Emacs enters Feature Freeze for the next release and other news

So it's official, that Emacs has entered Feature freeze before the next release is cut.  And svg support being made official and it's right now in testing and appears to work.  You could help test it further by trying the snapshots.


That's about it for the hols.

Your chance to influence Emacs development! Participate in an Emacs survey

The emacs development team is running a survey on what packages to enable by default.  To do that, they need your responses on the packages that you use.  You could parse your .emacs or do M-x report-emacs-bug and see the buffer for the list of modes enabled for you.  The survey link is below

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/FrequentlyEnabledPackages_Emacs244_Survey

Please follow the instructions in the link above.  If anything, it might make Emacs easier to use for others.  And please do spread the word.

A few unrelated Emacs tips

I used to prefer installing things by hand but now I'm not so sure after using Emacs package manager.  Add this to your .emacs and do a M-x list-packages to see the list of packages that are available for Emacs.

(setq package-archives '(("gnu" . "http://elpa.gnu.org/packages/")
                         ("marmalade" . "http://marmalade-repo.org/packages/")
                         ("melpa" . "http://melpa.milkbox.net/packages/")))

Yes, not all packages are there; yes, the sites go down sometime, yes it's goes into .emacs.d folder in your relevant OS.   It works smoothly and it saves you a lot of hassle in scouring the net for stuff which overrides the minor inconveniences.

Use outline-mode in your AucTeX mode when editing LaTeX files as outline-minor-mode and while you're at it, do install OutlineMagic to handle the not-so-easy-keychord issue of outline-mode.  I've mapped mine to PF12 key.

 (eval-after-load 'outline

  '(progn

    (require 'outline-magic)

    (define-key outline-minor-mode-map (kbd "<\f12>") 'outline-cycle)))

If you ever had the need to copy your gcc messages to different folders at the same time when sending out emails in gnus, then this thread might be of use to you. Currently doesn't work with group names with spaces in their names especially IMAP folders.