Last week the emacs development team released Emacs 22.1. Today I downloaded and installed this editor. One feature the I never ever want to miss, is that Emacs now fully integrates with the rest of my linux desktop - this makes life so much easier (e.g. by using drag and drop or file-open dialogs). This is pretty cool. I fear I'll never use Emacs 21 anymore.

One thing that struck me was that this huge package compiles within ... seconds. For some reason, I thought that I can go and ride my bicycle. In the end Emacs is a Lisp environment and does not need much compilation time. Great!

However, one thing I found disturbing was that GTK+ integration of Emacs is not automatically detected during configuration time. Instead it has to be switched manually, in order to get the entire beauty of the new Emacs.

After all I have to admit, that the six years since Emacs 21 resulted in a pretty cool piece of software. Thanks GNU!