It's the little changes that make you feel old

[jducoeur]

Emacs now has graphics in it. (Crappy graphics, to be sure, but pictures nonetheless.) Surely this is a sign of the end times...

Comments

[mneme]

Er...not a frequent emacs user, eh?

Emacs (not just Lucid/Xemacs) has had graphics for, oh, 5-10 years.

Every day

[metageek.livejournal.com]

I use emacs every day; I know there's some sort of graphics in the splash screen, but I've never looked into how to do it. If I need a GUI, I know where to find one.

What shocked me was when I started seeing italics and boldface in LaTeX and HTML modes.

[siderea]

Oh, good.

For a moment there I thought it was possible that there was something emacs hadn't had all along, and the foundations of my world trembled.

[mneme]

Oh, it -hasn't- had it all along. Just since, oh, 1997 or so. 10 years.

Gnu Emacs, by contrast, is 22 years old.

[siderea]

Shush, you, you're traumatizing me.

[jducoeur]

No shit? My heavy emacs days were, indeed, over ten years ago -- I was a deep guru once, but that was probably around 1992. (When I wrote a major mode to serve as the front end for our Ada IDE.)

I've been using it continuously ever since, but not particularly hard: just basic text editing, so I wasn't paying a lot of attention to the functionality. So I hadn't noticed the graphics until my download of the current version today, whapping me upside the head with a logo at startup and buttons along the top...

[mneme]

No shit. I remember the tiles from Xemacs moving into emacs around version 20(1997), though it might have been as late as 21 (2001).

There's a nifty emacs timeline here, though it doesn't have features, even major ones.

[fosveny.livejournal.com]

Apocalypse time1

[serakit.livejournal.com]

Why are graphics a sign of the end times?

[jducoeur]

Just that I think of emacs as so *definitively* text-oriented. It was still very text-y when the rest of the world was moving to graphical glitz...

[be-well-lowell.livejournal.com]

To be honest, though, the graphics support in emacs is still pretty utilitarian. There's a lot less graphical "glitz" than there is "if emacs support for this feature didn't handle graphics, I would need to find some other program that does."

[jducoeur]

Ah -- part of the "Emacs is really an operating system in disguise" thing...

[be-well-lowell.livejournal.com]

There's a bit of that, but for me the key would be e-mail. It's a thoroughly "text-y" application, but not being able to handle inline pictures would be a problem for me at this point.

The "operating system in disguise" idea is an increasingly minority view these days, primarily because Emacs is single-threaded. It does a lot of things, but the ones that aren't text-oriented are generally implemented by calling out to an external program -- in a separate task if appropriate.

[laid.livejournal.com]

Didn't they add the graphics about the same time they added coffeemaker support?