What's New in Emacs (Part 2) | Hacker News Reader

What's New in Emacs (Part 2)

masteringemacs.org

56 pointsnyellin10 comments

The most exciting part is at the end:

Code can now use lexical scoping by default instead of dynamic scoping. The `lexical-binding’ variable lets code use lexical scoping for local variables. It is typically set via file-local variables, in which case it applies to all the code in that file.

There are tons of goodies in there, and the author is doing a hell of a service to Emacs users.

That said, a part of my can't but sigh... Now we have new completion & new electric pairs. How is that going to propagate to other modes? Just the thought of new the work involved in diagnosing which mode is using what, and how to adapt for it gives me the chills.

The package manager looks nice, but how can it handle stuff hosted on a git rep? How are changes show? Without all of this sorted out, it's usefulness is severely diminished.

See the discussion about el-get here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3320458

Runs

The completion mechanism is actually the same as what it has always been. `completion-at-point' is Emacs's generic completion framework, and what they've done is replace all those mode-specific hatchet jobs with the more generic one. As for the electric stuff, that's the same story: every mode had its own way of doing it. I used (and still do, not migrated yet!) skeletons for my electric pairing as it did a really good job of handling all the edge cases (you're in a word, you're at a bracket already, etc.)

> C-y in Isearch is now bound to isearch-yank-kill, instead of isearch-yank-line.

Thank you.

> New commands `count-words-region’ and `count-words’.

No more M-| wc? Another thanks.

In general, I'm really glad to see the Emacs developers standardizing and catering to the rest of the world - a lot of these things are things that annoy me subconsciously or consciously, but not enough to figure out how to fix in my .emacs.

Make sure you read the caveat I wrote as what counts as a "word" depends on the mode.

I usually am counting in markdown-mode, so I doubt there are any major gotchas.

Aww, damnit. It's down again. I really need to ditch Apache or learn how to not make it take down my 1.8 GB ram Linode instance.

Wordpress is pretty easy to get going with Nginx. Took me a couple of hours (max) to switch from Apache on my linode box.

Caching, caching and more caching.

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