GNU Emacs Now Has Native Support For GTK Widgets (phoronix.com) 133
An anonymous reader writes: The GNU Emacs text editor now has merged the X Widgets branch. What this work allows is for embedding GTK+ user interface widgets within Emacs for features like landing MPlayer or a full web browser in Emacs. This allows now for more endless opportunities for the 40 year old GNU text editor. The X/GTK widgets support will come with GNU Emacs 25.1.
Old joke even more true.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Emacs would be a hell of an operating system if someone would just write a decent text editor for it.
Re: Old joke even more true.... (Score:3)
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Hmm. Running vim inside emacs. You sure the universe wouldn't explode and create a giant black hole or something?
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Hmm. Running vim inside emacs. You sure the universe wouldn't explode and create a giant black hole or something?
Emacs already has a vi/vim emulation mode - along with several other editors.
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I'm pretty sure that this is the straw that broke the camel's back. At some point you have to stop adding stuff. Well, no... You don't HAVE to. But you SHOULD. Who thought that this would be a good idea and how come nobody smacked them? Were they drunk? Stoned? It's a text editor. Well, no. It's supposed to be a text editor. There's probably a compiler built into it by now. It's got games in it. It's got a browser in it now, if you want to build it. It's no longer a text editor.
You can't even say it's a tex
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At some point you have to stop adding stuff. Well, no... You don't HAVE to. But you SHOULD.
The GTK stuff seems dumb, but most of the extensions are loadable modules written in LISP and the "E" in Emacs stands for Extensible, so adding stuff is kind of the point. Back in the day of just ASCII terminals, a lot of the stuff Emacs did was very helpful. Using it as an IDE, auto-formating code, starting a compile (via a Makefile) and parsing the compiler output so you could jump directly to the files and lines with the errors, etc... Being able to FTP files in/out of buffers. Arbitrarily splitting sc
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Yeah, I mean I get it but, really, still, today, and GTK now? I'm serious, you could almost have a fully functioning OS based on the kernel, an init system (systemd would work but I wasn't going to mention that in my first post) and just emacs if you wanted to extend it out. I guess you'd still want Perl installed, probably Python, a compiler, but one could make a fairly robust but very small (yet functional) desktop OS out of this at this point - well, this and a few other things. If it were just a consump
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I haven't decided if that's awesome or insane.
Re:Old joke even more true.... (Score:5, Funny)
Emacs is the purest implementation of Zawinski's Law [wikipedia.org]
-- .... :w :q :wq :wq! ^d
exit X Q ^C ^? :quitbye CtrlAltDel ~~q :~q logout save/quit :!QUIT
^[zz ^[ZZZZZZ ^H man vi ^@ ^L ^[c ^# ^E ^X ^I ^T ? help helpquit ^D
man quit ^C ^c ?Quit ?q CtrlShftDel "Hey, what does this button d..."
Disclaimer - These opiini^H^H damn! ^H^H ^Q ^[
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Has that been updated to include Facebook, Twitter, or Minecraft?
I'm not even sure kids use email these days.
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LOL ... please tell me you're joking. I can never tell with kitchen sink, I mean, emacs.
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Not joking:
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs... [emacswiki.org]
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Wow ... so ... what are we up to now? 8,762 pounds of shit in a 5 pound bag?
Yeah, I reiterate, I've found that ridiculous for the last 20 years. I see nothing has changed.
Re:Old joke even more true.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Why is it ridiculous?
I've used emacs for 20 years almost purely as a text editor, though it was my email client for about five years. The beauty of emacs is that you *can* do almost anything, but it doesn't make you. If all you want is a text editor, that's all it is, and you won't even know it can do other things unless you try to make it.
"Products" (word, firefox, etc...) will try to force you to use the new and useless (to you) capabilities with every release and prevent you from using it as the simple tool that you want. Emacs is the simple tool that you want first and foremost, and if you want more, it probably is that as well.
It is perfect.
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Playing devils advocate here. But does Emacs follow the Unix Philosophy of doing ONE thing and one thing well?
Not anymore it doesn't.
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send tweets from Emacs
Next task: Pipe the Emacs psychiatrist straight to Twitter and run as a background process. That ought to keep the Twits busy for a while.
Facebook support seems to be available. (Score:2)
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You can run a terminal instance within emacs, on which you can open another instance of emacs.
Of course it screws up the key chords because you have to specify whether they're for the inner or outer emacs.
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If you look at Emacs today, it's relatively small overall. The old joke gets stale because it's gone from being an example of a giant software package into something that is dwarfed by other packages. What makes it big is that it has a programming language which means there are thousands of optional user created programs for it. Meanwhile there are editors much bigger than Emacs which are not nearly as extensible.
Emacs is a textual display system with a programming language to use it, with several primit
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mod it up +5 very funny
VI is forever (Score:3)
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And nothing of value was added ... (Score:1, Flamebait)
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IIRC Ubuntu does not come with vim, but nano as a text editor for terminals (gedit for graphical). Which is fine.
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IIRC Ubuntu does not come with vim, but nano as a text editor for terminals (gedit for graphical). Which is fine.
It's there.
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IIRC Ubuntu does not come with vim, but nano as a text editor for terminals (gedit for graphical). Which is fine.
Open a terminal and type "vi" followed by ENTER key.
What can you see now?
Re:And nothing of value was added ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Funniest thing I ever saw was a guy who was so utterly dependent on his emacs as to be crippled without it ... and then he's on a client site, on a Solaris workstation he can't install software onto ... and the only editor he had was vi. He was almost in tears (we were too but from laughing at him).
Anybody who is going to use unix-type systems and doesn't know how to do at least some basics in vi is just asking to be made to look like an idiot.
I must confess, I've never grasped this incessant need to do everything from within emacs. I find it tends to create people who spend endless hours honing their editor instead of doing their jobs, and who suddenly can't do anything without all the training wheels they've added.
Seriously, check the damned weather somewhere else.
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I recall a time 10 or 15 years ago when I actually had to use ed . . . I vaguely want today that the debian I was using had dynamically linked vi, or some such, and it just wasn't available that early in the boot sequence. Or maybe /usr or /bin hadn't mounted; it's been a while.
What I really remember from it was the shock of needing to use ed for the first time in decades, and relief that I could pull it off . . .
hawk
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I recall a time 10 or 15 years ago when I actually had to use ed . . .
[...]
What I really remember from it was the shock of needing to use ed for the first time in decades, and relief that I could pull it off . . .
Bless you, sir. You have not lost the pure faith. [gnu.org]
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I must confess, I've never grasped this incessant need to do everything from within emacs. I find it tends to create people who spend endless hours honing their editor instead of doing their jobs, and who suddenly can't do anything without all the training wheels they've added.
They do it because thats all they know. They started using computers as the bearded priesthood in the 70's at MIT or Stanford when all they had was some Terminal with some wacky keyboard with waaaaay too many modifier keys.
Remember that emacs started as a set of macros for TECO, which was written in 1964. They Modified emacs to basically handle multiple applications and be a windowing system before there were any available windowing systems. Using emacs to do multiple things let one visually see the appl
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And yet in my experience most of the rest of the UNIX greybeards I have met ... most of the time they fire up vi.
Emacs is as much a cultural thing as anything else. You came from an emacs shop and drank the kool-aid, or you simply don't have any interest in it.
I cut my teeth on unix systems which didn't have emacs by default, by the time I saw it I was happy with vi and looked at emacs and went "what the hell?".
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Now I use whatever.
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When the only UI was an ascii terminal, that was very handy. You've got a VT100 with 24 lines only (and maybe a 25th status line). If your typical work cycle is "edit with vi then exist", "compile with cc", "remember line number of error", "edit with vi to fix error", and so on, then being able to do it all from one program is handy. Why run the shell inside of Emacs? Because you can scroll up and down and see previous shell output which you can't do with just a raw shell (though windowing systems remo
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When the only UI was an ascii terminal, that was very handy. You've got a VT100 with 24 lines only (and maybe a 25th status line). If your typical work cycle is "edit with vi then exist", "compile with cc", "remember line number of error", "edit with vi to fix error", and so on, then being able to do it all from one program is handy.
yes, but we now live in a X11 world, it isn't 1978 anymore. We have systems that can handle multiple applications/windows BETTER than emacs can because that's what it's designed to do.
Emacs started as an editor, well actually a bunch of macros for TECO....all the other stuff it can do is basically grafted on cruft designed for a computing past that doesn't exist anymore. And who uses all that cruft? People who were members of the bearded priesthood in the 70's who are still trying to live in computings p
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The need is because so many things require editing of some form. So you do a mail reader in emacs because you can compose your emails using the same editor that you use to edit everything else, and without spawning it as a subprocess of the mail reader. Same for news reader, etc. Same keystrokes, same commands, same environment. When the alternative was the standard command line "mail" then using Emacs was a vast improvement.
The other reason is that you can write your own and customize the hell out of i
Re:And nothing of value was added ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, this is SUCH a niche product. Everyone uses a VI clone because it's guaranteed to be present on *nux systems.
Emacs is a niche product? I've used Emacs (or XEmacs) on every system I've every used and/or administered, from PCs running BSD, Linux and Windows to just about every known mid-large Unix BDS/SysV system to Cray supercomputers since the mid 1980s. (Running Emacs on a Cray 2 is truly a guilty pleasure.) True I may have had to install (or build and install) it myself, but still hardly niche.
Of course, I *also* know vi/vim for simple editing tasks. For serious programming, I always use Emacs or XEmacs. One can always use the vi/vim emulation mode in Emacs... :-)
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Mod parent up, this is my experience, too. (And I love Aquamacs on my Mac.)
Why is it I don't have moderator points when I really want them?
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Yes, I can. Emacs run from the terminal is the classic Emacs experience. Aquamacs has a lot tighter integration with Mac OS X including better handling of both frames and windows.
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Fair enough...
But (a) I don't have a Linux box. Part of the discussion here is the ubiquity of Emacs, so a good quality Emacs that fits well in Mac OS X is relevant. I'd expect Emacs to be part of any (reasonable) Linux distribution, (b) which windowing environment would be running on my Linux box if I had one? (c) when I actively cranked out code for a living on Sun workstations, the only reason I ran the window manager was to get screen acceleration for my terminal windows, one of which ran old-fashion
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Voices of sanity in a sea of snark. Which keyindings do people use for their shell?
When I started as a sysadmin and wanted to muscle-memorise the vi commands, I would run 'set -o vi'. Worked a treat. After I discovered the joy of emacs, it was 'set -o emacs' .
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Why is it I don't have moderator points when I really want them?
I just use this command:
M-15 M-x get-slashdot-mod-points
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Too late! I've already posted and disqualified myself.
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I use both vi and emacs also. So I surprise some people who see me use vi and then say "wait, if you know vi then why do you use emacs?"
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I use both vi and emacs also. So I surprise some people who see me use vi and then say "wait, if you know vi then why do you use emacs?"
When I get asked things like that I reply, because Emacs can do everything Vi does and more, but not the other way around. Then I show them my 300+ page GBC-bound printed copy of the Emacs manual from the 1980s (that I printed/bound myself way back when) and note that it doesn't even cover the thousands of elisp libraries that can be loaded ... :-)
Yes, Vi is a fine editor for simple things and many, many people use it productively for more, but - quite frankly - there really isn't a more powerful editor
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I've got a coworker using vi who seems to take it as a challenge to watch me over my shoulder and point out "vi could do the same thing in fewer keystrokes". He doesn't care that Emacs can probably do it too it's only that I haven't memorized everything, and even though I use vi all the time I haven't memorized all of its keystrokes.
It's a pointless exercise to go down that route, because most of the reason for sticking with an editor is based on muscle memory anyway.
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Everyone? Emacs is on Macs (though it's text only). Most people I know go out of their way to stick their favorite editors on their systems, SlickEdit, JavaBeans, even full blown IDEs. I use vi and Emacs both. Why not?
I do remember days when vi was not present on all unix systems. Had to use ed on occasion.
Mplayer??? (Score:2)
Re:Mplayer??? (Score:4, Informative)
Gentoo, Debian and Ubuntu had switched to libav by default, then switched back to ffmpeg.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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FFMPEG (Score:3)
After the FFMPEG fork is there a Linux distro that still uses FFMPEG & Mplayer?
Firstly: Not all distro switched to avlib.
Some simply decided to stay with ffmpeg (e.g.: opensuse never switched at all)
Some changed their opinion back (e.g.: Debian went back to ffmpeg after a while)
This is mostly to avlib never really being a good an active fork, and didn't manage to attract most developper to it.
(Unlike OpenOffice.org to which most developer migrated after the fork from LibreOffice.org).
Since then the problematic leader of FFMPEG has decided to step down,
avlib has merged back to ffmpeg
an
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The splittters, well, split, because the project leader apparently wouldn't integrate the splitters changes in what they considered good time.
The leader didn't do this, not because he couldn't, but because he thought it was poor style.
His response to the fork was to integrate all changes implemented by the fork as soon as it was released by the fork, essentially making the original ffmpeg a super set of both projects.
The motivation for the fork was thus undermined and the additions from it's contributors dw
Security issues (Score:2)
Now that it has GTK widgets (Score:2)
Emacs will be a much better web browser.
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How did they overlook the need to include GIMP? Make it a part of the... OS.
Now, which will happen first - emacs incorporating systemd, or systemd incorporating emacs?
EMACS Memory Footprint? (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember when you would say "Eight Meg And Currently Swapping" and that was a funny criticism of how bloated EMACS was.
What's the mem footprint today?
Re:EMACS Memory Footprint? (Score:5, Informative)
My Emacs with a ton of buffers opened with a bunch of fancy modes is using 66 MB resident, according to top. It's been open for 6 hours now.
A fresh instance with no stuff in it (emacs -Q) is 39 MB.
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With 22 tabs of HTML, CSS, JS, and PHP spread accross five windows: 64.2MB
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Fresh instance of emacs: $0
Fresh instance of Sublime Text: $70
I think I'll stick to emacs
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Compare that to a fresh instance of any modern browser. Or any modern IDE. Emacs is no longer the hog.
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I'm not on the same system as GP, but here's the memory usage I see when I open Vim with an empty buffer:
VIRT: 178M
RES: 17M
SHR: 12M
In heavy coding mode I have Vims open in 20 Konsole tabs. Bit much, maybe, but that's never been the cause for memory problems. Those are typically caused by browsers, desktop multimedia applications (Amarok, mplayer, VLC, image browsers), and most of all the extreme bloat from KDE.
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GNU Emacs 24.4.1 (i686-pc-mingw32) takes 7,548K on Win7. This is immediately after launch, with the initial *GNU Emacs* buffer. I'll check my openbsd box at home to see what it's like there.
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It's like the classic answer to the price of a Rolls-Royce:
if you have to ask, you can't afford it.
hawk
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On Windows, with 5 frames open and 89 buffers (some of which have custom modes and highlighting running)
170MB.
In comparison, my Visual Studio instance is taking up over 550MB with very few plugins and way fewer files open. (The only reason I keep it running is for debugging. I do literally all my other programming and building from emacs.)
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I thought I was the only person that operates this way. Emacs for all editing, compiling and Visual Studio for debugging only. Visual Studio at 250 MB and Emacs at 75 MB right now. They are both looking at the same project except Emacs has SQLPlus running and a whole bunch for files open.
I honestly tried to use Visual Studio as my editor when I started at my position and it just wasn't as good as Emacs.
The only things I want is for Visual Studio to open command line applications in an Emacs shell instead
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We do most of our building through a build system, so I set up some compile commands to even do all my building in emacs so I can correct the errors straight from the build log. I've switched VS to an emacs key layout, but it still does weird things sometimes, so I gave up trying to square that circle.
I've spent a lot of time customizing my emacs setup, which I know some people think is a waste of time, but I like the intellectual stimulation of programming in a completely different language and learning el
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More memory doesn't help ergonomics or muscle memory. Nearly 20 years of using an editor isn't something an extra bit of RAM is going to change.
Oh, COME ON! (Emacs User here) (Score:2)
Give me an effing break! This is not even funny anymore.
How about building in a compiler stack into Emacs, some neat or something usefull if there's nothing more to do on Emacs?
How about building a search function with useful defaults for the options tree or improving its integrated documentation?
Integrated GTK toys - WTF?
One of the huge advantages of emacs is that it runs in the CLI. The GTK Version should get CUAS support and a bar with some buttons at the top (collapsible) and that's just about all Emacs
Re:Oh, COME ON! (Emacs User here) (Score:4, Insightful)
At the end of the day, code that goes in meets a few criteria:
1.) (the most important one): Somebody gives a crap.
2.) Somebody gives a crap and actually writes decent code
3.) Somebody gives a crap and gives so much of a crap that they're willing to do an additional 400-500% of work to get the patch into the main codebase.
Seriously, complaining what some nebulous "they" should do something is just stupid. This isn't a product that people buy, no project manager doing focus research on what consumers want, and no manager telling an employee "do this or you're fired".
There's just some guy/gal out there with an itch to scratch, who couldn't possibly care less what you want.
(S)he who codes, decides. End of story.
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Because Emacs right now has support for older X Windows widgets (default GNU version, not counting branches and things). GTK widgets are more modern and flexible. So why not? It has no effect on the command line version any more than the Lucid widgets affect the command line version.
To those asking what's the point... (Score:2)
I don't know, but let me come with an example.
You can either customize Emacs by writing a bit of Lisp and dumping it in your .emacs (or init.el), but you can also use the built-in customize interface that many packages support.
If you've ever used M-x customize, it's like a... a toolkit built with text elements. It's... weird. I actually tried starting it again now, and I think it's less weird than it used to be, but it's still some way from any configuration window you'd ever see in a regular GUI editor.
So
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The point is somebody thought it'd be a neat thing to do, did the work, and herded it into the codebase.
End of story.
Awesome (Score:1)
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First of all: GTK has OpenGL support, so that's already there. Has nothing to do with the web.
Although WebGL does implement OpenGL in a full-fledged web page, and I'm pretty sure GTK's WebGL just leverages GTK's OpenGL widgets.
Really, it's just a step towards what we've all known: Emacs has taken another step to becoming a modern graphical operating system.
Next, we need to be able to boot to Emacs from Grub, instead of using a hack like Linux to bootstrap Emacs.
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Compared to ActiveX (Score:2)
How does this compare to ActiveX? Yes, I know tons of people absolutely loath the thing (myself included), but learning how to program back in the days of Visual Basic 3 on Windows 3.1 and being able to embed an Internet Explorer 2 container into my app sure seemed sweet at the time!
I used to use EMACS in 1995 when in college (Score:3)
The 90s called (Score:2)
In 2017 (Score:2, Funny)
Will we be seeing a Slashdot story about how emacs now has native support for systemd?
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Or maybe the opposite : Emacs can now be used as an init system and has a systemd mode.
Great news! (Score:5, Interesting)
The xwidgets branch however promises even more. The main use case (at least from my point of view) isn't really to put normal widgets such as gtk buttons or sliders or anything like that in an emacs window. From my point of view the most important thing is that you will be able to embed whole applications using the GtkSocket widget. This means that you could, for example:
* Have a good PDF viewer embedded in one buffer while you are editing latex source code in another and be able to easily switch between those buffers using emacs commands.
* You could have inkscape running in one buffer and use normal inkscape editing commands for almost everything, except when you are editing text. In those situations you may want to use emacs commands instead.
* You could have a *good* webbrowser running inside emacs to search for documentation online while coding
Of course, the main xwidgets branch also opens up possibililties when it comes to prettyifying a lot of built in emacs applications. However, I don't find that very necessary in many cases. One of the main advantages with emacs is that (almost) everything is text, which means that you get a synergistic effect the more you do inside emacs.
; Witty end of comment for emacs aficionados:
(animate-string "Congratulations to Joakim Verona for getting this merged" 10 10)
My favorite anti-pattern (Score:2)
Inner-plattform effect [wikipedia.org]
Anyone else with 'Emacs carpal tunnel?' (Score:2)
When I was doing Real Work writing software, I developed the classic Emacs 'carpal tunnel' in the left hand from stretching the pinkie too much for moderator keys. A couple other people I know who are dyed-in-the-wool Emacs users have also developed that.
What other software produces its own injury? ;-)
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I mean, who the hell needs a caps-lock key placed in such a convenient place, these days? Back in the day when computers were first sold to businesses, their target audience must have been stenographers. The
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Frankly, I've never been much of a fan of IDEs. My biggest project used Rational Apex, which was a full up IDE (long before Eclipse, etc.) The most productive programmers on that project, though, used a text editor (Emacs or VI) and ran the compiler from the command line. No point wasting cycles on fancy GUIs that mostly got in the way. The only time I cranked up the Rational IDE was to run the debugger, and any time I had to run a debugger, it was a direct admission that I had -no clue- what my code (o
Wait, people still use GTK+? (Score:3)
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Well, for example Meld crashes when you run a comparison if you use any of a half-dozen classic styles that often still ship with distributions, due to changes in the underlying GTK libraries. And that's just ridiculous; a GUI toolkit that is so incapable of handling older then-valid styles that it crashes applications? That's not a very confidence-inducing GUI toolkit.
That's the only really recent one I can think of, but that's largely because the issues I've run into peaked about 2 years ago, at which poi
even better as login shell (Score:2)
Back in the VAX/BSD days, one of my co-workers used emacs as his login shell because he could do everything he wanted AND had a history more easily used than csh. I liked it, but bounced between disparate systems too often to mentally switch back and forth.
With graphics, I may need to give it a try on an X screen, since those are rather ubiquitous now.
Re:Changing Userbase? (Score:4, Interesting)
A very good question. EMACS tries to be all things to all people ... and it is. I've used it since almost the very beginning and can't live without it.
That said, I'm not interested in the GUI stuff because it slows me down, and since EMACS is infinitely customizable I just turn it off. To each his own; some people like menus and so on. I do enable display of in-line graphics but no more than that.
Yes, there is confusion over purpose and direction, but to somewhat justify it, I'll say this. Learning EMACS, which is a big job, is a lot easier with menus and a GUI interface to help get started. Over time you learn the keystrokes and become more efficient until eventually you don't need the GUI (but you can of course still keep it).
EMACS is very much not for everyone, but for those who love it, it's indispensable.
And one more little fact: on my Asus Zenbook, I typically get 5 hours running time with a mixed environment. But if I run EMACS and EMACS alone, in a full screen, I get 10 hours.
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Trying to be all things to all people is not a good way to put it. It's like saying that Java tries to be all things to all people because it let's you create many different kinds of programs. But that's the purpose of a programming language in the first place. Or that a web browser tries to be all things to all people, because you can go to Facebook, or GMail, or Wikipedia, or whatever, but the point of the browser is to let you do many many different things. Once you have a programming language in a s
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You have it backwards, integrate emacs into systemd.
now that is a war, who will integrate who, recursive integration anyone ?