In the beginning: A happy 2009 to everyone!
Last thing first: We are nearing another iteration of the GNU Emacs release cycle. After having to wait many years (about five if I remember correctly) between the two major release 21 and 22 which only brought minor improvements (though they were much needed, especially the GTK+ port), 23 will likely see light in 2009 backed by a new release team consisting of Chong Yidong and Stefan Monnier (Richard Stallmann stepped back earlier this year as Emacs' maintainer, but still is an active developer). This is a much shorter waiting period than hoped, so let's support upstream by testing the pretest versions (defined snapshots from upstream's development tree): As usual, the Gentoo GNU Emacs team will provide these snapshots in a timely manner as app-editors/emacs-cvs-23.0.9x ebuilds. Of course you can stick to the live ebuild (~app-editors/emacs-cvs-23.0.9999) that is in Portage for years now and I am sure a lot of bugs found during the development cycles is due to our active user base and this ebuild. Anyway, I wanted to talk about the news in Emacs 23, some are really exiting and users are desperately waiting for some for years. Most importantly a new font and character handling backend has been added, so Emacs is fully Unicode compatible (without bad hacks as before where the internal format was different, now it is an extended UTF-8) and supports the XFT extension (there is a short guide in our project space). The other big extension is the multi-tty interface, thus you can use the same Emacs session on a terminal in text mode and in X. Running Emacs as a server lets you connect to it from anywhere you want on any display type.
This is related to the Daemon mode I also want to talk about: Ulrich Müller (ulm) wrote the app-emacs/emacs-daemon package, which installs an init script for GNU Emacs. This makes use of the new Emacs daemon function. Yes, we are getting nearer to replace the init process with Emacs on your system ;)! Honestly: This helps your productivity. An Emacs server is started in the background and you connect to it through the emacsclient program, giving you a text mode Emacs or an X window (see multi-tty). Go to your /etc/init.d directory and create a symlink for every user that will run Emacs:
ln -s emacs emacs.user
Now run »/etc/init.d/emacs.user start« and/or add emacs.user to the default runlevel (rc-update). Have a look at the file /etc/conf.d/emacs to see how you can customize your setup, e.g. you can add command-line options you need. You may also create individual /etc/conf.d/emacs.user files for »multiplexed« user configuration. So now Emacs is running, but no window is open on your desktop. When you need it, it pops up and you can close it without losing your server socket for Emacs, so lost file associations (for example opening PDF or image files with emacsclient while having no active server) are from the past now.
Of course there have been more changes, but too much to list them in every detail here, so have a look at the NEWS (type C-h n in Emacs) file shipped with Emacs to find out if there is anything interesting for you.
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Kommentare
I had one problem in the very first try which I could not reproduce afterwards:
I started the service from within an X Session and it died after ending X.
Is this expected ?
Another question would be how to customize e.g. font colors for tty and graphical frames seperately ?
The dying is not expected, but maybe you should file a bug report.