, Unicode support is the big feature for Emacs 23 -- far and away. Even if you don't use Unicode much, that's the biggee. – Drew Sep 05 '11 at 00:26
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While I was using the pre-releases, the most noticeable feature has been the improved font support. and some small things about smarter window splitting.

hillu
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  • Smarter window splitting? Maybe, I don't know, but when I updated to Emacs 23, it changes the default of splitting windows horizontally to vertically, which I not only hate but I've no idea how to change it. I've googled a lot about it, but with no luck :( – Leandro López Oct 04 '09 at 14:16
  • Actually I did it on Super User: http://superuser.com/questions/55466/how-can-i-change-switch-to-buffer-other-window-to-split-vertically-instead-of-hor – Leandro López Oct 15 '09 at 15:59
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for me its font support and gnupg integration.

also its nice to read pdf's from within emacs.

Hamza Yerlikaya
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