And if stuff is not picky about line breaks, this means you’re not mashing M-q all the time. Soft word wrap means that it’s infinitely easier to eyes and your mind to edit stuff that’s picky about line breaks. Or, as the folks who have not been touched by the awesomeness of Emacs say, “soft word wrap”. If you want to put it in ~/.emacs, it’s just (set-face-attribute 'default nil :font 'Anonymous Pro 16') or something like that, and voila, you’ve got awesome fonts.Īnd the biggest, greatest feature to hit Emacs 23? Setting fonts? It’s in the freaking menu now. Ugly fonts? GTK+, Pango and Freetype, yadda yadda yadda. Stone-age widget sets? Hell no – you get GTK+ on Linux and Aqua on Mac, fits perfectly to both desktop environments. So, GNU Emacs is actually updated fairly often now, and each new release seems to bring in some outrageously awesome features. I thought we were going to get stuck in version 21 for ages.Īnd now they’re going at version 23, which is even more amazing. Much to my surprise, GNU Emacs folks launched version 22. My greatest pains were experienced years ago when I used XEmacs, which was updated ridiculously slowly, and that pace was still faster than what GNU Emacs had at the time. You use them, and you will experience great pain.īut… It’s always refreshing to see that stuff gets fixed. In times when the competitors get things right, it’s easy to start looking for alternatives. Later, a hacky support through a third-party package.

Neater widget set in XEmacs, though distinctly not GTK+. Font specification that was bizarrely difficult.So, obviously, you get some pretty heavy cognitive dissonance when you notice that the competing editors are better at something.Īnd in recent years, Emacs had a lot of things that were just plain outlandishly crappy. It’s a religious position, kind of like the Apple fandom.

As every Emacs fan knows, Emacs is the ultimate text editor – nothing can be better than Emacs. I’m a long-time Emacs user, and if there’s one thing that bugs me is that Emacs has frequently been in a state of stagnation. Because Emacs foiled that plan.Įmacs as a prose editor. Somewhere around the previous post, I made an outlandish promise that I might try out Celtx to see how well I could write a story in the “novel mode”.

Scrivenings mac outliner