Shiny and New: Emacs 22

XEmacs is great and cool and spiffy and all that. I make sure all my elisp files work under FSF and XEmacs, and I do fire up XEmacs occasionally.

I just find, and maybe it's my personal bad luck, that it crashes all the time. It's been like that since I was trying to use it back on Sun SparcStations. Every year I try using it again, on a new platform, and every year I give up because it crashes. GNU Emacs pretty much never ever crashes (by comparison).

I have various friends that have noticed the same thing, independently, so I'm fairly sure they don't have an if-stevey-crash clause in their code.

I think it comes down to your personal crash tolerance. Mine is low. Restarting Emacs is painful. I leave it running for weeks at a time, with hundreds of buffers. But if you fire up a new XEmacs session every day, then you probably don't mind if it crashes occasionally.

I'm so glad to see you've written more about Emacs--when you switched to Blogger I thought you might turn your focus away from what I believe to be the best material on your older Drunken Blog Rants.

I'll admit I have this strange fascination with Emacs blog postings--I guess I'm always trying to find out more about what other people find useful in it. I'm actually kind of surprised I don't see more of it. When I learn something nifty and new, I get excited about it and want to share.

Also, regarding stability and the occasional odd behaviour, I've found the emacs-snapshot package that's included with Ubuntu to be completely well-behaved; it treats me as well as Emacs 21 did.

Well, sort of. What you really mean is if it picked up the Python r"raw string" syntax (note the preceding 'r'). You still have to escape backslashes in triple-quoted strings. And the r-strings are a little kludgy, syntax-wise. I'd rather see a paired delimiter, e.g. /some-regexp/ (the way it's done in Perl, Ruby and JavaScript -- a substantial user base), or even better, a formal reader-macro system implemented in elisp so you can simply define your own syntactic constructs for this sort of thing.

I mention PyMacs in the article, and there's a very serious objection, which isn't entirely PyMacs's fault. The problem is that Emacs lacks a JAR-like distribution mechanism via archive files. So if you write a bunch of PyMacs code, you have to tell your users to install PyMacs, and most casual Emacs users lack the sophistication to do even that much. If Emacs introduced "EAR" (emacs archive) files, it would dramatically simplify using languages other than elisp.

Honestly, though, a few fixes to elisp would go a long way towards making it more likeable. Regexps are soooo common; it's amazing they haven't updated the regexp capabilities and made it simpler to embed them in elisp code.

Another great use for regexp in Emacs is dired mode. I routinely use this on both Unix and Windows platforms to select and rename groups of files.

C-/ is undo? Thanks -- I've been using C-_ for 25 years!

BTW, great blog.

Another great use for regexp in Emacs is dired mode. I routinely use this on both Unix and Windows platforms to select and rename groups of files.

C-/ is undo? Thanks -- I've been using C-_ for 25 years!

Sorry for the insignificant detail, but I don't understand the "études" line. How doesn't it finish with [a-z]?

Hey there,

I'm Googling for half an hour to figure out how could I reference to a \(matched\) group outside the function. That is, I want to do a (re-search-backward "\\(fo+\\)" and somehow access what would I do in Perl with $1 (whatever matched). Any hints?

Thanks.
-Mihai

Nevermind, I just found it: http://www.delorie.com/gnu/docs/elisp-manual-21/elisp_577.html

:D

Damnit! The replace super powers have made me ditch emacs-20.7.1 and upgrade. 20.7.1 has been with me on win95, win2K and winXP. Installed from the same tar-ball for 6 years!

Could it be possible to get the super-power of replace-regexp also in EMACS 21, maybe just upgrading the replace.el file?

Thanks,
Giovanni

Hi All:
I am new to emacs, is there a way to do the search-replace in the rectangle. Or copy from one rectangle and paste to another rectangle? Thanks

William

SICP is online now too:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html

Thanks for this introduction. I've been on a minimalist streak for some time using vim but I'm game for seeing the other side of the fence and this was an interesting start.

Loved your writing style; if there were more articles like this, I'd have to say less to convince people as to why I'm using 25+ year old editing technology.

I got some problem with (1 + \#) in replace-regexp functions.

Maybe I missed something but (+ 1 \#) works as well

Great post!

/kritstian