Emacs – Differences Between Various Versions of Emacs

10.10emacs

Ubuntu (10.10) offers emacs21,22,23 and emacs-snapshot. What are the differences between them and which one does the emacs package install by default? Also, I presume emacs-snapshot-gtk is the most up to date one. I would like to use this because it seems to pay attention to my .Xdefaults settings, which emacs doesn't. What disadvantages might this cause?

I use emacs for LaTeX, ORGmode and ESS/R programming.

Best Answer

emacs-snapshot is a development version of Emacs. It has more goodies but likely also more bugs, so use it at your own risk. The others are released versions; the only reason I can think not to install the latest one is if you're very short on disk space.

The emacs package depends on emacs23 (you can see the dependencies in any package administration tool).

Gtk programs don't use X resources (.Xdefaults). Non-gtk (but X) versions of Emacs do.

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