Emacs 22 (upgrade to a backport)

(tags editor, Emacs, upgrade)

Steve Yegge retreated to a Gnu Emacs review blog post. I don't fault him on these Emacs topics. He's very insightful here. In his new post, "Shiny and New Emacs 22", he goes over two interesting parts of the "new" Emacs 22, which is more Unicode and hookable regexp search and replace. Actually I don't know how new it is, but at version 22.0.55, it should be stable by now, so I decide to standardize on it. I've been using Emacs 21.x for 5 years I think?

My hobby Linux OS is Gentoo, and on there, it's just an easy emerge command, but you have to pick the right package, which is right now emacs-cvs and "unmask" it properly.

Debian is my production Linux OS. I use Stable (codename Sarge, also known as version 3.1), which means Gnu Emacs 21.4, but if you use a backport, you can have Emacs 22.x goodness. See the EmacsWiki entry EmacsCvsAndDebian for clarification.

Finally, I am a Windows lover, but on there, I go for the Meadow port of Gnu Emacs, because I like they way the integrate the Microsoft Input Method Editors (MS-IME) into Emacs. I am totally dependant on the MS-IME for Japanese and I can't stand trying to use another input method such as ATOK or SKK or whatever comes with standard Emacs + Leim. Lucky for me, they package Gnu Emacs with a package installer very much like the Cygwin installer, and also version 22 is packaged as Meadow version 3.0. Yeah. I installed it with the quickness and it isn't half bad. The first thing I always check out is M-x view-hello-file. Only with Meadow do I see all the fonts and glyphs.

Now I dread the effort it will take to port my own customizations and Emacs Lisp code over. Absolute dread. I have stuff from Emacs 19.34 in there, ugh.