Ubuntu – How to install the *latest* version of Emacs

I had a good look at the situation again today (more that 2 months later)... as I've mentioned in the comment above (and repeated here)..

I managed to get it working (although it does has a minor(?) issue with Devanagari script, where it repeats the last character of a word when I press space after the word (temporary workaround: Left+Right+Space) .. I hope to eventually sort it out somehow).... The main problem seemed to be a mismatch between the way Emacs (ibus-el) expected to switch IBus on/off, and how IBus (native) expected it.

There may have been some other issue(s) involved in getting Emace ibus-el running, but the nett result is that it does work :)

If you must chase the very latest version, then you can always get the source and compile it yourself. Unless you know of some killer new feature that emacs24 has though, I'd not waste the time and just use the one that ships with Ubuntu.

There's no downsides to calling it directly, but the emacs way is to start up one emacs session when you log on and never close it. You can export EDITOR=emacsclient and run M-x server-start in emacs and things like crontab -e will prompt emacs to open the file in the other window. When you are done, you hit C-x C-# to unblock the emacsclient.

If you prefer to keep the editing in the terminal window ( of course, you can just run M-x ansi-term and do your terminal work inside an emacs buffer ), you can add -t to the emacsclient command and it will open a new emacs frame on that terminal so you can do your editing in the terminal, but still have access to all of your other buffers, the kill ring, etc.