Emacs 22: "And to think... I hesitated."

[elfs]

Emacs 21 came out on January 9, 2001, and it has been what I've been using until just about a week ago. I had tried several times to upgrade to Emacs 22, but 22.0 was just not doing it for me: font management seemed to be screwy and it wasn't using the fonts I'd set. There were other problems with it as well. Fortunately for me, given that Emacs is often my operating system (and Linux is just its device driver), I was paranoid about backing everything up before upgrading, so downgrading was just a matter of swapping install and untarring (that's the Unix version of "unzipping") the old archive.

Well, Emacs 22.1 came out recently and I decided to try the upgrade again. I'm so glad I did. There are so many things that I love about Emacs 22, let me tell you about them:

Everything I used in Emacs 21 works

Gnus, Muse, Outline, W3M, LJComposer, LaTex, NoWeb, and Dired worked just fine out of the box. That made me happy. Even better, some of the programming modes are better, like the Javascript and Python modes, Ruby mode is new, and text editing now includes functional highliting and fill-individual-paragraph modes stock.

ACPI works

When I upgraded to my new laptop, which uses ACPI Configurable Power Interface, the battery status display, which depened upon APM Power Management, stopped working. Emacs 22 speaks ACPI, and my battery stats are back. Yay!

Regular Expressions are much improved

They were great in 21, and even better in 22. Especially the "do over" feature.

Org-mode rocks my socks off

I've used outline-mode for a long time, but it's clunky and difficult to grok. Org mode totally works, and fits my brain. It's an outlining mode that's very, very smart about "Do what I mean, organize it the way I want it organized," it speaks both an internal and external linking syntax (that's similar too-- but not exactly like, dammit!-- EmacsMuse's linking syntax, which again is similar too-- but not exactly like, dammit!-- EmacsWiki's linking syntax). I spent two hours organizing the Princess Jera and Prince Darwon stories using it, and was completely happy with it. There are external organizers for Linux, but a really, really good one inside Emacs totally fits the bill for me

Anyway, I'm just happy with it, and if you've been putting off upgrades because you heard 22.0 was buggy, well, 22.1 Just Works.

Comments

[icebluenothing.livejournal.com]

Hellraiser II reference == For The Win.

(I have no actual comment here on the post itself -- if I told you what text editor I use, you'd never stop laughing, so, yeah.)

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Hellraiser II came out when I was 22, and I still didn't sleep well after watching it. Man, that was one scary movie.

[norikos-author.livejournal.com]

Regular Expressions are much improved
They were great in 21, and even better in 22. Especially the "do over" feature.

EXPN "do over"? I've been using 22 for a while now, and I'm wondering if this is something I use already and just don't think about, or if I've missed something....

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Have you noticed that when you call up regular expressions for a second time, the prompt now shows you your last expression, and if you just hit ENTER it will do it automatically, so you can repeat the action on different regions without the traditional Up-Up-ENTER-Up-Up-ENTER key sequence?

[norikos-author.livejournal.com]

Huh. No, I hadn't. Nifty.