8 Apr 2007 wlach   » (Master)

Got the urge to upgrade my emacs installation a while back, was pleasantly surprised to find that installing/running the latest version was as easy as:

cd $HOME/src
wget ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/pretest/emacs-22.0.97.tar.gz
tar zxvf emacs-22.0.97.tar.gz
cd emacs-22.0.97
./configure --prefix=$HOME/emacs22
make
make install
PATH=$HOME/emacs22/bin:$PATH emacs
Seems like a nice overall improvement over previous versions so far and it hasn't crashed on me once. Of particular note is the default inclusion of RMS's wonderful GNU Emacs LISP Reference Manual in info, which has been a godsend in my previous disconnected-by-default state of being. I know that's something one is supposed to be able to discover/download/install seperately, but after almost 10 years of using emacs variants, it's only within the last year that the zen of the program has begun to come together in my head.

Heck, a year ago I didn't even *bother* with M-x info (a bounty of well-organized, easily navigable information), assuming that it was just legacy garbage that had been obsoleted by the interwebs and google. Never mind Emacs Lisp, which I assumed was the domain of the terminally insane. Now it's become pretty clear how one could conceivably have a computing session which never left emacs, and why one might want to do so.

Strange how vintage software and idioms seem to excite me more than anything else these days, at least when it comes down to tools which I use for actual productive work. For the more superficial things in life, I'm quite happy with my Gaim, Evolution and Mozilla, thank you very much (except perhaps for the latter's habit of leaking pixmaps). Perhaps I'll write more on that epiphany later.

Syndicated 2007-04-08 22:29:16 from wlach

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