Anyone sticking with "outdated" Emacs versions?

The recent anniversary of Lucid Emacs reminded me of a few people I know (on- and offline) who really stuck with XEmacs for a long time. And if I remember correctly, I myself used 19.34 for a long time despite 20.x being out. So, anyone in here not feeling the need to pick one of the latest releases? Or just happy with the version that comes with your OS, despite it not being 27/28? With more prevalent package usage, that might get more problematic earlier than before, where you just missed some new core feature. But I would assume that people doing this are happy with their general config anyway.

If you just use your own configuration, I don't think you have to switch to a different version as long as you feel comfortable.

"An innovation is not necessarily an advance." Sigmund Freud

I know someone who is still using XEmacs, he was also using Ubuntu 14.04 well past EOL for some people, old habits die hard

I basically just use whatever Emacs came with my OS. The only time I might explicitly upgrade is if I want to edit a relatively new language and the module for that language mode requires a newer version of Emacs. I too loved XEmacs until its abandonware status meant I couldn't run groovy-mode for editing Groovy language files. Oh well.

I have gone for long stretches without upgrading. But I think native comp is a substantial improvement and it was well-worth the upgrade.

I had a good setup several years ago, then I (foolishly) decided to upgrade and it broke everything. I tried to fix stuff before I gave up. I don't use emacs anymore.

I am on Debian stable. I don't stick to outdated software. Outdated software sticks to me.

I’ve been a user since 1987. I’ve done a lot of consulting over the years and finding the local emacs version ( and occasionally upgrading it) has always been job 1 or 2. The muscle memory just compels me to find it and install it if it’s not present. Use it for all sorts of coding, notes, scratch storage, and even presentations that I’ll have to eventually put into word or PowerPoint.

I've been an Emacs user since 1982 -- since before GNU Emacs existed. Except that one was written in MIT MacLisp at MIT and didn't run on any kind of personal computer or ordinary mainframe. Oh well. Needless to say when I first got to use Unix in 1985 one of the first things I did was track down Emacs and get a copy for the university. That was back in the days when you sent off a 9 track tape to RMS with return postage and he sent your tape back to you with Emacs on it, 8 megabytes was a lot of memory, and a 500 megabyte hard drive was a lot of hard drive space (my own PC only had a 30 megabyte RLL hard drive and 640k of memory).

I am usually a few versions behind, because I am already so happy with how emacs works I am not in a hurry to upgrade. Usually on whatever is in the distribution and I have some computers still not upgraded from Lubuntu 18.04 for instance (including my main desktop at home). Also I like to keep old machines and some virtual machines running and I still want emacs on some of those. I could not easily get a recent version of emacs to run in FreeDOS for instance, so I use something like 21 or 23 there. Some of my old phones are stuck with older versions too, maybe 25-26. My init.el is full of conditionals to make it possible for me to use the same .emacs.d everywhere. It is a bit messy, but manageable so far.

For all three major OS (Windows, Linux and MacOS), I am using a Frankenstein version of Emacs 25 trunk that was a developmental version leading up to its future release, which has been modified to include several later bug fixes as well as newer features such as the built-in line numbers, and my own built-in crosshairs that track the cursor position. The majority of the Lisp libraries that I use daily have been copied and taken over, renaming things by adding a custom naming convention prefix "lawlist-..." and modified either a little or with substantial modifications and bug fixes. I use modern versions of various external executables and lots of other things to permit current compatibility with stuff I use daily ...

I go with whatever my distro packages, but I'm on a rolling release so it's usually the latest version with maybe a few days of lag on new releases.

- For months I avoided (held back the distro package update) whichever version it was that switched to Cairo rendering; it broke some of my font config, and so I put off upgrading until I was ready to figure out what to do about it. And by "ready" I mean forced, because some language mode I needed didn't work on the older Emacs. - When I was in college 2012-2016, lots of my classmates used XEmacs... because for some reason the Computer Science department's computers all had GNU Emacs compiled with text anti-aliasing disabled, but XEmacs compiled with it enabled. (I just compiled my own copy of GNU Emacs with it enabled, and installed to my `~/.local/bin/`)

That's tragic 😭 The upgrade to 28 broke some of my custom stuff (I never go out of my way to upgrade, I just get them handed to me with full system updates) and for a while there I thought I was never getting my old comfy settings back.

I have yet to recover from seeing a blogger call the move from XEmacs to Gnu Emacs "traumatic"

Same. Arch user?

the move away from Unity was more traumatic because it was forced, I fully expect him to continue using XEmacs either until he retires or for as long as it is actually possible to do so

Honestly wishing him luck with that, losing a setting and environment one depends on is if nothing else annoying and off-putting as hell.

Off-topic but I've used a sliding release distro for many years now so updates are relatively minor. I'm interested to know if you ever have a major shock with lots of software changing functionality/looks after a major OS update?

Sysadmin here. Yes.

Some of us, on the other hand, get very uncomfortable when the latest bleeding edge version won't compile smoothly. 😉

Yep

> my own PC only had a 30 megabyte RLL hard drive and 640k of memory I’ve heard that ought to be enough for anybody.

I've been doing system admin work on Unix-like OSs for nearly 40 years and pretty much been using version of gnu since they came out. (Mid 80s forget the year) And many of those years were on old DEC terminals or clones that didn't have decent arrow or function keys, not even a 'meta' key. So my muscle memory is all doing it the 'long' way with Ctrl and escapes. But I also pretty much never use the graphical version whether on native console or X. That's because I'm nearly always sshing into hundreds of headless servers remotely. So I stick to text terminal emacs only. As I jump from machine to machine, I try to keep things as basic as possible so rarely add packages or customize. So I hardly ever upgrade, as long as core key bindings work I'm good.

The first machine I used it on was called an Athena computer and I think it was a Lisp based OS. It was probably based on the initial Athena environment at MIT as it had some MIT association. Coming from a mainframe COBOL background back then, it was incredible.

it's pretty easy to plug an alternative repo/PPA though

So said Bill Gates, anyhow!

Beware of the FrankenDebian !

There are lots of changes every time the stable version bumps up, but the transition has been quite smooth for me every time. Functionality and Appearance: The functionality has not broken for me for the past 11 years. The appearance is the realm of DEs, and whether you like the changes or not can be quite subjective. I was not happy with Gnome3.x so I moved to KDE. I do admit that I do not use or want to use the latest cutting edge releases of most software - unless needed for work. In the rare case that I do, there are usually ways of upgrading (e.g., pyenv or jil).

I'm not talking about mixing different debian versions, I'm talking about 3rd party repos built for the specific debian

Ah yes. Those might be better. In my experience they are usually less stable. Avoid if possible. That said, I do use Preining's repo for KDE though.

>In my experience they are usually less stable. well, Emacs has a relatively small amount of dependencies, so in this case the stability depends mostly on Emacs itself

I build Emacs from latest master with pgtk and native comp, because I use Sway and I want Emacs to be Wayland-native. Thanks to `use-package` it opens for me for less than 1 second, so no need to use daemon-mode. My config is [here](https://github.com/Crandel/home/tree/master/.config/emacs)