The third version of Emacs 26 branch, GNU Emacs 26.3, is here

It became known a few days ago the availability of a new version ofl popular text editor GNU Emacs, which comes with its new version 26.3. This is the third version in the 26.x branch, after the first version (26.1) released in May 2018 and the second (26.2) released last April.

For those who are unfamiliar with this popular text editor, they should know that GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable, free and open text editor created by the founder of the GNU Project, Richard Stallman. This is the most popular of the Emacs family of text editors.

This text editor is available for GNU / Linux, Windows and macOS, It is written in C and provides Emacs Lisp as an extension language. Also implemented in C, Emacs Lisp is a "dialect" of the Lisp programming language used by Emacs as a scripting language.

For those who are not familiar with this text editor, GNU Emacs features include:

• content-sensitive editing modes, including syntax highlighting, for many file types
• Integrated comprehensive documentation, including a tutorial for new users
• Full Unicode support for almost all scripts
• It is also highly customizable, using Emacs Lisp code or a graphical user interface.
• It has a full ecosystem of features beyond text editing, including your schedule tracking and project planner (with Org mode), an email and newsreader (Gnus), a debugging interface, and more.
• also benefits from a package system (Emacs Lisp Package Archive or ELPA) to download and install extensions
• And many more

Emacs 26.3 Key New Features

Undoubtedly the version of Emacs 26.1 was the one that brought many new features, because of them the following stand out:

• Implementing a limited form of competition with Lisp threads
• Support for optional display of line numbers in the buffer. Note that to edit a file in Emacs (which file is on the hard disk), the editor makes a copy in its own memory area, and this copy is called a buffer
• a new single line horizontal scrolling mode
• 24-bit color support on compatible text terminals

While in this new release of GNU Emacs which is version 26.3 there are few changes that stand out, for one of them is the inclusion of a new GPG key to verify the packages in the GNU ELPA directory.

A new option, 'help-enable-complete-auto-load', has also been proposed to disable the feature introduced in Emacs 26.1 that downloads files during input completion by combining 'Ch f' and 'Ch v '.

How to install Gnu Emacs 26.3 on Ubuntu and derivatives?

If you are interested in being able to install this new version of Gnu Emacs on your distro, They can do it in two ways.

The first one of them is to do it directly from the Software Center from Ubuntu or with the help of Synaptic.

Although, as you know, application updates are not usually available immediately, so we must wait a few days for it to be made available to everyone.

The other way and the recommended in order to have ya a more current version version 26.2.

It is with the help of a repository which a few hours ago I made the update of the package and that (at this moment in which I am writing this article) available for Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial, 18.04 Bionic Beaver, 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish, 19.04 Disco Dingo, Linux Mint 19 and other derivatives of Ubuntu .

To install GNU Emacs on Ubuntu, as well as derivatives of it, we will only have to open a terminal (We can do this with the key combination Ctrl + Al + T) and copy the following commands into it:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kelleyk/emacs -y
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install emacs26

How to uninstall Gnu Emacs 26.3?

If for any reason you want to remove this text editor from your operating system, you will only have to open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T).

After that you will only have to write the following in it:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kelleyk/emacs -r
sudo apt remove emacs26
sudo apt autoremove