A new version of the fabled Emacs text editor has been released, with a range of new features including a “Getting things done” mode.
Emacs and vi are the traditional text editors used on UNIX and Linux platforms. vi has a minimalist philosophy, including a rich, powerful set of features which have remained largely unchanged for 30 years. Emacs has a core basic of functionality on which users are encouraged to build “modes” for different activities. Thus there are modes for reading email, browsing the web, directly editing compressed files and even those only accessible over ftp, as well as more mainstream modes to enabling the editing and correction of a wide variety of textual file formats.
The software design philosophy choice has interesting effects on the resulting user community: whereas Emacs has a large community of contributors still building the system, vi is essentially frozen with a much smaller contributor community focused on bug fixes, portability and optimisations, even though both appear to have a similar number of users. The smaller size and well-defined feature set led to vi to be selected over Emacs for standardisation in the POSIX standard.
The new version will take several months to filter through the distribution channels before appearing in the next upgrade of the major operating systems.
Personally I’m disappointed that “better Unicode support” is still on the Emacs TODO list rather than on the new features list.
Hardly release early, release often – a six year development cycle on this release and still no decent Unicode support – what a shame.
Still, a new release will encourage me to take a look at Emacs again (I used to use it exclusively up until a couple of years ago).
There is also a port of emacs Java (my favourite platform), but it appears to have been stalled for quite some time now: JEmacs.