Coming soon to Emacs...

I've recently read about these new features that are making their way into Emacs CVS. (You can check out many of these by compiling from CVS or using a recent snapshot.) It may be a while before Emacs 23 is released, but never let it be said that Emacs is stagnant:

  • Emacs is now a viewer for PDF, PS and DVI files (screencast). The new doc-view mode is automatically activated when you visit any of those file types.
  • Emacs is getting D-Bus support. D-Bus provides a channel for Emacs to talk to other desktop and system applications that support it.
  • Tramp (remote file access) is now faster than ever because it caches all the diagnostics it performs on each host.
  • As I've previously mentioned, VC-mode is being reworked to better deal with changeset-oriented and distributed VCS.
  • With the merging of the Unicode branch, Emacs will get, among other things, gorgeous anti-aliased font rendering.
  • The multi-TTY branch allows a currently running Emacs to open frames on other displays and TTYs. This means emacsclient is now a fast and proper editor for terminal programs that invoke an editor.

Update: Emacs is also getting support for status area icons and notifications. Hopefully this will lead to better integration with the rest of the desktop for Emacs-based applications.

No comments:

Post a Comment