emacs 23 has been released!

Emacs 23(.1) has been released! After only just over two years since the previous version, emacs 23 has been released on July 29 2009. Time to celebrate! And a big thanks all the talented hackers that made it possible!

Emacs 23 brings many new features. Some of those have been discussed before in emacs-fu, and of course you can get the full list from the NEWS-file (C-h n). This is just a list of some of the highlights, in particular the end-user-visible ones. Let's go through them - of course I cannot mention all of them, so feel free to add your favorite one in the comments.

fonts & anti-aliasing

Finally, emacs 23 brings support for anti-aliased fonts to X (Mac/Windows users have had this for a while). If you're running emacs on X, this one change is enough to never want to go back to an older version of Emacs again.

The new font system mentioned in some posts before: setting fonts and emacs 23.

support for D-Bus and Zeroconf

You can now call other services on the desktop using the DBUS IPC system (popular on X); using d-bus: an example shows how to communicate with the Tomboy note taker program from emacs. As more and more desktop services are accessible using D-BUS, this offers great opportunities for better integrating emacs with the rest of the desktop. For example, one could imagine that emacs could communicate with a network manager when it needs a connection. Or it could show a desktop notification when an appointment is near. And all without adding hard dependencies or calling external binaries.

Using Zeroconf is also quite easy; for example, to get a list of all zeroconf-support printers, you could do something silly like:

(require 'zeroconf)
(zeroconf-init)
(dolist (srv (zeroconf-list-services "_printer._tcp"))
  (insert (format "\nprinter: %s" (nth 2 srv))))

to insert a list of the available printers in your current buffer. As with D-Bus, it's really an enabler for a lot of cool things.

support for 'headless' emacs-daemon

If you have a lot of support packages, emacs startup can be a bit slow. However, emacs 23 brings emacs --daemon, which enables you to start emacs in the background (for example when you log in). You can instantly pop up new emacs windows (frames) with emacsclient. Of course, you could already have an emacs 'server' in older versions, but being able to start it in the background makes this a much nicer solution.

The Emacs-daemon was discussed in emacs-fu in emacs –daemon and windows and daemons (for MS-Windows). Popping up new emacs windows is so fast that you can use emacs for any editing job, for example as an editor for an email program, or for quick rememember notes.

You can even combine X and console clients in one session now.

Emacs now support Xembed

This enables you to embed emacs in other programs (on X) using XEmbed. Haven't played with that yet. There is some more information in EmacsWiki/Xembed.

Support for frame opacity

You can now make you emacs frames transparent. Discussed before in transparent emacs. Not sure how useful this is, but it surely looks nice :)

Internationalization

Emacs's character set is a superset of Unicode, with about four times the space available. That should be enough for the foreseeable future… There are also many new character sets available, as well as new language environments, such as Chinese-GB18030, Khmer, Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati, Oriya, Telugu, Sinhala, and TaiViet.

Note that, internally, emacs uses UTF-8 now.

New defaults

• Screen motion now goes by screen lines by default, that is when you move the cursor up or down, it follows the line as you see them. Nice.
• Transient mark mode (visible selection) is now on by default, so no need for (transient-mark-mode t) in your .emacs anymore. However, you still need to put (delete-selection-mode t) if you like replace the current selection with your typing.
• Also shift-select mode is enabled by default, so you can select with shift + the arrow keys.

New modes and packages, and updated ones

• docview-mode enables you to open PDF/DVI/PS files within emacs;
• M-x butterfly (see http://xkcd.com/378/)
• EasyPG; access GNUPG, available under Tools/Encryption/Decryption
• fast line numbers with linum; see showing line numbers;
• proced: dired for processes (M-x proced);
• remember-mode, for jotting down things to remember; see remember;
• ruby-mode, xesam-mode, zeroconf, …
• abbrev has been rewritten
• gdb can be very fancy now: fancy debugging with gdb;
• file deletion can use the system 'Trash'; see using the system's trash when deleting files.