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1 GNU Emacs NEWS -- history of user-visible changes. 2000-08-14
2 Copyright (C) 1999, 2000 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3 See the end for copying conditions.
4
5 Please send Emacs bug reports to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
6 For older news, see the file ONEWS
7
8 \f
9 * Installation Changes in Emacs 21.1
10
11 ** Support for GNU/Linux on IA64 machines has been added.
12
13 ** Support for LynxOS has been added.
14
15 ** `movemail' defaults to supporting POP. You can turn this off using
16 the --without-pop configure option, should that be necessary.
17
18 ** There are new configure options associated with the support for
19 images and toolkit scrollbars. Use the --help option in `configure'
20 to list them.
21
22 ** There is a new configure option `--without-xim' that instructs
23 Emacs to not use X Input Methods (XIM), if these are available.
24
25 ** There is a new configure option `--disable-largefile' to omit
26 Unix-98-style support for large files if that is available.
27
28 ** You can build a 64-bit Emacs for SPARC/Solaris systems which
29 support 64-bit executables. See etc/MACHINES for instructions.
30
31 \f
32 * Changes in Emacs 21.1
33
34 * When an error is signaled during the loading of the user's init
35 file, Emacs now pops up the *Messages* buffer.
36
37 ** Polish and German translations of Emacs' reference card have been
38 added. They are named `pl-refcard.tex' and `de-refcard.tex'.
39 Postscript files are included.
40
41 ** A reference card for Dired has been added. Its name is
42 `dired-ref.tex'.
43
44 ** The new variable `auto-mode-interpreter-regexp' contains a regular
45 expression matching interpreters, for file mode determination.
46
47 This regular expression is matched against the first line of a file to
48 determine the file's mode in `set-auto-mode' when Emacs can't deduce a
49 mode from the file's name. If it matches, the file is assumed to be
50 interpreted by the interpreter matched by the second group of the
51 regular expression. The mode is then determined as the mode
52 associated with that interpreter in `interpreter-mode-alist'.
53
54 +++
55 ** C-down-mouse-3 is bound differently. Now if the menu bar is not
56 displayed it pops up a menu containing the items which would be on the
57 menu bar. If the menu bar is displayed, it pops up the major mode
58 menu or the Edit menu if there is no major mode menu.
59
60 ** Variable `load-path' is no longer customizable because it contains
61 a version-dependent component.
62
63 ** The <delete> function key is now bound to `delete-char' by default.
64 Note that this takes effect only on window systems. On TTYs, Emacs
65 will receive ASCII 127 when the DEL key is pressed. This
66 character is still bound as before.
67
68 ** Item Save Options on the Options menu allows saving options set
69 using that menu.
70
71 ** New function executable-make-buffer-file-executable-if-script-p is
72 suitable as an after-save-hook as an alternative to `executable-chmod'.
73
74 +++
75 ** The most preferred coding-system is now used to save a buffer if
76 buffer-file-coding-system is `undecided' and it is safe for the buffer
77 contents. (The most preferred is set by set-language-environment or
78 by M-x prefer-coding-system.) Thus if you visit an ASCII file and
79 insert a non-ASCII character from your current language environment,
80 the file will be saved silently with the appropriate coding.
81 Previously you would be prompted for a safe coding system.
82
83 +++
84 ** New variable `inhibit-iso-escape-detection' determines if Emacs'
85 coding system detection algorithm should pay attention to ISO2022's
86 escape sequences. If this variable is non-nil, the algorithm ignores
87 such escape sequences. The default value is nil, and it is
88 recommended not to change it except for the special case that you
89 always want to read any escape code verbatim. If you just want to
90 read a specific file without decoding escape codes, use C-x RET c
91 (`universal-coding-system-argument'). For instance, C-x RET c latin-1
92 RET C-x C-f filename RET.
93
94 ** Variable `default-korean-keyboard' is initialized properly from the
95 environment variable `HANGUL_KEYBOARD_TYPE'.
96
97 +++
98 ** C-u C-x = provides detailed information about the character at
99 point in a pop-up window.
100
101 +++
102 ** New command M-x list-charset-chars reads a character set name and
103 displays all characters in that character set.
104
105 ** M-x set-terminal-coding-system (C-x RET t) now allows CCL-based
106 coding systems such as cpXXX and cyrillic-koi8.
107
108 +++
109 ** M-; now calls comment-dwim which tries to do something clever based
110 on the context. M-x kill-comment is now an alias to comment-kill,
111 defined on newcomment.el.
112
113 +++
114 ** The function `getenv' is now callable interactively.
115
116 ** The many obsolete language `setup-...-environment' commands have
117 been removed -- use `set-language-environment'.
118
119 +++
120 ** New user options `display-time-mail-face' and
121 `display-time-use-mail-icon' control the appearance of mode-line mail
122 indicator used by the display-time package. On a suitable display the
123 indicator can be an icon and is mouse-sensitive.
124
125 +++
126 ** Emacs' auto-save list files are now by default stored in a
127 sub-directory `.emacs.d/auto-save-list/' of the user's home directory.
128 (On MS-DOS, this subdirectory's name is `_emacs.d/auto-save.list/'.)
129 You can customize `auto-save-list-prefix' to change this location.
130
131 +++
132 ** On window-systems, additional space can be put between text lines
133 on the display using several methods
134
135 +++
136 - By setting frame parameter `line-spacing' to PIXELS. PIXELS must be
137 a positive integer, and specifies that PIXELS number of pixels should
138 be put below text lines on the affected frame or frames.
139
140 +++
141 - By setting X resource `lineSpacing', class `LineSpacing'. This is
142 equivalent ot specifying the frame parameter.
143
144 - By specifying `--line-spacing=N' or `-lsp N' on the command line.
145
146 - By setting buffer-local variable `line-spacing'. The meaning is
147 the same, but applies to the a particular buffer only.
148
149 +++
150 ** The new command `clone-indirect-buffer' can be used to create
151 an indirect buffer that is a twin copy of the current buffer. The
152 command `clone-indirect-buffer-other-window', bound to C-x 4 c,
153 does the same but displays the indirect buffer in another window.
154
155 +++
156 ** New user options `backup-directory-alist' and
157 `make-backup-file-name-function' control the placement of backups,
158 typically in a single directory or in an invisible sub-directory.
159
160 ** New commands iso-iso2sgml and iso-sgml2iso convert between Latin-1
161 characters and the corresponding SGML (HTML) entities.
162
163 +++
164 ** Emacs now refuses to load compiled Lisp files which weren't
165 compiled with Emacs. Set `load-dangerous-libraries' to t to change
166 this behavior.
167
168 The reason for this change is an incompatible change in XEmacs' byte
169 compiler. Files compiled with XEmacs can contain byte codes that let
170 Emacs dump core.
171
172 +++
173 ** New X resources recognized
174
175 *** The X resource `synchronous', class `Synchronous', specifies
176 whether Emacs should run in synchronous mode. Synchronous mode
177 is useful for debugging X problems.
178
179 Example:
180
181 emacs.synchronous: true
182
183 *** The X resource `visualClass, class `VisualClass', specifies the
184 visual Emacs should use. The resource's value should be a string of
185 the form `CLASS-DEPTH', where CLASS is the name of the visual class,
186 and DEPTH is the requested color depth as a decimal number. Valid
187 visual class names are
188
189 TrueColor
190 PseudoColor
191 DirectColor
192 StaticColor
193 GrayScale
194 StaticGray
195
196 Visual class names specified as X resource are case-insensitive, i.e.
197 `pseudocolor', `Pseudocolor' and `PseudoColor' all have the same
198 meaning.
199
200 The program `xdpyinfo' can be used to list the visual classes
201 supported on your display, and which depths they have. If
202 `visualClass' is not specified, Emacs uses the display's default
203 visual.
204
205 Example:
206
207 emacs.visualClass: TrueColor-8
208
209 *** The X resource `privateColormap', class `PrivateColormap',
210 specifies that Emacs should use a private colormap if it is using the
211 default visual, and that visual is of class PseudoColor. Recognized
212 resource values are `true' or `on'.
213
214 Example:
215
216 emacs.privateColormap: true
217
218 ** The menu bar configuration has changed. The new configuration is
219 more CUA-compliant. The most significant change is that Options is
220 now a separate menu-bar item, with Mule and Customize as its submenus.
221
222 ** User-option `show-cursor-in-non-selected-windows' controls how to
223 display the cursor in non-selected windows. If nil, no cursor is
224 shown, if non-nil a hollow box cursor is shown. This option can
225 be customized.
226
227 +++
228 ** The variable `echo-keystrokes' may now have a floating point value.
229
230 +++
231 ** C-x 5 1 runs the new command delete-other-frames which deletes
232 all frames except the selected one.
233
234 ** If your init file is compiled (.emacs.elc), `user-init-file' is set
235 to the source name (.emacs.el), if that exists, after loading it.
236
237 ** The help string specified for a menu-item whose definition contains
238 the property `:help HELP' is now displayed under X, on MS-Windows, and
239 MS-DOS, either in the echo area or with tooltips. Many standard menus
240 displayed by Emacs now have help strings.
241
242 +++
243 ** Highlighting of mouse-sensitive regions is now supported in the
244 MS-DOS version of Emacs.
245
246 ** New user option `read-mail-command' specifies a command to use to
247 read mail from the menu etc.
248
249 +++
250 ** Hexl contains a new command `hexl-insert-hex-string' which inserts
251 a string of hexadecimal numbers read from the mini-buffer.
252
253 ** Changes in Texinfo mode.
254
255 ** A couple of new key bindings have been added for inserting Texinfo
256 macros
257
258 Key binding Macro
259 -------------------------
260 C-c C-c C-s @strong
261 C-c C-c C-e @emph
262 C-c C-c u @url
263 C-c C-c q @quotation
264 C-c C-c m @email
265
266 ** Changes in Outline mode.
267
268 There is now support for Imenu to index headings. A new command
269 `outline-headers-as-kill' copies the visible headings in the region to
270 the kill ring, e.g. to produce a table of contents.
271
272 ** Changes to Emacs Server
273
274 +++
275 *** The new option `server-kill-new-buffers' specifies what to do
276 with buffers when done with them. If non-nil, the default, buffers
277 are killed, unless they were already present before visiting them with
278 Emacs Server. If nil, `server-temp-file-regexp' specifies which
279 buffers to kill, as before.
280
281 Please note that only buffers are killed that still have a client,
282 i.e. buffers visited with `emacsclient --no-wait' are never killed in
283 this way.
284
285 ** Changes to Show Paren mode.
286
287 *** Overlays used by Show Paren mode now use a priority property.
288 The new user option show-paren-priority specifies the priority to
289 use. Default is 1000.
290
291 +++
292 ** New command M-x check-parens can be used to find unbalanced paren
293 groups and strings in buffers in Lisp mode (or other modes).
294
295 +++
296 ** You can now easily create new *Info* buffers using either
297 M-x clone-buffer, C-u m <entry> RET or C-u g <entry> RET.
298 M-x clone-buffer can also be used on *Help* and several other special
299 buffers.
300
301 +++
302 ** Emacs can now support 'wheeled' mice (such as the MS IntelliMouse)
303 under XFree86. To enable this, simply put (mwheel-install) in your
304 .emacs file.
305
306 The variables `mwheel-follow-mouse' and `mwheel-scroll-amount'
307 determine where and by how much buffers are scrolled.
308
309 ** Listing buffers with M-x list-buffers (C-x C-b) now shows
310 abbreviated file names. Abbreviations can be customized by changing
311 `directory-abbrev-alist'.
312
313 ** Faces and frame parameters.
314
315 There are four new faces `scroll-bar', `border', `cursor' and `mouse'.
316 Setting the frame parameters `scroll-bar-foreground' and
317 `scroll-bar-background' sets foreground and background color of face
318 `scroll-bar' and vice versa. Setting frame parameter `border-color'
319 sets the background color of face `border' and vice versa. Likewise
320 for frame parameters `cursor-color' and face `cursor', and frame
321 parameter `mouse-color' and face `mouse'.
322
323 Changing frame parameter `font' sets font-related attributes of the
324 `default' face and vice versa. Setting frame parameters
325 `foreground-color' or `background-color' sets the colors of the
326 `default' face and vice versa.
327
328 +++
329 ** New face `menu'.
330
331 The face `menu' can be used to change colors and font of Emacs' menus.
332 Setting the font of LessTif/Motif menus is currently not supported;
333 attempts to set the font are ignored in this case.
334
335 +++
336 ** New frame parameter `screen-gamma' for gamma correction.
337
338 The new frame parameter `screen-gamma' specifies gamma-correction for
339 colors. Its value may be nil, the default, in which case no gamma
340 correction occurs, or a number > 0, usually a float, that specifies
341 the screen gamma of a frame's display.
342
343 PC monitors usually have a screen gamma of 2.2. smaller values result
344 in darker colors. You might want to try a screen gamma of 1.5 for LCD
345 color displays. The viewing gamma Emacs uses is 0.4545. (1/2.2).
346
347 The X resource name of this parameter is `screenGamma', class
348 `ScreenGamma'.
349
350 ** Emacs has a new redisplay engine.
351
352 The new redisplay handles characters of variable width and height.
353 Italic text can be used without redisplay problems. Fonts containing
354 oversized characters, i.e. characters larger than the logical height
355 of a font can be used. Images of various formats can be displayed in
356 the text.
357
358 ** Emacs has a new face implementation.
359
360 The new faces no longer fundamentally use X font names to specify the
361 font. Instead, each face has several independent attributes--family,
362 height, width, weight and slant--that it may or may not specify.
363 These attributes can be merged from various faces, and then together
364 specify a font.
365
366 Faces are supported on terminals that can display color or fonts.
367 These terminal capabilities are auto-detected. Details can be found
368 under Lisp changes, below.
369
370 ** New default font is Courier 12pt.
371
372 +++
373 ** When using a windowing terminal, each Emacs window now has a cursor
374 of its own. When the window is selected, the cursor is solid;
375 otherwise, it is hollow.
376
377 ** Bitmap areas to the left and right of windows are used to display
378 truncation marks, continuation marks, overlay arrows and alike. The
379 foreground, background, and stipple of these areas can be changed by
380 customizing face `fringe'.
381
382 ** The mode line under X is now drawn with shadows by default. You
383 can change its appearance by modifying the face `modeline'.
384
385 ** LessTif support.
386
387 Emacs now runs with the LessTif toolkit (see <http://www.lesstif.org>).
388 You will need a version 0.88.1 or later.
389
390 ** Toolkit scroll bars.
391
392 Emacs now uses toolkit scrollbars if available. When configured for
393 LessTif/Motif, it will use that toolkit's scrollbar. Otherwise, when
394 configured for Lucid and Athena widgets, it will use the Xaw3d scroll
395 bar if Xaw3d is available. You can turn off the use of toolkit scroll
396 bars by specifying `--with-toolkit-scroll-bars=no' when configuring
397 Emacs.
398
399 When you encounter problems with the Xaw3d scroll bar, watch out how
400 Xaw3d is compiled on your system. If the Makefile generated from
401 Xaw3d's Imakefile contains a `-DNARROWPROTO' compiler option, and your
402 Emacs system configuration file `s/your-system.h' does not contain a
403 define for NARROWPROTO, you might consider adding it. Take
404 `s/freebsd.h' as an example.
405
406 Alternatively, if you don't have access to the Xaw3d source code, take
407 a look at your system's imake configuration file, for example in the
408 directory `/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/config' (paths are different on
409 different systems). You will find files `*.cf' there. If your
410 system's cf-file contains a line like `#define NeedWidePrototypes NO',
411 add a `#define NARROWPROTO' to your Emacs system configuration file.
412
413 The reason for this is that one Xaw3d function uses `double' or
414 `float' function parameters depending on the setting of NARROWPROTO.
415 This is not a problem when Imakefiles are used because each system's
416 image configuration file contains the necessary information. Since
417 Emacs doesn't use imake, this has do be done manually.
418
419 ** Toggle buttons and radio buttons in menus.
420
421 When compiled with LessTif (or Motif) support, Emacs uses toolkit
422 widgets for radio and toggle buttons in menus. When configured for
423 Lucid, Emacs draws radio buttons and toggle buttons similar to Motif.
424
425 +++
426 ** Highlighting of trailing whitespace.
427
428 When `show-trailing-whitespace' is non-nil, Emacs displays trailing
429 whitespace in the face `trailing-whitespace'. Trailing whitespace is
430 defined as spaces or tabs at the end of a line. To avoid busy
431 highlighting when entering new text, trailing whitespace is not
432 displayed if point is at the end of the line containing the
433 whitespace.
434
435 +++
436 ** Busy-cursor.
437
438 Emacs can optionally display a busy-cursor under X. You can turn the
439 display on or off by customizing group `cursor'.
440
441 +++
442 ** Blinking cursor
443
444 M-x blink-cursor-mode toggles a blinking cursor under X and on
445 terminals having terminal capabilities `vi', `vs', and `ve'. Blinking
446 and related parameters like frequency and delay can be customized in
447 the group `cursor'.
448
449 ** New font-lock support mode `jit-lock-mode'.
450
451 This support mode is roughly equivalent to `lazy-lock' but is
452 generally faster. It supports stealth and deferred fontification.
453 See the documentation of the function `jit-lock-mode' for more
454 details.
455
456 Font-lock uses jit-lock-mode as default support mode, so you don't
457 have to do anything to activate it.
458
459 ** Tabs and variable-width text.
460
461 Tabs are now displayed with stretch properties; the width of a tab is
462 defined as a multiple of the normal character width of a frame, and is
463 independent of the fonts used in the text where the tab appears.
464 Thus, tabs can be used to line up text in different fonts.
465
466 ** Enhancements of the Lucid menu bar
467
468 +++
469 *** The Lucid menu bar now supports the resource "margin".
470
471 emacs.pane.menubar.margin: 5
472
473 The default margin is 4 which makes the menu bar appear like the
474 LessTif/Motif one.
475
476 *** Arrows that indicate sub-menus are now drawn with shadows, as in
477 LessTif and Motif.
478
479 +++
480 ** Hscrolling in C code.
481
482 Horizontal scrolling now happens automatically if
483 `automatic-hscrolling' is set (the default). This setting can be
484 customized.
485
486 ** Tool bar support.
487
488 Emacs supports a tool bar at the top of a frame under X. For details
489 how to define a tool bar, see the page describing Lisp-level changes.
490
491 +++
492 ** Mouse-sensitive mode line.
493
494 Different parts of the mode line under X have been made
495 mouse-sensitive. Moving the mouse to a mouse-sensitive part in the mode
496 line changes the appearance of the mouse pointer to an arrow, and help
497 about available mouse actions is displayed either in the echo area, or
498 in the tooltip window if you have enabled one.
499
500 Currently, the following actions have been defined:
501
502 - Mouse-1 on the buffer name in the mode line switches between two
503 buffers.
504
505 - Mouse-2 on the buffer-name switches to the next buffer, and
506 M-mouse-2 switches to the previous buffer in the buffer list.
507
508 - Mouse-3 on the buffer-name displays a buffer menu.
509
510 - Mouse-2 on the read-only or modified status in the mode line (`%' or
511 `*') toggles the status.
512
513 - Mouse-3 on the mode name display a minor-mode menu.
514
515 ** LessTif/Motif file selection dialog.
516
517 When Emacs is configured to use LessTif or Motif, reading a file name
518 from a menu will pop up a file selection dialog if `use-dialog-box' is
519 non-nil.
520
521 ** Emacs can display faces on TTY frames.
522
523 Emacs automatically detects terminals that are able to display colors.
524 Faces with a weight greater than normal are displayed extra-bright, if
525 the terminal supports it. Faces with a weight less than normal and
526 italic faces are displayed dimmed, if the terminal supports it.
527 Underlined faces are displayed underlined if possible. Other face
528 attributes such as `overline', `strike-through', and `box' are ignored
529 on terminals.
530
531 ** Sound support
532
533 Emacs supports playing sound files on GNU/Linux and FreeBSD (Voxware
534 driver and native BSD driver, a.k.a. Luigi's driver). Currently
535 supported file formats are RIFF-WAVE (*.wav) and Sun Audio (*.au).
536
537 +++
538 ** A new variable, backup-by-copying-when-privileged-mismatch, gives
539 the highest file uid for which backup-by-copying-when-mismatch will be
540 forced on. The assumption is that uids less than or equal to this
541 value are special uids (root, bin, daemon, etc.--not real system
542 users) and that files owned by these users should not change ownership,
543 even if your system policy allows users other than root to edit them.
544
545 The default is 200; set the variable to nil to disable the feature.
546
547 +++
548 ** A block cursor can be drawn as wide as the glyph under it under X.
549
550 As an example: if a block cursor is over a tab character, it will be
551 drawn as wide as that tab on the display. To do this, set
552 `x-stretch-cursor' to a non-nil value.
553
554 +++
555 ** Empty display lines at the end of a buffer may be marked with a
556 bitmap (this is similar to the tilde displayed by vi).
557
558 This behavior is activated by setting the buffer-local variable
559 `indicate-empty-lines' to a non-nil value. The default value of this
560 variable is found in `default-indicate-empty-lines'.
561
562 +++
563 ** There is a new "aggressive" scrolling method.
564
565 When scrolling up because point is above the window start, if the
566 value of the buffer-local variable `scroll-up-aggessively' is a
567 number, Emacs chooses a new window start so that point ends up that
568 fraction of the window's height from the top of the window.
569
570 When scrolling down because point is below the window end, if the
571 value of the buffer-local variable `scroll-down-aggessively' is a
572 number, Emacs chooses a new window start so that point ends up that
573 fraction of the window's height from the bottom of the window.
574
575 ** The rectangle commands now avoid inserting undesirable spaces,
576 notably at the end of lines.
577
578 All these functions have been rewritten to avoid inserting unwanted
579 spaces, and an optional prefix now allows them to behave the old way.
580
581 +++
582 There is a new command M-x replace-rectangle.
583
584 ** The new command M-x query-replace-regexp-eval acts like
585 query-replace-regexp, but takes a Lisp expression which is evaluated
586 after each match to get the replacement text.
587
588 +++
589 ** M-x query-replace recognizes a new command `e' (or `E') that lets
590 you edit the replacement string.
591
592 ** The new command mail-abbrev-complete-alias, bound to `M-TAB', lets
593 you complete mail aliases in the text, analogous to
594 lisp-complete-symbol.
595
596 +++
597 ** Emacs now resizes mini-windows if appropriate.
598
599 If a message is longer than one line, or minibuffer contents are
600 longer than one line, Emacs now resizes the minibuffer window unless
601 it is on a frame of its own. You can control the maximum minibuffer
602 window size by setting the following variable:
603
604 - User option: max-mini-window-height
605
606 Maximum height for resizing mini-windows. If a float, it specifies a
607 fraction of the mini-window frame's height. If an integer, it
608 specifies a number of lines. If nil, don't resize.
609
610 Default is 0.25.
611
612 ** The command `Info-search' now uses a search history.
613
614 ** Changes to hideshow.el
615
616 Hideshow is now at version 5.x. It uses a new algorithms for block
617 selection and traversal and includes more isearch support.
618
619 *** Generalized block selection and traversal
620
621 A block is now recognized by three things: its start and end regexps
622 (both strings), and a match-data selector (an integer) specifying
623 which sub-expression in the start regexp serves as the place where a
624 `forward-sexp'-like function can operate. Hideshow always adjusts
625 point to this sub-expression before calling `hs-forward-sexp-func'
626 (which for most modes evaluates to `forward-sexp').
627
628 If the match-data selector is not specified, it defaults to zero,
629 i.e., the entire start regexp is valid, w/ no prefix. This is
630 backwards compatible with previous versions of hideshow. Please see
631 the docstring for variable `hs-special-modes-alist' for details.
632
633 *** Isearch support for updating mode line
634
635 During incremental search, if Hideshow minor mode is active, hidden
636 blocks are temporarily shown. The variable `hs-headline' records the
637 line at the beginning of the opened block (preceding the hidden
638 portion of the buffer), and the mode line is refreshed. When a block
639 is re-hidden, the variable is set to nil.
640
641 To show `hs-headline' in the mode line, you may wish to include
642 something like this in your .emacs.
643
644 (add-hook 'hs-minor-mode-hook
645 (lambda ()
646 (add-to-list 'mode-line-format 'hs-headline)))
647
648 ** Changes to Change Log mode and Add-Log functions
649
650 +++
651 If you invoke `add-change-log-entry' from a backup file, it makes an
652 entry appropriate for the file's parent. This is useful for making
653 log entries by comparing a version with deleted functions.
654
655 +++
656 New command M-x change-log-merge merges another log into the current
657 buffer.
658
659 +++
660 New command M-x change-log-redate fixes any old-style date entries in
661 a log file.
662
663 +++
664 Change Log mode now adds a file's version number to change log entries
665 if user-option `change-log-version-info-enabled' is non-nil.
666
667 +++
668 Unless the file is under version control the search for a file's
669 version number is performed based on regular expressions from
670 `change-log-version-number-regexp-list' which can be cutomized.
671 Version numbers are only found in the first 10 percent of a file.
672
673 ** Changes in Font Lock
674
675 *** The new function `font-lock-remove-keywords' can be used to remove
676 font-lock keywords from the current buffer or from a specific major
677 mode.
678
679 ** Comint (subshell) changes
680
681 By default, comint no longer uses the variable `comint-prompt-regexp' to
682 distiguish prompts from user-input. Instead, it notices which parts of
683 the text were output by the process, and which entered by the user, and
684 attaches `field' properties to allow emacs commands to use this information.
685 Common movement commands, notably beginning-of-line, respect field
686 boundaries in a fairly natural manner.
687 To disable this feature, and use the old behavior, set the variable
688 `comint-use-prompt-regexp-instead-of-fields' to a non-nil value.
689
690 Comint now includes new features to send commands to running processes
691 and redirect the output to a designated buffer or buffers.
692
693 The command M-x comint-redirect-send-command reads a command and
694 buffer name from the mini-buffer. The command is sent to the current
695 buffer's process, and its output is inserted into the specified buffer.
696
697 The command M-x comint-redirect-send-command-to-process acts like
698 M-x comint-redirect-send-command but additionally reads the name of
699 the buffer whose process should be used from the mini-buffer.
700
701 Packages based on comint.el like shell-mode, and scheme-interaction-mode
702 now highlight user input and program prompts, and support choosing
703 previous input with mouse-2. To control these feature, see the
704 user-options `comint-highlight-input' and `comint-highlight-prompt'.
705
706 ** Changes to Rmail mode
707
708 *** The new user-option rmail-rmail-user-mail-address-regexp can be
709 set to fine tune the identification of of the correspondent when
710 receiving new mail. If it matches the address of the sender, the
711 recipient is taken as correspondent of a mail. If nil, the default,
712 `user-login-name' and `user-mail-address' are used to exclude yourself
713 as correspondent.
714
715 Usually you don't have to set this variable, except if you collect
716 mails sent by you under different user names. Then it should be a
717 regexp matching your mail addresses.
718
719 *** The new user-option rmail-confirm-expunge controls whether and how
720 to ask for confirmation before expunging deleted messages from an
721 Rmail file. You can choose between no confirmation, confirmation
722 with y-or-n-p, or confirmation with yes-or-no-p. Default is to ask
723 for confirmation with yes-or-no-p.
724
725 *** RET is now bound in the Rmail summary to rmail-summary-goto-msg,
726 like `j'.
727
728 *** There is a new user option `rmail-digest-end-regexps' that
729 specifies the regular expressions to detect the line that ends a
730 digest message.
731
732 *** The new user option `rmail-automatic-folder-directives' specifies
733 in which folder to put messages automatically.
734
735 ** Changes to TeX mode
736
737 The default mode has been changed from `plain-tex-mode' to
738 `latex-mode'.
739
740 ** Changes to RefTeX mode
741
742 *** RefTeX has new support for index generation. Index entries can be
743 created with `C-c <', with completion available on index keys.
744 Pressing `C-c /' indexes the word at the cursor with a default
745 macro. `C-c >' compiles all index entries into an alphabetically
746 sorted *Index* buffer which looks like the final index. Entries
747 can be edited from that buffer.
748
749 *** Label and citation key selection now allow to select several
750 items and reference them together (use `m' to mark items, `a' or
751 `A' to use all marked entries).
752
753 *** reftex.el has been split into a number of smaller files to reduce
754 memory use when only a part of RefTeX is being used.
755
756 *** a new command `reftex-view-crossref-from-bibtex' (bound to `C-c &'
757 in BibTeX-mode) can be called in a BibTeX database buffer in order
758 to show locations in LaTeX documents where a particular entry has
759 been cited.
760
761 ** Emacs Lisp mode now allows multiple levels of outline headings.
762 The level of a heading is determined from the number of leading
763 semicolons in a heading line. Toplevel forms starting with a `('
764 in column 1 are always made leaves.
765
766 ** The M-x time-stamp command (most commonly used on write-file-hooks)
767 has the following new features:
768
769 *** The patterns for finding the time stamp and for updating a pattern
770 may match text spanning multiple lines. For example, some people like
771 to have the filename and date on separate lines. The new variable
772 time-stamp-inserts-lines controls the matching for multi-line patterns.
773
774 *** More than one time stamp can be updated in the same file. This
775 feature is useful if you need separate time stamps in a program source
776 file to both include in formatted documentation and insert in the
777 compiled binary. The same time-stamp will be written at each matching
778 pattern. The variable time-stamp-count enables this new feature; it
779 defaults to 1.
780
781 ** Partial Completion mode now completes environment variables in
782 file names.
783
784 +++
785 ** Tooltips.
786
787 Tooltips are small X windows displaying a help string at the current
788 mouse position. To use them, use the Lisp package `tooltip' which you
789 can access via the user option `tooltip-mode'.
790
791 Tooltips also provides support for GUD debugging. If activated,
792 variable values can be displayed in tooltips by pointing at them with
793 the mouse in source buffers. You can customize various aspects of the
794 tooltip display in the group `tooltip'.
795
796 +++
797 ** Customize changes
798
799 *** Customize now supports comments about customized items. Use the
800 `State' menu to add comments. Note that customization comments will
801 cause the customizations to fail in earlier versions of Emacs.
802
803 *** The new option `custom-buffer-done-function' says whether to kill
804 Custom buffers when you've done with them or just bury them (the
805 default).
806
807 *** The keyword :set-after in defcustom allows to specify dependencies
808 between custom options. Example:
809
810 (defcustom default-input-method nil
811 "*Default input method for multilingual text (a string).
812 This is the input method activated automatically by the command
813 `toggle-input-method' (\\[toggle-input-method])."
814 :group 'mule
815 :type '(choice (const nil) string)
816 :set-after '(current-language-environment))
817
818 This specifies that default-input-method should be set after
819 current-language-environment even if default-input-method appears
820 first in a custom-set-variables statement.
821
822 ** New features in evaluation commands
823
824 *** The commands to evaluate Lisp expressions, such as C-M-x in Lisp
825 modes, C-j in Lisp Interaction mode, and M-:, now bind the variables
826 print-level, print-length, and debug-on-error based on the
827 customizable variables eval-expression-print-level,
828 eval-expression-print-length, and eval-expression-debug-on-error.
829
830 *** The function `eval-defun' (M-C-x) now loads Edebug and instruments
831 code when called with a prefix argument.
832
833 ** Ispell changes
834
835 +++
836 *** The command `ispell' now spell-checks a region if
837 transient-mark-mode is on, and the mark is active. Otherwise it
838 spell-checks the current buffer.
839
840 +++
841 *** Support for synchronous subprocesses - DOS/Windoze - has been
842 added.
843
844 *** An "alignment error" bug was fixed when a manual spelling
845 correction is made and re-checked.
846
847 *** An Italian and a Portuguese dictionary definition has been added.
848
849 *** Region skipping performance has been vastly improved in some
850 cases.
851
852 *** Spell checking HTML buffers has been improved and isn't so strict
853 on syntax errors.
854
855 *** The buffer-local words are now always placed on a new line at the
856 end of the buffer.
857
858 ** Dired changes
859
860 *** New variable `dired-recursive-deletes' determines if the delete
861 command will delete non-empty directories recursively. The default
862 is, delete only empty directories.
863
864 *** New variable `dired-recursive-copies' determines if the copy
865 command will copy directories recursively. The default is, do not
866 copy directories recursively.
867
868 *** In command `dired-do-shell-command' (usually bound to `!') a `?'
869 in the shell command has a special meaning similar to `*', but with
870 the difference that the command will be run on each file individually.
871
872 *** The new command `dired-find-alternate-file' (usually bound to `a')
873 replaces the Dired buffer with the buffer for an alternate file or
874 directory.
875
876 *** The new command `dired-show-file-type' (usually bound to `w') shows
877 a message in the echo area describing what type of file the point is on.
878 This command invokes the external program `file' do its work, and so
879 will only work on systems with that program, and will be only as
880 accurate or inaccurate as it is.
881
882 *** Dired now properly handles undo changes of adding/removing `-R'
883 from ls switches.
884
885 ** The variable mail-specify-envelope-from controls whether to
886 use the -f option when sending mail.
887
888 ** CC mode changes.
889
890 Note: This release contains changes that might not be compatible with
891 current user setups (although it's believed that these
892 incompatibilities will only show in very uncommon circumstances).
893 However, since the impact is uncertain, these changes may be rolled
894 back depending on user feedback. Therefore there's no forward
895 compatibility guarantee wrt the new features introduced in this
896 release.
897
898 *** c-style-variables-are-local-p now defaults to t.
899 This is an incompatible change that has been made to make the behavior
900 of the style system wrt global variable settings less confusing for
901 non-advanced users. If you know what this variable does you might
902 want to set it to nil in your .emacs, otherwise you probably don't
903 have to bother.
904
905 Defaulting c-style-variables-are-local-p to t avoids the confusing
906 situation that occurs when a user sets some style variables globally
907 and edits both a Java and a non-Java file in the same Emacs session.
908 If the style variables aren't buffer local in this case, loading of
909 the second file will cause the default style (either "gnu" or "java"
910 by default) to override the global settings made by the user.
911
912 *** New initialization procedure for the style system.
913 When the initial style for a buffer is determined by CC Mode (from the
914 variable c-default-style), the global values of style variables now
915 take precedence over the values specified by the chosen style. This
916 is different than the old behavior: previously, the style-specific
917 settings would override the global settings. This change makes it
918 possible to do simple configuration in the intuitive way with
919 Customize or with setq lines in one's .emacs file.
920
921 By default, the global value of every style variable is the new
922 special symbol set-from-style, which causes the value to be taken from
923 the style system. This means that in effect, only an explicit setting
924 of a style variable will cause the "overriding" behavior described
925 above.
926
927 Also note that global settings override style-specific settings *only*
928 when the initial style of a buffer is chosen by a CC Mode major mode
929 function. When a style is chosen in other ways --- for example, by a
930 call like (c-set-style "gnu") in a hook, or via M-x c-set-style ---
931 then the style-specific values take precedence over any global style
932 values. In Lisp terms, global values override style-specific values
933 only when the new second argument to c-set-style is non-nil; see the
934 function documentation for more info.
935
936 The purpose of these changes is to make it easier for users,
937 especially novice users, to do simple customizations with Customize or
938 with setq in their .emacs files. On the other hand, the new system is
939 intended to be compatible with advanced users' customizations as well,
940 such as those that choose styles in hooks or whatnot. This new system
941 is believed to be almost entirely compatible with current
942 configurations, in spite of the changed precedence between style and
943 global variable settings when a buffer's default style is set.
944
945 (Thanks to Eric Eide for clarifying this explanation a bit.)
946
947 **** c-offsets-alist is now a customizable variable.
948 This became possible as a result of the new initialization behavior.
949
950 This variable is treated slightly differently from the other style
951 variables; instead of using the symbol set-from-style, it will be
952 completed with the syntactic symbols it doesn't already contain when
953 the style is first initialized. This means it now defaults to the
954 empty list to make all syntactic elements get their values from the
955 style system.
956
957 **** Compatibility variable to restore the old behavior.
958 In case your configuration doesn't work with this change, you can set
959 c-old-style-variable-behavior to non-nil to get the old behavior back
960 as far as possible.
961
962 *** Improvements to line breaking and text filling.
963 CC Mode now handles this more intelligently and seamlessly wrt the
964 surrounding code, especially inside comments. For details see the new
965 chapter about this in the manual.
966
967 **** New variable to recognize comment line prefix decorations.
968 The variable c-comment-prefix-regexp has been added to properly
969 recognize the line prefix in both block and line comments. It's
970 primarily used to initialize the various paragraph recognition and
971 adaptive filling variables that the text handling functions uses.
972
973 **** New variable c-block-comment-prefix.
974 This is a generalization of the now obsolete variable
975 c-comment-continuation-stars to handle arbitrary strings.
976
977 **** CC Mode now uses adaptive fill mode.
978 This to make it adapt better to the paragraph style inside comments.
979
980 It's also possible to use other adaptive filling packages inside CC
981 Mode, notably Kyle E. Jones' Filladapt mode (http://wonderworks.com/).
982 A new convenience function c-setup-filladapt sets up Filladapt for use
983 inside CC Mode.
984
985 Note though that the 2.12 version of Filladapt lacks a feature that
986 causes it to work suboptimally when c-comment-prefix-regexp can match
987 the empty string (which it commonly does). A patch for that is
988 available from the CC Mode web site (http://www.python.org/emacs/
989 cc-mode/).
990
991 **** It's now possible to selectively turn off auto filling.
992 The variable c-ignore-auto-fill is used to ignore auto fill mode in
993 specific contexts, e.g. in preprocessor directives and in string
994 literals.
995
996 **** New context sensitive line break function c-context-line-break.
997 It works like newline-and-indent in normal code, and adapts the line
998 prefix according to the comment style when used inside comments. If
999 you're normally using newline-and-indent, you might want to switch to
1000 this function.
1001
1002 *** Fixes to IDL mode.
1003 It now does a better job in recognizing only the constructs relevant
1004 to IDL. E.g. it no longer matches "class" as the beginning of a
1005 struct block, but it does match the CORBA 2.3 "valuetype" keyword.
1006 Thanks to Eric Eide.
1007
1008 *** Improvements to the Whitesmith style.
1009 It now keeps the style consistently on all levels and both when
1010 opening braces hangs and when they don't.
1011
1012 **** New lineup function c-lineup-whitesmith-in-block.
1013
1014 *** New lineup functions c-lineup-template-args and c-indent-multi-line-block.
1015 See their docstrings for details. c-lineup-template-args does a
1016 better job of tracking the brackets used as parens in C++ templates,
1017 and is used by default to line up continued template arguments.
1018
1019 *** c-lineup-comment now preserves alignment with a comment on the
1020 previous line. It used to instead preserve comments that started in
1021 the column specified by comment-column.
1022
1023 *** c-lineup-C-comments handles "free form" text comments.
1024 In comments with a long delimiter line at the start, the indentation
1025 is kept unchanged for lines that start with an empty comment line
1026 prefix. This is intended for the type of large block comments that
1027 contain documentation with its own formatting. In these you normally
1028 don't want CC Mode to change the indentation.
1029
1030 *** The `c' syntactic symbol is now relative to the comment start
1031 instead of the previous line, to make integers usable as lineup
1032 arguments.
1033
1034 *** All lineup functions have gotten docstrings.
1035
1036 *** More preprocessor directive movement functions.
1037 c-down-conditional does the reverse of c-up-conditional.
1038 c-up-conditional-with-else and c-down-conditional-with-else are
1039 variants of these that also stops at "#else" lines (suggested by Don
1040 Provan).
1041
1042 *** Minor improvements to many movement functions in tricky situations.
1043
1044 ** Makefile mode changes
1045
1046 *** The mode now uses the abbrev table `makefile-mode-abbrev-table'.
1047
1048 *** Conditionals and include statements are now highlighted when
1049 Fontlock mode is active.
1050
1051 ** Isearch changes
1052
1053 *** Isearch now puts a call to `isearch-resume' in the command history,
1054 so that searches can be resumed.
1055
1056 *** In Isearch mode, M-C-s and M-C-r are now bound like C-s and C-r,
1057 respectively, i.e. you can repeat a regexp isearch with the same keys
1058 that started the search.
1059
1060 *** In Isearch mode, mouse-2 in the echo area now yanks the current
1061 selection into the search string rather than giving an error.
1062
1063 +++
1064 *** There is a new lazy highlighting feature in incremental search.
1065
1066 Lazy highlighting is switched on/off by customizing variable
1067 `isearch-lazy-highlight'. When active, all matches for the current
1068 search string are highlighted. The current match is highlighted as
1069 before using face `isearch' or `region'. All other matches are
1070 highlighted using face `isearch-lazy-highlight-face' which defaults to
1071 `secondary-selection'.
1072
1073 The extra highlighting makes it easier to anticipate where the cursor
1074 will end up each time you press C-s or C-r to repeat a pending search.
1075 Highlighting of these additional matches happens in a deferred fashion
1076 using "idle timers," so the cycles needed do not rob isearch of its
1077 usual snappy response.
1078
1079 If `isearch-lazy-highlight-cleanup' is set to t, highlights for
1080 matches are automatically cleared when you end the search. If it is
1081 set to nil, you can remove the highlights manually with `M-x
1082 isearch-lazy-highlight-cleanup'.
1083
1084 +++
1085 ** Changes in sort.el
1086
1087 The function sort-numeric-fields interprets numbers starting with `0'
1088 as octal and numbers starting with `0x' or `0X' as hexadecimal. The
1089 new user-option sort-numeric-base can be used to specify a default
1090 numeric base.
1091
1092 ** Changes to Ange-ftp
1093
1094 +++
1095 *** Ange-ftp allows you to specify of a port number in remote file
1096 names cleanly. It is appended to the host name, separated by a hash
1097 sign, e.g. `/foo@bar.org#666:mumble'. (This syntax comes from EFS.)
1098
1099 *** If the new user-option `ange-ftp-try-passive-mode' is set, passive
1100 ftp mode will be used if the ftp client supports that.
1101
1102 *** Ange-ftp handles the output of the w32-style clients which
1103 output ^M at the end of lines.
1104
1105 ** Shell script mode changes.
1106
1107 Shell script mode (sh-script) can now indent scripts for shells
1108 derived from sh and rc. The indentation style is customizeable, and
1109 sh-script can attempt to "learn" the current buffer's style.
1110
1111 ** Etags changes.
1112
1113 *** In DOS, etags looks for file.cgz if it cannot find file.c.
1114
1115 *** New option --ignore-case-regex is an alternative to --regex. It is now
1116 possible to bind a regexp to a language, by prepending the regexp with
1117 {lang}, where lang is one of the languages that `etags --help' prints out.
1118 This feature is useful especially for regex files, where each line contains
1119 a regular expression. The manual contains details.
1120
1121 *** In C and derived languages, etags creates tags for function
1122 declarations when given the --declarations option.
1123
1124 *** In C++, tags are created for "operator". The tags have the form
1125 "operator+", without spaces between the keyword and the operator.
1126
1127 *** New language Ada: tags are functions, procedures, packages, tasks, and
1128 types.
1129
1130 *** In Fortran, `procedure' is not tagged.
1131
1132 *** In Java, tags are created for "interface".
1133
1134 *** In Lisp, "(defstruct (foo", "(defun (operator" and similar constructs
1135 are now tagged.
1136
1137 *** In Perl, the --globals option tags global variables. my and local
1138 variables are tagged.
1139
1140 *** New language Python: def and class at the beginning of a line are tags.
1141
1142 *** .ss files are Scheme files, .pdb is Postscript with C syntax, .psw is
1143 for PSWrap.
1144
1145 +++
1146 ** Changes in etags.el
1147
1148 *** The new user-option tags-case-fold-search can be used to make
1149 tags operations case-sensitive or case-insensitive. The default
1150 is to use the same setting as case-fold-search.
1151
1152 *** You can display additional output with M-x tags-apropos by setting
1153 the new variable tags-apropos-additional-actions.
1154
1155 If non-nil, the variable's value should be a list of triples (TITLE
1156 FUNCTION TO-SEARCH). For each triple, M-x tags-apropos processes
1157 TO-SEARCH and lists tags from it. TO-SEARCH should be an alist,
1158 obarray, or symbol. If it is a symbol, the symbol's value is used.
1159
1160 TITLE is a string to use to label the list of tags from TO-SEARCH.
1161
1162 FUNCTION is a function to call when an entry is selected in the Tags
1163 List buffer. It is called with one argument, the selected symbol.
1164
1165 A useful example value for this variable might be something like:
1166
1167 '(("Emacs Lisp" Info-goto-emacs-command-node obarray)
1168 ("Common Lisp" common-lisp-hyperspec common-lisp-hyperspec-obarray)
1169 ("SCWM" scwm-documentation scwm-obarray))
1170
1171 *** The face tags-tag-face can be used to customize the appearance
1172 of tags in the output of M-x tags-apropos.
1173
1174 *** Setting tags-apropos-verbose to a non-nil value displays the
1175 names of tags files in the *Tags List* buffer.
1176
1177 +++
1178 ** Emacs now attempts to determine the initial language environment
1179 and preferred and locale coding systems systematically from the
1180 LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, and LANG environment variables during startup.
1181
1182 +++
1183 ** New language environments `Polish', `Latin-8' and `Latin-9'.
1184 Latin-8 and Latin-9 correspond respectively to the ISO character sets
1185 8859-14 (Celtic) and 8859-15 (updated Latin-1, with the Euro sign).
1186 GNU Intlfonts doesn't support these yet; there are basic 8859-14 and
1187 8859-15 fonts at <URL:http://czyborra.com/charsets/> and recent X
1188 releases have 8859-15. There are new Latin-8 and Latin-9 prefix
1189 (only) and Polish slash input methods in Leim.
1190
1191 +++
1192 ** Fortran mode has a new command `fortran-strip-sequence-nos' to
1193 remove text past column 72. The syntax class of `\' in Fortran is now
1194 appropriate for C-style escape sequences in strings.
1195
1196 ** SGML mode's default `sgml-validate-command' is now `nsgmls'.
1197
1198 +++
1199 ** A new command `view-emacs-problems' (C-h P) displays the PROBLEMS file.
1200
1201 +++
1202 ** The Dabbrev package has a new user-option `dabbrev-ignored-regexps'
1203 containing a list of regular expressions. Buffers matching a regular
1204 expression from that list, are not checked.
1205
1206 ** Emacs can now figure out modification times of remote files.
1207 When you do C-x C-f /user@host:/path/file RET and edit the file,
1208 and someone else modifies the file, you will be prompted to revert
1209 the buffer, just like for the local files.
1210
1211 ** The buffer menu (C-x C-b) no longer lists the *Buffer List* buffer.
1212
1213 ** When invoked with a prefix argument, the command `list-abbrevs' now
1214 displays local abbrevs, only.
1215
1216 ** New modes and packages
1217
1218 +++
1219 *** The new package timeclock.el is a mode is for keeping track of time
1220 intervals. You can use it for whatever purpose you like, but the
1221 typical scenario is to keep track of how much time you spend working
1222 on certain projects.
1223
1224 +++
1225 *** The new package hi-lock.el, text matching interactively entered
1226 regexp's can be highlighted. For example,
1227
1228 M-x highlight-regexp RET clearly RET RET
1229
1230 will highlight all occurrences of `clearly' using a yellow background
1231 face. New occurrences of `clearly' will be highlighted as they are
1232 typed. `M-x unhighlight-regexp RET' will remove the highlighting.
1233 Any existing face can be used for highlighting and a set of
1234 appropriate faces is provided. The regexps can be written into the
1235 current buffer in a form that will be recognized the next time the
1236 corresponding file is read.
1237
1238 +++
1239 *** The new package zone.el plays games with Emacs' display when
1240 Emacs is idle.
1241
1242 *** The new package xml.el provides a simple but generic XML
1243 parser. It doesn't parse the DTDs however.
1244
1245 *** The comment operations are now provided by the newcomment.el
1246 package which allows different styles of comment-region and should
1247 be more robust while offering the same functionality.
1248
1249 +++
1250 *** The Ebrowse package implements a C++ class browser and tags
1251 facilities tailored for use with C++. It is documented in a
1252 separate Texinfo file.
1253
1254 +++
1255 *** The PCL-CVS package available by either running M-x cvs-examine or
1256 by visiting a CVS administrative directory (with a prefix argument)
1257 provides an alternative interface to VC-dired for CVS. It comes with
1258 `log-view-mode' to view RCS and SCCS logs and `log-edit-mode' used to
1259 enter checkin log messages.
1260
1261 +++
1262 *** The new package called `woman' allows to browse Unix man pages
1263 without invoking external programs.
1264
1265 The command `M-x woman' formats manual pages entirely in Emacs Lisp
1266 and then displays them, like `M-x manual-entry' does. Unlike
1267 `manual-entry', `woman' does not invoke any external programs, so it
1268 is useful on systems such as MS-DOS/MS-Windows where the `man' and
1269 Groff or `troff' commands are not readily available.
1270
1271 The command `M-x woman-find-file' asks for the file name of a man
1272 page, then formats and displays it like `M-x woman' does.
1273
1274 +++
1275 *** The new command M-x re-builder offers a convenient interface for
1276 authoring regular expressions with immediate visual feedback.
1277
1278 The buffer from which the command was called becomes the target for
1279 the regexp editor popping up in a separate window. Matching text in
1280 the target buffer is immediately color marked during the editing.
1281 Each sub-expression of the regexp will show up in a different face so
1282 even complex regexps can be edited and verified on target data in a
1283 single step.
1284
1285 On displays not supporting faces the matches instead blink like
1286 matching parens to make them stand out. On such a setup you will
1287 probably also want to use the sub-expression mode when the regexp
1288 contains such to get feedback about their respective limits.
1289
1290 +++
1291 *** glasses-mode is a minor mode that makes
1292 unreadableIdentifiersLikeThis readable. It works as glasses, without
1293 actually modifying content of a buffer.
1294
1295 *** The package ebnf2ps translates an EBNF to a syntactic chart in
1296 PostScript.
1297
1298 Currently accepts ad-hoc EBNF, ISO EBNF and Bison/Yacc.
1299
1300 The ad-hoc default EBNF syntax has the following elements:
1301
1302 ; comment (until end of line)
1303 A non-terminal
1304 "C" terminal
1305 ?C? special
1306 $A default non-terminal
1307 $"C" default terminal
1308 $?C? default special
1309 A = B. production (A is the header and B the body)
1310 C D sequence (C occurs before D)
1311 C | D alternative (C or D occurs)
1312 A - B exception (A excluding B, B without any non-terminal)
1313 n * A repetition (A repeats n (integer) times)
1314 (C) group (expression C is grouped together)
1315 [C] optional (C may or not occurs)
1316 C+ one or more occurrences of C
1317 {C}+ one or more occurrences of C
1318 {C}* zero or more occurrences of C
1319 {C} zero or more occurrences of C
1320 C / D equivalent to: C {D C}*
1321 {C || D}+ equivalent to: C {D C}*
1322 {C || D}* equivalent to: [C {D C}*]
1323 {C || D} equivalent to: [C {D C}*]
1324
1325 Please, see ebnf2ps documentation for EBNF syntax and how to use it.
1326
1327 *** The package align.el will align columns within a region, using M-x
1328 align. Its mode-specific rules, based on regular expressions,
1329 determine where the columns should be split. In C and C++, for
1330 example, it will align variable names in declaration lists, or the
1331 equal signs of assignments.
1332
1333 +++
1334 *** `paragraph-indent-minor-mode' is a new minor mode supporting
1335 paragraphs in the same style as `paragraph-indent-text-mode'.
1336
1337 +++
1338 *** bs.el is a new package for buffer selection similar to
1339 list-buffers or electric-buffer-list. Use M-x bs-show to display a
1340 buffer menu with this package. You can use M-x bs-customize to
1341 customize the package.
1342
1343 *** find-lisp.el is a package emulating the Unix find command in Lisp.
1344
1345 *** calculator.el is a small calculator package that is intended to
1346 replace desktop calculators such as xcalc and calc.exe. Actually, it
1347 is not too small - it has more features than most desktop calculators,
1348 and can be customized easily to get many more functions. It should
1349 not be confused with "calc" which is a much bigger mathematical tool
1350 which answers different needs.
1351
1352 +++
1353 *** The minor modes cwarn-mode and global-cwarn-mode highlights
1354 suspicious C and C++ constructions. Currently, assignments inside
1355 expressions, semicolon following `if', `for' and `while' (except, of
1356 course, after a `do .. while' statement), and C++ functions with
1357 reference parameters are recognized. The modes require font-lock mode
1358 to be enabled.
1359
1360 +++
1361 *** smerge-mode.el provides `smerge-mode', a simple minor-mode for files
1362 containing diff3-style conflict markers, such as generated by RCS.
1363
1364 +++
1365 *** 5x5.el is a simple puzzle game.
1366
1367 +++
1368 *** hl-line.el provides a minor mode to highlight the current line.
1369
1370 *** ansi-color.el translates ANSI terminal escapes into text-properties.
1371
1372 *** delphi.el provides a major mode for editing the Delphi (Object
1373 Pascal) language.
1374
1375 +++
1376 *** quickurl.el provides a simple method of inserting a URL based on
1377 the text at point.
1378
1379 *** sql.el provides an interface to SQL data bases.
1380
1381 +++
1382 *** fortune.el uses the fortune program to create mail/news signatures.
1383
1384 *** whitespace.el ???
1385
1386 *** PostScript mode (ps-mode) is a new major mode for editing PostScript
1387 files. It offers: interaction with a PostScript interpreter, including
1388 (very basic) error handling; fontification, easily customizable for
1389 interpreter messages; auto-indentation; insertion of EPSF templates and
1390 often used code snippets; viewing of BoundingBox; commenting out /
1391 uncommenting regions; conversion of 8bit characters to PostScript octal
1392 codes. All functionality is accessible through a menu.
1393
1394 *** delim-col helps to prettify columns in a text region or rectangle.
1395
1396 Here is an example of columns:
1397
1398 horse apple bus
1399 dog pineapple car EXTRA
1400 porcupine strawberry airplane
1401
1402 Doing the following settings:
1403
1404 (setq delimit-columns-str-before "[ ")
1405 (setq delimit-columns-str-after " ]")
1406 (setq delimit-columns-str-separator ", ")
1407 (setq delimit-columns-separator "\t")
1408
1409
1410 Selecting the lines above and typing:
1411
1412 M-x delimit-columns-region
1413
1414 It results:
1415
1416 [ horse , apple , bus , ]
1417 [ dog , pineapple , car , EXTRA ]
1418 [ porcupine, strawberry, airplane, ]
1419
1420 delim-col has the following options:
1421
1422 delimit-columns-str-before Specify a string to be inserted
1423 before all columns.
1424
1425 delimit-columns-str-separator Specify a string to be inserted
1426 between each column.
1427
1428 delimit-columns-str-after Specify a string to be inserted
1429 after all columns.
1430
1431 delimit-columns-separator Specify a regexp which separates
1432 each column.
1433
1434 delim-col has the following commands:
1435
1436 delimit-columns-region Prettify all columns in a text region.
1437 delimit-columns-rectangle Prettify all columns in a text rectangle.
1438
1439 +++
1440 *** The package recentf.el maintains a menu for visiting files that
1441 were operated on recently.
1442
1443 M-x recentf-mode RET toggles recentf mode.
1444
1445 M-x customize-variable RET recentf-mode RET can be used to enable
1446 recentf at Emacs startup.
1447
1448 M-x customize-variable RET recentf-menu-filter RET to specify a menu
1449 filter function to change the menu appearance. For example, the recent
1450 file list can be displayed:
1451
1452 - organized by major modes, directories or user defined rules.
1453 - sorted by file pathes, file names, ascending or descending.
1454 - showing pathes relative to the current default-directory
1455
1456 The `recentf-filter-changer' menu filter function allows to
1457 dynamically change the menu appearance.
1458
1459 *** elide-head.el provides a mechanism for eliding boilerplate header
1460 text.
1461
1462 +++
1463 *** footnote.el provides `footnote-mode', a minor mode supporting use
1464 of footnotes. It is intended for use with Message mode, but isn't
1465 specific to Message mode.
1466
1467 +++
1468 *** diff-mode.el provides `diff-mode', a major mode for
1469 viewing/editing context diffs (patches). It is selected for files
1470 with extension `.diff', `.diffs', `.patch' and `.rej'.
1471
1472 +++
1473 *** EUDC, the Emacs Unified Directory Client, provides a common user
1474 interface to access directory servers using different directory
1475 protocols. It has a separate manual.
1476
1477 *** autoconf.el provides a major mode for editing configure.in files
1478 for Autoconf, selected automatically.
1479
1480 +++
1481 *** windmove.el provides moving between windows.
1482
1483 *** crm.el provides a facility to read multiple strings from the
1484 minibuffer with completion.
1485
1486 *** todo-mode.el provides management of TODO lists and integration
1487 with the diary features.
1488
1489 *** autoarg.el provides a feature reported from Twenex Emacs whereby
1490 numeric keys supply prefix args rather than self inserting.
1491
1492 *** The function `turn-off-auto-fill' unconditionally turns off Auto
1493 Fill mode.
1494
1495 ** Withdrawn packages
1496
1497 *** mldrag.el has been removed. mouse.el provides the same
1498 functionality with aliases for the mldrag functions.
1499
1500 *** eval-reg.el has been obsoleted by changes to edebug.el and removed.
1501
1502 *** ph.el has been obsoleted by EUDC and removed.
1503
1504 \f
1505 * Lisp changes made after edition 2.6 of the Emacs Lisp Manual,
1506 (Display-related features are described in a page of their own below.)
1507
1508 +++
1509 ** Reading from the mini-buffer now reads from standard input if Emacs
1510 is running in batch mode. For example,
1511
1512 (message "%s" (read t))
1513
1514 will read a Lisp expression from standard input and print the result
1515 to standard output.
1516
1517 +++
1518 ** The argument of `down-list', `backward-up-list', `up-list',
1519 `kill-sexp', `backward-kill-sexp' and `mark-sexp' is now optional.
1520
1521 ** If `display-buffer-reuse-frames' is set, function `display-buffer'
1522 will raise frames displaying a buffer, instead of creating a new
1523 frame or window.
1524
1525 +++
1526 ** Two new functions for removing elements from lists/sequences
1527 were added
1528
1529 - Function: remove ELT SEQ
1530
1531 Return a copy of SEQ with all occurences of ELT removed. SEQ must be
1532 a list, vector, or string. The comparison is done with `equal'.
1533
1534 - Function: remq ELT LIST
1535
1536 Return a copy of LIST with all occurences of ELT removed. The
1537 comparison is done with `eq'.
1538
1539 ** The function `delete' now also works with vectors and strings.
1540
1541 ** The meaning of the `:weakness WEAK' argument of make-hash-table
1542 has been changed.
1543
1544 +++
1545 ** Function `aset' stores any multibyte character in any string
1546 without signaling "Attempt to change char length of a string". It may
1547 convert a unibyte string to multibyte if necessary.
1548
1549 ** The value of the `help-echo' text property is called as a function
1550 or evaluated, if it is not a string already, to obtain a help string.
1551
1552 ** Function `make-obsolete' now has an optional arg to say when the
1553 function was declared obsolete.
1554
1555 ** Function `plist-member' is renamed from `widget-plist-member' (which is
1556 retained as an alias).
1557
1558 ** Easy-menu's :filter now works as in XEmacs.
1559 It takes the unconverted (i.e. XEmacs) form of the menu and the result
1560 is automatically converted to Emacs' form.
1561
1562 ** The new function `window-list' has been defined
1563
1564 - Function: window-list &optional WINDOW MINIBUF ALL-FRAMES
1565
1566 Return a list of windows in canonical order. The parameters WINDOW,
1567 MINIBUF and ALL-FRAMES are defined like for `next-window'.
1568
1569 ** There's a new function `some-window' defined as follows
1570
1571 - Function: some-window PREDICATE &optional MINIBUF ALL-FRAMES DEFAULT
1572
1573 Return a window satisfying PREDICATE.
1574
1575 This function cycles through all visible windows using `walk-windows',
1576 calling PREDICATE on each one. PREDICATE is called with a window as
1577 argument. The first window for which PREDICATE returns a non-nil
1578 value is returned. If no window satisfies PREDICATE, DEFAULT is
1579 returned.
1580
1581 Optional second arg MINIBUF t means count the minibuffer window even
1582 if not active. MINIBUF nil or omitted means count the minibuffer iff
1583 it is active. MINIBUF neither t nor nil means not to count the
1584 minibuffer even if it is active.
1585
1586 Several frames may share a single minibuffer; if the minibuffer
1587 counts, all windows on all frames that share that minibuffer count
1588 too. Therefore, if you are using a separate minibuffer frame
1589 and the minibuffer is active and MINIBUF says it counts,
1590 `walk-windows' includes the windows in the frame from which you
1591 entered the minibuffer, as well as the minibuffer window.
1592
1593 ALL-FRAMES is the optional third argument.
1594 ALL-FRAMES nil or omitted means cycle within the frames as specified above.
1595 ALL-FRAMES = `visible' means include windows on all visible frames.
1596 ALL-FRAMES = 0 means include windows on all visible and iconified frames.
1597 ALL-FRAMES = t means include windows on all frames including invisible frames.
1598 If ALL-FRAMES is a frame, it means include windows on that frame.
1599 Anything else means restrict to the selected frame.
1600
1601 ** The function `single-key-description' now encloses function key and
1602 event names in angle brackets. When called with a second optional
1603 argument non-nil, angle brackets won't be printed.
1604
1605 ** If the variable `message-truncate-lines' is bound to t around a
1606 call to `message', the echo area will not be resized to display that
1607 message; it will be truncated instead, as it was done in 20.x.
1608 Default value is nil.
1609
1610 ** The user option `line-number-display-limit' can now be set to nil,
1611 meaning no limit.
1612
1613 ** `select-safe-coding-system' now also checks the most preferred
1614 coding-system if buffer-file-coding-system is `undecided' and
1615 DEFAULT-CODING-SYSTEM is not specified,
1616
1617 ** The function `subr-arity' provides information on the argument list
1618 of a primitive.
1619
1620 ** The text property `keymap' specifies a key map which overrides the
1621 buffer's local map and the map specified by the `local-map' property.
1622 This is probably what most current uses of `local-map' want, rather
1623 than replacing the local map.
1624
1625 ** The obsolete variables before-change-function and
1626 after-change-function are no longer acted upon and have been removed.
1627
1628 ** The function `apropos-mode' runs the hook `apropos-mode-hook'.
1629
1630 +++
1631 ** `concat' no longer accepts individual integer arguments, as
1632 promised long ago.
1633
1634 ** The new function `float-time' returns the current time as a float.
1635 \f
1636 * Lisp changes in Emacs 21.1 (see following page for display-related features)
1637
1638 Note that +++ before an item means the Lisp manual has been updated.
1639 --- means that I have decided it does not need to be in the Lisp manual.
1640 When you add a new item, please add it without either +++ or ---
1641 so I will know I still need to look at it -- rms.
1642
1643 *** The special form `save-restriction' now works correctly even if the
1644 buffer is widened inside the save-restriction and changes made outside
1645 the original restriction. Previously, doing this would cause the saved
1646 restriction to be restored incorrectly.
1647
1648 *** The functions `find-charset-region' and `find-charset-string' include
1649 `eight-bit-control' and/or `eight-bit-graphic' in the returned list
1650 when it finds 8-bit characters. Previously, it included `ascii' in a
1651 multibyte buffer and `unknown' in a unibyte buffer.
1652
1653 *** The functions `set-buffer-modified', `string-as-multibyte' and
1654 `string-as-unibyte' change the byte sequence of a buffer if it
1655 contains a character from the `eight-bit-control' character set.
1656
1657 *** The handling of multibyte sequences in a multibyte buffer is
1658 changed. Previously, a byte sequence matching the pattern
1659 [\200-\237][\240-\377]+ was interpreted as a single character
1660 regardless of the length of the trailing bytes [\240-\377]+. Thus, if
1661 the sequence was longer than what the leading byte indicated, the
1662 extra trailing bytes were ignored by Lisp functions. Now such extra
1663 bytes are independent 8-bit characters belonging to the charset
1664 eight-bit-graphic.
1665
1666 ** Fontsets are now implemented using char-tables.
1667
1668 A fontset can now be specified for for each independent character, for
1669 a group of characters or for a character set rather than just for a
1670 character set as previously.
1671
1672 *** The arguments of the function `set-fontset-font' are changed.
1673 They are NAME, CHARACTER, FONTNAME, and optional FRAME. The function
1674 modifies fontset NAME to use FONTNAME for CHARACTER.
1675
1676 CHARACTER may be a cons (FROM . TO), where FROM and TO are non-generic
1677 characters. In that case FONTNAME is used for all characters in the
1678 range FROM and TO (inclusive). CHARACTER may be a charset. In that
1679 case FONTNAME is used for all character in the charset.
1680
1681 FONTNAME may be a cons (FAMILY . REGISTRY), where FAMILY is the family
1682 name of a font and REGSITRY is a registry name of a font.
1683
1684 *** Variable x-charset-registry has been deleted. The default charset
1685 registries of character sets are set in the default fontset
1686 "fontset-default".
1687
1688 *** The function `create-fontset-from-fontset-spec' ignores the second
1689 argument STYLE-VARIANT. It never creates style-variant fontsets.
1690
1691 ** The method of composing characters is changed. Now character
1692 composition is done by a special text property `composition' in
1693 buffers and strings.
1694
1695 *** Charset composition is deleted. Emacs never creates a `composite
1696 character' which is an independent character with a unique character
1697 code. Thus the following functions handling `composite characters'
1698 have been deleted: composite-char-component,
1699 composite-char-component-count, composite-char-composition-rule,
1700 composite-char-composition-rule and decompose-composite-char delete.
1701 The variables leading-code-composition and min-composite-char have
1702 also been deleted.
1703
1704 *** Three more glyph reference points are added. They can be used to
1705 specify a composition rule. See the documentation of the variable
1706 `reference-point-alist' for more detail.
1707
1708 *** The function `compose-region' takes new arguments COMPONENTS and
1709 MODIFICATION-FUNC. With COMPONENTS, you can specify not only a
1710 composition rule but also characters to be composed. Such characters
1711 may differ between buffer and string text.
1712
1713 *** The function `compose-string' takes new arguments START, END,
1714 COMPONENTS, and MODIFICATION-FUNC.
1715
1716 *** The function `compose-string' puts text property `composition'
1717 directly on the argument STRING instead of returning a new string.
1718 Likewise, the function `decompose-string' just removes text property
1719 `composition' from STRING.
1720
1721 *** The new function `find-composition' returns information about
1722 a composition at a specified position in a buffer or a string.
1723
1724 *** The function `decompose-composite-char' is now labeled as
1725 obsolete.
1726
1727 ** The new character set `mule-unicode-0100-24ff' is introduced for
1728 Unicode characters of the range U+0100..U+24FF. Currently, this
1729 character set is not used.
1730
1731 ** The new character sets `japanese-jisx0213-1' and
1732 `japanese-jisx0213-2' are introduced for the new Japanese standard JIS
1733 X 0213 Plane 1 and Plane 2.
1734
1735 +++
1736 ** The new character sets `eight-bit-control' and `eight-bit-graphic'
1737 are introduced for 8-bit characters in the ranges 0x80..0x9F and
1738 0xA0..0xFF respectively.
1739
1740 +++
1741 ** If the APPEND argument of `write-region' is an integer, it seeks to
1742 that offset in the file before writing.
1743
1744 ** The function `add-minor-mode' has been added for convenience and
1745 compatibility with XEmacs (and is used internally by define-minor-mode).
1746
1747 ** The function `shell-command' now sets the default directory of the
1748 `*Shell Command Output*' buffer to the default directory of the buffer
1749 from which the command was issued.
1750
1751 ** The functions `query-replace', `query-replace-regexp',
1752 `query-replace-regexp-eval' `map-query-replace-regexp',
1753 `replace-string', `replace-regexp', and `perform-replace' take two
1754 additional optional arguments START and END that specify the region to
1755 operate on.
1756
1757 ** The new function `count-screen-lines' is a more flexible alternative
1758 to `window-buffer-height'.
1759
1760 - Function: count-screen-lines &optional BEG END COUNT-FINAL-NEWLINE WINDOW
1761
1762 Return the number of screen lines in the region between BEG and END.
1763 The number of screen lines may be different from the number of actual
1764 lines, due to line breaking, display table, etc.
1765
1766 Optional arguments BEG and END default to `point-min' and `point-max'
1767 respectively.
1768
1769 If region ends with a newline, ignore it unless optinal third argument
1770 COUNT-FINAL-NEWLINE is non-nil.
1771
1772 The optional fourth argument WINDOW specifies the window used for
1773 obtaining parameters such as width, horizontal scrolling, and so
1774 on. The default is to use the selected window's parameters.
1775
1776 Like `vertical-motion', `count-screen-lines' always uses the current
1777 buffer, regardless of which buffer is displayed in WINDOW. This makes
1778 possible to use `count-screen-lines' in any buffer, whether or not it
1779 is currently displayed in some window.
1780
1781 ** The new function `mapc' is like `mapcar' but doesn't collect the
1782 argument function's results.
1783
1784 ** The functions base64-decode-region and base64-decode-string now
1785 signal an error instead of returning nil if decoding fails.
1786
1787 ** The function sendmail-user-agent-compose now recognizes a `body'
1788 header is the list of headers passed to it.
1789
1790 ** The new function member-ignore-case works like `member', but
1791 ignores differences in case and text representation.
1792
1793 ** The buffer-local variable cursor-type can be used to specify the
1794 cursor to use in windows displaying a buffer. Values are interpreted
1795 as follows:
1796
1797 t use the cursor specified for the frame (default)
1798 nil don't display a cursor
1799 `bar' display a bar cursor with default width
1800 (bar . WIDTH) display a bar cursor with width WIDTH
1801 others display a box cursor.
1802
1803 ** The variable open-paren-in-column-0-is-defun-start controls whether
1804 an open parenthesis in column 0 is considered to be the start of a
1805 defun. If set, the default, it is considered a defun start. If not
1806 set, an open parenthesis in column 0 has no special meaning.
1807
1808 ** The new function `string-to-syntax' can be used to translate syntax
1809 specifications in string form as accepted by `modify-syntax-entry' to
1810 the cons-cell form that is used for the values of the `syntax-table'
1811 text property, and in `font-lock-syntactic-keywords'.
1812
1813 Example:
1814
1815 (string-to-syntax "()")
1816 => (4 . 41)
1817
1818 ** Emacs' reader supports CL read syntax for integers in bases
1819 other than 10.
1820
1821 *** `#BINTEGER' or `#bINTEGER' reads INTEGER in binary (radix 2).
1822 INTEGER optionally contains a sign.
1823
1824 #b1111
1825 => 15
1826 #b-1111
1827 => -15
1828
1829 *** `#OINTEGER' or `#oINTEGER' reads INTEGER in octal (radix 8).
1830
1831 #o666
1832 => 438
1833
1834 *** `#XINTEGER' or `#xINTEGER' reads INTEGER in hexadecimal (radix 16).
1835
1836 #xbeef
1837 => 48815
1838
1839 *** `#RADIXrINTEGER' reads INTEGER in radix RADIX, 2 <= RADIX <= 36.
1840
1841 #2R-111
1842 => -7
1843 #25rah
1844 => 267
1845
1846 ** The function `documentation-property' now evaluates the value of
1847 the given property to obtain a string if it doesn't refer to etc/DOC
1848 and isn't a string.
1849
1850 ** If called for a symbol, the function `documentation' now looks for
1851 a `function-documentation' property of that symbol. If it has a non-nil
1852 value, the documentation is taken from that value. If the value is
1853 not a string, it is evaluated to obtain a string.
1854
1855 +++
1856 ** The last argument of `define-key-after' defaults to t for convenience.
1857
1858 ** The new function `replace-regexp-in-string' replaces all matches
1859 for a regexp in a string.
1860
1861 ** `mouse-position' now runs the abnormal hook
1862 `mouse-position-function'.
1863
1864 ** The function string-to-number now returns a float for numbers
1865 that don't fit into a Lisp integer.
1866
1867 ** The variable keyword-symbols-constants-flag has been removed.
1868 Keywords are now always considered constants.
1869
1870 +++
1871 ** The new function `delete-and-extract-region' deletes text and
1872 returns it.
1873
1874 ** The function `clear-this-command-keys' now also clears the vector
1875 returned by function `recent-keys'.
1876
1877 +++
1878 ** Variables `beginning-of-defun-function' and `end-of-defun-function'
1879 can be used to define handlers for the functions that find defuns.
1880 Major modes can define these locally instead of rebinding M-C-a
1881 etc. if the normal conventions for defuns are not appropriate for the
1882 mode.
1883
1884 +++
1885 ** easy-mmode-define-minor-mode now takes an additional BODY argument
1886 and is renamed `define-minor-mode'.
1887
1888 +++
1889 ** If an abbrev has a hook function which is a symbol, and that symbol
1890 has a non-nil `no-self-insert' property, the return value of the hook
1891 function specifies whether an expansion has been done or not. If it
1892 returns nil, abbrev-expand also returns nil, meaning "no expansion has
1893 been performed."
1894
1895 When abbrev expansion is done by typing a self-inserting character,
1896 and the abbrev has a hook with the `no-self-insert' property, and the
1897 hook function returns non-nil meaning expansion has been done,
1898 then the self-inserting character is not inserted.
1899
1900 +++
1901 ** The function `intern-soft' now accepts a symbol as first argument.
1902 In this case, that exact symbol is looked up in the specified obarray,
1903 and the function's value is nil if it is not found.
1904
1905 +++
1906 ** The new macro `with-syntax-table' can be used to evaluate forms
1907 with the syntax table of the current buffer temporarily set to a
1908 specified table.
1909
1910 (with-syntax-table TABLE &rest BODY)
1911
1912 Evaluate BODY with syntax table of current buffer set to a copy of
1913 TABLE. The current syntax table is saved, BODY is evaluated, and the
1914 saved table is restored, even in case of an abnormal exit. Value is
1915 what BODY returns.
1916
1917 +++
1918 ** Regular expressions now support intervals \{n,m\} as well as
1919 Perl's shy-groups \(?:...\) and non-greedy *? +? and ?? operators.
1920
1921 +++
1922 ** The optional argument BUFFER of function file-local-copy has been
1923 removed since it wasn't used by anything.
1924
1925 +++
1926 ** The file name argument of function `file-locked-p' is now required
1927 instead of being optional.
1928
1929 +++
1930 ** The new built-in error `text-read-only' is signaled when trying to
1931 modify read-only text.
1932
1933 +++
1934 ** New functions and variables for locales.
1935
1936 The new variable `locale-coding-system' specifies how to encode and
1937 decode strings passed to low-level message functions like strerror and
1938 time functions like strftime. The new variables
1939 `system-messages-locale' and `system-time-locale' give the system
1940 locales to be used when invoking these two types of functions.
1941
1942 The new function `set-locale-environment' sets the language
1943 environment, preferred coding system, and locale coding system from
1944 the system locale as specified by the LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, and LANG
1945 environment variables. Normally, it is invoked during startup and need
1946 not be invoked thereafter. It uses the new variables
1947 `locale-language-names', `locale-charset-language-names', and
1948 `locale-preferred-coding-systems' to make its decisions.
1949
1950 +++
1951 ** syntax tables now understand nested comments.
1952 To declare a comment syntax as allowing nesting, just add an `n'
1953 modifier to either of the characters of the comment end and the comment
1954 start sequences.
1955
1956 +++
1957 ** The function `pixmap-spec-p' has been renamed `bitmap-spec-p'
1958 because `bitmap' is more in line with the usual X terminology.
1959
1960 +++
1961 ** New function `propertize'
1962
1963 The new function `propertize' can be used to conveniently construct
1964 strings with text properties.
1965
1966 - Function: propertize STRING &rest PROPERTIES
1967
1968 Value is a copy of STRING with text properties assigned as specified
1969 by PROPERTIES. PROPERTIES is a sequence of pairs PROPERTY VALUE, with
1970 PROPERTY being the name of a text property and VALUE being the
1971 specified value of that property. Example:
1972
1973 (propertize "foo" 'face 'bold 'read-only t)
1974
1975 +++
1976 ** push and pop macros.
1977
1978 Simple versions of the push and pop macros of Common Lisp
1979 are now defined in Emacs Lisp. These macros allow only symbols
1980 as the place that holds the list to be changed.
1981
1982 (push NEWELT LISTNAME) add NEWELT to the front of LISTNAME's value.
1983 (pop LISTNAME) return first elt of LISTNAME, and remove it
1984 (thus altering the value of LISTNAME).
1985
1986 ** New dolist and dotimes macros.
1987
1988 Simple versions of the dolist and dotimes macros of Common Lisp
1989 are now defined in Emacs Lisp.
1990
1991 (dolist (VAR LIST [RESULT]) BODY...)
1992 Execute body once for each element of LIST,
1993 using the variable VAR to hold the current element.
1994 Then return the value of RESULT, or nil if RESULT is omitted.
1995
1996 (dotimes (VAR COUNT [RESULT]) BODY...)
1997 Execute BODY with VAR bound to successive integers running from 0,
1998 inclusive, to COUNT, exclusive.
1999 Then return the value of RESULT, or nil if RESULT is omitted.
2000
2001 +++
2002 ** Regular expressions now support Posix character classes such
2003 as [:alpha:], [:space:] and so on.
2004
2005 [:digit:] matches 0 through 9
2006 [:cntrl:] matches ASCII control characters
2007 [:xdigit:] matches 0 through 9, a through f and A through F.
2008 [:blank:] matches space and tab only
2009 [:graph:] matches graphic characters--everything except ASCII control chars,
2010 space, and DEL.
2011 [:print:] matches printing characters--everything except ASCII control chars
2012 and DEL.
2013 [:alnum:] matches letters and digits.
2014 (But at present, for multibyte characters,
2015 it matches anything that has word syntax.)
2016 [:alpha:] matches letters.
2017 (But at present, for multibyte characters,
2018 it matches anything that has word syntax.)
2019 [:ascii:] matches ASCII (unibyte) characters.
2020 [:nonascii:] matches non-ASCII (multibyte) characters.
2021 [:lower:] matches anything lower-case.
2022 [:punct:] matches punctuation.
2023 (But at present, for multibyte characters,
2024 it matches anything that has non-word syntax.)
2025 [:space:] matches anything that has whitespace syntax.
2026 [:upper:] matches anything upper-case.
2027 [:word:] matches anything that has word syntax.
2028
2029 +++
2030 ** Emacs now has built-in hash tables.
2031
2032 The following functions are defined for hash tables:
2033
2034 - Function: make-hash-table ARGS
2035
2036 The argument list ARGS consists of keyword/argument pairs. All arguments
2037 are optional. The following arguments are defined:
2038
2039 :test TEST
2040
2041 TEST must be a symbol specifying how to compare keys. Default is `eql'.
2042 Predefined are `eq', `eql' and `equal'. If TEST is not predefined,
2043 it must have been defined with `define-hash-table-test'.
2044
2045 :size SIZE
2046
2047 SIZE must be an integer > 0 giving a hint to the implementation how
2048 many elements will be put in the hash table. Default size is 65.
2049
2050 :rehash-size REHASH-SIZE
2051
2052 REHASH-SIZE specifies by how much to grow a hash table once it becomes
2053 full. If REHASH-SIZE is an integer, add that to the hash table's old
2054 size to get the new size. Otherwise, REHASH-SIZE must be a float >
2055 1.0, and the new size is computed by multiplying REHASH-SIZE with the
2056 old size. Default rehash size is 1.5.
2057
2058 :rehash-threshold THRESHOLD
2059
2060 THRESHOLD must be a float > 0 and <= 1.0 specifying when to resize the
2061 hash table. It is resized when the ratio of (number of entries) /
2062 (size of hash table) is >= THRESHOLD. Default threshold is 0.8.
2063
2064 :weakness WEAK
2065
2066 WEAK must be either nil, one of the symbols `key, `value',
2067 `key-or-value', `key-and-value', or t, meaning the same as
2068 `key-and-value'. Entries are removed from weak tables during garbage
2069 collection if their key and/or value are not referenced elsewhere
2070 outside of the hash table. Default are non-weak hash tables.
2071
2072 - Function: makehash &optional TEST
2073
2074 Similar to make-hash-table, but only TEST can be specified.
2075
2076 - Function: hash-table-p TABLE
2077
2078 Returns non-nil if TABLE is a hash table object.
2079
2080 - Function: copy-hash-table TABLE
2081
2082 Returns a copy of TABLE. Only the table itself is copied, keys and
2083 values are shared.
2084
2085 - Function: hash-table-count TABLE
2086
2087 Returns the number of entries in TABLE.
2088
2089 - Function: hash-table-rehash-size TABLE
2090
2091 Returns the rehash size of TABLE.
2092
2093 - Function: hash-table-rehash-threshold TABLE
2094
2095 Returns the rehash threshold of TABLE.
2096
2097 - Function: hash-table-rehash-size TABLE
2098
2099 Returns the size of TABLE.
2100
2101 - Function: hash-table-test TABLE
2102
2103 Returns the test TABLE uses to compare keys.
2104
2105 - Function: hash-table-weakness TABLE
2106
2107 Returns the weakness specified for TABLE.
2108
2109 - Function: clrhash TABLE
2110
2111 Clear TABLE.
2112
2113 - Function: gethash KEY TABLE &optional DEFAULT
2114
2115 Look up KEY in TABLE and return its associated VALUE or DEFAULT if
2116 not found.
2117
2118 - Function: puthash KEY VALUE TABLE
2119
2120 Associate KEY with VALUE in TABLE. If KEY is already associated with
2121 another value, replace the old value with VALUE.
2122
2123 - Function: remhash KEY TABLE
2124
2125 Remove KEY from TABLE if it is there.
2126
2127 - Function: maphash FUNCTION TABLE
2128
2129 Call FUNCTION for all elements in TABLE. FUNCTION must take two
2130 arguments KEY and VALUE.
2131
2132 - Function: sxhash OBJ
2133
2134 Return a hash code for Lisp object OBJ.
2135
2136 - Function: define-hash-table-test NAME TEST-FN HASH-FN
2137
2138 Define a new hash table test named NAME. If NAME is specified as
2139 a test in `make-hash-table', the table created will use TEST-FN for
2140 comparing keys, and HASH-FN to compute hash codes for keys. Test
2141 and hash function are stored as symbol property `hash-table-test'
2142 of NAME with a value of (TEST-FN HASH-FN).
2143
2144 TEST-FN must take two arguments and return non-nil if they are the same.
2145
2146 HASH-FN must take one argument and return an integer that is the hash
2147 code of the argument. The function should use the whole range of
2148 integer values for hash code computation, including negative integers.
2149
2150 Example: The following creates a hash table whose keys are supposed to
2151 be strings that are compared case-insensitively.
2152
2153 (defun case-fold-string= (a b)
2154 (compare-strings a nil nil b nil nil t))
2155
2156 (defun case-fold-string-hash (a)
2157 (sxhash (upcase a)))
2158
2159 (define-hash-table-test 'case-fold 'case-fold-string=
2160 'case-fold-string-hash))
2161
2162 (make-hash-table :test 'case-fold)
2163
2164 +++
2165 ** The Lisp reader handles circular structure.
2166
2167 It now works to use the #N= and #N# constructs to represent
2168 circular structures. For example, #1=(a . #1#) represents
2169 a cons cell which is its own cdr.
2170
2171 +++
2172 ** The Lisp printer handles circular structure.
2173
2174 If you bind print-circle to a non-nil value, the Lisp printer outputs
2175 #N= and #N# constructs to represent circular and shared structure.
2176
2177 +++
2178 ** If the second argument to `move-to-column' is anything but nil or
2179 t, that means replace a tab with spaces if necessary to reach the
2180 specified column, but do not add spaces at the end of the line if it
2181 is too short to reach that column.
2182
2183 +++
2184 ** perform-replace has a new feature: the REPLACEMENTS argument may
2185 now be a cons cell (FUNCTION . DATA). This means to call FUNCTION
2186 after each match to get the replacement text. FUNCTION is called with
2187 two arguments: DATA, and the number of replacements already made.
2188
2189 If the FROM-STRING contains any upper-case letters,
2190 perform-replace also turns off `case-fold-search' temporarily
2191 and inserts the replacement text without altering case in it.
2192
2193 +++
2194 ** The function buffer-size now accepts an optional argument
2195 to specify which buffer to return the size of.
2196
2197 +++
2198 ** The calendar motion commands now run the normal hook
2199 calendar-move-hook after moving point.
2200
2201 +++
2202 ** The new variable small-temporary-file-directory specifies a
2203 directory to use for creating temporary files that are likely to be
2204 small. (Certain Emacs features use this directory.) If
2205 small-temporary-file-directory is nil, they use
2206 temporary-file-directory instead.
2207
2208 +++
2209 ** The variable `inhibit-modification-hooks', if non-nil, inhibits all
2210 the hooks that track changes in the buffer. This affects
2211 `before-change-functions' and `after-change-functions', as well as
2212 hooks attached to text properties and overlay properties.
2213
2214 +++
2215 ** assoc-delete-all is a new function that deletes all the
2216 elements of an alist which have a particular value as the car.
2217
2218 +++
2219 ** make-temp-file provides a more reliable way to create a temporary file.
2220
2221 make-temp-file is used like make-temp-name, except that it actually
2222 creates the file before it returns. This prevents a timing error,
2223 ensuring that no other job can use the same name for a temporary file.
2224
2225 +++
2226 ** New exclusive-open feature in `write-region'
2227
2228 The optional seventh arg is now called MUSTBENEW. If non-nil, it insists
2229 on a check for an existing file with the same name. If MUSTBENEW
2230 is `excl', that means to get an error if the file already exists;
2231 never overwrite. If MUSTBENEW is neither nil nor `excl', that means
2232 ask for confirmation before overwriting, but do go ahead and
2233 overwrite the file if the user gives confirmation.
2234
2235 If the MUSTBENEW argument in `write-region' is `excl',
2236 that means to use a special feature in the `open' system call
2237 to get an error if the file exists at that time.
2238 The error reported is `file-already-exists'.
2239
2240 +++
2241 ** Function `format' now handles text properties.
2242
2243 Text properties of the format string are applied to the result string.
2244 If the result string is longer than the format string, text properties
2245 ending at the end of the format string are extended to the end of the
2246 result string.
2247
2248 Text properties from string arguments are applied to the result
2249 string where arguments appear in the result string.
2250
2251 Example:
2252
2253 (let ((s1 "hello, %s")
2254 (s2 "world"))
2255 (put-text-property 0 (length s1) 'face 'bold s1)
2256 (put-text-property 0 (length s2) 'face 'italic s2)
2257 (format s1 s2))
2258
2259 results in a bold-face string with an italic `world' at the end.
2260
2261 +++
2262 ** Messages can now be displayed with text properties.
2263
2264 Text properties are handled as described above for function `format'.
2265 The following example displays a bold-face message with an italic
2266 argument in it.
2267
2268 (let ((msg "hello, %s!")
2269 (arg "world"))
2270 (put-text-property 0 (length msg) 'face 'bold msg)
2271 (put-text-property 0 (length arg) 'face 'italic arg)
2272 (message msg arg))
2273
2274 +++
2275 ** Sound support
2276
2277 Emacs supports playing sound files on GNU/Linux and the free BSDs
2278 (Voxware driver and native BSD driver, aka as Luigi's driver).
2279
2280 Currently supported file formats are RIFF-WAVE (*.wav) and Sun Audio
2281 (*.au). You must configure Emacs with the option `--with-sound=yes'
2282 to enable sound support.
2283
2284 Sound files can be played by calling (play-sound SOUND). SOUND is a
2285 list of the form `(sound PROPERTY...)'. The function is only defined
2286 when sound support is present for the system on which Emacs runs. The
2287 functions runs `play-sound-functions' with one argument which is the
2288 sound to play, before playing the sound.
2289
2290 The following sound properties are supported:
2291
2292 - `:file FILE'
2293
2294 FILE is a file name. If FILE isn't an absolute name, it will be
2295 searched relative to `data-directory'.
2296
2297 - `:data DATA'
2298
2299 DATA is a string containing sound data. Either :file or :data
2300 may be present, but not both.
2301
2302 - `:volume VOLUME'
2303
2304 VOLUME must be an integer in the range 0..100 or a float in the range
2305 0..1. This property is optional.
2306
2307 Other properties are ignored.
2308
2309 ** `multimedia' is a new Finder keyword and Custom group.
2310
2311 ** keywordp is a new predicate to test efficiently for an object being
2312 a keyword symbol.
2313
2314 ** Changes to garbage collection
2315
2316 *** The function garbage-collect now additionally returns the number
2317 of live and free strings.
2318
2319 *** There is a new variable `strings-consed' holding the number of
2320 strings that have been consed so far.
2321
2322 \f
2323 * Lisp-level Display features added after release 2.6 of the Emacs
2324 Lisp Manual
2325
2326 *** On window systems, `glyph-table' is no longer used.
2327
2328 +++
2329 ** Help strings in menu items are now used to provide `help-echo' text.
2330
2331 ** The function `image-size' can be used to determine the size of an
2332 image.
2333
2334 - Function: image-size SPEC &optional PIXELS FRAME
2335
2336 Return the size of an image as a pair (WIDTH . HEIGHT).
2337
2338 SPEC is an image specification. PIXELS non-nil means return sizes
2339 measured in pixels, otherwise return sizes measured in canonical
2340 character units (fractions of the width/height of the frame's default
2341 font). FRAME is the frame on which the image will be displayed.
2342 FRAME nil or omitted means use the selected frame.
2343
2344 +++
2345 ** The function `find-image' can be used to find a usable image
2346 satisfying one of a list of specifications.
2347
2348 +++
2349 ** The STRING argument of `put-image' and `insert-image' is now
2350 optional.
2351
2352 +++
2353 ** Image specifications may contain the property `:ascent center' (see
2354 below).
2355
2356 \f
2357 * New Lisp-level Display features in Emacs 21.1
2358
2359 Note that +++ before an item means the Lisp manual has been updated.
2360 --- means that I have decided it does not need to be in the Lisp manual.
2361 When you add a new item, please add it without either +++ or ---
2362 so I will know I still need to look at it -- rms.
2363
2364 ** The function tty-suppress-bold-inverse-default-colors can be used
2365 to make Emacs avoid displaying text with bold black foreground on TTYs.
2366
2367 Some terminals, notably PC consoles, emulate bold text by displaying
2368 text in brighter colors. On such a console, a bold black foreground
2369 is displayed in a gray color. If this turns out to be hard to read on
2370 your monitor---the problem occurred with the mode line on
2371 laptops---you can instruct Emacs to ignore the text's boldness, and to
2372 just display it black instead.
2373
2374 This situation can't be detected automatically. You will have to put
2375 a line like
2376
2377 (tty-suppress-bold-inverse-default-colors t)
2378
2379 in your `.emacs'.
2380
2381 ** New face implementation.
2382
2383 Emacs faces have been reimplemented from scratch. They don't use XLFD
2384 font names anymore and face merging now works as expected.
2385
2386 +++
2387 *** New faces.
2388
2389 Each face can specify the following display attributes:
2390
2391 1. Font family or fontset alias name.
2392
2393 2. Relative proportionate width, aka character set width or set
2394 width (swidth), e.g. `semi-compressed'.
2395
2396 3. Font height in 1/10pt
2397
2398 4. Font weight, e.g. `bold'.
2399
2400 5. Font slant, e.g. `italic'.
2401
2402 6. Foreground color.
2403
2404 7. Background color.
2405
2406 8. Whether or not characters should be underlined, and in what color.
2407
2408 9. Whether or not characters should be displayed in inverse video.
2409
2410 10. A background stipple, a bitmap.
2411
2412 11. Whether or not characters should be overlined, and in what color.
2413
2414 12. Whether or not characters should be strike-through, and in what
2415 color.
2416
2417 13. Whether or not a box should be drawn around characters, its
2418 color, the width of the box lines, and 3D appearance.
2419
2420 Faces are frame-local by nature because Emacs allows to define the
2421 same named face (face names are symbols) differently for different
2422 frames. Each frame has an alist of face definitions for all named
2423 faces. The value of a named face in such an alist is a Lisp vector
2424 with the symbol `face' in slot 0, and a slot for each each of the face
2425 attributes mentioned above.
2426
2427 There is also a global face alist `face-new-frame-defaults'. Face
2428 definitions from this list are used to initialize faces of newly
2429 created frames.
2430
2431 A face doesn't have to specify all attributes. Those not specified
2432 have a nil value. Faces specifying all attributes are called
2433 `fully-specified'.
2434
2435 +++
2436 *** Face merging.
2437
2438 The display style of a given character in the text is determined by
2439 combining several faces. This process is called `face merging'. Any
2440 aspect of the display style that isn't specified by overlays or text
2441 properties is taken from the `default' face. Since it is made sure
2442 that the default face is always fully-specified, face merging always
2443 results in a fully-specified face.
2444
2445 +++
2446 *** Face realization.
2447
2448 After all face attributes for a character have been determined by
2449 merging faces of that character, that face is `realized'. The
2450 realization process maps face attributes to what is physically
2451 available on the system where Emacs runs. The result is a `realized
2452 face' in form of an internal structure which is stored in the face
2453 cache of the frame on which it was realized.
2454
2455 Face realization is done in the context of the charset of the
2456 character to display because different fonts and encodings are used
2457 for different charsets. In other words, for characters of different
2458 charsets, different realized faces are needed to display them.
2459
2460 Except for composite characters, faces are always realized for a
2461 specific character set and contain a specific font, even if the face
2462 being realized specifies a fontset. The reason is that the result of
2463 the new font selection stage is better than what can be done with
2464 statically defined font name patterns in fontsets.
2465
2466 In unibyte text, Emacs' charsets aren't applicable; function
2467 `char-charset' reports ASCII for all characters, including those >
2468 0x7f. The X registry and encoding of fonts to use is determined from
2469 the variable `face-default-registry' in this case. The variable is
2470 initialized at Emacs startup time from the font the user specified for
2471 Emacs.
2472
2473 Currently all unibyte text, i.e. all buffers with
2474 `enable-multibyte-characters' nil are displayed with fonts of the same
2475 registry and encoding `face-default-registry'. This is consistent
2476 with the fact that languages can also be set globally, only.
2477
2478 ++++
2479 **** Clearing face caches.
2480
2481 The Lisp function `clear-face-cache' can be called to clear face caches
2482 on all frames. If called with a non-nil argument, it will also unload
2483 unused fonts.
2484
2485 +++
2486 *** Font selection.
2487
2488 Font selection tries to find the best available matching font for a
2489 given (charset, face) combination. This is done slightly differently
2490 for faces specifying a fontset, or a font family name.
2491
2492 If the face specifies a fontset name, that fontset determines a
2493 pattern for fonts of the given charset. If the face specifies a font
2494 family, a font pattern is constructed. Charset symbols have a
2495 property `x-charset-registry' for that purpose that maps a charset to
2496 an XLFD registry and encoding in the font pattern constructed.
2497
2498 Available fonts on the system on which Emacs runs are then matched
2499 against the font pattern. The result of font selection is the best
2500 match for the given face attributes in this font list.
2501
2502 Font selection can be influenced by the user.
2503
2504 The user can specify the relative importance he gives the face
2505 attributes width, height, weight, and slant by setting
2506 face-font-selection-order (faces.el) to a list of face attribute
2507 names. The default is (:width :height :weight :slant), and means
2508 that font selection first tries to find a good match for the font
2509 width specified by a face, then---within fonts with that width---tries
2510 to find a best match for the specified font height, etc.
2511
2512 Setting `face-alternative-font-family-alist' allows the user to
2513 specify alternative font families to try if a family specified by a
2514 face doesn't exist.
2515
2516 +++
2517 **** Scalable fonts
2518
2519 Emacs can make use of scalable fonts but doesn't do so by default,
2520 since the use of too many or too big scalable fonts may crash XFree86
2521 servers.
2522
2523 To enable scalable font use, set the variable
2524 `scalable-fonts-allowed'. A value of nil, the default, means never use
2525 scalable fonts. A value of t means any scalable font may be used.
2526 Otherwise, the value must be a list of regular expressions. A
2527 scalable font may then be used if it matches a regular expression from
2528 that list. Example:
2529
2530 (setq scalable-fonts-allowed '("muleindian-2$"))
2531
2532 allows the use of scalable fonts with registry `muleindian-2'.
2533
2534 +++
2535 *** Functions and variables related to font selection.
2536
2537 - Function: x-family-fonts &optional FAMILY FRAME
2538
2539 Return a list of available fonts of family FAMILY on FRAME. If FAMILY
2540 is omitted or nil, list all families. Otherwise, FAMILY must be a
2541 string, possibly containing wildcards `?' and `*'.
2542
2543 If FRAME is omitted or nil, use the selected frame. Each element of
2544 the result is a vector [FAMILY WIDTH POINT-SIZE WEIGHT SLANT FIXED-P
2545 FULL REGISTRY-AND-ENCODING]. FAMILY is the font family name.
2546 POINT-SIZE is the size of the font in 1/10 pt. WIDTH, WEIGHT, and
2547 SLANT are symbols describing the width, weight and slant of the font.
2548 These symbols are the same as for face attributes. FIXED-P is non-nil
2549 if the font is fixed-pitch. FULL is the full name of the font, and
2550 REGISTRY-AND-ENCODING is a string giving the registry and encoding of
2551 the font. The result list is sorted according to the current setting
2552 of the face font sort order.
2553
2554 - Function: x-font-family-list
2555
2556 Return a list of available font families on FRAME. If FRAME is
2557 omitted or nil, use the selected frame. Value is a list of conses
2558 (FAMILY . FIXED-P) where FAMILY is a font family, and FIXED-P is
2559 non-nil if fonts of that family are fixed-pitch.
2560
2561 - Variable: font-list-limit
2562
2563 Limit for font matching. If an integer > 0, font matching functions
2564 won't load more than that number of fonts when searching for a
2565 matching font. The default is currently 100.
2566
2567 +++
2568 *** Setting face attributes.
2569
2570 For the most part, the new face implementation is interface-compatible
2571 with the old one. Old face attribute related functions are now
2572 implemented in terms of the new functions `set-face-attribute' and
2573 `face-attribute'.
2574
2575 Face attributes are identified by their names which are keyword
2576 symbols. All attributes can be set to `unspecified'.
2577
2578 The following attributes are recognized:
2579
2580 `:family'
2581
2582 VALUE must be a string specifying the font family, e.g. ``courier'',
2583 or a fontset alias name. If a font family is specified, wild-cards `*'
2584 and `?' are allowed.
2585
2586 `:width'
2587
2588 VALUE specifies the relative proportionate width of the font to use.
2589 It must be one of the symbols `ultra-condensed', `extra-condensed',
2590 `condensed', `semi-condensed', `normal', `semi-expanded', `expanded',
2591 `extra-expanded', or `ultra-expanded'.
2592
2593 `:height'
2594
2595 VALUE must be either an integer specifying the height of the font to use
2596 in 1/10 pt, a floating point number specifying the amount by which to
2597 scale any underlying face, or a function, which is called with the old
2598 height (from the underlying face), and should return the new height.
2599
2600 `:weight'
2601
2602 VALUE specifies the weight of the font to use. It must be one of the
2603 symbols `ultra-bold', `extra-bold', `bold', `semi-bold', `normal',
2604 `semi-light', `light', `extra-light', `ultra-light'.
2605
2606 `:slant'
2607
2608 VALUE specifies the slant of the font to use. It must be one of the
2609 symbols `italic', `oblique', `normal', `reverse-italic', or
2610 `reverse-oblique'.
2611
2612 `:foreground', `:background'
2613
2614 VALUE must be a color name, a string.
2615
2616 `:underline'
2617
2618 VALUE specifies whether characters in FACE should be underlined. If
2619 VALUE is t, underline with foreground color of the face. If VALUE is
2620 a string, underline with that color. If VALUE is nil, explicitly
2621 don't underline.
2622
2623 `:overline'
2624
2625 VALUE specifies whether characters in FACE should be overlined. If
2626 VALUE is t, overline with foreground color of the face. If VALUE is a
2627 string, overline with that color. If VALUE is nil, explicitly don't
2628 overline.
2629
2630 `:strike-through'
2631
2632 VALUE specifies whether characters in FACE should be drawn with a line
2633 striking through them. If VALUE is t, use the foreground color of the
2634 face. If VALUE is a string, strike-through with that color. If VALUE
2635 is nil, explicitly don't strike through.
2636
2637 `:box'
2638
2639 VALUE specifies whether characters in FACE should have a box drawn
2640 around them. If VALUE is nil, explicitly don't draw boxes. If
2641 VALUE is t, draw a box with lines of width 1 in the foreground color
2642 of the face. If VALUE is a string, the string must be a color name,
2643 and the box is drawn in that color with a line width of 1. Otherwise,
2644 VALUE must be a property list of the form `(:line-width WIDTH
2645 :color COLOR :style STYLE)'. If a keyword/value pair is missing from
2646 the property list, a default value will be used for the value, as
2647 specified below. WIDTH specifies the width of the lines to draw; it
2648 defaults to 1. COLOR is the name of the color to draw in, default is
2649 the foreground color of the face for simple boxes, and the background
2650 color of the face for 3D boxes. STYLE specifies whether a 3D box
2651 should be draw. If STYLE is `released-button', draw a box looking
2652 like a released 3D button. If STYLE is `pressed-button' draw a box
2653 that appears like a pressed button. If STYLE is nil, the default if
2654 the property list doesn't contain a style specification, draw a 2D
2655 box.
2656
2657 `:inverse-video'
2658
2659 VALUE specifies whether characters in FACE should be displayed in
2660 inverse video. VALUE must be one of t or nil.
2661
2662 `:stipple'
2663
2664 If VALUE is a string, it must be the name of a file of pixmap data.
2665 The directories listed in the `x-bitmap-file-path' variable are
2666 searched. Alternatively, VALUE may be a list of the form (WIDTH
2667 HEIGHT DATA) where WIDTH and HEIGHT are the size in pixels, and DATA
2668 is a string containing the raw bits of the bitmap. VALUE nil means
2669 explicitly don't use a stipple pattern.
2670
2671 For convenience, attributes `:family', `:width', `:height', `:weight',
2672 and `:slant' may also be set in one step from an X font name:
2673
2674 `:font'
2675
2676 Set font-related face attributes from VALUE. VALUE must be a valid
2677 XLFD font name. If it is a font name pattern, the first matching font
2678 is used--this is for compatibility with the behavior of previous
2679 versions of Emacs.
2680
2681 For compatibility with Emacs 20, keywords `:bold' and `:italic' can
2682 be used to specify that a bold or italic font should be used. VALUE
2683 must be t or nil in that case. A value of `unspecified' is not allowed."
2684
2685 Please see also the documentation of `set-face-attribute' and
2686 `defface'.
2687
2688 `:inherit'
2689
2690 VALUE is the name of a face from which to inherit attributes, or a list
2691 of face names. Attributes from inherited faces are merged into the face
2692 like an underlying face would be, with higher priority than underlying faces.
2693
2694 *** Face attributes and X resources
2695
2696 The following X resource names can be used to set face attributes
2697 from X resources:
2698
2699 Face attribute X resource class
2700 -----------------------------------------------------------------------
2701 :family attributeFamily . Face.AttributeFamily
2702 :width attributeWidth Face.AttributeWidth
2703 :height attributeHeight Face.AttributeHeight
2704 :weight attributeWeight Face.AttributeWeight
2705 :slant attributeSlant Face.AttributeSlant
2706 foreground attributeForeground Face.AttributeForeground
2707 :background attributeBackground . Face.AttributeBackground
2708 :overline attributeOverline Face.AttributeOverline
2709 :strike-through attributeStrikeThrough Face.AttributeStrikeThrough
2710 :box attributeBox Face.AttributeBox
2711 :underline attributeUnderline Face.AttributeUnderline
2712 :inverse-video attributeInverse Face.AttributeInverse
2713 :stipple attributeStipple Face.AttributeStipple
2714 or attributeBackgroundPixmap
2715 Face.AttributeBackgroundPixmap
2716 :font attributeFont Face.AttributeFont
2717 :bold attributeBold Face.AttributeBold
2718 :italic attributeItalic . Face.AttributeItalic
2719 :font attributeFont Face.AttributeFont
2720
2721 +++
2722 *** Text property `face'.
2723
2724 The value of the `face' text property can now be a single face
2725 specification or a list of such specifications. Each face
2726 specification can be
2727
2728 1. A symbol or string naming a Lisp face.
2729
2730 2. A property list of the form (KEYWORD VALUE ...) where each
2731 KEYWORD is a face attribute name, and VALUE is an appropriate value
2732 for that attribute. Please see the doc string of `set-face-attribute'
2733 for face attribute names.
2734
2735 3. Conses of the form (FOREGROUND-COLOR . COLOR) or
2736 (BACKGROUND-COLOR . COLOR) where COLOR is a color name. This is
2737 for compatibility with previous Emacs versions.
2738
2739 +++
2740 ** Support functions for colors on text-only terminals.
2741
2742 The function `tty-color-define' can be used to define colors for use
2743 on TTY and MSDOS frames. It maps a color name to a color number on
2744 the terminal. Emacs defines a couple of common color mappings by
2745 default. You can get defined colors with a call to
2746 `defined-colors'. The function `tty-color-clear' can be
2747 used to clear the mapping table.
2748
2749 ** Unified support for colors independent of frame type.
2750
2751 The new functions `defined-colors', `color-defined-p', `color-values',
2752 and `display-color-p' work for any type of frame. On frames whose
2753 type is neither x nor w32, these functions transparently map X-style
2754 color specifications to the closest colors supported by the frame
2755 display. Lisp programs should use these new functions instead of the
2756 old `x-defined-colors', `x-color-defined-p', `x-color-values', and
2757 `x-display-color-p'. (The old function names are still available for
2758 compatibility; they are now aliases of the new names.) Lisp programs
2759 should no more look at the value of the variable window-system to
2760 modify their color-related behavior.
2761
2762 The primitives `color-gray-p' and `color-supported-p' also work for
2763 any frame type.
2764
2765 ** Platform-independent functions to describe display capabilities.
2766
2767 The new functions `display-mouse-p', `display-popup-menus-p',
2768 `display-graphic-p', `display-selections-p', `display-screens',
2769 `display-pixel-width', `display-pixel-height', `display-mm-width',
2770 `display-mm-height', `display-backing-store', `display-save-under',
2771 `display-planes', `display-color-cells', `display-visual-class', and
2772 `display-grayscale-p' describe the basic capabilities of a particular
2773 display. Lisp programs should call these functions instead of testing
2774 the value of the variables `window-system' or `system-type', or calling
2775 platform-specific functions such as `x-display-pixel-width'.
2776
2777 +++
2778 ** The minibuffer prompt is now actually inserted in the minibuffer.
2779
2780 This makes it possible to scroll through the prompt, if you want to.
2781
2782 The function minubuffer-prompt-end returns the current position of the
2783 end of the minibuffer prompt, if the minibuffer is current.
2784 Otherwise, it returns zero.
2785
2786 ** New `field' abstraction in buffers.
2787
2788 There is now code to support an abstraction called `fields' in emacs
2789 buffers. A field is a contiguous region of text with the same `field'
2790 property (which can be a text property or an overlay).
2791
2792 Many emacs functions, such as forward-word, forward-sentence,
2793 forward-paragraph, beginning-of-line, etc., stop moving when they come
2794 to the boundary between fields; beginning-of-line and end-of-line will
2795 not let the point move past the field boundary, but other movement
2796 commands continue into the next field if repeated. Stopping at field
2797 boundaries can be suppressed programmatically by binding
2798 `inhibit-field-text-motion' to a non-nil value around calls to these
2799 functions.
2800
2801 Now that the minibuffer prompt is inserted into the minibuffer, it is in
2802 a separate field from the user-input part of the buffer, so that common
2803 editing commands treat the user's text separately from the prompt.
2804
2805 The following functions are defined for operating on fields:
2806
2807 - Function: constrain-to-field NEW-POS OLD-POS &optional ESCAPE-FROM-EDGE ONLY-IN-LINE INHIBIT-CAPTURE-PROPERTY
2808
2809 Return the position closest to NEW-POS that is in the same field as OLD-POS.
2810
2811 A field is a region of text with the same `field' property.
2812 If NEW-POS is nil, then the current point is used instead, and set to the
2813 constrained position if that is is different.
2814
2815 If OLD-POS is at the boundary of two fields, then the allowable
2816 positions for NEW-POS depends on the value of the optional argument
2817 ESCAPE-FROM-EDGE: If ESCAPE-FROM-EDGE is nil, then NEW-POS is
2818 constrained to the field that has the same `field' char-property
2819 as any new characters inserted at OLD-POS, whereas if ESCAPE-FROM-EDGE
2820 is non-nil, NEW-POS is constrained to the union of the two adjacent
2821 fields. Additionally, if two fields are separated by another field with
2822 the special value `boundary', then any point within this special field is
2823 also considered to be `on the boundary'.
2824
2825 If the optional argument ONLY-IN-LINE is non-nil and constraining
2826 NEW-POS would move it to a different line, NEW-POS is returned
2827 unconstrained. This useful for commands that move by line, like
2828 C-n or C-a, which should generally respect field boundaries
2829 only in the case where they can still move to the right line.
2830
2831 If the optional argument INHIBIT-CAPTURE-PROPERTY is non-nil, and OLD-POS has
2832 a non-nil property of that name, then any field boundaries are ignored.
2833
2834 Field boundaries are not noticed if `inhibit-field-text-motion' is non-nil.
2835
2836 - Function: delete-field &optional POS
2837
2838 Delete the field surrounding POS.
2839 A field is a region of text with the same `field' property.
2840 If POS is nil, the value of point is used for POS.
2841
2842 - Function: field-beginning &optional POS ESCAPE-FROM-EDGE
2843
2844 Return the beginning of the field surrounding POS.
2845 A field is a region of text with the same `field' property.
2846 If POS is nil, the value of point is used for POS.
2847 If ESCAPE-FROM-EDGE is non-nil and POS is at the beginning of its
2848 field, then the beginning of the *previous* field is returned.
2849
2850 - Function: field-end &optional POS ESCAPE-FROM-EDGE
2851
2852 Return the end of the field surrounding POS.
2853 A field is a region of text with the same `field' property.
2854 If POS is nil, the value of point is used for POS.
2855 If ESCAPE-FROM-EDGE is non-nil and POS is at the end of its field,
2856 then the end of the *following* field is returned.
2857
2858 - Function: field-string &optional POS
2859
2860 Return the contents of the field surrounding POS as a string.
2861 A field is a region of text with the same `field' property.
2862 If POS is nil, the value of point is used for POS.
2863
2864 - Function: field-string-no-properties &optional POS
2865
2866 Return the contents of the field around POS, without text-properties.
2867 A field is a region of text with the same `field' property.
2868 If POS is nil, the value of point is used for POS.
2869
2870 +++
2871 ** Image support.
2872
2873 Emacs can now display images. Images are inserted into text by giving
2874 strings or buffer text a `display' text property containing one of
2875 (AREA IMAGE) or IMAGE. The display of the `display' property value
2876 replaces the display of the characters having that property.
2877
2878 If the property value has the form (AREA IMAGE), AREA must be one of
2879 `(margin left-margin)', `(margin right-margin)' or `(margin nil)'. If
2880 AREA is `(margin nil)', IMAGE will be displayed in the text area of a
2881 window, otherwise it will be displayed in the left or right marginal
2882 area.
2883
2884 IMAGE is an image specification.
2885
2886 *** Image specifications
2887
2888 Image specifications are lists of the form `(image PROPS)' where PROPS
2889 is a property list whose keys are keyword symbols. Each
2890 specifications must contain a property `:type TYPE' with TYPE being a
2891 symbol specifying the image type, e.g. `xbm'. Properties not
2892 described below are ignored.
2893
2894 The following is a list of properties all image types share.
2895
2896 `:ascent ASCENT'
2897
2898 ASCENT must be a number in the range 0..100, or the symbol `center'.
2899 If it is a number, it specifies the percentage of the image's height
2900 to use for its ascent.
2901
2902 If not specified, ASCENT defaults to the value 50 which means that the
2903 image will be centered with the base line of the row it appears in.
2904
2905 If ASCENT is `center' the image is vertically centered around a
2906 centerline which is the vertical center of text drawn at the position
2907 of the image, in the manner specified by the text properties and
2908 overlays that apply to the image.
2909
2910 `:margin MARGIN'
2911
2912 MARGIN must be a number >= 0 specifying how many pixels to put as
2913 margin around the image. Default is 0.
2914
2915 `:relief RELIEF'
2916
2917 RELIEF is analogous to the `:relief' attribute of faces. Puts a relief
2918 around an image.
2919
2920 `:algorithm ALGO'
2921
2922 Apply an image algorithm to the image before displaying it. ALGO must
2923 be a symbol specifying the algorithm. Currently only `laplace' is
2924 supported which applies a Laplace edge detection algorithm to an image
2925 which is intended to display images "disabled."
2926
2927 `:heuristic-mask BG'
2928
2929 If BG is not nil, build a clipping mask for the image, so that the
2930 background of a frame is visible behind the image. If BG is t,
2931 determine the background color of the image by looking at the 4
2932 corners of the image, assuming the most frequently occuring color from
2933 the corners is the background color of the image. Otherwise, BG must
2934 be a list `(RED GREEN BLUE)' specifying the color to assume for the
2935 background of the image.
2936
2937 `:file FILE'
2938
2939 Load image from FILE. If FILE is not absolute after expanding it,
2940 search for the image in `data-directory'. Some image types support
2941 building images from data. When this is done, no `:file' property
2942 may be present in the image specification.
2943
2944 `:data DATA'
2945
2946 Get image data from DATA. (As of this writing, this is not yet
2947 supported for image type `postscript'). Either :file or :data may be
2948 present in an image specification, but not both. All image types
2949 support strings as DATA, some types allow additional types of DATA.
2950
2951 *** Supported image types
2952
2953 **** XBM, image type `xbm'.
2954
2955 XBM images don't require an external library. Additional image
2956 properties supported are
2957
2958 `:foreground FG'
2959
2960 FG must be a string specifying the image foreground color. Default
2961 is the frame's foreground.
2962
2963 `:background FG'
2964
2965 BG must be a string specifying the image foreground color. Default is
2966 the frame's background color.
2967
2968 XBM images can be constructed from data instead of file. In this
2969 case, the image specification must contain the following properties
2970 instead of a `:file' property.
2971
2972 `:width WIDTH'
2973
2974 WIDTH specifies the width of the image in pixels.
2975
2976 `:height HEIGHT'
2977
2978 HEIGHT specifies the height of the image in pixels.
2979
2980 `:data DATA'
2981
2982 DATA must be either
2983
2984 1. a string large enough to hold the bitmap data, i.e. it must
2985 have a size >= (WIDTH + 7) / 8 * HEIGHT
2986
2987 2. a bool-vector of size >= WIDTH * HEIGHT
2988
2989 3. a vector of strings or bool-vectors, one for each line of the
2990 bitmap.
2991
2992 4. a string that's an in-memory XBM file. Neither width nor
2993 height may be specified in this case because these are defined
2994 in the file.
2995
2996 **** XPM, image type `xpm'
2997
2998 XPM images require the external library `libXpm', package
2999 `xpm-3.4k.tar.gz', version 3.4k or later. Make sure the library is
3000 found when Emacs is configured by supplying appropriate paths via
3001 `--x-includes' and `--x-libraries'.
3002
3003 Additional image properties supported are:
3004
3005 `:color-symbols SYMBOLS'
3006
3007 SYMBOLS must be a list of pairs (NAME . COLOR), with NAME being the
3008 name of color as it appears in an XPM file, and COLOR being an X color
3009 name.
3010
3011 XPM images can be built from memory instead of files. In that case,
3012 add a `:data' property instead of a `:file' property.
3013
3014 The XPM library uses libz in its implementation so that it is able
3015 to display compressed images.
3016
3017 **** PBM, image type `pbm'
3018
3019 PBM images don't require an external library. Color, gray-scale and
3020 mono images are supported. There are no additional image properties
3021 defined.
3022
3023 **** JPEG, image type `jpeg'
3024
3025 Support for JPEG images requires the external library `libjpeg',
3026 package `jpegsrc.v6a.tar.gz', or later. Additional image properties
3027 are:
3028
3029 **** TIFF, image type `tiff'
3030
3031 Support for TIFF images requires the external library `libtiff',
3032 package `tiff-v3.4-tar.gz', or later. There are no additional image
3033 properties defined.
3034
3035 **** GIF, image type `gif'
3036
3037 Support for GIF images requires the external library `libungif', package
3038 `libungif-4.1.0', or later.
3039
3040 Additional image properties supported are:
3041
3042 `:index INDEX'
3043
3044 INDEX must be an integer >= 0. Load image number INDEX from a
3045 multi-image GIF file. An error is signalled if INDEX is too large.
3046
3047 This could be used to implement limited support for animated GIFs.
3048 For example, the following function displays a multi-image GIF file
3049 at point-min in the current buffer, switching between sub-images
3050 every 0.1 seconds.
3051
3052 (defun show-anim (file max)
3053 "Display multi-image GIF file FILE which contains MAX subimages."
3054 (display-anim (current-buffer) file 0 max t))
3055
3056 (defun display-anim (buffer file idx max first-time)
3057 (when (= idx max)
3058 (setq idx 0))
3059 (let ((img (create-image file nil nil :index idx)))
3060 (save-excursion
3061 (set-buffer buffer)
3062 (goto-char (point-min))
3063 (unless first-time (delete-char 1))
3064 (insert-image img "x"))
3065 (run-with-timer 0.1 nil 'display-anim buffer file (1+ idx) max nil)))
3066
3067 **** PNG, image type `png'
3068
3069 Support for PNG images requires the external library `libpng',
3070 package `libpng-1.0.2.tar.gz', or later. There are no additional image
3071 properties defined.
3072
3073 **** Ghostscript, image type `postscript'.
3074
3075 Additional image properties supported are:
3076
3077 `:pt-width WIDTH'
3078
3079 WIDTH is width of the image in pt (1/72 inch). WIDTH must be an
3080 integer. This is a required property.
3081
3082 `:pt-height HEIGHT'
3083
3084 HEIGHT specifies the height of the image in pt (1/72 inch). HEIGHT
3085 must be a integer. This is an required property.
3086
3087 `:bounding-box BOX'
3088
3089 BOX must be a list or vector of 4 integers giving the bounding box of
3090 the PS image, analogous to the `BoundingBox' comment found in PS
3091 files. This is an required property.
3092
3093 Part of the Ghostscript interface is implemented in Lisp. See
3094 lisp/gs.el.
3095
3096 *** Lisp interface.
3097
3098 The variable `image-types' contains a list of those image types
3099 which are supported in the current configuration.
3100
3101 Images are stored in an image cache and removed from the cache when
3102 they haven't been displayed for `image-cache-eviction-delay seconds.
3103 The function `clear-image-cache' can be used to clear the image cache
3104 manually. Images in the cache are compared with `equal', i.e. all
3105 images with `equal' specifications share the same image.
3106
3107 *** Simplified image API, image.el
3108
3109 The new Lisp package image.el contains functions that simplify image
3110 creation and putting images into text. The function `create-image'
3111 can be used to create images. The macro `defimage' can be used to
3112 define an image based on available image types. The functions
3113 `put-image' and `insert-image' can be used to insert an image into a
3114 buffer.
3115
3116 +++
3117 ** Display margins.
3118
3119 Windows can now have margins which are used for special text
3120 and images.
3121
3122 To give a window margins, either set the buffer-local variables
3123 `left-margin-width' and `right-margin-width', or call
3124 `set-window-margins'. The function `window-margins' can be used to
3125 obtain the current settings. To make `left-margin-width' and
3126 `right-margin-width' take effect, you must set them before displaying
3127 the buffer in a window, or use `set-window-buffer' to force an update
3128 of the display margins.
3129
3130 You can put text in margins by giving it a `display' text property
3131 containing a pair of the form `(LOCATION . VALUE)', where LOCATION is
3132 one of `left-margin' or `right-margin' or nil. VALUE can be either a
3133 string, an image specification or a stretch specification (see later
3134 in this file).
3135
3136 +++
3137 ** Help display
3138
3139 Emacs displays short help messages in the echo area, when the mouse
3140 moves over a tool-bar item or a piece of text that has a text property
3141 `help-echo'. This feature also applies to strings in the mode line
3142 that have a `help-echo' property.
3143
3144 If the value of the `help-echo' property is a function, that function
3145 is called with three arguments WINDOW, OBJECT and POSITION. WINDOW is
3146 the window in which the help was found.
3147
3148 If OBJECT is a buffer, POS is the position in the buffer where the
3149 `help-echo' text property was found.
3150
3151 If OBJECT is an overlay, that overlay has a `help-echo' property, and
3152 POS is the position in the overlay's buffer under the mouse.
3153
3154 If OBJECT is a string (an overlay string or a string displayed with
3155 the `display' property), POS is the position in that string under the
3156 mouse.
3157
3158 If the value of the `help-echo' property is neither a function nor a
3159 string, it is evaluated to obtain a help string.
3160
3161 For tool-bar and menu-bar items, their key definition is used to
3162 determine the help to display. If their definition contains a
3163 property `:help FORM', FORM is evaluated to determine the help string.
3164 For tool-bar items without a help form, the caption of the item is
3165 used as help string.
3166
3167 The hook `show-help-function' can be set to a function that displays
3168 the help string differently. For example, enabling a tooltip window
3169 causes the help display to appear there instead of in the echo area.
3170
3171 +++
3172 ** Vertical fractional scrolling.
3173
3174 The display of text in windows can be scrolled smoothly in pixels.
3175 This is useful, for example, for making parts of large images visible.
3176
3177 The function `window-vscroll' returns the current value of vertical
3178 scrolling, a non-negative fraction of the canonical character height.
3179 The function `set-window-vscroll' can be used to set the vertical
3180 scrolling value. Here is an example of how these function might be
3181 used.
3182
3183 (global-set-key [A-down]
3184 #'(lambda ()
3185 (interactive)
3186 (set-window-vscroll (selected-window)
3187 (+ 0.5 (window-vscroll)))))
3188 (global-set-key [A-up]
3189 #'(lambda ()
3190 (interactive)
3191 (set-window-vscroll (selected-window)
3192 (- (window-vscroll) 0.5)))))
3193
3194 +++
3195 ** New hook `fontification-functions'.
3196
3197 Functions from `fontification-functions' are called from redisplay
3198 when it encounters a region of text that is not yet fontified. This
3199 variable automatically becomes buffer-local when set. Each function
3200 is called with one argument, POS.
3201
3202 At least one of the hook functions should fontify one or more
3203 characters starting at POS in the current buffer. It should mark them
3204 as fontified by giving them a non-nil value of the `fontified' text
3205 property. It may be reasonable for these functions to check for the
3206 `fontified' property and not put it back on, but they do not have to.
3207
3208 +++
3209 ** Tool bar support.
3210
3211 Emacs supports a tool bar at the top of a frame under X. The frame
3212 parameter `tool-bar-lines' (X resource "toolBar", class "ToolBar")
3213 controls how may lines to reserve for the tool bar. A zero value
3214 suppresses the tool bar. If the value is non-zero and
3215 `auto-resize-tool-bars' is non-nil the tool bar's size will be changed
3216 automatically so that all tool bar items are visible.
3217
3218 before this facility can be useful, we need people to donate icons.
3219
3220 *** Tool bar item definitions
3221
3222 Tool bar items are defined using `define-key' with a prefix-key
3223 `tool-bar'. For example `(define-key global-map [tool-bar item1] ITEM)'
3224 where ITEM is a list `(menu-item CAPTION BINDING PROPS...)'.
3225
3226 CAPTION is the caption of the item, If it's not a string, it is
3227 evaluated to get a string. The caption is currently not displayed in
3228 the tool bar, but it is displayed if the item doesn't have a `:help'
3229 property (see below).
3230
3231 BINDING is the tool bar item's binding. Tool bar items with keymaps as
3232 binding are currently ignored.
3233
3234 The following properties are recognized:
3235
3236 `:enable FORM'.
3237
3238 FORM is evaluated and specifies whether the tool bar item is enabled
3239 or disabled.
3240
3241 `:visible FORM'
3242
3243 FORM is evaluated and specifies whether the tool bar item is displayed.
3244
3245 `:filter FUNCTION'
3246
3247 FUNCTION is called with one parameter, the same list BINDING in which
3248 FUNCTION is specified as the filter. The value FUNCTION returns is
3249 used instead of BINDING to display this item.
3250
3251 `:button (TYPE SELECTED)'
3252
3253 TYPE must be one of `:radio' or `:toggle'. SELECTED is evaluated
3254 and specifies whether the button is selected (pressed) or not.
3255
3256 `:image IMAGES'
3257
3258 IMAGES is either a single image specification or a vector of four
3259 image specifications. If it is a vector, this table lists the
3260 meaning of each of the four elements:
3261
3262 Index Use when item is
3263 ----------------------------------------
3264 0 enabled and selected
3265 1 enabled and deselected
3266 2 disabled and selected
3267 3 disabled and deselected
3268
3269 If IMAGE is a single image specification, a Laplace edge-detection
3270 algorithm is used on that image to draw the image in disabled state.
3271
3272 `:help HELP-STRING'.
3273
3274 Gives a help string to display for the tool bar item. This help
3275 is displayed when the mouse is moved over the item.
3276
3277 *** Tool-bar-related variables.
3278
3279 If `auto-resize-tool-bar' is non-nil, the tool bar will automatically
3280 resize to show all defined tool bar items. It will never grow larger
3281 than 1/4 of the frame's size.
3282
3283 If `auto-raise-tool-bar-buttons' is non-nil, tool bar buttons will be
3284 raised when the mouse moves over them.
3285
3286 You can add extra space between tool bar items by setting
3287 `tool-bar-button-margin' to a positive integer specifying a number of
3288 pixels. Default is 1.
3289
3290 You can change the shadow thickness of tool bar buttons by setting
3291 `tool-bar-button-relief' to an integer. Default is 3.
3292
3293 *** Tool-bar clicks with modifiers.
3294
3295 You can bind commands to clicks with control, shift, meta etc. on
3296 a tool bar item. If
3297
3298 (define-key global-map [tool-bar shell]
3299 '(menu-item "Shell" shell
3300 :image (image :type xpm :file "shell.xpm")))
3301
3302 is the original tool bar item definition, then
3303
3304 (define-key global-map [tool-bar S-shell] 'some-command)
3305
3306 makes a binding to run `some-command' for a shifted click on the same
3307 item.
3308
3309 ** Mode line changes.
3310
3311 +++
3312 *** Mouse-sensitive mode line.
3313
3314 The mode line can be made mouse-sensitive by displaying strings there
3315 that have a `local-map' text property. There are three ways to display
3316 a string with a `local-map' property in the mode line.
3317
3318 1. The mode line spec contains a variable whose string value has
3319 a `local-map' text property.
3320
3321 2. The mode line spec contains a format specifier (e.g. `%12b'), and
3322 that format specifier has a `local-map' property.
3323
3324 3. The mode line spec contains a list containing `:eval FORM'. FORM
3325 is evaluated. If the result is a string, and that string has a
3326 `local-map' property.
3327
3328 The same mechanism is used to determine the `face' and `help-echo'
3329 properties of strings in the mode line. See `bindings.el' for an
3330 example.
3331
3332 *** If a mode line element has the form `(:eval FORM)', FORM is
3333 evaluated and the result is used as mode line element.
3334
3335 +++
3336 *** You can suppress mode-line display by setting the buffer-local
3337 variable mode-line-format to nil.
3338
3339 +++
3340 *** A headerline can now be displayed at the top of a window.
3341
3342 This mode line's contents are controlled by the new variable
3343 `header-line-format' and `default-header-line-format' which are
3344 completely analogous to `mode-line-format' and
3345 `default-mode-line-format'. A value of nil means don't display a top
3346 line.
3347
3348 The appearance of top mode lines is controlled by the face
3349 `header-line'.
3350
3351 The function `coordinates-in-window-p' returns `header-line' for a
3352 position in the header-line.
3353
3354 +++
3355 ** Text property `display'
3356
3357 The `display' text property is used to insert images into text, and
3358 also control other aspects of how text displays. The value of the
3359 `display' property should be a display specification, as described
3360 below, or a list or vector containing display specifications.
3361
3362 *** Variable width and height spaces
3363
3364 To display a space of fractional width or height, use a display
3365 specification of the form `(LOCATION STRECH)'. If LOCATION is
3366 `(margin left-margin)', the space is displayed in the left marginal
3367 area, if it is `(margin right-margin)', it is displayed in the right
3368 marginal area, and if LOCATION is `(margin nil)' the space is
3369 displayed in the text. In the latter case you can also use the
3370 simpler form STRETCH as property value.
3371
3372 The stretch specification STRETCH itself is a list of the form `(space
3373 PROPS)', where PROPS is a property list which can contain the
3374 properties described below.
3375
3376 The display of the fractional space replaces the display of the
3377 characters having the `display' property.
3378
3379 - :width WIDTH
3380
3381 Specifies that the space width should be WIDTH times the normal
3382 character width. WIDTH can be an integer or floating point number.
3383
3384 - :relative-width FACTOR
3385
3386 Specifies that the width of the stretch should be computed from the
3387 first character in a group of consecutive characters that have the
3388 same `display' property. The computation is done by multiplying the
3389 width of that character by FACTOR.
3390
3391 - :align-to HPOS
3392
3393 Specifies that the space should be wide enough to reach HPOS. The
3394 value HPOS is measured in units of the normal character width.
3395
3396 Exactly one of the above properties should be used.
3397
3398 - :height HEIGHT
3399
3400 Specifies the height of the space, as HEIGHT, measured in terms of the
3401 normal line height.
3402
3403 - :relative-height FACTOR
3404
3405 The height of the space is computed as the product of the height
3406 of the text having the `display' property and FACTOR.
3407
3408 - :ascent ASCENT
3409
3410 Specifies that ASCENT percent of the height of the stretch should be
3411 used for the ascent of the stretch, i.e. for the part above the
3412 baseline. The value of ASCENT must be a non-negative number less or
3413 equal to 100.
3414
3415 You should not use both `:height' and `:relative-height' together.
3416
3417 *** Images
3418
3419 A display specification for an image has the form `(LOCATION
3420 . IMAGE)', where IMAGE is an image specification. The image replaces,
3421 in the display, the characters having this display specification in
3422 their `display' text property. If LOCATION is `(margin left-margin)',
3423 the image will be displayed in the left marginal area, if it is
3424 `(margin right-margin)' it will be displayed in the right marginal
3425 area, and if LOCATION is `(margin nil)' the image will be displayed in
3426 the text. In the latter case you can also use the simpler form IMAGE
3427 as display specification.
3428
3429 *** Other display properties
3430
3431 - :space-width FACTOR
3432
3433 Specifies that space characters in the text having that property
3434 should be displayed FACTOR times as wide as normal; FACTOR must be an
3435 integer or float.
3436
3437 - :height HEIGHT
3438
3439 Display text having this property in a font that is smaller or larger.
3440
3441 If HEIGHT is a list of the form `(+ N)', where N is an integer, that
3442 means to use a font that is N steps larger. If HEIGHT is a list of
3443 the form `(- N)', that means to use a font that is N steps smaller. A
3444 ``step'' is defined by the set of available fonts; each size for which
3445 a font is available counts as a step.
3446
3447 If HEIGHT is a number, that means to use a font that is HEIGHT times
3448 as tall as the frame's default font.
3449
3450 If HEIGHT is a symbol, it is called as a function with the current
3451 height as argument. The function should return the new height to use.
3452
3453 Otherwise, HEIGHT is evaluated to get the new height, with the symbol
3454 `height' bound to the current specified font height.
3455
3456 - :raise FACTOR
3457
3458 FACTOR must be a number, specifying a multiple of the current
3459 font's height. If it is positive, that means to display the characters
3460 raised. If it is negative, that means to display them lower down. The
3461 amount of raising or lowering is computed without taking account of the
3462 `:height' subproperty.
3463
3464 *** Conditional display properties
3465
3466 All display specifications can be conditionalized. If a specification
3467 has the form `(:when CONDITION . SPEC)', the specification SPEC
3468 applies only when CONDITION yields a non-nil value when evaluated.
3469 During evaluattion, point is temporarily set to the end position of
3470 the text having the `display' property.
3471
3472 The normal specification consisting of SPEC only is equivalent to
3473 `(:when t SPEC)'.
3474
3475 +++
3476 ** New menu separator types.
3477
3478 Emacs now supports more than one menu separator type. Menu items with
3479 item names consisting of dashes only (including zero dashes) are
3480 treated like before. In addition, the following item names are used
3481 to specify other menu separator types.
3482
3483 - `--no-line' or `--space', or `--:space', or `--:noLine'
3484
3485 No separator lines are drawn, but a small space is inserted where the
3486 separator occurs.
3487
3488 - `--single-line' or `--:singleLine'
3489
3490 A single line in the menu's foreground color.
3491
3492 - `--double-line' or `--:doubleLine'
3493
3494 A double line in the menu's foreground color.
3495
3496 - `--single-dashed-line' or `--:singleDashedLine'
3497
3498 A single dashed line in the menu's foreground color.
3499
3500 - `--double-dashed-line' or `--:doubleDashedLine'
3501
3502 A double dashed line in the menu's foreground color.
3503
3504 - `--shadow-etched-in' or `--:shadowEtchedIn'
3505
3506 A single line with 3D sunken appearance. This is the the form
3507 displayed for item names consisting of dashes only.
3508
3509 - `--shadow-etched-out' or `--:shadowEtchedOut'
3510
3511 A single line with 3D raised appearance.
3512
3513 - `--shadow-etched-in-dash' or `--:shadowEtchedInDash'
3514
3515 A single dashed line with 3D sunken appearance.
3516
3517 - `--shadow-etched-out-dash' or `--:shadowEtchedOutDash'
3518
3519 A single dashed line with 3D raise appearance.
3520
3521 - `--shadow-double-etched-in' or `--:shadowDoubleEtchedIn'
3522
3523 Two lines with 3D sunken appearance.
3524
3525 - `--shadow-double-etched-out' or `--:shadowDoubleEtchedOut'
3526
3527 Two lines with 3D raised appearance.
3528
3529 - `--shadow-double-etched-in-dash' or `--:shadowDoubleEtchedInDash'
3530
3531 Two dashed lines with 3D sunken appearance.
3532
3533 - `--shadow-double-etched-out-dash' or `--:shadowDoubleEtchedOutDash'
3534
3535 Two dashed lines with 3D raised appearance.
3536
3537 Under LessTif/Motif, the last four separator types are displayed like
3538 the corresponding single-line separators.
3539
3540 +++
3541 ** New frame parameters for scroll bar colors.
3542
3543 The new frame parameters `scroll-bar-foreground' and
3544 `scroll-bar-background' can be used to change scroll bar colors.
3545 Their value must be either a color name, a string, or nil to specify
3546 that scroll bars should use a default color. For toolkit scroll bars,
3547 default colors are toolkit specific. For non-toolkit scroll bars, the
3548 default background is the background color of the frame, and the
3549 default foreground is black.
3550
3551 The X resource name of these parameters are `scrollBarForeground'
3552 (class ScrollBarForeground) and `scrollBarBackground' (class
3553 `ScrollBarBackground').
3554
3555 Setting these parameters overrides toolkit specific X resource
3556 settings for scroll bar colors.
3557
3558 +++
3559 ** You can set `redisplay-dont-pause' to a non-nil value to prevent
3560 display updates from being interrupted when input is pending.
3561
3562 ---
3563 ** Changing a window's width may now change its window start if it
3564 starts on a continuation line. The new window start is computed based
3565 on the window's new width, starting from the start of the continued
3566 line as the start of the screen line with the minimum distance from
3567 the original window start.
3568
3569 ---
3570 ** The variable `hscroll-step' and the functions
3571 `hscroll-point-visible' and `hscroll-window-column' have been removed
3572 now that proper horizontal scrolling is implemented.
3573
3574 +++
3575 ** Windows can now be made fixed-width and/or fixed-height.
3576
3577 A window is fixed-size if its buffer has a buffer-local variable
3578 `window-size-fixed' whose value is not nil. A value of `height' makes
3579 windows fixed-height, a value of `width' makes them fixed-width, any
3580 other non-nil value makes them both fixed-width and fixed-height.
3581
3582 The following code makes all windows displaying the current buffer
3583 fixed-width and fixed-height.
3584
3585 (set (make-local-variable 'window-size-fixed) t)
3586
3587 A call to enlarge-window on a window gives an error if that window is
3588 fixed-width and it is tried to change the window's width, or if the
3589 window is fixed-height, and it is tried to change its height. To
3590 change the size of a fixed-size window, bind `window-size-fixed'
3591 temporarily to nil, for example
3592
3593 (let ((window-size-fixed nil))
3594 (enlarge-window 10))
3595
3596 Likewise, an attempt to split a fixed-height window vertically,
3597 or a fixed-width window horizontally results in a error.
3598
3599 ** The cursor-type frame parameter is now supported on MS-DOS
3600 terminals. When Emacs starts, it by default changes the cursor shape
3601 to a solid box, as it does on Unix. The `cursor-type' frame parameter
3602 overrides this as it does on Unix, except that the bar cursor is
3603 horizontal rather than vertical (since the MS-DOS display doesn't
3604 support a vertical-bar cursor).
3605
3606
3607 ^L
3608 * Emacs 20.7 is a bug-fix release with few user-visible changes
3609
3610 ** It is now possible to use CCL-based coding systems for keyboard
3611 input.
3612
3613 ** ange-ftp now handles FTP security extensions, like Kerberos.
3614
3615 ** Rmail has been extended to recognize more forms of digest messages.
3616
3617 ** Now, most coding systems set in keyboard coding system work not
3618 only for character input, but also in incremental search. The
3619 exceptions are such coding systems that handle 2-byte character sets
3620 (e.g euc-kr, euc-jp) and that use ISO's escape sequence
3621 (e.g. iso-2022-jp). They are ignored in incremental search.
3622
3623 ** Support for Macintosh PowerPC-based machines running GNU/Linux has
3624 been added.
3625
3626 ^L
3627 * Emacs 20.6 is a bug-fix release with one user-visible change
3628
3629 ** Support for ARM-based non-RISCiX machines has been added.
3630
3631 ^L
3632 * Emacs 20.5 is a bug-fix release with no user-visible changes.
3633
3634 ** Not new, but not mentioned before:
3635 M-w when Transient Mark mode is enabled disables the mark.
3636 \f
3637 * Changes in Emacs 20.4
3638
3639 ** Init file may be called .emacs.el.
3640
3641 You can now call the Emacs init file `.emacs.el'.
3642 Formerly the name had to be `.emacs'. If you use the name
3643 `.emacs.el', you can byte-compile the file in the usual way.
3644
3645 If both `.emacs' and `.emacs.el' exist, the latter file
3646 is the one that is used.
3647
3648 ** shell-command, and shell-command-on-region, now return
3649 the exit code of the command (unless it is asynchronous).
3650 Also, you can specify a place to put the error output,
3651 separate from the command's regular output.
3652 Interactively, the variable shell-command-default-error-buffer
3653 says where to put error output; set it to a buffer name.
3654 In calls from Lisp, an optional argument ERROR-BUFFER specifies
3655 the buffer name.
3656
3657 When you specify a non-nil error buffer (or buffer name), any error
3658 output is inserted before point in that buffer, with \f\n to separate
3659 it from the previous batch of error output. The error buffer is not
3660 cleared, so error output from successive commands accumulates there.
3661
3662 ** Setting the default value of enable-multibyte-characters to nil in
3663 the .emacs file, either explicitly using setq-default, or via Custom,
3664 is now essentially equivalent to using --unibyte: all buffers
3665 created during startup will be made unibyte after loading .emacs.
3666
3667 ** C-x C-f now handles the wildcards * and ? in file names. For
3668 example, typing C-x C-f c*.c RET visits all the files whose names
3669 match c*.c. To visit a file whose name contains * or ?, add the
3670 quoting sequence /: to the beginning of the file name.
3671
3672 ** The M-x commands keep-lines, flush-lines and count-matches
3673 now have the same feature as occur and query-replace:
3674 if the pattern contains any upper case letters, then
3675 they never ignore case.
3676
3677 ** The end-of-line format conversion feature previously mentioned
3678 under `* Emacs 20.1 changes for MS-DOS and MS-Windows' actually
3679 applies to all operating systems. Emacs recognizes from the contents
3680 of a file what convention it uses to separate lines--newline, CRLF, or
3681 just CR--and automatically converts the contents to the normal Emacs
3682 convention (using newline to separate lines) for editing. This is a
3683 part of the general feature of coding system conversion.
3684
3685 If you subsequently save the buffer, Emacs converts the text back to
3686 the same format that was used in the file before.
3687
3688 You can turn off end-of-line conversion by setting the variable
3689 `inhibit-eol-conversion' to non-nil, e.g. with Custom in the MULE group.
3690
3691 ** The character set property `prefered-coding-system' has been
3692 renamed to `preferred-coding-system', for the sake of correct spelling.
3693 This is a fairly internal feature, so few programs should be affected.
3694
3695 ** Mode-line display of end-of-line format is changed.
3696 The indication of the end-of-line format of the file visited by a
3697 buffer is now more explicit when that format is not the usual one for
3698 your operating system. For example, the DOS-style end-of-line format
3699 is displayed as "(DOS)" on Unix and GNU/Linux systems. The usual
3700 end-of-line format is still displayed as a single character (colon for
3701 Unix, backslash for DOS and Windows, and forward slash for the Mac).
3702
3703 The values of the variables eol-mnemonic-unix, eol-mnemonic-dos,
3704 eol-mnemonic-mac, and eol-mnemonic-undecided, which are strings,
3705 control what is displayed in the mode line for each end-of-line
3706 format. You can now customize these variables.
3707
3708 ** In the previous version of Emacs, tar-mode didn't work well if a
3709 filename contained non-ASCII characters. Now this is fixed. Such a
3710 filename is decoded by file-name-coding-system if the default value of
3711 enable-multibyte-characters is non-nil.
3712
3713 ** The command temp-buffer-resize-mode toggles a minor mode
3714 in which temporary buffers (such as help buffers) are given
3715 windows just big enough to hold the whole contents.
3716
3717 ** If you use completion.el, you must now run the function
3718 dynamic-completion-mode to enable it. Just loading the file
3719 doesn't have any effect.
3720
3721 ** In Flyspell mode, the default is now to make just one Ispell process,
3722 not one per buffer.
3723
3724 ** If you use iswitchb but do not call (iswitchb-default-keybindings) to
3725 use the default keybindings, you will need to add the following line:
3726 (add-hook 'minibuffer-setup-hook 'iswitchb-minibuffer-setup)
3727
3728 ** Auto-show mode is no longer enabled just by loading auto-show.el.
3729 To control it, set `auto-show-mode' via Custom or use the
3730 `auto-show-mode' command.
3731
3732 ** Handling of X fonts' ascent/descent parameters has been changed to
3733 avoid redisplay problems. As a consequence, compared with previous
3734 versions the line spacing and frame size now differ with some font
3735 choices, typically increasing by a pixel per line. This change
3736 occurred in version 20.3 but was not documented then.
3737
3738 ** If you select the bar cursor style, it uses the frame's
3739 cursor-color, rather than the cursor foreground pixel.
3740
3741 ** In multibyte mode, Rmail decodes incoming MIME messages using the
3742 character set specified in the message. If you want to disable this
3743 feature, set the variable rmail-decode-mime-charset to nil.
3744
3745 ** Not new, but not mentioned previously in NEWS: when you use #! at
3746 the beginning of a file to make it executable and specify an
3747 interpreter program, Emacs looks on the second line for the -*- mode
3748 and variable specification, as well as on the first line.
3749
3750 ** Support for IBM codepage encoding of non-ASCII characters.
3751
3752 The new command M-x codepage-setup creates a special coding system
3753 that can be used to convert text between a specific IBM codepage and
3754 one of the character sets built into Emacs which matches that
3755 codepage. For example, codepage 850 corresponds to Latin-1 character
3756 set, codepage 855 corresponds to Cyrillic-ISO character set, etc.
3757
3758 Windows codepages 1250, 1251 and some others, where Windows deviates
3759 from the corresponding ISO character set, are also supported.
3760
3761 IBM box-drawing characters and other glyphs which don't have
3762 equivalents in the corresponding ISO character set, are converted to
3763 a character defined by dos-unsupported-char-glyph on MS-DOS, and to
3764 `?' on other systems.
3765
3766 IBM codepages are widely used on MS-DOS and MS-Windows, so this
3767 feature is most useful on those platforms, but it can also be used on
3768 Unix.
3769
3770 Emacs compiled for MS-DOS automatically loads the support for the
3771 current codepage when it starts.
3772
3773 ** Mail changes
3774
3775 *** When mail is sent using compose-mail (C-x m), and if
3776 `mail-send-nonascii' is set to the new default value `mime',
3777 appropriate MIME headers are added. The headers are added only if
3778 non-ASCII characters are present in the body of the mail, and no other
3779 MIME headers are already present. For example, the following three
3780 headers are added if the coding system used in the *mail* buffer is
3781 latin-1:
3782
3783 MIME-version: 1.0
3784 Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
3785 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
3786
3787 *** The new variable default-sendmail-coding-system specifies the
3788 default way to encode outgoing mail. This has higher priority than
3789 default-buffer-file-coding-system but has lower priority than
3790 sendmail-coding-system and the local value of
3791 buffer-file-coding-system.
3792
3793 You should not set this variable manually. Instead, set
3794 sendmail-coding-system to specify a fixed encoding for all outgoing
3795 mail.
3796
3797 *** When you try to send a message that contains non-ASCII characters,
3798 if the coding system specified by those variables doesn't handle them,
3799 Emacs will ask you to select a suitable coding system while showing a
3800 list of possible coding systems.
3801
3802 ** CC Mode changes
3803
3804 *** c-default-style can now take an association list that maps major
3805 modes to style names. When this variable is an alist, Java mode no
3806 longer hardcodes a setting to "java" style. See the variable's
3807 docstring for details.
3808
3809 *** It's now possible to put a list as the offset on a syntactic
3810 symbol. The list is evaluated recursively until a non-nil offset is
3811 found. This is useful to combine several lineup functions to act in a
3812 prioritized order on a single line. However, none of the supplied
3813 lineup functions use this feature currently.
3814
3815 *** New syntactic symbol catch-clause, which is used on the "catch" and
3816 "finally" lines in try-catch constructs in C++ and Java.
3817
3818 *** New cleanup brace-catch-brace on c-cleanup-list, which does for
3819 "catch" lines what brace-elseif-brace does for "else if" lines.
3820
3821 *** The braces of Java anonymous inner classes are treated separately
3822 from the braces of other classes in auto-newline mode. Two new
3823 symbols inexpr-class-open and inexpr-class-close may be used on
3824 c-hanging-braces-alist to control the automatic newlines used for
3825 anonymous classes.
3826
3827 *** Support for the Pike language added, along with new Pike specific
3828 syntactic symbols: inlambda, lambda-intro-cont
3829
3830 *** Support for Java anonymous classes via new syntactic symbol
3831 inexpr-class. New syntactic symbol inexpr-statement for Pike
3832 support and gcc-style statements inside expressions. New lineup
3833 function c-lineup-inexpr-block.
3834
3835 *** New syntactic symbol brace-entry-open which is used in brace lists
3836 (i.e. static initializers) when a list entry starts with an open
3837 brace. These used to be recognized as brace-list-entry's.
3838 c-electric-brace also recognizes brace-entry-open braces
3839 (brace-list-entry's can no longer be electrified).
3840
3841 *** New command c-indent-line-or-region, not bound by default.
3842
3843 *** `#' is only electric when typed in the indentation of a line.
3844
3845 *** Parentheses are now electric (via the new command c-electric-paren)
3846 for auto-reindenting lines when parens are typed.
3847
3848 *** In "gnu" style, inline-open offset is now set to zero.
3849
3850 *** Uniform handling of the inclass syntactic symbol. The indentation
3851 associated with it is now always relative to the class opening brace.
3852 This means that the indentation behavior has changed in some
3853 circumstances, but only if you've put anything besides 0 on the
3854 class-open syntactic symbol (none of the default styles do that).
3855
3856 ** Gnus changes.
3857
3858 *** New functionality for using Gnus as an offline newsreader has been
3859 added. A plethora of new commands and modes have been added. See the
3860 Gnus manual for the full story.
3861
3862 *** The nndraft backend has returned, but works differently than
3863 before. All Message buffers are now also articles in the nndraft
3864 group, which is created automatically.
3865
3866 *** `gnus-alter-header-function' can now be used to alter header
3867 values.
3868
3869 *** `gnus-summary-goto-article' now accept Message-ID's.
3870
3871 *** A new Message command for deleting text in the body of a message
3872 outside the region: `C-c C-v'.
3873
3874 *** You can now post to component group in nnvirtual groups with
3875 `C-u C-c C-c'.
3876
3877 *** `nntp-rlogin-program' -- new variable to ease customization.
3878
3879 *** `C-u C-c C-c' in `gnus-article-edit-mode' will now inhibit
3880 re-highlighting of the article buffer.
3881
3882 *** New element in `gnus-boring-article-headers' -- `long-to'.
3883
3884 *** `M-i' symbolic prefix command. See the section "Symbolic
3885 Prefixes" in the Gnus manual for details.
3886
3887 *** `L' and `I' in the summary buffer now take the symbolic prefix
3888 `a' to add the score rule to the "all.SCORE" file.
3889
3890 *** `gnus-simplify-subject-functions' variable to allow greater
3891 control over simplification.
3892
3893 *** `A T' -- new command for fetching the current thread.
3894
3895 *** `/ T' -- new command for including the current thread in the
3896 limit.
3897
3898 *** `M-RET' is a new Message command for breaking cited text.
3899
3900 *** \\1-expressions are now valid in `nnmail-split-methods'.
3901
3902 *** The `custom-face-lookup' function has been removed.
3903 If you used this function in your initialization files, you must
3904 rewrite them to use `face-spec-set' instead.
3905
3906 *** Cancelling now uses the current select method. Symbolic prefix
3907 `a' forces normal posting method.
3908
3909 *** New command to translate M******** sm*rtq**t*s into proper text
3910 -- `W d'.
3911
3912 *** For easier debugging of nntp, you can set `nntp-record-commands'
3913 to a non-nil value.
3914
3915 *** nntp now uses ~/.authinfo, a .netrc-like file, for controlling
3916 where and how to send AUTHINFO to NNTP servers.
3917
3918 *** A command for editing group parameters from the summary buffer
3919 has been added.
3920
3921 *** A history of where mails have been split is available.
3922
3923 *** A new article date command has been added -- `article-date-iso8601'.
3924
3925 *** Subjects can be simplified when threading by setting
3926 `gnus-score-thread-simplify'.
3927
3928 *** A new function for citing in Message has been added --
3929 `message-cite-original-without-signature'.
3930
3931 *** `article-strip-all-blank-lines' -- new article command.
3932
3933 *** A new Message command to kill to the end of the article has
3934 been added.
3935
3936 *** A minimum adaptive score can be specified by using the
3937 `gnus-adaptive-word-minimum' variable.
3938
3939 *** The "lapsed date" article header can be kept continually
3940 updated by the `gnus-start-date-timer' command.
3941
3942 *** Web listserv archives can be read with the nnlistserv backend.
3943
3944 *** Old dejanews archives can now be read by nnweb.
3945
3946 *** `gnus-posting-styles' has been re-activated.
3947
3948 ** Changes to TeX and LaTeX mode
3949
3950 *** The new variable `tex-start-options-string' can be used to give
3951 options for the TeX run. The default value causes TeX to run in
3952 nonstopmode. For an interactive TeX run set it to nil or "".
3953
3954 *** The command `tex-feed-input' sends input to the Tex Shell. In a
3955 TeX buffer it is bound to the keys C-RET, C-c RET, and C-c C-m (some
3956 of these keys may not work on all systems). For instance, if you run
3957 TeX interactively and if the TeX run stops because of an error, you
3958 can continue it without leaving the TeX buffer by typing C-RET.
3959
3960 *** The Tex Shell Buffer is now in `compilation-shell-minor-mode'.
3961 All error-parsing commands of the Compilation major mode are available
3962 but bound to keys that don't collide with the shell. Thus you can use
3963 the Tex Shell for command line executions like a usual shell.
3964
3965 *** The commands `tex-validate-region' and `tex-validate-buffer' check
3966 the matching of braces and $'s. The errors are listed in a *Occur*
3967 buffer and you can use C-c C-c or mouse-2 to go to a particular
3968 mismatch.
3969
3970 ** Changes to RefTeX mode
3971
3972 *** The table of contents buffer can now also display labels and
3973 file boundaries in addition to sections. Use `l', `i', and `c' keys.
3974
3975 *** Labels derived from context (the section heading) are now
3976 lowercase by default. To make the label legal in LaTeX, latin-1
3977 characters will lose their accent. All Mule characters will be
3978 removed from the label.
3979
3980 *** The automatic display of cross reference information can also use
3981 a window instead of the echo area. See variable `reftex-auto-view-crossref'.
3982
3983 *** kpsewhich can be used by RefTeX to find TeX and BibTeX files. See the
3984 customization group `reftex-finding-files'.
3985
3986 *** The option `reftex-bibfile-ignore-list' has been renamed to
3987 `reftex-bibfile-ignore-regexps' and indeed can be fed with regular
3988 expressions.
3989
3990 *** Multiple Selection buffers are now hidden buffers.
3991
3992 ** New/deleted modes and packages
3993
3994 *** The package snmp-mode.el provides major modes for editing SNMP and
3995 SNMPv2 MIBs. It has entries on `auto-mode-alist'.
3996
3997 *** The package sql.el provides a major mode, M-x sql-mode, for
3998 editing SQL files, and M-x sql-interactive-mode for interacting with
3999 SQL interpreters. It has an entry on `auto-mode-alist'.
4000
4001 *** M-x highlight-changes-mode provides a minor mode displaying buffer
4002 changes with a special face.
4003
4004 *** ispell4.el has been deleted. It got in the way of ispell.el and
4005 this was hard to fix reliably. It has long been obsolete -- use
4006 Ispell 3.1 and ispell.el.
4007 \f
4008 * MS-DOS changes in Emacs 20.4
4009
4010 ** Emacs compiled for MS-DOS now supports MULE features better.
4011 This includes support for display of all ISO 8859-N character sets,
4012 conversion to and from IBM codepage encoding of non-ASCII characters,
4013 and automatic setup of the MULE environment at startup. For details,
4014 check out the section `MS-DOS and MULE' in the manual.
4015
4016 The MS-DOS installation procedure automatically configures and builds
4017 Emacs with input method support if it finds an unpacked Leim
4018 distribution when the config.bat script is run.
4019
4020 ** Formerly, the value of lpr-command did not affect printing on
4021 MS-DOS unless print-region-function was set to nil, but now it
4022 controls whether an external program is invoked or output is written
4023 directly to a printer port. Similarly, in the previous version of
4024 Emacs, the value of ps-lpr-command did not affect PostScript printing
4025 on MS-DOS unless ps-printer-name was set to something other than a
4026 string (eg. t or `pipe'), but now it controls whether an external
4027 program is used. (These changes were made so that configuration of
4028 printing variables would be almost identical across all platforms.)
4029
4030 ** In the previous version of Emacs, PostScript and non-PostScript
4031 output was piped to external programs, but because most print programs
4032 available for MS-DOS and MS-Windows cannot read data from their standard
4033 input, on those systems the data to be output is now written to a
4034 temporary file whose name is passed as the last argument to the external
4035 program.
4036
4037 An exception is made for `print', a standard program on Windows NT,
4038 and `nprint', a standard program on Novell Netware. For both of these
4039 programs, the command line is constructed in the appropriate syntax
4040 automatically, using only the value of printer-name or ps-printer-name
4041 as appropriate--the value of the relevant `-switches' variable is
4042 ignored, as both programs have no useful switches.
4043
4044 ** The value of the variable dos-printer (cf. dos-ps-printer), if it has
4045 a value, overrides the value of printer-name (cf. ps-printer-name), on
4046 MS-DOS and MS-Windows only. This has been true since version 20.3, but
4047 was not documented clearly before.
4048
4049 ** All the Emacs games now work on MS-DOS terminals.
4050 This includes Tetris and Snake.
4051 \f
4052 * Lisp changes in Emacs 20.4
4053
4054 ** New functions line-beginning-position and line-end-position
4055 return the position of the beginning or end of the current line.
4056 They both accept an optional argument, which has the same
4057 meaning as the argument to beginning-of-line or end-of-line.
4058
4059 ** find-file and allied functions now have an optional argument
4060 WILDCARD. If this is non-nil, they do wildcard processing,
4061 and visit all files that match the wildcard pattern.
4062
4063 ** Changes in the file-attributes function.
4064
4065 *** The file size returned by file-attributes may be an integer or a float.
4066 It is an integer if the size fits in a Lisp integer, float otherwise.
4067
4068 *** The inode number returned by file-attributes may be an integer (if
4069 the number fits in a Lisp integer) or a cons cell containing two
4070 integers.
4071
4072 ** The new function directory-files-and-attributes returns a list of
4073 files in a directory and their attributes. It accepts the same
4074 arguments as directory-files and has similar semantics, except that
4075 file names and attributes are returned.
4076
4077 ** The new function file-attributes-lessp is a helper function for
4078 sorting the list generated by directory-files-and-attributes. It
4079 accepts two arguments, each a list of a file name and its atttributes.
4080 It compares the file names of each according to string-lessp and
4081 returns the result.
4082
4083 ** The new function file-expand-wildcards expands a wildcard-pattern
4084 to produce a list of existing files that match the pattern.
4085
4086 ** New functions for base64 conversion:
4087
4088 The function base64-encode-region converts a part of the buffer
4089 into the base64 code used in MIME. base64-decode-region
4090 performs the opposite conversion. Line-breaking is supported
4091 optionally.
4092
4093 Functions base64-encode-string and base64-decode-string do a similar
4094 job on the text in a string. They return the value as a new string.
4095
4096 **
4097 The new function process-running-child-p
4098 will tell you if a subprocess has given control of its
4099 terminal to its own child process.
4100
4101 ** interrupt-process and such functions have a new feature:
4102 when the second argument is `lambda', they send a signal
4103 to the running child of the subshell, if any, but if the shell
4104 itself owns its terminal, no signal is sent.
4105
4106 ** There are new widget types `plist' and `alist' which can
4107 be used for customizing variables whose values are plists or alists.
4108
4109 ** easymenu.el Now understands `:key-sequence' and `:style button'.
4110 :included is an alias for :visible.
4111
4112 easy-menu-add-item now understands the values returned by
4113 easy-menu-remove-item and easy-menu-item-present-p. This can be used
4114 to move or copy menu entries.
4115
4116 ** Multibyte editing changes
4117
4118 *** The definitions of sref and char-bytes are changed. Now, sref is
4119 an alias of aref and char-bytes always returns 1. This change is to
4120 make some Emacs Lisp code which works on 20.2 and earlier also
4121 work on the latest Emacs. Such code uses a combination of sref and
4122 char-bytes in a loop typically as below:
4123 (setq char (sref str idx)
4124 idx (+ idx (char-bytes idx)))
4125 The byte-compiler now warns that this is obsolete.
4126
4127 If you want to know how many bytes a specific multibyte character
4128 (say, CH) occupies in a multibyte buffer, use this code:
4129 (charset-bytes (char-charset ch))
4130
4131 *** In multibyte mode, when you narrow a buffer to some region, and the
4132 region is preceded or followed by non-ASCII codes, inserting or
4133 deleting at the head or the end of the region may signal this error:
4134
4135 Byte combining across boundary of accessible buffer text inhibitted
4136
4137 This is to avoid some bytes being combined together into a character
4138 across the boundary.
4139
4140 *** The functions find-charset-region and find-charset-string include
4141 `unknown' in the returned list in the following cases:
4142 o The current buffer or the target string is unibyte and
4143 contains 8-bit characters.
4144 o The current buffer or the target string is multibyte and
4145 contains invalid characters.
4146
4147 *** The functions decode-coding-region and encode-coding-region remove
4148 text properties of the target region. Ideally, they should correctly
4149 preserve text properties, but for the moment, it's hard. Removing
4150 text properties is better than preserving them in a less-than-correct
4151 way.
4152
4153 *** prefer-coding-system sets EOL conversion of default coding systems.
4154 If the argument to prefer-coding-system specifies a certain type of
4155 end of line conversion, the default coding systems set by
4156 prefer-coding-system will specify that conversion type for end of line.
4157
4158 *** The new function thai-compose-string can be used to properly
4159 compose Thai characters in a string.
4160
4161 ** The primitive `define-prefix-command' now takes an optional third
4162 argument NAME, which should be a string. It supplies the menu name
4163 for the created keymap. Keymaps created in order to be displayed as
4164 menus should always use the third argument.
4165
4166 ** The meanings of optional second arguments for read-char,
4167 read-event, and read-char-exclusive are flipped. Now the second
4168 arguments are INHERIT-INPUT-METHOD. These functions use the current
4169 input method (if any) if and only if INHERIT-INPUT-METHOD is non-nil.
4170
4171 ** The new function clear-this-command-keys empties out the contents
4172 of the vector that (this-command-keys) returns. This is useful in
4173 programs that read passwords, to prevent the passwords from echoing
4174 inadvertently as part of the next command in certain cases.
4175
4176 ** The new macro `with-temp-message' displays a temporary message in
4177 the echo area, while executing some Lisp code. Like `progn', it
4178 returns the value of the last form, but it also restores the previous
4179 echo area contents.
4180
4181 (with-temp-message MESSAGE &rest BODY)
4182
4183 ** The function `require' now takes an optional third argument
4184 NOERROR. If it is non-nil, then there is no error if the
4185 requested feature cannot be loaded.
4186
4187 ** In the function modify-face, an argument of (nil) for the
4188 foreground color, background color or stipple pattern
4189 means to clear out that attribute.
4190
4191 ** The `outer-window-id' frame property of an X frame
4192 gives the window number of the outermost X window for the frame.
4193
4194 ** Temporary buffers made with with-output-to-temp-buffer are now
4195 read-only by default, and normally use the major mode Help mode
4196 unless you put them in some other non-Fundamental mode before the
4197 end of with-output-to-temp-buffer.
4198
4199 ** The new functions gap-position and gap-size return information on
4200 the gap of the current buffer.
4201
4202 ** The new functions position-bytes and byte-to-position provide a way
4203 to convert between character positions and byte positions in the
4204 current buffer.
4205
4206 ** vc.el defines two new macros, `edit-vc-file' and `with-vc-file', to
4207 facilitate working with version-controlled files from Lisp programs.
4208 These macros check out a given file automatically if needed, and check
4209 it back in after any modifications have been made.
4210 \f
4211 * Installation Changes in Emacs 20.3
4212
4213 ** The default value of load-path now includes most subdirectories of
4214 the site-specific directories /usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp and
4215 /usr/local/share/emacs/VERSION/site-lisp, in addition to those
4216 directories themselves. Both immediate subdirectories and
4217 subdirectories multiple levels down are added to load-path.
4218
4219 Not all subdirectories are included, though. Subdirectories whose
4220 names do not start with a letter or digit are excluded.
4221 Subdirectories named RCS or CVS are excluded. Also, a subdirectory
4222 which contains a file named `.nosearch' is excluded. You can use
4223 these methods to prevent certain subdirectories from being searched.
4224
4225 Emacs finds these subdirectories and adds them to load-path when it
4226 starts up. While it would be cleaner to find the subdirectories each
4227 time Emacs loads a file, that would be much slower.
4228
4229 This feature is an incompatible change. If you have stored some Emacs
4230 Lisp files in a subdirectory of the site-lisp directory specifically
4231 to prevent them from being used, you will need to rename the
4232 subdirectory to start with a non-alphanumeric character, or create a
4233 `.nosearch' file in it, in order to continue to achieve the desired
4234 results.
4235
4236 ** Emacs no longer includes an old version of the C preprocessor from
4237 GCC. This was formerly used to help compile Emacs with C compilers
4238 that had limits on the significant length of an identifier, but in
4239 fact we stopped supporting such compilers some time ago.
4240 \f
4241 * Changes in Emacs 20.3
4242
4243 ** The new command C-x z (repeat) repeats the previous command
4244 including its argument. If you repeat the z afterward,
4245 it repeats the command additional times; thus, you can
4246 perform many repetitions with one keystroke per repetition.
4247
4248 ** Emacs now supports "selective undo" which undoes only within a
4249 specified region. To do this, set point and mark around the desired
4250 region and type C-u C-x u (or C-u C-_). You can then continue undoing
4251 further, within the same region, by repeating the ordinary undo
4252 command C-x u or C-_. This will keep undoing changes that were made
4253 within the region you originally specified, until either all of them
4254 are undone, or it encounters a change which crosses the edge of that
4255 region.
4256
4257 In Transient Mark mode, undoing when a region is active requests
4258 selective undo.
4259
4260 ** If you specify --unibyte when starting Emacs, then all buffers are
4261 unibyte, except when a Lisp program specifically creates a multibyte
4262 buffer. Setting the environment variable EMACS_UNIBYTE has the same
4263 effect. The --no-unibyte option overrides EMACS_UNIBYTE and directs
4264 Emacs to run normally in multibyte mode.
4265
4266 The option --unibyte does not affect the reading of Emacs Lisp files,
4267 though. If you want a Lisp file to be read in unibyte mode, use
4268 -*-unibyte: t;-*- on its first line. That will force Emacs to
4269 load that file in unibyte mode, regardless of how Emacs was started.
4270
4271 ** toggle-enable-multibyte-characters no longer has a key binding and
4272 no longer appears in the menu bar. We've realized that changing the
4273 enable-multibyte-characters variable in an existing buffer is
4274 something that most users not do.
4275
4276 ** You can specify a coding system to use for the next cut or paste
4277 operations through the window system with the command C-x RET X.
4278 The coding system can make a difference for communication with other
4279 applications.
4280
4281 C-x RET x specifies a coding system for all subsequent cutting and
4282 pasting operations.
4283
4284 ** You can specify the printer to use for commands that do printing by
4285 setting the variable `printer-name'. Just what a printer name looks
4286 like depends on your operating system. You can specify a different
4287 printer for the Postscript printing commands by setting
4288 `ps-printer-name'.
4289
4290 ** Emacs now supports on-the-fly spell checking by the means of a
4291 minor mode. It is called M-x flyspell-mode. You don't have to remember
4292 any other special commands to use it, and you will hardly notice it
4293 except when you make a spelling error. Flyspell works by highlighting
4294 incorrect words as soon as they are completed or as soon as the cursor
4295 hits a new word.
4296
4297 Flyspell mode works with whichever dictionary you have selected for
4298 Ispell in Emacs. In TeX mode, it understands TeX syntax so as not
4299 to be confused by TeX commands.
4300
4301 You can correct a misspelled word by editing it into something
4302 correct. You can also correct it, or accept it as correct, by
4303 clicking on the word with Mouse-2; that gives you a pop-up menu
4304 of various alternative replacements and actions.
4305
4306 Flyspell mode also proposes "automatic" corrections. M-TAB replaces
4307 the current misspelled word with a possible correction. If several
4308 corrections are made possible, M-TAB cycles through them in
4309 alphabetical order, or in order of decreasing likelihood if
4310 flyspell-sort-corrections is nil.
4311
4312 Flyspell mode also flags an error when a word is repeated, if
4313 flyspell-mark-duplications-flag is non-nil.
4314
4315 ** Changes in input method usage.
4316
4317 Now you can use arrow keys (right, left, down, up) for selecting among
4318 the alternatives just the same way as you do by C-f, C-b, C-n, and C-p
4319 respectively.
4320
4321 You can use the ENTER key to accept the current conversion.
4322
4323 If you type TAB to display a list of alternatives, you can select one
4324 of the alternatives with Mouse-2.
4325
4326 The meaning of the variable `input-method-verbose-flag' is changed so
4327 that you can set it to t, nil, `default', or `complex-only'.
4328
4329 If the value is nil, extra guidance is never given.
4330
4331 If the value is t, extra guidance is always given.
4332
4333 If the value is `complex-only', extra guidance is always given only
4334 when you are using complex input methods such as chinese-py.
4335
4336 If the value is `default' (this is the default), extra guidance is
4337 given in the following case:
4338 o When you are using a complex input method.
4339 o When you are using a simple input method but not in the minibuffer.
4340
4341 If you are using Emacs through a very slow line, setting
4342 input-method-verbose-flag to nil or to complex-only is a good choice,
4343 and if you are using an input method you are not familiar with,
4344 setting it to t is helpful.
4345
4346 The old command select-input-method is now called set-input-method.
4347
4348 In the language environment "Korean", you can use the following
4349 keys:
4350 Shift-SPC toggle-korean-input-method
4351 C-F9 quail-hangul-switch-symbol-ksc
4352 F9 quail-hangul-switch-hanja
4353 These key bindings are canceled when you switch to another language
4354 environment.
4355
4356 ** The minibuffer history of file names now records the specified file
4357 names, not the entire minibuffer input. For example, if the
4358 minibuffer starts out with /usr/foo/, you might type in /etc/passwd to
4359 get
4360
4361 /usr/foo//etc/passwd
4362
4363 which stands for the file /etc/passwd.
4364
4365 Formerly, this used to put /usr/foo//etc/passwd in the history list.
4366 Now this puts just /etc/passwd in the history list.
4367
4368 ** If you are root, Emacs sets backup-by-copying-when-mismatch to t
4369 at startup, so that saving a file will be sure to preserve
4370 its owner and group.
4371
4372 ** find-func.el can now also find the place of definition of Emacs
4373 Lisp variables in user-loaded libraries.
4374
4375 ** C-x r t (string-rectangle) now deletes the existing rectangle
4376 contents before inserting the specified string on each line.
4377
4378 ** There is a new command delete-whitespace-rectangle
4379 which deletes whitespace starting from a particular column
4380 in all the lines on a rectangle. The column is specified
4381 by the left edge of the rectangle.
4382
4383 ** You can now store a number into a register with C-u NUMBER C-x r n REG,
4384 increment it by INC with C-u INC C-x r + REG (to increment by one, omit
4385 C-u INC), and insert it in the buffer with C-x r g REG. This is useful
4386 for writing keyboard macros.
4387
4388 ** The new command M-x speedbar displays a frame in which directories,
4389 files, and tags can be displayed, manipulated, and jumped to. The
4390 frame defaults to 20 characters in width, and is the same height as
4391 the frame that it was started from. Some major modes define
4392 additional commands for the speedbar, including Rmail, GUD/GDB, and
4393 info.
4394
4395 ** query-replace-regexp is now bound to C-M-%.
4396
4397 ** In Transient Mark mode, when the region is active, M-x
4398 query-replace and the other replace commands now operate on the region
4399 contents only.
4400
4401 ** M-x write-region, when used interactively, now asks for
4402 confirmation before overwriting an existing file. When you call
4403 the function from a Lisp program, a new optional argument CONFIRM
4404 says whether to ask for confirmation in this case.
4405
4406 ** If you use find-file-literally and the file is already visited
4407 non-literally, the command asks you whether to revisit the file
4408 literally. If you say no, it signals an error.
4409
4410 ** Major modes defined with the "derived mode" feature
4411 now use the proper name for the mode hook: WHATEVER-mode-hook.
4412 Formerly they used the name WHATEVER-mode-hooks, but that is
4413 inconsistent with Emacs conventions.
4414
4415 ** shell-command-on-region (and shell-command) reports success or
4416 failure if the command produces no output.
4417
4418 ** Set focus-follows-mouse to nil if your window system or window
4419 manager does not transfer focus to another window when you just move
4420 the mouse.
4421
4422 ** mouse-menu-buffer-maxlen has been renamed to
4423 mouse-buffer-menu-maxlen to be consistent with the other related
4424 function and variable names.
4425
4426 ** The new variable auto-coding-alist specifies coding systems for
4427 reading specific files. This has higher priority than
4428 file-coding-system-alist.
4429
4430 ** If you set the variable unibyte-display-via-language-environment to
4431 t, then Emacs displays non-ASCII characters are displayed by
4432 converting them to the equivalent multibyte characters according to
4433 the current language environment. As a result, they are displayed
4434 according to the current fontset.
4435
4436 ** C-q's handling of codes in the range 0200 through 0377 is changed.
4437
4438 The codes in the range 0200 through 0237 are inserted as one byte of
4439 that code regardless of the values of nonascii-translation-table and
4440 nonascii-insert-offset.
4441
4442 For the codes in the range 0240 through 0377, if
4443 enable-multibyte-characters is non-nil and nonascii-translation-table
4444 nor nonascii-insert-offset can't convert them to valid multibyte
4445 characters, they are converted to Latin-1 characters.
4446
4447 ** If you try to find a file that is not read-accessible, you now get
4448 an error, rather than an empty buffer and a warning.
4449
4450 ** In the minibuffer history commands M-r and M-s, an upper case
4451 letter in the regular expression forces case-sensitive search.
4452
4453 ** In the *Help* buffer, cross-references to commands and variables
4454 are inferred and hyperlinked. Use C-h m in Help mode for the relevant
4455 command keys.
4456
4457 ** M-x apropos-command, with a prefix argument, no longer looks for
4458 user option variables--instead it looks for noninteractive functions.
4459
4460 Meanwhile, the command apropos-variable normally searches for
4461 user option variables; with a prefix argument, it looks at
4462 all variables that have documentation.
4463
4464 ** When you type a long line in the minibuffer, and the minibuffer
4465 shows just one line, automatically scrolling works in a special way
4466 that shows you overlap with the previous line of text. The variable
4467 minibuffer-scroll-overlap controls how many characters of overlap
4468 it should show; the default is 20.
4469
4470 Meanwhile, Resize Minibuffer mode is still available; in that mode,
4471 the minibuffer grows taller (up to a point) as needed to show the whole
4472 of your input.
4473
4474 ** The new command M-x customize-changed-options lets you customize
4475 all the options whose meanings or default values have changed in
4476 recent Emacs versions. You specify a previous Emacs version number as
4477 argument, and the command creates a customization buffer showing all
4478 the customizable options which were changed since that version.
4479 Newly added options are included as well.
4480
4481 If you don't specify a particular version number argument,
4482 then the customization buffer shows all the customizable options
4483 for which Emacs versions of changes are recorded.
4484
4485 This function is also bound to the Changed Options entry in the
4486 Customize menu.
4487
4488 ** When you run M-x grep with a prefix argument, it figures out
4489 the tag around point and puts that into the default grep command.
4490
4491 ** The new command M-* (pop-tag-mark) pops back through a history of
4492 buffer positions from which M-. or other tag-finding commands were
4493 invoked.
4494
4495 ** The new variable comment-padding specifies the number of spaces
4496 that `comment-region' will insert before the actual text of the comment.
4497 The default is 1.
4498
4499 ** In Fortran mode the characters `.', `_' and `$' now have symbol
4500 syntax, not word syntax. Fortran mode now supports `imenu' and has
4501 new commands fortran-join-line (M-^) and fortran-narrow-to-subprogram
4502 (C-x n d). M-q can be used to fill a statement or comment block
4503 sensibly.
4504
4505 ** GUD now supports jdb, the Java debugger, and pdb, the Python debugger.
4506
4507 ** If you set the variable add-log-keep-changes-together to a non-nil
4508 value, the command `C-x 4 a' will automatically notice when you make
4509 two entries in one day for one file, and combine them.
4510
4511 ** You can use the command M-x diary-mail-entries to mail yourself a
4512 reminder about upcoming diary entries. See the documentation string
4513 for a sample shell script for calling this function automatically
4514 every night.
4515
4516 ** Desktop changes
4517
4518 *** All you need to do to enable use of the Desktop package, is to set
4519 the variable desktop-enable to t with Custom.
4520
4521 *** Minor modes are now restored. Which minor modes are restored
4522 and how modes are restored is controlled by `desktop-minor-mode-table'.
4523
4524 ** There is no need to do anything special, now, to enable Gnus to
4525 read and post multi-lingual articles.
4526
4527 ** Outline mode has now support for showing hidden outlines when
4528 doing an isearch. In order for this to happen search-invisible should
4529 be set to open (the default). If an isearch match is inside a hidden
4530 outline the outline is made visible. If you continue pressing C-s and
4531 the match moves outside the formerly invisible outline, the outline is
4532 made invisible again.
4533
4534 ** Mail reading and sending changes
4535
4536 *** The Rmail e command now switches to displaying the whole header of
4537 the message before it lets you edit the message. This is so that any
4538 changes you make in the header will not be lost if you subsequently
4539 toggle.
4540
4541 *** The w command in Rmail, which writes the message body into a file,
4542 now works in the summary buffer as well. (The command to delete the
4543 summary buffer is now Q.) The default file name for the w command, if
4544 the message has no subject, is stored in the variable
4545 rmail-default-body-file.
4546
4547 *** Most of the commands and modes that operate on mail and netnews no
4548 longer depend on the value of mail-header-separator. Instead, they
4549 handle whatever separator the buffer happens to use.
4550
4551 *** If you set mail-signature to a value which is not t, nil, or a string,
4552 it should be an expression. When you send a message, this expression
4553 is evaluated to insert the signature.
4554
4555 *** The new Lisp library feedmail.el (version 8) enhances processing of
4556 outbound email messages. It works in coordination with other email
4557 handling packages (e.g., rmail, VM, gnus) and is responsible for
4558 putting final touches on messages and actually submitting them for
4559 transmission. Users of the emacs program "fakemail" might be
4560 especially interested in trying feedmail.
4561
4562 feedmail is not enabled by default. See comments at the top of
4563 feedmail.el for set-up instructions. Among the bigger features
4564 provided by feedmail are:
4565
4566 **** you can park outgoing messages into a disk-based queue and
4567 stimulate sending some or all of them later (handy for laptop users);
4568 there is also a queue for draft messages
4569
4570 **** you can get one last look at the prepped outbound message and
4571 be prompted for confirmation
4572
4573 **** does smart filling of address headers
4574
4575 **** can generate a MESSAGE-ID: line and a DATE: line; the date can be
4576 the time the message was written or the time it is being sent; this
4577 can make FCC copies more closely resemble copies that recipients get
4578
4579 **** you can specify an arbitrary function for actually transmitting
4580 the message; included in feedmail are interfaces for /bin/[r]mail,
4581 /usr/lib/sendmail, and elisp smtpmail; it's easy to write a new
4582 function for something else (10-20 lines of elisp)
4583
4584 ** Dired changes
4585
4586 *** The Dired function dired-do-toggle, which toggles marked and unmarked
4587 files, is now bound to "t" instead of "T".
4588
4589 *** dired-at-point has been added to ffap.el. It allows one to easily
4590 run Dired on the directory name at point.
4591
4592 *** Dired has a new command: %g. It searches the contents of
4593 files in the directory and marks each file that contains a match
4594 for a specified regexp.
4595
4596 ** VC Changes
4597
4598 *** New option vc-ignore-vc-files lets you turn off version control
4599 conveniently.
4600
4601 *** VC Dired has been completely rewritten. It is now much
4602 faster, especially for CVS, and works very similar to ordinary
4603 Dired.
4604
4605 VC Dired is invoked by typing C-x v d and entering the name of the
4606 directory to display. By default, VC Dired gives you a recursive
4607 listing of all files at or below the given directory which are
4608 currently locked (for CVS, all files not up-to-date are shown).
4609
4610 You can change the listing format by setting vc-dired-recurse to nil,
4611 then it shows only the given directory, and you may also set
4612 vc-dired-terse-display to nil, then it shows all files under version
4613 control plus the names of any subdirectories, so that you can type `i'
4614 on such lines to insert them manually, as in ordinary Dired.
4615
4616 All Dired commands operate normally in VC Dired, except for `v', which
4617 is redefined as the version control prefix. That means you may type
4618 `v l', `v =' etc. to invoke `vc-print-log', `vc-diff' and the like on
4619 the file named in the current Dired buffer line. `v v' invokes
4620 `vc-next-action' on this file, or on all files currently marked.
4621
4622 The new command `v t' (vc-dired-toggle-terse-mode) allows you to
4623 toggle between terse display (only locked files) and full display (all
4624 VC files plus subdirectories). There is also a special command,
4625 `* l', to mark all files currently locked.
4626
4627 Giving a prefix argument to C-x v d now does the same thing as in
4628 ordinary Dired: it allows you to supply additional options for the ls
4629 command in the minibuffer, to fine-tune VC Dired's output.
4630
4631 *** Under CVS, if you merge changes from the repository into a working
4632 file, and CVS detects conflicts, VC now offers to start an ediff
4633 session to resolve them.
4634
4635 Alternatively, you can use the new command `vc-resolve-conflicts' to
4636 resolve conflicts in a file at any time. It works in any buffer that
4637 contains conflict markers as generated by rcsmerge (which is what CVS
4638 uses as well).
4639
4640 *** You can now transfer changes between branches, using the new
4641 command vc-merge (C-x v m). It is implemented for RCS and CVS. When
4642 you invoke it in a buffer under version-control, you can specify
4643 either an entire branch or a pair of versions, and the changes on that
4644 branch or between the two versions are merged into the working file.
4645 If this results in any conflicts, they may be resolved interactively,
4646 using ediff.
4647
4648 ** Changes in Font Lock
4649
4650 *** The face and variable previously known as font-lock-reference-face
4651 are now called font-lock-constant-face to better reflect their typical
4652 use for highlighting constants and labels. (Its face properties are
4653 unchanged.) The variable font-lock-reference-face remains for now for
4654 compatibility reasons, but its value is font-lock-constant-face.
4655
4656 ** Frame name display changes
4657
4658 *** The command set-frame-name lets you set the name of the current
4659 frame. You can use the new command select-frame-by-name to select and
4660 raise a frame; this is mostly useful on character-only terminals, or
4661 when many frames are invisible or iconified.
4662
4663 *** On character-only terminal (not a window system), changing the
4664 frame name is now reflected on the mode line and in the Buffers/Frames
4665 menu.
4666
4667 ** Comint (subshell) changes
4668
4669 *** In Comint modes, the commands to kill, stop or interrupt a
4670 subjob now also kill pending input. This is for compatibility
4671 with ordinary shells, where the signal characters do this.
4672
4673 *** There are new commands in Comint mode.
4674
4675 C-c C-x fetches the "next" line from the input history;
4676 that is, the line after the last line you got.
4677 You can use this command to fetch successive lines, one by one.
4678
4679 C-c SPC accumulates lines of input. More precisely, it arranges to
4680 send the current line together with the following line, when you send
4681 the following line.
4682
4683 C-c C-a if repeated twice consecutively now moves to the process mark,
4684 which separates the pending input from the subprocess output and the
4685 previously sent input.
4686
4687 C-c M-r now runs comint-previous-matching-input-from-input;
4688 it searches for a previous command, using the current pending input
4689 as the search string.
4690
4691 *** New option compilation-scroll-output can be set to scroll
4692 automatically in compilation-mode windows.
4693
4694 ** C mode changes
4695
4696 *** Multiline macros are now handled, both as they affect indentation,
4697 and as recognized syntax. New syntactic symbol cpp-macro-cont is
4698 assigned to second and subsequent lines of a multiline macro
4699 definition.
4700
4701 *** A new style "user" which captures all non-hook-ified
4702 (i.e. top-level) .emacs file variable settings and customizations.
4703 Style "cc-mode" is an alias for "user" and is deprecated. "gnu"
4704 style is still the default however.
4705
4706 *** "java" style now conforms to Sun's JDK coding style.
4707
4708 *** There are new commands c-beginning-of-defun, c-end-of-defun which
4709 are alternatives which you could bind to C-M-a and C-M-e if you prefer
4710 them. They do not have key bindings by default.
4711
4712 *** New and improved implementations of M-a (c-beginning-of-statement)
4713 and M-e (c-end-of-statement).
4714
4715 *** C++ namespace blocks are supported, with new syntactic symbols
4716 namespace-open, namespace-close, and innamespace.
4717
4718 *** File local variable settings of c-file-style and c-file-offsets
4719 makes the style variables local to that buffer only.
4720
4721 *** New indentation functions c-lineup-close-paren,
4722 c-indent-one-line-block, c-lineup-dont-change.
4723
4724 *** Improvements (hopefully!) to the way CC Mode is loaded. You
4725 should now be able to do a (require 'cc-mode) to get the entire
4726 package loaded properly for customization in your .emacs file. A new
4727 variable c-initialize-on-load controls this and is t by default.
4728
4729 ** Changes to hippie-expand.
4730
4731 *** New customization variable `hippie-expand-dabbrev-skip-space'. If
4732 non-nil, trailing spaces may be included in the abbreviation to search for,
4733 which then gives the same behavior as the original `dabbrev-expand'.
4734
4735 *** New customization variable `hippie-expand-dabbrev-as-symbol'. If
4736 non-nil, characters of syntax '_' is considered part of the word when
4737 expanding dynamically.
4738
4739 *** New customization variable `hippie-expand-no-restriction'. If
4740 non-nil, narrowed buffers are widened before they are searched.
4741
4742 *** New customization variable `hippie-expand-only-buffers'. If
4743 non-empty, buffers searched are restricted to the types specified in
4744 this list. Useful for example when constructing new special-purpose
4745 expansion functions with `make-hippie-expand-function'.
4746
4747 *** Text properties of the expansion are no longer copied.
4748
4749 ** Changes in BibTeX mode.
4750
4751 *** Any titleword matching a regexp in the new variable
4752 bibtex-autokey-titleword-ignore (case sensitive) is ignored during
4753 automatic key generation. This replaces variable
4754 bibtex-autokey-titleword-first-ignore, which only checked for matches
4755 against the first word in the title.
4756
4757 *** Autokey generation now uses all words from the title, not just
4758 capitalized words. To avoid conflicts with existing customizations,
4759 bibtex-autokey-titleword-ignore is set up such that words starting with
4760 lowerkey characters will still be ignored. Thus, if you want to use
4761 lowercase words from the title, you will have to overwrite the
4762 bibtex-autokey-titleword-ignore standard setting.
4763
4764 *** Case conversion of names and title words for automatic key
4765 generation is more flexible. Variable bibtex-autokey-preserve-case is
4766 replaced by bibtex-autokey-titleword-case-convert and
4767 bibtex-autokey-name-case-convert.
4768
4769 ** Changes in vcursor.el.
4770
4771 *** Support for character terminals is available: there is a new keymap
4772 and the vcursor will appear as an arrow between buffer text. A
4773 variable `vcursor-interpret-input' allows input from the vcursor to be
4774 entered exactly as if typed. Numerous functions, including
4775 `vcursor-compare-windows', have been rewritten to improve consistency
4776 in the selection of windows and corresponding keymaps.
4777
4778 *** vcursor options can now be altered with M-x customize under the
4779 Editing group once the package is loaded.
4780
4781 *** Loading vcursor now does not define keys by default, as this is
4782 generally a bad side effect. Use M-x customize to set
4783 vcursor-key-bindings to t to restore the old behaviour.
4784
4785 *** vcursor-auto-disable can be `copy', which turns off copying from the
4786 vcursor, but doesn't disable it, after any non-vcursor command.
4787
4788 ** Ispell changes.
4789
4790 *** You can now spell check comments and strings in the current
4791 buffer with M-x ispell-comments-and-strings. Comments and strings
4792 are identified by syntax tables in effect.
4793
4794 *** Generic region skipping implemented.
4795 A single buffer can be broken into a number of regions where text will
4796 and will not be checked. The definitions of the regions can be user
4797 defined. New applications and improvements made available by this
4798 include:
4799
4800 o URLs are automatically skipped
4801 o EMail message checking is vastly improved.
4802
4803 *** Ispell can highlight the erroneous word even on non-window terminals.
4804
4805 ** Changes to RefTeX mode
4806
4807 RefTeX has been updated in order to make it more usable with very
4808 large projects (like a several volume math book). The parser has been
4809 re-written from scratch. To get maximum speed from RefTeX, check the
4810 section `Optimizations' in the manual.
4811
4812 *** New recursive parser.
4813
4814 The old version of RefTeX created a single large buffer containing the
4815 entire multifile document in order to parse the document. The new
4816 recursive parser scans the individual files.
4817
4818 *** Parsing only part of a document.
4819
4820 Reparsing of changed document parts can now be made faster by enabling
4821 partial scans. To use this feature, read the documentation string of
4822 the variable `reftex-enable-partial-scans' and set the variable to t.
4823
4824 (setq reftex-enable-partial-scans t)
4825
4826 *** Storing parsing information in a file.
4827
4828 This can improve startup times considerably. To turn it on, use
4829
4830 (setq reftex-save-parse-info t)
4831
4832 *** Using multiple selection buffers
4833
4834 If the creation of label selection buffers is too slow (this happens
4835 for large documents), you can reuse these buffers by setting
4836
4837 (setq reftex-use-multiple-selection-buffers t)
4838
4839 *** References to external documents.
4840
4841 The LaTeX package `xr' allows to cross-reference labels in external
4842 documents. RefTeX can provide information about the external
4843 documents as well. To use this feature, set up the \externaldocument
4844 macros required by the `xr' package and rescan the document with
4845 RefTeX. The external labels can then be accessed with the `x' key in
4846 the selection buffer provided by `reftex-reference' (bound to `C-c )').
4847 The `x' key also works in the table of contents buffer.
4848
4849 *** Many more labeled LaTeX environments are recognized by default.
4850
4851 The builtin command list now covers all the standard LaTeX commands,
4852 and all of the major packages included in the LaTeX distribution.
4853
4854 Also, RefTeX now understands the \appendix macro and changes
4855 the enumeration of sections in the *toc* buffer accordingly.
4856
4857 *** Mouse support for selection and *toc* buffers
4858
4859 The mouse can now be used to select items in the selection and *toc*
4860 buffers. See also the new option `reftex-highlight-selection'.
4861
4862 *** New keymaps for selection and table of contents modes.
4863
4864 The selection processes for labels and citation keys, and the table of
4865 contents buffer now have their own keymaps: `reftex-select-label-map',
4866 `reftex-select-bib-map', `reftex-toc-map'. The selection processes
4867 have a number of new keys predefined. In particular, TAB lets you
4868 enter a label with completion. Check the on-the-fly help (press `?'
4869 at the selection prompt) or read the Info documentation to find out
4870 more.
4871
4872 *** Support for the varioref package
4873
4874 The `v' key in the label selection buffer toggles \ref versus \vref.
4875
4876 *** New hooks
4877
4878 Three new hooks can be used to redefine the way labels, references,
4879 and citations are created. These hooks are
4880 `reftex-format-label-function', `reftex-format-ref-function',
4881 `reftex-format-cite-function'.
4882
4883 *** Citations outside LaTeX
4884
4885 The command `reftex-citation' may also be used outside LaTeX (e.g. in
4886 a mail buffer). See the Info documentation for details.
4887
4888 *** Short context is no longer fontified.
4889
4890 The short context in the label menu no longer copies the
4891 fontification from the text in the buffer. If you prefer it to be
4892 fontified, use
4893
4894 (setq reftex-refontify-context t)
4895
4896 ** file-cache-minibuffer-complete now accepts a prefix argument.
4897 With a prefix argument, it does not try to do completion of
4898 the file name within its directory; it only checks for other
4899 directories that contain the same file name.
4900
4901 Thus, given the file name Makefile, and assuming that a file
4902 Makefile.in exists in the same directory, ordinary
4903 file-cache-minibuffer-complete will try to complete Makefile to
4904 Makefile.in and will therefore never look for other directories that
4905 have Makefile. A prefix argument tells it not to look for longer
4906 names such as Makefile.in, so that instead it will look for other
4907 directories--just as if the name were already complete in its present
4908 directory.
4909
4910 ** New modes and packages
4911
4912 *** There is a new alternative major mode for Perl, Cperl mode.
4913 It has many more features than Perl mode, and some people prefer
4914 it, but some do not.
4915
4916 *** There is a new major mode, M-x vhdl-mode, for editing files of VHDL
4917 code.
4918
4919 *** M-x which-function-mode enables a minor mode that displays the
4920 current function name continuously in the mode line, as you move
4921 around in a buffer.
4922
4923 Which Function mode is effective in major modes which support Imenu.
4924
4925 *** Gametree is a major mode for editing game analysis trees. The author
4926 uses it for keeping notes about his postal Chess games, but it should
4927 be helpful for other two-player games as well, as long as they have an
4928 established system of notation similar to Chess.
4929
4930 *** The new minor mode checkdoc-minor-mode provides Emacs Lisp
4931 documentation string checking for style and spelling. The style
4932 guidelines are found in the Emacs Lisp programming manual.
4933
4934 *** The net-utils package makes some common networking features
4935 available in Emacs. Some of these functions are wrappers around
4936 system utilities (ping, nslookup, etc); others are implementations of
4937 simple protocols (finger, whois) in Emacs Lisp. There are also
4938 functions to make simple connections to TCP/IP ports for debugging and
4939 the like.
4940
4941 *** highlight-changes-mode is a minor mode that uses colors to
4942 identify recently changed parts of the buffer text.
4943
4944 *** The new package `midnight' lets you specify things to be done
4945 within Emacs at midnight--by default, kill buffers that you have not
4946 used in a considerable time. To use this feature, customize
4947 the user option `midnight-mode' to t.
4948
4949 *** The file generic-x.el defines a number of simple major modes.
4950
4951 apache-generic-mode: For Apache and NCSA httpd configuration files
4952 samba-generic-mode: Samba configuration files
4953 fvwm-generic-mode: For fvwm initialization files
4954 x-resource-generic-mode: For X resource files
4955 hosts-generic-mode: For hosts files (.rhosts, /etc/hosts, etc)
4956 mailagent-rules-generic-mode: For mailagent .rules files
4957 javascript-generic-mode: For JavaScript files
4958 vrml-generic-mode: For VRML files
4959 java-manifest-generic-mode: For Java MANIFEST files
4960 java-properties-generic-mode: For Java property files
4961 mailrc-generic-mode: For .mailrc files
4962
4963 Platform-specific modes:
4964
4965 prototype-generic-mode: For Solaris/Sys V prototype files
4966 pkginfo-generic-mode: For Solaris/Sys V pkginfo files
4967 alias-generic-mode: For C shell alias files
4968 inf-generic-mode: For MS-Windows INF files
4969 ini-generic-mode: For MS-Windows INI files
4970 reg-generic-mode: For MS-Windows Registry files
4971 bat-generic-mode: For MS-Windows BAT scripts
4972 rc-generic-mode: For MS-Windows Resource files
4973 rul-generic-mode: For InstallShield scripts
4974 \f
4975 * Lisp changes in Emacs 20.3 since the Emacs Lisp Manual was published
4976
4977 ** If you want a Lisp file to be read in unibyte mode,
4978 use -*-unibyte: t;-*- on its first line.
4979 That will force Emacs to read that file in unibyte mode.
4980 Otherwise, the file will be loaded and byte-compiled in multibyte mode.
4981
4982 Thus, each lisp file is read in a consistent way regardless of whether
4983 you started Emacs with --unibyte, so that a Lisp program gives
4984 consistent results regardless of how Emacs was started.
4985
4986 ** The new function assoc-default is useful for searching an alist,
4987 and using a default value if the key is not found there. You can
4988 specify a comparison predicate, so this function is useful for
4989 searching comparing a string against an alist of regular expressions.
4990
4991 ** The functions unibyte-char-to-multibyte and
4992 multibyte-char-to-unibyte convert between unibyte and multibyte
4993 character codes, in a way that is appropriate for the current language
4994 environment.
4995
4996 ** The functions read-event, read-char and read-char-exclusive now
4997 take two optional arguments. PROMPT, if non-nil, specifies a prompt
4998 string. SUPPRESS-INPUT-METHOD, if non-nil, says to disable the
4999 current input method for reading this one event.
5000
5001 ** Two new variables print-escape-nonascii and print-escape-multibyte
5002 now control whether to output certain characters as
5003 backslash-sequences. print-escape-nonascii applies to single-byte
5004 non-ASCII characters; print-escape-multibyte applies to multibyte
5005 characters. Both of these variables are used only when printing
5006 in readable fashion (prin1 uses them, princ does not).
5007 \f
5008 * Lisp changes in Emacs 20.3 before the Emacs Lisp Manual was published
5009
5010 ** Compiled Emacs Lisp files made with the modified "MBSK" version
5011 of Emacs 20.2 do not work in Emacs 20.3.
5012
5013 ** Buffer positions are now measured in characters, as they were
5014 in Emacs 19 and before. This means that (forward-char 1)
5015 always increases point by 1.
5016
5017 The function chars-in-region now just subtracts its arguments. It is
5018 considered obsolete. The function char-boundary-p has been deleted.
5019
5020 See below for additional changes relating to multibyte characters.
5021
5022 ** defcustom, defface and defgroup now accept the keyword `:version'.
5023 Use this to specify in which version of Emacs a certain variable's
5024 default value changed. For example,
5025
5026 (defcustom foo-max 34 "*Maximum number of foo's allowed."
5027 :type 'integer
5028 :group 'foo
5029 :version "20.3")
5030
5031 (defgroup foo-group nil "The foo group."
5032 :version "20.3")
5033
5034 If an entire new group is added or the variables in it have the
5035 default values changed, then just add a `:version' to that group. It
5036 is recommended that new packages added to the distribution contain a
5037 `:version' in the top level group.
5038
5039 This information is used to control the customize-changed-options command.
5040
5041 ** It is now an error to change the value of a symbol whose name
5042 starts with a colon--if it is interned in the standard obarray.
5043
5044 However, setting such a symbol to its proper value, which is that
5045 symbol itself, is not an error. This is for the sake of programs that
5046 support previous Emacs versions by explicitly setting these variables
5047 to themselves.
5048
5049 If you set the variable keyword-symbols-constant-flag to nil,
5050 this error is suppressed, and you can set these symbols to any
5051 values whatever.
5052
5053 ** There is a new debugger command, R.
5054 It evaluates an expression like e, but saves the result
5055 in the buffer *Debugger-record*.
5056
5057 ** Frame-local variables.
5058
5059 You can now make a variable local to various frames. To do this, call
5060 the function make-variable-frame-local; this enables frames to have
5061 local bindings for that variable.
5062
5063 These frame-local bindings are actually frame parameters: you create a
5064 frame-local binding in a specific frame by calling
5065 modify-frame-parameters and specifying the variable name as the
5066 parameter name.
5067
5068 Buffer-local bindings take precedence over frame-local bindings.
5069 Thus, if the current buffer has a buffer-local binding, that binding is
5070 active; otherwise, if the selected frame has a frame-local binding,
5071 that binding is active; otherwise, the default binding is active.
5072
5073 It would not be hard to implement window-local bindings, but it is not
5074 clear that this would be very useful; windows tend to come and go in a
5075 very transitory fashion, so that trying to produce any specific effect
5076 through a window-local binding would not be very robust.
5077
5078 ** `sregexq' and `sregex' are two new functions for constructing
5079 "symbolic regular expressions." These are Lisp expressions that, when
5080 evaluated, yield conventional string-based regexps. The symbolic form
5081 makes it easier to construct, read, and maintain complex patterns.
5082 See the documentation in sregex.el.
5083
5084 ** parse-partial-sexp's return value has an additional element which
5085 is used to pass information along if you pass it to another call to
5086 parse-partial-sexp, starting its scan where the first call ended.
5087 The contents of this field are not yet finalized.
5088
5089 ** eval-region now accepts a fourth optional argument READ-FUNCTION.
5090 If it is non-nil, that function is used instead of `read'.
5091
5092 ** unload-feature by default removes the feature's functions from
5093 known hooks to avoid trouble, but a package providing FEATURE can
5094 define a hook FEATURE-unload-hook to be run by unload-feature instead.
5095
5096 ** read-from-minibuffer no longer returns the argument DEFAULT-VALUE
5097 when the user enters empty input. It now returns the null string, as
5098 it did in Emacs 19. The default value is made available in the
5099 history via M-n, but it is not applied here as a default.
5100
5101 The other, more specialized minibuffer-reading functions continue to
5102 return the default value (not the null string) when the user enters
5103 empty input.
5104
5105 ** The new variable read-buffer-function controls which routine to use
5106 for selecting buffers. For example, if you set this variable to
5107 `iswitchb-read-buffer', iswitchb will be used to read buffer names.
5108 Other functions can also be used if they accept the same arguments as
5109 `read-buffer' and return the selected buffer name as a string.
5110
5111 ** The new function read-passwd reads a password from the terminal,
5112 echoing a period for each character typed. It takes three arguments:
5113 a prompt string, a flag which says "read it twice to make sure", and a
5114 default password to use if the user enters nothing.
5115
5116 ** The variable fill-nobreak-predicate gives major modes a way to
5117 specify not to break a line at certain places. Its value is a
5118 function which is called with no arguments, with point located at the
5119 place where a break is being considered. If the function returns
5120 non-nil, then the line won't be broken there.
5121
5122 ** window-end now takes an optional second argument, UPDATE.
5123 If this is non-nil, then the function always returns an accurate
5124 up-to-date value for the buffer position corresponding to the
5125 end of the window, even if this requires computation.
5126
5127 ** other-buffer now takes an optional argument FRAME
5128 which specifies which frame's buffer list to use.
5129 If it is nil, that means use the selected frame's buffer list.
5130
5131 ** The new variable buffer-display-time, always local in every buffer,
5132 holds the value of (current-time) as of the last time that a window
5133 was directed to display this buffer.
5134
5135 ** It is now meaningful to compare two window-configuration objects
5136 with `equal'. Two window-configuration objects are equal if they
5137 describe equivalent arrangements of windows, in the same frame--in
5138 other words, if they would give the same results if passed to
5139 set-window-configuration.
5140
5141 ** compare-window-configurations is a new function that compares two
5142 window configurations loosely. It ignores differences in saved buffer
5143 positions and scrolling, and considers only the structure and sizes of
5144 windows and the choice of buffers to display.
5145
5146 ** The variable minor-mode-overriding-map-alist allows major modes to
5147 override the key bindings of a minor mode. The elements of this alist
5148 look like the elements of minor-mode-map-alist: (VARIABLE . KEYMAP).
5149
5150 If the VARIABLE in an element of minor-mode-overriding-map-alist has a
5151 non-nil value, the paired KEYMAP is active, and totally overrides the
5152 map (if any) specified for the same variable in minor-mode-map-alist.
5153
5154 minor-mode-overriding-map-alist is automatically local in all buffers,
5155 and it is meant to be set by major modes.
5156
5157 ** The function match-string-no-properties is like match-string
5158 except that it discards all text properties from the result.
5159
5160 ** The function load-average now accepts an optional argument
5161 USE-FLOATS. If it is non-nil, the load average values are returned as
5162 floating point numbers, rather than as integers to be divided by 100.
5163
5164 ** The new variable temporary-file-directory specifies the directory
5165 to use for creating temporary files. The default value is determined
5166 in a reasonable way for your operating system; on GNU and Unix systems
5167 it is based on the TMP and TMPDIR environment variables.
5168
5169 ** Menu changes
5170
5171 *** easymenu.el now uses the new menu item format and supports the
5172 keywords :visible and :filter. The existing keyword :keys is now
5173 better supported.
5174
5175 The variable `easy-menu-precalculate-equivalent-keybindings' controls
5176 a new feature which calculates keyboard equivalents for the menu when
5177 you define the menu. The default is t. If you rarely use menus, you
5178 can set the variable to nil to disable this precalculation feature;
5179 then the calculation is done only if you use the menu bar.
5180
5181 *** A new format for menu items is supported.
5182
5183 In a keymap, a key binding that has the format
5184 (STRING . REAL-BINDING) or (STRING HELP-STRING . REAL-BINDING)
5185 defines a menu item. Now a menu item definition may also be a list that
5186 starts with the symbol `menu-item'.
5187
5188 The format is:
5189 (menu-item ITEM-NAME) or
5190 (menu-item ITEM-NAME REAL-BINDING . ITEM-PROPERTY-LIST)
5191 where ITEM-NAME is an expression which evaluates to the menu item
5192 string, and ITEM-PROPERTY-LIST has the form of a property list.
5193 The supported properties include
5194
5195 :enable FORM Evaluate FORM to determine whether the
5196 item is enabled.
5197 :visible FORM Evaluate FORM to determine whether the
5198 item should appear in the menu.
5199 :filter FILTER-FN
5200 FILTER-FN is a function of one argument,
5201 which will be REAL-BINDING.
5202 It should return a binding to use instead.
5203 :keys DESCRIPTION
5204 DESCRIPTION is a string that describes an equivalent keyboard
5205 binding for for REAL-BINDING. DESCRIPTION is expanded with
5206 `substitute-command-keys' before it is used.
5207 :key-sequence KEY-SEQUENCE
5208 KEY-SEQUENCE is a key-sequence for an equivalent
5209 keyboard binding.
5210 :key-sequence nil
5211 This means that the command normally has no
5212 keyboard equivalent.
5213 :help HELP HELP is the extra help string (not currently used).
5214 :button (TYPE . SELECTED)
5215 TYPE is :toggle or :radio.
5216 SELECTED is a form, to be evaluated, and its
5217 value says whether this button is currently selected.
5218
5219 Buttons are at the moment only simulated by prefixes in the menu.
5220 Eventually ordinary X-buttons may be supported.
5221
5222 (menu-item ITEM-NAME) defines unselectable item.
5223
5224 ** New event types
5225
5226 *** The new event type `mouse-wheel' is generated by a wheel on a
5227 mouse (such as the MS Intellimouse). The event contains a delta that
5228 corresponds to the amount and direction that the wheel is rotated,
5229 which is typically used to implement a scroll or zoom. The format is:
5230
5231 (mouse-wheel POSITION DELTA)
5232
5233 where POSITION is a list describing the position of the event in the
5234 same format as a mouse-click event, and DELTA is a signed number
5235 indicating the number of increments by which the wheel was rotated. A
5236 negative DELTA indicates that the wheel was rotated backwards, towards
5237 the user, and a positive DELTA indicates that the wheel was rotated
5238 forward, away from the user.
5239
5240 As of now, this event type is generated only on MS Windows.
5241
5242 *** The new event type `drag-n-drop' is generated when a group of
5243 files is selected in an application outside of Emacs, and then dragged
5244 and dropped onto an Emacs frame. The event contains a list of
5245 filenames that were dragged and dropped, which are then typically
5246 loaded into Emacs. The format is:
5247
5248 (drag-n-drop POSITION FILES)
5249
5250 where POSITION is a list describing the position of the event in the
5251 same format as a mouse-click event, and FILES is the list of filenames
5252 that were dragged and dropped.
5253
5254 As of now, this event type is generated only on MS Windows.
5255
5256 ** Changes relating to multibyte characters.
5257
5258 *** The variable enable-multibyte-characters is now read-only;
5259 any attempt to set it directly signals an error. The only way
5260 to change this value in an existing buffer is with set-buffer-multibyte.
5261
5262 *** In a string constant, `\ ' now stands for "nothing at all". You
5263 can use it to terminate a hex escape which is followed by a character
5264 that could otherwise be read as part of the hex escape.
5265
5266 *** String indices are now measured in characters, as they were
5267 in Emacs 19 and before.
5268
5269 The function chars-in-string has been deleted.
5270 The function concat-chars has been renamed to `string'.
5271
5272 *** The function set-buffer-multibyte sets the flag in the current
5273 buffer that says whether the buffer uses multibyte representation or
5274 unibyte representation. If the argument is nil, it selects unibyte
5275 representation. Otherwise it selects multibyte representation.
5276
5277 This function does not change the contents of the buffer, viewed
5278 as a sequence of bytes. However, it does change the contents
5279 viewed as characters; a sequence of two bytes which is treated as
5280 one character when the buffer uses multibyte representation
5281 will count as two characters using unibyte representation.
5282
5283 This function sets enable-multibyte-characters to record which
5284 representation is in use. It also adjusts various data in the buffer
5285 (including its markers, overlays and text properties) so that they are
5286 consistent with the new representation.
5287
5288 *** string-make-multibyte takes a string and converts it to multibyte
5289 representation. Most of the time, you don't need to care
5290 about the representation, because Emacs converts when necessary;
5291 however, it makes a difference when you compare strings.
5292
5293 The conversion of non-ASCII characters works by adding the value of
5294 nonascii-insert-offset to each character, or by translating them
5295 using the table nonascii-translation-table.
5296
5297 *** string-make-unibyte takes a string and converts it to unibyte
5298 representation. Most of the time, you don't need to care about the
5299 representation, but it makes a difference when you compare strings.
5300
5301 The conversion from multibyte to unibyte representation
5302 loses information; the only time Emacs performs it automatically
5303 is when inserting a multibyte string into a unibyte buffer.
5304
5305 *** string-as-multibyte takes a string, and returns another string
5306 which contains the same bytes, but treats them as multibyte.
5307
5308 *** string-as-unibyte takes a string, and returns another string
5309 which contains the same bytes, but treats them as unibyte.
5310
5311 *** The new function compare-strings lets you compare
5312 portions of two strings. Unibyte strings are converted to multibyte,
5313 so that a unibyte string can match a multibyte string.
5314 You can specify whether to ignore case or not.
5315
5316 *** assoc-ignore-case now uses compare-strings so that
5317 it can treat unibyte and multibyte strings as equal.
5318
5319 *** Regular expression operations and buffer string searches now
5320 convert the search pattern to multibyte or unibyte to accord with the
5321 buffer or string being searched.
5322
5323 One consequence is that you cannot always use \200-\377 inside of
5324 [...] to match all non-ASCII characters. This does still work when
5325 searching or matching a unibyte buffer or string, but not when
5326 searching or matching a multibyte string. Unfortunately, there is no
5327 obvious choice of syntax to use within [...] for that job. But, what
5328 you want is just to match all non-ASCII characters, the regular
5329 expression [^\0-\177] works for it.
5330
5331 *** Structure of coding system changed.
5332
5333 All coding systems (including aliases and subsidiaries) are named
5334 by symbols; the symbol's `coding-system' property is a vector
5335 which defines the coding system. Aliases share the same vector
5336 as the principal name, so that altering the contents of this
5337 vector affects the principal name and its aliases. You can define
5338 your own alias name of a coding system by the function
5339 define-coding-system-alias.
5340
5341 The coding system definition includes a property list of its own. Use
5342 the new functions `coding-system-get' and `coding-system-put' to
5343 access such coding system properties as post-read-conversion,
5344 pre-write-conversion, character-translation-table-for-decode,
5345 character-translation-table-for-encode, mime-charset, and
5346 safe-charsets. For instance, (coding-system-get 'iso-latin-1
5347 'mime-charset) gives the corresponding MIME-charset parameter
5348 `iso-8859-1'.
5349
5350 Among the coding system properties listed above, safe-charsets is new.
5351 The value of this property is a list of character sets which this
5352 coding system can correctly encode and decode. For instance:
5353 (coding-system-get 'iso-latin-1 'safe-charsets) => (ascii latin-iso8859-1)
5354
5355 Here, "correctly encode" means that the encoded character sets can
5356 also be handled safely by systems other than Emacs as far as they
5357 are capable of that coding system. Though, Emacs itself can encode
5358 the other character sets and read it back correctly.
5359
5360 *** The new function select-safe-coding-system can be used to find a
5361 proper coding system for encoding the specified region or string.
5362 This function requires a user interaction.
5363
5364 *** The new functions find-coding-systems-region and
5365 find-coding-systems-string are helper functions used by
5366 select-safe-coding-system. They return a list of all proper coding
5367 systems to encode a text in some region or string. If you don't want
5368 a user interaction, use one of these functions instead of
5369 select-safe-coding-system.
5370
5371 *** The explicit encoding and decoding functions, such as
5372 decode-coding-region and encode-coding-string, now set
5373 last-coding-system-used to reflect the actual way encoding or decoding
5374 was done.
5375
5376 *** The new function detect-coding-with-language-environment can be
5377 used to detect a coding system of text according to priorities of
5378 coding systems used by some specific language environment.
5379
5380 *** The functions detect-coding-region and detect-coding-string always
5381 return a list if the arg HIGHEST is nil. Thus, if only ASCII
5382 characters are found, they now return a list of single element
5383 `undecided' or its subsidiaries.
5384
5385 *** The new functions coding-system-change-eol-conversion and
5386 coding-system-change-text-conversion can be used to get a different
5387 coding system than what specified only in how end-of-line or text is
5388 converted.
5389
5390 *** The new function set-selection-coding-system can be used to set a
5391 coding system for communicating with other X clients.
5392
5393 *** The function `map-char-table' now passes as argument only valid
5394 character codes, plus generic characters that stand for entire
5395 character sets or entire subrows of a character set. In other words,
5396 each time `map-char-table' calls its FUNCTION argument, the key value
5397 either will be a valid individual character code, or will stand for a
5398 range of characters.
5399
5400 *** The new function `char-valid-p' can be used for checking whether a
5401 Lisp object is a valid character code or not.
5402
5403 *** The new function `charset-after' returns a charset of a character
5404 in the current buffer at position POS.
5405
5406 *** Input methods are now implemented using the variable
5407 input-method-function. If this is non-nil, its value should be a
5408 function; then, whenever Emacs reads an input event that is a printing
5409 character with no modifier bits, it calls that function, passing the
5410 event as an argument. Often this function will read more input, first
5411 binding input-method-function to nil.
5412
5413 The return value should be a list of the events resulting from input
5414 method processing. These events will be processed sequentially as
5415 input, before resorting to unread-command-events. Events returned by
5416 the input method function are not passed to the input method function,
5417 not even if they are printing characters with no modifier bits.
5418
5419 The input method function is not called when reading the second and
5420 subsequent events of a key sequence.
5421
5422 *** You can customize any language environment by using
5423 set-language-environment-hook and exit-language-environment-hook.
5424
5425 The hook `exit-language-environment-hook' should be used to undo
5426 customizations that you made with set-language-environment-hook. For
5427 instance, if you set up a special key binding for a specific language
5428 environment by set-language-environment-hook, you should set up
5429 exit-language-environment-hook to restore the normal key binding.
5430 \f
5431 * Changes in Emacs 20.1
5432
5433 ** Emacs has a new facility for customization of its many user
5434 options. It is called M-x customize. With this facility you can look
5435 at the many user options in an organized way; they are grouped into a
5436 tree structure.
5437
5438 M-x customize also knows what sorts of values are legitimate for each
5439 user option and ensures that you don't use invalid values.
5440
5441 With M-x customize, you can set options either for the present Emacs
5442 session or permanently. (Permanent settings are stored automatically
5443 in your .emacs file.)
5444
5445 ** Scroll bars are now on the left side of the window.
5446 You can change this with M-x customize-option scroll-bar-mode.
5447
5448 ** The mode line no longer includes the string `Emacs'.
5449 This makes more space in the mode line for other information.
5450
5451 ** When you select a region with the mouse, it is highlighted
5452 immediately afterward. At that time, if you type the DELETE key, it
5453 kills the region.
5454
5455 The BACKSPACE key, and the ASCII character DEL, do not do this; they
5456 delete the character before point, as usual.
5457
5458 ** In an incremental search the whole current match is highlighted
5459 on terminals which support this. (You can disable this feature
5460 by setting search-highlight to nil.)
5461
5462 ** In the minibuffer, in some cases, you can now use M-n to
5463 insert the default value into the minibuffer as text. In effect,
5464 the default value (if the minibuffer routines know it) is tacked
5465 onto the history "in the future". (The more normal use of the
5466 history list is to use M-p to insert minibuffer input used in the
5467 past.)
5468
5469 ** In Text mode, now only blank lines separate paragraphs.
5470 This makes it possible to get the full benefit of Adaptive Fill mode
5471 in Text mode, and other modes derived from it (such as Mail mode).
5472 TAB in Text mode now runs the command indent-relative; this
5473 makes a practical difference only when you use indented paragraphs.
5474
5475 As a result, the old Indented Text mode is now identical to Text mode,
5476 and is an alias for it.
5477
5478 If you want spaces at the beginning of a line to start a paragraph,
5479 use the new mode, Paragraph Indent Text mode.
5480
5481 ** Scrolling changes
5482
5483 *** Scroll commands to scroll a whole screen now preserve the screen
5484 position of the cursor, if scroll-preserve-screen-position is non-nil.
5485
5486 In this mode, if you scroll several screens back and forth, finishing
5487 on the same screen where you started, the cursor goes back to the line
5488 where it started.
5489
5490 *** If you set scroll-conservatively to a small number, then when you
5491 move point a short distance off the screen, Emacs will scroll the
5492 screen just far enough to bring point back on screen, provided that
5493 does not exceed `scroll-conservatively' lines.
5494
5495 *** The new variable scroll-margin says how close point can come to the
5496 top or bottom of a window. It is a number of screen lines; if point
5497 comes within that many lines of the top or bottom of the window, Emacs
5498 recenters the window.
5499
5500 ** International character set support (MULE)
5501
5502 Emacs now supports a wide variety of international character sets,
5503 including European variants of the Latin alphabet, as well as Chinese,
5504 Devanagari (Hindi and Marathi), Ethiopian, Greek, IPA, Japanese,
5505 Korean, Lao, Russian, Thai, Tibetan, and Vietnamese scripts. These
5506 features have been merged from the modified version of Emacs known as
5507 MULE (for "MULti-lingual Enhancement to GNU Emacs")
5508
5509 Users of these scripts have established many more-or-less standard
5510 coding systems for storing files. Emacs uses a single multibyte
5511 character encoding within Emacs buffers; it can translate from a wide
5512 variety of coding systems when reading a file and can translate back
5513 into any of these coding systems when saving a file.
5514
5515 Keyboards, even in the countries where these character sets are used,
5516 generally don't have keys for all the characters in them. So Emacs
5517 supports various "input methods", typically one for each script or
5518 language, to make it possible to type them.
5519
5520 The Emacs internal multibyte encoding represents a non-ASCII
5521 character as a sequence of bytes in the range 0200 through 0377.
5522
5523 The new prefix key C-x RET is used for commands that pertain
5524 to multibyte characters, coding systems, and input methods.
5525
5526 You can disable multibyte character support as follows:
5527
5528 (setq-default enable-multibyte-characters nil)
5529
5530 Calling the function standard-display-european turns off multibyte
5531 characters, unless you specify a non-nil value for the second
5532 argument, AUTO. This provides compatibility for people who are
5533 already using standard-display-european to continue using unibyte
5534 characters for their work until they want to change.
5535
5536 *** Input methods
5537
5538 An input method is a kind of character conversion which is designed
5539 specifically for interactive input. In Emacs, typically each language
5540 has its own input method (though sometimes several languages which use
5541 the same characters can share one input method). Some languages
5542 support several input methods.
5543
5544 The simplest kind of input method works by mapping ASCII letters into
5545 another alphabet. This is how the Greek and Russian input methods
5546 work.
5547
5548 A more powerful technique is composition: converting sequences of
5549 characters into one letter. Many European input methods use
5550 composition to produce a single non-ASCII letter from a sequence which
5551 consists of a letter followed by diacritics. For example, a' is one
5552 sequence of two characters that might be converted into a single
5553 letter.
5554
5555 The input methods for syllabic scripts typically use mapping followed
5556 by conversion. The input methods for Thai and Korean work this way.
5557 First, letters are mapped into symbols for particular sounds or tone
5558 marks; then, sequences of these which make up a whole syllable are
5559 mapped into one syllable sign--most often a "composite character".
5560
5561 None of these methods works very well for Chinese and Japanese, so
5562 they are handled specially. First you input a whole word using
5563 phonetic spelling; then, after the word is in the buffer, Emacs
5564 converts it into one or more characters using a large dictionary.
5565
5566 Since there is more than one way to represent a phonetically spelled
5567 word using Chinese characters, Emacs can only guess which one to use;
5568 typically these input methods give you a way to say "guess again" if
5569 the first guess is wrong.
5570
5571 *** The command C-x RET m (toggle-enable-multibyte-characters)
5572 turns multibyte character support on or off for the current buffer.
5573
5574 If multibyte character support is turned off in a buffer, then each
5575 byte is a single character, even codes 0200 through 0377--exactly as
5576 they did in Emacs 19.34. This includes the features for support for
5577 the European characters, ISO Latin-1 and ISO Latin-2.
5578
5579 However, there is no need to turn off multibyte character support to
5580 use ISO Latin-1 or ISO Latin-2; the Emacs multibyte character set
5581 includes all the characters in these character sets, and Emacs can
5582 translate automatically to and from either one.
5583
5584 *** Visiting a file in unibyte mode.
5585
5586 Turning off multibyte character support in the buffer after visiting a
5587 file with multibyte code conversion will display the multibyte
5588 sequences already in the buffer, byte by byte. This is probably not
5589 what you want.
5590
5591 If you want to edit a file of unibyte characters (Latin-1, for
5592 example), you can do it by specifying `no-conversion' as the coding
5593 system when reading the file. This coding system also turns off
5594 multibyte characters in that buffer.
5595
5596 If you turn off multibyte character support entirely, this turns off
5597 character conversion as well.
5598
5599 *** Displaying international characters on X Windows.
5600
5601 A font for X typically displays just one alphabet or script.
5602 Therefore, displaying the entire range of characters Emacs supports
5603 requires using many fonts.
5604
5605 Therefore, Emacs now supports "fontsets". Each fontset is a
5606 collection of fonts, each assigned to a range of character codes.
5607
5608 A fontset has a name, like a font. Individual fonts are defined by
5609 the X server; fontsets are defined within Emacs itself. But once you
5610 have defined a fontset, you can use it in a face or a frame just as
5611 you would use a font.
5612
5613 If a fontset specifies no font for a certain character, or if it
5614 specifies a font that does not exist on your system, then it cannot
5615 display that character. It will display an empty box instead.
5616
5617 The fontset height and width are determined by the ASCII characters
5618 (that is, by the font in the fontset which is used for ASCII
5619 characters). If another font in the fontset has a different height,
5620 or the wrong width, then characters assigned to that font are clipped,
5621 and displayed within a box if highlight-wrong-size-font is non-nil.
5622
5623 *** Defining fontsets.
5624
5625 Emacs does not use any fontset by default. Its default font is still
5626 chosen as in previous versions. You can tell Emacs to use a fontset
5627 with the `-fn' option or the `Font' X resource.
5628
5629 Emacs creates a standard fontset automatically according to the value
5630 of standard-fontset-spec. This fontset's short name is
5631 `fontset-standard'. Bold, italic, and bold-italic variants of the
5632 standard fontset are created automatically.
5633
5634 If you specify a default ASCII font with the `Font' resource or `-fn'
5635 argument, a fontset is generated from it. This works by replacing the
5636 FOUNDARY, FAMILY, ADD_STYLE, and AVERAGE_WIDTH fields of the font name
5637 with `*' then using this to specify a fontset. This fontset's short
5638 name is `fontset-startup'.
5639
5640 Emacs checks resources of the form Fontset-N where N is 0, 1, 2...
5641 The resource value should have this form:
5642 FONTSET-NAME, [CHARSET-NAME:FONT-NAME]...
5643 FONTSET-NAME should have the form of a standard X font name, except:
5644 * most fields should be just the wild card "*".
5645 * the CHARSET_REGISTRY field should be "fontset"
5646 * the CHARSET_ENCODING field can be any nickname of the fontset.
5647 The construct CHARSET-NAME:FONT-NAME can be repeated any number
5648 of times; each time specifies the font for one character set.
5649 CHARSET-NAME should be the name name of a character set, and
5650 FONT-NAME should specify an actual font to use for that character set.
5651
5652 Each of these fontsets has an alias which is made from the
5653 last two font name fields, CHARSET_REGISTRY and CHARSET_ENCODING.
5654 You can refer to the fontset by that alias or by its full name.
5655
5656 For any character sets that you don't mention, Emacs tries to choose a
5657 font by substituting into FONTSET-NAME. For instance, with the
5658 following resource,
5659 Emacs*Fontset-0: -*-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-24-*-*-*-*-*-fontset-24
5660 the font for ASCII is generated as below:
5661 -*-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-24-*-ISO8859-1
5662 Here is the substitution rule:
5663 Change CHARSET_REGISTRY and CHARSET_ENCODING to that of the charset
5664 defined in the variable x-charset-registries. For instance, ASCII has
5665 the entry (ascii . "ISO8859-1") in this variable. Then, reduce
5666 sequences of wild cards -*-...-*- with a single wildcard -*-.
5667 (This is to prevent use of auto-scaled fonts.)
5668
5669 The function which processes the fontset resource value to create the
5670 fontset is called create-fontset-from-fontset-spec. You can also call
5671 that function explicitly to create a fontset.
5672
5673 With the X resource Emacs.Font, you can specify a fontset name just
5674 like an actual font name. But be careful not to specify a fontset
5675 name in a wildcard resource like Emacs*Font--that tries to specify the
5676 fontset for other purposes including menus, and they cannot handle
5677 fontsets.
5678
5679 *** The command M-x set-language-environment sets certain global Emacs
5680 defaults for a particular choice of language.
5681
5682 Selecting a language environment typically specifies a default input
5683 method and which coding systems to recognize automatically when
5684 visiting files. However, it does not try to reread files you have
5685 already visited; the text in those buffers is not affected. The
5686 language environment may also specify a default choice of coding
5687 system for new files that you create.
5688
5689 It makes no difference which buffer is current when you use
5690 set-language-environment, because these defaults apply globally to the
5691 whole Emacs session.
5692
5693 For example, M-x set-language-environment RET Latin-1 RET
5694 chooses the Latin-1 character set. In the .emacs file, you can do this
5695 with (set-language-environment "Latin-1").
5696
5697 *** The command C-x RET f (set-buffer-file-coding-system)
5698 specifies the file coding system for the current buffer. This
5699 specifies what sort of character code translation to do when saving
5700 the file. As an argument, you must specify the name of one of the
5701 coding systems that Emacs supports.
5702
5703 *** The command C-x RET c (universal-coding-system-argument)
5704 lets you specify a coding system when you read or write a file.
5705 This command uses the minibuffer to read a coding system name.
5706 After you exit the minibuffer, the specified coding system
5707 is used for *the immediately following command*.
5708
5709 So if the immediately following command is a command to read or
5710 write a file, it uses the specified coding system for that file.
5711
5712 If the immediately following command does not use the coding system,
5713 then C-x RET c ultimately has no effect.
5714
5715 For example, C-x RET c iso-8859-1 RET C-x C-f temp RET
5716 visits the file `temp' treating it as ISO Latin-1.
5717
5718 *** You can specify the coding system for a file using the -*-
5719 construct. Include `coding: CODINGSYSTEM;' inside the -*-...-*-
5720 to specify use of coding system CODINGSYSTEM. You can also
5721 specify the coding system in a local variable list at the end
5722 of the file.
5723
5724 *** The command C-x RET t (set-terminal-coding-system) specifies
5725 the coding system for terminal output. If you specify a character
5726 code for terminal output, all characters output to the terminal are
5727 translated into that character code.
5728
5729 This feature is useful for certain character-only terminals built in
5730 various countries to support the languages of those countries.
5731
5732 By default, output to the terminal is not translated at all.
5733
5734 *** The command C-x RET k (set-keyboard-coding-system) specifies
5735 the coding system for keyboard input.
5736
5737 Character code translation of keyboard input is useful for terminals
5738 with keys that send non-ASCII graphic characters--for example,
5739 some terminals designed for ISO Latin-1 or subsets of it.
5740
5741 By default, keyboard input is not translated at all.
5742
5743 Character code translation of keyboard input is similar to using an
5744 input method, in that both define sequences of keyboard input that
5745 translate into single characters. However, input methods are designed
5746 to be convenient for interactive use, while the code translations are
5747 designed to work with terminals.
5748
5749 *** The command C-x RET p (set-buffer-process-coding-system)
5750 specifies the coding system for input and output to a subprocess.
5751 This command applies to the current buffer; normally, each subprocess
5752 has its own buffer, and thus you can use this command to specify
5753 translation to and from a particular subprocess by giving the command
5754 in the corresponding buffer.
5755
5756 By default, process input and output are not translated at all.
5757
5758 *** The variable file-name-coding-system specifies the coding system
5759 to use for encoding file names before operating on them.
5760 It is also used for decoding file names obtained from the system.
5761
5762 *** The command C-\ (toggle-input-method) activates or deactivates
5763 an input method. If no input method has been selected before, the
5764 command prompts for you to specify the language and input method you
5765 want to use.
5766
5767 C-u C-\ (select-input-method) lets you switch to a different input
5768 method. C-h C-\ (or C-h I) describes the current input method.
5769
5770 *** Some input methods remap the keyboard to emulate various keyboard
5771 layouts commonly used for particular scripts. How to do this
5772 remapping properly depends on your actual keyboard layout. To specify
5773 which layout your keyboard has, use M-x quail-set-keyboard-layout.
5774
5775 *** The command C-h C (describe-coding-system) displays
5776 the coding systems currently selected for various purposes, plus
5777 related information.
5778
5779 *** The command C-h h (view-hello-file) displays a file called
5780 HELLO, which has examples of text in many languages, using various
5781 scripts.
5782
5783 *** The command C-h L (describe-language-support) displays
5784 information about the support for a particular language.
5785 You specify the language as an argument.
5786
5787 *** The mode line now contains a letter or character that identifies
5788 the coding system used in the visited file. It normally follows the
5789 first dash.
5790
5791 A dash indicates the default state of affairs: no code conversion
5792 (except CRLF => newline if appropriate). `=' means no conversion
5793 whatsoever. The ISO 8859 coding systems are represented by digits
5794 1 through 9. Other coding systems are represented by letters:
5795
5796 A alternativnyj (Russian)
5797 B big5 (Chinese)
5798 C cn-gb-2312 (Chinese)
5799 C iso-2022-cn (Chinese)
5800 D in-is13194-devanagari (Indian languages)
5801 E euc-japan (Japanese)
5802 I iso-2022-cjk or iso-2022-ss2 (Chinese, Japanese, Korean)
5803 J junet (iso-2022-7) or old-jis (iso-2022-jp-1978-irv) (Japanese)
5804 K euc-korea (Korean)
5805 R koi8 (Russian)
5806 Q tibetan
5807 S shift_jis (Japanese)
5808 T lao
5809 T tis620 (Thai)
5810 V viscii or vscii (Vietnamese)
5811 i iso-2022-lock (Chinese, Japanese, Korean)
5812 k iso-2022-kr (Korean)
5813 v viqr (Vietnamese)
5814 z hz (Chinese)
5815
5816 When you are using a character-only terminal (not a window system),
5817 two additional characters appear in between the dash and the file
5818 coding system. These two characters describe the coding system for
5819 keyboard input, and the coding system for terminal output.
5820
5821 *** The new variable rmail-file-coding-system specifies the code
5822 conversion to use for RMAIL files. The default value is nil.
5823
5824 When you read mail with Rmail, each message is decoded automatically
5825 into Emacs' internal format. This has nothing to do with
5826 rmail-file-coding-system. That variable controls reading and writing
5827 Rmail files themselves.
5828
5829 *** The new variable sendmail-coding-system specifies the code
5830 conversion for outgoing mail. The default value is nil.
5831
5832 Actually, there are three different ways of specifying the coding system
5833 for sending mail:
5834
5835 - If you use C-x RET f in the mail buffer, that takes priority.
5836 - Otherwise, if you set sendmail-coding-system non-nil, that specifies it.
5837 - Otherwise, the default coding system for new files is used,
5838 if that is non-nil. That comes from your language environment.
5839 - Otherwise, Latin-1 is used.
5840
5841 *** The command C-h t (help-with-tutorial) accepts a prefix argument
5842 to specify the language for the tutorial file. Currently, English,
5843 Japanese, Korean and Thai are supported. We welcome additional
5844 translations.
5845
5846 ** An easy new way to visit a file with no code or format conversion
5847 of any kind: Use M-x find-file-literally. There is also a command
5848 insert-file-literally which inserts a file into the current buffer
5849 without any conversion.
5850
5851 ** C-q's handling of octal character codes is changed.
5852 You can now specify any number of octal digits.
5853 RET terminates the digits and is discarded;
5854 any other non-digit terminates the digits and is then used as input.
5855
5856 ** There are new commands for looking up Info documentation for
5857 functions, variables and file names used in your programs.
5858
5859 Type M-x info-lookup-symbol to look up a symbol in the buffer at point.
5860 Type M-x info-lookup-file to look up a file in the buffer at point.
5861
5862 Precisely which Info files are used to look it up depends on the major
5863 mode. For example, in C mode, the GNU libc manual is used.
5864
5865 ** M-TAB in most programming language modes now runs the command
5866 complete-symbol. This command performs completion on the symbol name
5867 in the buffer before point.
5868
5869 With a numeric argument, it performs completion based on the set of
5870 symbols documented in the Info files for the programming language that
5871 you are using.
5872
5873 With no argument, it does completion based on the current tags tables,
5874 just like the old binding of M-TAB (complete-tag).
5875
5876 ** File locking works with NFS now.
5877
5878 The lock file for FILENAME is now a symbolic link named .#FILENAME,
5879 in the same directory as FILENAME.
5880
5881 This means that collision detection between two different machines now
5882 works reasonably well; it also means that no file server or directory
5883 can become a bottleneck.
5884
5885 The new method does have drawbacks. It means that collision detection
5886 does not operate when you edit a file in a directory where you cannot
5887 create new files. Collision detection also doesn't operate when the
5888 file server does not support symbolic links. But these conditions are
5889 rare, and the ability to have collision detection while using NFS is
5890 so useful that the change is worth while.
5891
5892 When Emacs or a system crashes, this may leave behind lock files which
5893 are stale. So you may occasionally get warnings about spurious
5894 collisions. When you determine that the collision is spurious, just
5895 tell Emacs to go ahead anyway.
5896
5897 ** If you wish to use Show Paren mode to display matching parentheses,
5898 it is no longer sufficient to load paren.el. Instead you must call
5899 show-paren-mode.
5900
5901 ** If you wish to use Delete Selection mode to replace a highlighted
5902 selection when you insert new text, it is no longer sufficient to load
5903 delsel.el. Instead you must call the function delete-selection-mode.
5904
5905 ** If you wish to use Partial Completion mode to complete partial words
5906 within symbols or filenames, it is no longer sufficient to load
5907 complete.el. Instead you must call the function partial-completion-mode.
5908
5909 ** If you wish to use uniquify to rename buffers for you,
5910 it is no longer sufficient to load uniquify.el. You must also
5911 set uniquify-buffer-name-style to one of the non-nil legitimate values.
5912
5913 ** Changes in View mode.
5914
5915 *** Several new commands are available in View mode.
5916 Do H in view mode for a list of commands.
5917
5918 *** There are two new commands for entering View mode:
5919 view-file-other-frame and view-buffer-other-frame.
5920
5921 *** Exiting View mode does a better job of restoring windows to their
5922 previous state.
5923
5924 *** New customization variable view-scroll-auto-exit. If non-nil,
5925 scrolling past end of buffer makes view mode exit.
5926
5927 *** New customization variable view-exits-all-viewing-windows. If
5928 non-nil, view-mode will at exit restore all windows viewing buffer,
5929 not just the selected window.
5930
5931 *** New customization variable view-read-only. If non-nil, visiting a
5932 read-only file automatically enters View mode, and toggle-read-only
5933 turns View mode on or off.
5934
5935 *** New customization variable view-remove-frame-by-deleting controls
5936 how to remove a not needed frame at view mode exit. If non-nil,
5937 delete the frame, if nil make an icon of it.
5938
5939 ** C-x v l, the command to print a file's version control log,
5940 now positions point at the entry for the file's current branch version.
5941
5942 ** C-x v =, the command to compare a file with the last checked-in version,
5943 has a new feature. If the file is currently not locked, so that it is
5944 presumably identical to the last checked-in version, the command now asks
5945 which version to compare with.
5946
5947 ** When using hideshow.el, incremental search can temporarily show hidden
5948 blocks if a match is inside the block.
5949
5950 The block is hidden again if the search is continued and the next match
5951 is outside the block. By customizing the variable
5952 isearch-hide-immediately you can choose to hide all the temporarily
5953 shown blocks only when exiting from incremental search.
5954
5955 By customizing the variable hs-isearch-open you can choose what kind
5956 of blocks to temporarily show during isearch: comment blocks, code
5957 blocks, all of them or none.
5958
5959 ** The new command C-x 4 0 (kill-buffer-and-window) kills the
5960 current buffer and deletes the selected window. It asks for
5961 confirmation first.
5962
5963 ** C-x C-w, which saves the buffer into a specified file name,
5964 now changes the major mode according to that file name.
5965 However, the mode will not be changed if
5966 (1) a local variables list or the `-*-' line specifies a major mode, or
5967 (2) the current major mode is a "special" mode,
5968 not suitable for ordinary files, or
5969 (3) the new file name does not particularly specify any mode.
5970
5971 This applies to M-x set-visited-file-name as well.
5972
5973 However, if you set change-major-mode-with-file-name to nil, then
5974 these commands do not change the major mode.
5975
5976 ** M-x occur changes.
5977
5978 *** If the argument to M-x occur contains upper case letters,
5979 it performs a case-sensitive search.
5980
5981 *** In the *Occur* buffer made by M-x occur,
5982 if you type g or M-x revert-buffer, this repeats the search
5983 using the same regular expression and the same buffer as before.
5984
5985 ** In Transient Mark mode, the region in any one buffer is highlighted
5986 in just one window at a time. At first, it is highlighted in the
5987 window where you set the mark. The buffer's highlighting remains in
5988 that window unless you select to another window which shows the same
5989 buffer--then the highlighting moves to that window.
5990
5991 ** The feature to suggest key bindings when you use M-x now operates
5992 after the command finishes. The message suggesting key bindings
5993 appears temporarily in the echo area. The previous echo area contents
5994 come back after a few seconds, in case they contain useful information.
5995
5996 ** Each frame now independently records the order for recently
5997 selected buffers, so that the default for C-x b is now based on the
5998 buffers recently selected in the selected frame.
5999
6000 ** Outline mode changes.
6001
6002 *** Outline mode now uses overlays (this is the former noutline.el).
6003
6004 *** Incremental searches skip over invisible text in Outline mode.
6005
6006 ** When a minibuffer window is active but not the selected window, if
6007 you try to use the minibuffer, you used to get a nested minibuffer.
6008 Now, this not only gives an error, it also cancels the minibuffer that
6009 was already active.
6010
6011 The motive for this change is so that beginning users do not
6012 unknowingly move away from minibuffers, leaving them active, and then
6013 get confused by it.
6014
6015 If you want to be able to have recursive minibuffers, you must
6016 set enable-recursive-minibuffers to non-nil.
6017
6018 ** Changes in dynamic abbrevs.
6019
6020 *** Expanding dynamic abbrevs with M-/ is now smarter about case
6021 conversion. If the expansion has mixed case not counting the first
6022 character, and the abbreviation matches the beginning of the expansion
6023 including case, then the expansion is copied verbatim.
6024
6025 The expansion is also copied verbatim if the abbreviation itself has
6026 mixed case. And using SPC M-/ to copy an additional word always
6027 copies it verbatim except when the previous copied word is all caps.
6028
6029 *** The values of `dabbrev-case-replace' and `dabbrev-case-fold-search'
6030 are no longer Lisp expressions. They have simply three possible
6031 values.
6032
6033 `dabbrev-case-replace' has these three values: nil (don't preserve
6034 case), t (do), or `case-replace' (do like M-x query-replace).
6035 `dabbrev-case-fold-search' has these three values: nil (don't ignore
6036 case), t (do), or `case-fold-search' (do like search).
6037
6038 ** Minibuffer history lists are truncated automatically now to a
6039 certain length. The variable history-length specifies how long they
6040 can be. The default value is 30.
6041
6042 ** Changes in Mail mode.
6043
6044 *** The key C-x m no longer runs the `mail' command directly.
6045 Instead, it runs the command `compose-mail', which invokes the mail
6046 composition mechanism you have selected with the variable
6047 `mail-user-agent'. The default choice of user agent is
6048 `sendmail-user-agent', which gives behavior compatible with the old
6049 behavior.
6050
6051 C-x 4 m now runs compose-mail-other-window, and C-x 5 m runs
6052 compose-mail-other-frame.
6053
6054 *** While composing a reply to a mail message, from Rmail, you can use
6055 the command C-c C-r to cite just the region from the message you are
6056 replying to. This copies the text which is the selected region in the
6057 buffer that shows the original message.
6058
6059 *** The command C-c C-i inserts a file at the end of the message,
6060 with separator lines around the contents.
6061
6062 *** The command M-x expand-mail-aliases expands all mail aliases
6063 in suitable mail headers. Emacs automatically extracts mail alias
6064 definitions from your mail alias file (e.g., ~/.mailrc). You do not
6065 need to expand mail aliases yourself before sending mail.
6066
6067 *** New features in the mail-complete command.
6068
6069 **** The mail-complete command now inserts the user's full name,
6070 for local users or if that is known. The variable mail-complete-style
6071 controls the style to use, and whether to do this at all.
6072 Its values are like those of mail-from-style.
6073
6074 **** The variable mail-passwd-command lets you specify a shell command
6075 to run to fetch a set of password-entries that add to the ones in
6076 /etc/passwd.
6077
6078 **** The variable mail-passwd-file now specifies a list of files to read
6079 to get the list of user ids. By default, one file is used:
6080 /etc/passwd.
6081
6082 ** You can "quote" a file name to inhibit special significance of
6083 special syntax, by adding `/:' to the beginning. Thus, if you have a
6084 directory named `/foo:', you can prevent it from being treated as a
6085 reference to a remote host named `foo' by writing it as `/:/foo:'.
6086
6087 Emacs uses this new construct automatically when necessary, such as
6088 when you start it with a working directory whose name might otherwise
6089 be taken to be magic.
6090
6091 ** There is a new command M-x grep-find which uses find to select
6092 files to search through, and grep to scan them. The output is
6093 available in a Compile mode buffer, as with M-x grep.
6094
6095 M-x grep now uses the -e option if the grep program supports that.
6096 (-e prevents problems if the search pattern starts with a dash.)
6097
6098 ** In Dired, the & command now flags for deletion the files whose names
6099 suggest they are probably not needed in the long run.
6100
6101 In Dired, * is now a prefix key for mark-related commands.
6102
6103 new key dired.el binding old key
6104 ------- ---------------- -------
6105 * c dired-change-marks c
6106 * m dired-mark m
6107 * * dired-mark-executables * (binding deleted)
6108 * / dired-mark-directories / (binding deleted)
6109 * @ dired-mark-symlinks @ (binding deleted)
6110 * u dired-unmark u
6111 * DEL dired-unmark-backward DEL
6112 * ? dired-unmark-all-files M-C-?
6113 * ! dired-unmark-all-marks
6114 * % dired-mark-files-regexp % m
6115 * C-n dired-next-marked-file M-}
6116 * C-p dired-prev-marked-file M-{
6117
6118 ** Rmail changes.
6119
6120 *** When Rmail cannot convert your incoming mail into Babyl format, it
6121 saves the new mail in the file RMAILOSE.n, where n is an integer
6122 chosen to make a unique name. This way, Rmail will not keep crashing
6123 each time you run it.
6124
6125 *** In Rmail, the variable rmail-summary-line-count-flag now controls
6126 whether to include the line count in the summary. Non-nil means yes.
6127
6128 *** In Rmail summary buffers, d and C-d (the commands to delete
6129 messages) now take repeat counts as arguments. A negative argument
6130 means to move in the opposite direction.
6131
6132 *** In Rmail, the t command now takes an optional argument which lets
6133 you specify whether to show the message headers in full or pruned.
6134
6135 *** In Rmail, the new command w (rmail-output-body-to-file) writes
6136 just the body of the current message into a file, without the headers.
6137 It takes the file name from the message subject, by default, but you
6138 can edit that file name in the minibuffer before it is actually used
6139 for output.
6140
6141 ** Gnus changes.
6142
6143 *** nntp.el has been totally rewritten in an asynchronous fashion.
6144
6145 *** Article prefetching functionality has been moved up into
6146 Gnus.
6147
6148 *** Scoring can now be performed with logical operators like
6149 `and', `or', `not', and parent redirection.
6150
6151 *** Article washing status can be displayed in the
6152 article mode line.
6153
6154 *** gnus.el has been split into many smaller files.
6155
6156 *** Suppression of duplicate articles based on Message-ID.
6157
6158 (setq gnus-suppress-duplicates t)
6159
6160 *** New variables for specifying what score and adapt files
6161 are to be considered home score and adapt files. See
6162 `gnus-home-score-file' and `gnus-home-adapt-files'.
6163
6164 *** Groups can inherit group parameters from parent topics.
6165
6166 *** Article editing has been revamped and is now usable.
6167
6168 *** Signatures can be recognized in more intelligent fashions.
6169 See `gnus-signature-separator' and `gnus-signature-limit'.
6170
6171 *** Summary pick mode has been made to look more nn-like.
6172 Line numbers are displayed and the `.' command can be
6173 used to pick articles.
6174
6175 *** Commands for moving the .newsrc.eld from one server to
6176 another have been added.
6177
6178 `M-x gnus-change-server'
6179
6180 *** A way to specify that "uninteresting" fields be suppressed when
6181 generating lines in buffers.
6182
6183 *** Several commands in the group buffer can be undone with
6184 `M-C-_'.
6185
6186 *** Scoring can be done on words using the new score type `w'.
6187
6188 *** Adaptive scoring can be done on a Subject word-by-word basis:
6189
6190 (setq gnus-use-adaptive-scoring '(word))
6191
6192 *** Scores can be decayed.
6193
6194 (setq gnus-decay-scores t)
6195
6196 *** Scoring can be performed using a regexp on the Date header. The
6197 Date is normalized to compact ISO 8601 format first.
6198
6199 *** A new command has been added to remove all data on articles from
6200 the native server.
6201
6202 `M-x gnus-group-clear-data-on-native-groups'
6203
6204 *** A new command for reading collections of documents
6205 (nndoc with nnvirtual on top) has been added -- `M-C-d'.
6206
6207 *** Process mark sets can be pushed and popped.
6208
6209 *** A new mail-to-news backend makes it possible to post
6210 even when the NNTP server doesn't allow posting.
6211
6212 *** A new backend for reading searches from Web search engines
6213 (DejaNews, Alta Vista, InReference) has been added.
6214
6215 Use the `G w' command in the group buffer to create such
6216 a group.
6217
6218 *** Groups inside topics can now be sorted using the standard
6219 sorting functions, and each topic can be sorted independently.
6220
6221 See the commands under the `T S' submap.
6222
6223 *** Subsets of the groups can be sorted independently.
6224
6225 See the commands under the `G P' submap.
6226
6227 *** Cached articles can be pulled into the groups.
6228
6229 Use the `Y c' command.
6230
6231 *** Score files are now applied in a more reliable order.
6232
6233 *** Reports on where mail messages end up can be generated.
6234
6235 `M-x nnmail-split-history'
6236
6237 *** More hooks and functions have been added to remove junk
6238 from incoming mail before saving the mail.
6239
6240 See `nnmail-prepare-incoming-header-hook'.
6241
6242 *** The nnml mail backend now understands compressed article files.
6243
6244 *** To enable Gnus to read/post multi-lingual articles, you must execute
6245 the following code, for instance, in your .emacs.
6246
6247 (add-hook 'gnus-startup-hook 'gnus-mule-initialize)
6248
6249 Then, when you start Gnus, it will decode non-ASCII text automatically
6250 and show appropriate characters. (Note: if you are using gnus-mime
6251 from the SEMI package, formerly known as TM, you should NOT add this
6252 hook to gnus-startup-hook; gnus-mime has its own method of handling
6253 this issue.)
6254
6255 Since it is impossible to distinguish all coding systems
6256 automatically, you may need to specify a choice of coding system for a
6257 particular news group. This can be done by:
6258
6259 (gnus-mule-add-group NEWSGROUP 'CODING-SYSTEM)
6260
6261 Here NEWSGROUP should be a string which names a newsgroup or a tree
6262 of newsgroups. If NEWSGROUP is "XXX.YYY", all news groups under
6263 "XXX.YYY" (including "XXX.YYY.ZZZ") will use the specified coding
6264 system. CODING-SYSTEM specifies which coding system to use (for both
6265 for reading and posting).
6266
6267 CODING-SYSTEM can also be a cons cell of the form
6268 (READ-CODING-SYSTEM . POST-CODING-SYSTEM)
6269 Then READ-CODING-SYSTEM is used when you read messages from the
6270 newsgroups, while POST-CODING-SYSTEM is used when you post messages
6271 there.
6272
6273 Emacs knows the right coding systems for certain newsgroups by
6274 default. Here are some of these default settings:
6275
6276 (gnus-mule-add-group "fj" 'iso-2022-7)
6277 (gnus-mule-add-group "alt.chinese.text" 'hz-gb-2312)
6278 (gnus-mule-add-group "alt.hk" 'hz-gb-2312)
6279 (gnus-mule-add-group "alt.chinese.text.big5" 'cn-big5)
6280 (gnus-mule-add-group "soc.culture.vietnamese" '(nil . viqr))
6281
6282 When you reply by mail to an article, these settings are ignored;
6283 the mail is encoded according to sendmail-coding-system, as usual.
6284
6285 ** CC mode changes.
6286
6287 *** If you edit primarily one style of C (or C++, Objective-C, Java)
6288 code, you may want to make the CC Mode style variables have global
6289 values so that you can set them directly in your .emacs file. To do
6290 this, set c-style-variables-are-local-p to nil in your .emacs file.
6291 Note that this only takes effect if you do it *before* cc-mode.el is
6292 loaded.
6293
6294 If you typically edit more than one style of C (or C++, Objective-C,
6295 Java) code in a single Emacs session, you may want to make the CC Mode
6296 style variables have buffer local values. By default, all buffers
6297 share the same style variable settings; to make them buffer local, set
6298 c-style-variables-are-local-p to t in your .emacs file. Note that you
6299 must do this *before* CC Mode is loaded.
6300
6301 *** The new variable c-indentation-style holds the C style name
6302 of the current buffer.
6303
6304 *** The variable c-block-comments-indent-p has been deleted, because
6305 it is no longer necessary. C mode now handles all the supported styles
6306 of block comments, with no need to say which one you will use.
6307
6308 *** There is a new indentation style "python", which specifies the C
6309 style that the Python developers like.
6310
6311 *** There is a new c-cleanup-list option: brace-elseif-brace.
6312 This says to put ...} else if (...) {... on one line,
6313 just as brace-else-brace says to put ...} else {... on one line.
6314
6315 ** VC Changes [new]
6316
6317 ** In vc-retrieve-snapshot (C-x v r), if you don't specify a snapshot
6318 name, it retrieves the *latest* versions of all files in the current
6319 directory and its subdirectories (aside from files already locked).
6320
6321 This feature is useful if your RCS directory is a link to a common
6322 master directory, and you want to pick up changes made by other
6323 developers.
6324
6325 You can do the same thing for an individual file by typing C-u C-x C-q
6326 RET in a buffer visiting that file.
6327
6328 *** VC can now handle files under CVS that are being "watched" by
6329 other developers. Such files are made read-only by CVS. To get a
6330 writable copy, type C-x C-q in a buffer visiting such a file. VC then
6331 calls "cvs edit", which notifies the other developers of it.
6332
6333 *** vc-version-diff (C-u C-x v =) now suggests reasonable defaults for
6334 version numbers, based on the current state of the file.
6335
6336 ** Calendar changes.
6337
6338 A new function, list-holidays, allows you list holidays or subclasses
6339 of holidays for ranges of years. Related menu items allow you do this
6340 for the year of the selected date, or the following/previous years.
6341
6342 ** ps-print changes
6343
6344 There are some new user variables for customizing the page layout.
6345
6346 *** Paper size, paper orientation, columns
6347
6348 The variable `ps-paper-type' determines the size of paper ps-print
6349 formats for; it should contain one of the symbols:
6350 `a4' `a3' `letter' `legal' `letter-small' `tabloid'
6351 `ledger' `statement' `executive' `a4small' `b4' `b5'
6352 It defaults to `letter'.
6353 If you need other sizes, see the variable `ps-page-dimensions-database'.
6354
6355 The variable `ps-landscape-mode' determines the orientation
6356 of the printing on the page. nil, the default, means "portrait" mode,
6357 non-nil means "landscape" mode.
6358
6359 The variable `ps-number-of-columns' must be a positive integer.
6360 It determines the number of columns both in landscape and portrait mode.
6361 It defaults to 1.
6362
6363 *** Horizontal layout
6364
6365 The horizontal layout is determined by the variables
6366 `ps-left-margin', `ps-inter-column', and `ps-right-margin'.
6367 All are measured in points.
6368
6369 *** Vertical layout
6370
6371 The vertical layout is determined by the variables
6372 `ps-bottom-margin', `ps-top-margin', and `ps-header-offset'.
6373 All are measured in points.
6374
6375 *** Headers
6376
6377 If the variable `ps-print-header' is nil, no header is printed. Then
6378 `ps-header-offset' is not relevant and `ps-top-margin' represents the
6379 margin above the text.
6380
6381 If the variable `ps-print-header-frame' is non-nil, a gaudy
6382 framing box is printed around the header.
6383
6384 The contents of the header are determined by `ps-header-lines',
6385 `ps-show-n-of-n', `ps-left-header' and `ps-right-header'.
6386
6387 The height of the header is determined by `ps-header-line-pad',
6388 `ps-header-font-family', `ps-header-title-font-size' and
6389 `ps-header-font-size'.
6390
6391 *** Font managing
6392
6393 The variable `ps-font-family' determines which font family is to be
6394 used for ordinary text. Its value must be a key symbol in the alist
6395 `ps-font-info-database'. You can add other font families by adding
6396 elements to this alist.
6397
6398 The variable `ps-font-size' determines the size of the font
6399 for ordinary text. It defaults to 8.5 points.
6400
6401 ** hideshow changes.
6402
6403 *** now supports hiding of blocks of single line comments (like // for
6404 C++, ; for lisp).
6405
6406 *** Support for java-mode added.
6407
6408 *** When doing `hs-hide-all' it is now possible to also hide the comments
6409 in the file if `hs-hide-comments-when-hiding-all' is set.
6410
6411 *** The new function `hs-hide-initial-comment' hides the the comments at
6412 the beginning of the files. Finally those huge RCS logs don't stay in your
6413 way! This is run by default when entering the `hs-minor-mode'.
6414
6415 *** Now uses overlays instead of `selective-display', so is more
6416 robust and a lot faster.
6417
6418 *** A block beginning can span multiple lines.
6419
6420 *** The new variable `hs-show-hidden-short-form' if t, directs hideshow
6421 to show only the beginning of a block when it is hidden. See the
6422 documentation for more details.
6423
6424 ** Changes in Enriched mode.
6425
6426 *** When you visit a file in enriched-mode, Emacs will make sure it is
6427 filled to the current fill-column. This behavior is now independent
6428 of the size of the window. When you save the file, the fill-column in
6429 use is stored as well, so that the whole buffer need not be refilled
6430 the next time unless the fill-column is different.
6431
6432 *** use-hard-newlines is now a minor mode. When it is enabled, Emacs
6433 distinguishes between hard and soft newlines, and treats hard newlines
6434 as paragraph boundaries. Otherwise all newlines inserted are marked
6435 as soft, and paragraph boundaries are determined solely from the text.
6436
6437 ** Font Lock mode
6438
6439 *** Custom support
6440
6441 The variables font-lock-face-attributes, font-lock-display-type and
6442 font-lock-background-mode are now obsolete; the recommended way to specify the
6443 faces to use for Font Lock mode is with M-x customize-group on the new custom
6444 group font-lock-highlighting-faces. If you set font-lock-face-attributes in
6445 your ~/.emacs file, Font Lock mode will respect its value. However, you should
6446 consider converting from setting that variable to using M-x customize.
6447
6448 You can still use X resources to specify Font Lock face appearances.
6449
6450 *** Maximum decoration
6451
6452 Fontification now uses the maximum level of decoration supported by
6453 default. Previously, fontification used a mode-specific default level
6454 of decoration, which is typically the minimum level of decoration
6455 supported. You can set font-lock-maximum-decoration to nil
6456 to get the old behavior.
6457
6458 *** New support
6459
6460 Support is now provided for Java, Objective-C, AWK and SIMULA modes.
6461
6462 Note that Font Lock mode can be turned on without knowing exactly what modes
6463 support Font Lock mode, via the command global-font-lock-mode.
6464
6465 *** Configurable support
6466
6467 Support for C, C++, Objective-C and Java can be more easily configured for
6468 additional types and classes via the new variables c-font-lock-extra-types,
6469 c++-font-lock-extra-types, objc-font-lock-extra-types and, you guessed it,
6470 java-font-lock-extra-types. These value of each of these variables should be a
6471 list of regexps matching the extra type names. For example, the default value
6472 of c-font-lock-extra-types is ("\\sw+_t") which means fontification follows the
6473 convention that C type names end in _t. This results in slower fontification.
6474
6475 Of course, you can change the variables that specify fontification in whatever
6476 way you wish, typically by adding regexps. However, these new variables make
6477 it easier to make specific and common changes for the fontification of types.
6478
6479 *** Adding highlighting patterns to existing support
6480
6481 You can use the new function font-lock-add-keywords to add your own
6482 highlighting patterns, such as for project-local or user-specific constructs,
6483 for any mode.
6484
6485 For example, to highlight `FIXME:' words in C comments, put:
6486
6487 (font-lock-add-keywords 'c-mode '(("\\<FIXME:" 0 font-lock-warning-face t)))
6488
6489 in your ~/.emacs.
6490
6491 *** New faces
6492
6493 Font Lock now defines two new faces, font-lock-builtin-face and
6494 font-lock-warning-face. These are intended to highlight builtin keywords,
6495 distinct from a language's normal keywords, and objects that should be brought
6496 to user attention, respectively. Various modes now use these new faces.
6497
6498 *** Changes to fast-lock support mode
6499
6500 The fast-lock package, one of the two Font Lock support modes, can now process
6501 cache files silently. You can use the new variable fast-lock-verbose, in the
6502 same way as font-lock-verbose, to control this feature.
6503
6504 *** Changes to lazy-lock support mode
6505
6506 The lazy-lock package, one of the two Font Lock support modes, can now fontify
6507 according to the true syntactic context relative to other lines. You can use
6508 the new variable lazy-lock-defer-contextually to control this feature. If
6509 non-nil, changes to the buffer will cause subsequent lines in the buffer to be
6510 refontified after lazy-lock-defer-time seconds of idle time. If nil, then only
6511 the modified lines will be refontified; this is the same as the previous Lazy
6512 Lock mode behaviour and the behaviour of Font Lock mode.
6513
6514 This feature is useful in modes where strings or comments can span lines.
6515 For example, if a string or comment terminating character is deleted, then if
6516 this feature is enabled subsequent lines in the buffer will be correctly
6517 refontified to reflect their new syntactic context. Previously, only the line
6518 containing the deleted character would be refontified and you would have to use
6519 the command M-g M-g (font-lock-fontify-block) to refontify some lines.
6520
6521 As a consequence of this new feature, two other variables have changed:
6522
6523 Variable `lazy-lock-defer-driven' is renamed `lazy-lock-defer-on-scrolling'.
6524 Variable `lazy-lock-defer-time' can now only be a time, i.e., a number.
6525 Buffer modes for which on-the-fly deferral applies can be specified via the
6526 new variable `lazy-lock-defer-on-the-fly'.
6527
6528 If you set these variables in your ~/.emacs, then you may have to change those
6529 settings.
6530
6531 ** Ada mode changes.
6532
6533 *** There is now better support for using find-file.el with Ada mode.
6534 If you switch between spec and body, the cursor stays in the same
6535 procedure (modulo overloading). If a spec has no body file yet, but
6536 you try to switch to its body file, Ada mode now generates procedure
6537 stubs.
6538
6539 *** There are two new commands:
6540 - `ada-make-local' : invokes gnatmake on the current buffer
6541 - `ada-check-syntax' : check syntax of current buffer.
6542
6543 The user options `ada-compiler-make', `ada-make-options',
6544 `ada-language-version', `ada-compiler-syntax-check', and
6545 `ada-compile-options' are used within these commands.
6546
6547 *** Ada mode can now work with Outline minor mode. The outline level
6548 is calculated from the indenting, not from syntactic constructs.
6549 Outlining does not work if your code is not correctly indented.
6550
6551 *** The new function `ada-gnat-style' converts the buffer to the style of
6552 formatting used in GNAT. It places two blanks after a comment start,
6553 places one blank between a word end and an opening '(', and puts one
6554 space between a comma and the beginning of a word.
6555
6556 ** Scheme mode changes.
6557
6558 *** Scheme mode indentation now uses many of the facilities of Lisp
6559 mode; therefore, the variables to customize it are the variables used
6560 for Lisp mode which have names starting with `lisp-'. The variables
6561 with names starting with `scheme-' which used to do this no longer
6562 have any effect.
6563
6564 If you want to use different indentation for Scheme and Lisp, this is
6565 still possible, but now you must do it by adding a hook to
6566 scheme-mode-hook, which could work by setting the `lisp-' indentation
6567 variables as buffer-local variables.
6568
6569 *** DSSSL mode is a variant of Scheme mode, for editing DSSSL scripts.
6570 Use M-x dsssl-mode.
6571
6572 ** Changes to the emacsclient program
6573
6574 *** If a socket can't be found, and environment variables LOGNAME or
6575 USER are set, emacsclient now looks for a socket based on the UID
6576 associated with the name. That is an emacsclient running as root
6577 can connect to an Emacs server started by a non-root user.
6578
6579 *** The emacsclient program now accepts an option --no-wait which tells
6580 it to return immediately without waiting for you to "finish" the
6581 buffer in Emacs.
6582
6583 *** The new option --alternate-editor allows to specify an editor to
6584 use if Emacs is not running. The environment variable
6585 ALTERNATE_EDITOR can be used for the same effect; the command line
6586 option takes precedence.
6587
6588 ** M-x eldoc-mode enables a minor mode in which the echo area
6589 constantly shows the parameter list for function being called at point
6590 (in Emacs Lisp and Lisp Interaction modes only).
6591
6592 ** C-x n d now runs the new command narrow-to-defun,
6593 which narrows the accessible parts of the buffer to just
6594 the current defun.
6595
6596 ** Emacs now handles the `--' argument in the standard way; all
6597 following arguments are treated as ordinary file names.
6598
6599 ** On MSDOS and Windows, the bookmark file is now called _emacs.bmk,
6600 and the saved desktop file is now called _emacs.desktop (truncated if
6601 necessary).
6602
6603 ** When you kill a buffer that visits a file,
6604 if there are any registers that save positions in the file,
6605 these register values no longer become completely useless.
6606 If you try to go to such a register with C-x j, then you are
6607 asked whether to visit the file again. If you say yes,
6608 it visits the file and then goes to the same position.
6609
6610 ** When you visit a file that changes frequently outside Emacs--for
6611 example, a log of output from a process that continues to run--it may
6612 be useful for Emacs to revert the file without querying you whenever
6613 you visit the file afresh with C-x C-f.
6614
6615 You can request this behavior for certain files by setting the
6616 variable revert-without-query to a list of regular expressions. If a
6617 file's name matches any of these regular expressions, find-file and
6618 revert-buffer revert the buffer without asking for permission--but
6619 only if you have not edited the buffer text yourself.
6620
6621 ** set-default-font has been renamed to set-frame-font
6622 since it applies only to the current frame.
6623
6624 ** In TeX mode, you can use the variable tex-main-file to specify the
6625 file for tex-file to run TeX on. (By default, tex-main-file is nil,
6626 and tex-file runs TeX on the current visited file.)
6627
6628 This is useful when you are editing a document that consists of
6629 multiple files. In each of the included files, you can set up a local
6630 variable list which specifies the top-level file of your document for
6631 tex-main-file. Then tex-file will run TeX on the whole document
6632 instead of just the file you are editing.
6633
6634 ** RefTeX mode
6635
6636 RefTeX mode is a new minor mode with special support for \label, \ref
6637 and \cite macros in LaTeX documents. RefTeX distinguishes labels of
6638 different environments (equation, figure, ...) and has full support for
6639 multifile documents. To use it, select a buffer with a LaTeX document and
6640 turn the mode on with M-x reftex-mode. Here are the main user commands:
6641
6642 C-c ( reftex-label
6643 Creates a label semi-automatically. RefTeX is context sensitive and
6644 knows which kind of label is needed.
6645
6646 C-c ) reftex-reference
6647 Offers in a menu all labels in the document, along with context of the
6648 label definition. The selected label is referenced as \ref{LABEL}.
6649
6650 C-c [ reftex-citation
6651 Prompts for a regular expression and displays a list of matching BibTeX
6652 database entries. The selected entry is cited with a \cite{KEY} macro.
6653
6654 C-c & reftex-view-crossref
6655 Views the cross reference of a \ref or \cite command near point.
6656
6657 C-c = reftex-toc
6658 Shows a table of contents of the (multifile) document. From there you
6659 can quickly jump to every section.
6660
6661 Under X, RefTeX installs a "Ref" menu in the menu bar, with additional
6662 commands. Press `?' to get help when a prompt mentions this feature.
6663 Full documentation and customization examples are in the file
6664 reftex.el. You can use the finder to view the file documentation:
6665 C-h p --> tex --> reftex.el
6666
6667 ** Changes in BibTeX mode.
6668
6669 *** Info documentation is now available.
6670
6671 *** Don't allow parentheses in string constants anymore. This confused
6672 both the BibTeX program and Emacs BibTeX mode.
6673
6674 *** Renamed variable bibtex-mode-user-optional-fields to
6675 bibtex-user-optional-fields.
6676
6677 *** Removed variable bibtex-include-OPTannote
6678 (use bibtex-user-optional-fields instead).
6679
6680 *** New interactive functions to copy and kill fields and complete
6681 entries to the BibTeX kill ring, from where they can be yanked back by
6682 appropriate functions.
6683
6684 *** New interactive functions for repositioning and marking of
6685 entries. They are bound by default to M-C-l and M-C-h.
6686
6687 *** New hook bibtex-clean-entry-hook. It is called after entry has
6688 been cleaned.
6689
6690 *** New variable bibtex-field-delimiters, which replaces variables
6691 bibtex-field-{left|right}-delimiter.
6692
6693 *** New variable bibtex-entry-delimiters to determine how entries
6694 shall be delimited.
6695
6696 *** Allow preinitialization of fields. See documentation of
6697 bibtex-user-optional-fields, bibtex-entry-field-alist, and
6698 bibtex-include-OPTkey for details.
6699
6700 *** Book and InBook entries require either an author or an editor
6701 field. This is now supported by bibtex.el. Alternative fields are
6702 prefixed with `ALT'.
6703
6704 *** New variable bibtex-entry-format, which replaces variable
6705 bibtex-clean-entry-zap-empty-opts and allows specification of many
6706 formatting options performed on cleaning an entry (see variable
6707 documentation).
6708
6709 *** Even more control on how automatic keys are generated. See
6710 documentation of bibtex-generate-autokey for details. Transcriptions
6711 for foreign languages other than German are now handled, too.
6712
6713 *** New boolean user option bibtex-comma-after-last-field to decide if
6714 comma should be inserted at end of last field.
6715
6716 *** New boolean user option bibtex-align-at-equal-sign to determine if
6717 alignment should be made at left side of field contents or at equal
6718 signs. New user options to control entry layout (e.g. indentation).
6719
6720 *** New function bibtex-fill-entry to realign entries.
6721
6722 *** New function bibtex-reformat to reformat region or buffer.
6723
6724 *** New function bibtex-convert-alien to convert a BibTeX database
6725 from alien sources.
6726
6727 *** New function bibtex-complete-key (similar to bibtex-complete-string)
6728 to complete prefix to a key defined in buffer. Mainly useful in
6729 crossref entries.
6730
6731 *** New function bibtex-count-entries to count entries in buffer or
6732 region.
6733
6734 *** Added support for imenu.
6735
6736 *** The function `bibtex-validate' now checks current region instead
6737 of buffer if mark is active. Now it shows all errors of buffer in a
6738 `compilation mode' buffer. You can use the normal commands (e.g.
6739 `next-error') for compilation modes to jump to errors.
6740
6741 *** New variable `bibtex-string-file-path' to determine where the files
6742 from `bibtex-string-files' are searched.
6743
6744 ** Iso Accents mode now supports Latin-3 as an alternative.
6745
6746 ** The command next-error now opens blocks hidden by hideshow.
6747
6748 ** The function using-unix-filesystems has been replaced by the
6749 functions add-untranslated-filesystem and remove-untranslated-filesystem.
6750 Each of these functions takes the name of a drive letter or directory
6751 as an argument.
6752
6753 When a filesystem is added as untranslated, all files on it are read
6754 and written in binary mode (no cr/lf translation is performed).
6755
6756 ** browse-url changes
6757
6758 *** New methods for: Grail (browse-url-generic), MMM (browse-url-mmm),
6759 Lynx in a separate xterm (browse-url-lynx-xterm) or in an Emacs window
6760 (browse-url-lynx-emacs), remote W3 (browse-url-w3-gnudoit), generic
6761 non-remote-controlled browsers (browse-url-generic) and associated
6762 customization variables.
6763
6764 *** New commands `browse-url-of-region' and `browse-url'.
6765
6766 *** URLs marked up with <URL:...> (RFC1738) work if broken across
6767 lines. Browsing methods can be associated with URL regexps
6768 (e.g. mailto: URLs) via `browse-url-browser-function'.
6769
6770 ** Changes in Ediff
6771
6772 *** Clicking Mouse-2 on a brief command description in Ediff control panel
6773 pops up the Info file for this command.
6774
6775 *** There is now a variable, ediff-autostore-merges, which controls whether
6776 the result of a merge is saved in a file. By default, this is done only when
6777 merge is done from a session group (eg, when merging files in two different
6778 directories).
6779
6780 *** Since Emacs 19.31 (this hasn't been announced before), Ediff can compare
6781 and merge groups of files residing in different directories, or revisions of
6782 files in the same directory.
6783
6784 *** Since Emacs 19.31, Ediff can apply multi-file patches interactively.
6785 The patches must be in the context format or GNU unified format. (The bug
6786 related to the GNU format has now been fixed.)
6787
6788 ** Changes in Viper
6789
6790 *** The startup file is now .viper instead of .vip
6791 *** All variable/function names have been changed to start with viper-
6792 instead of vip-.
6793 *** C-\ now simulates the meta-key in all Viper states.
6794 *** C-z in Insert state now escapes to Vi for the duration of the next
6795 Viper command. In Vi and Insert states, C-z behaves as before.
6796 *** C-c \ escapes to Vi for one command if Viper is in Insert or Emacs states.
6797 *** _ is no longer the meta-key in Vi state.
6798 *** The variable viper-insert-state-cursor-color can be used to change cursor
6799 color when Viper is in insert state.
6800 *** If search lands the cursor near the top or the bottom of the window,
6801 Viper pulls the window up or down to expose more context. The variable
6802 viper-adjust-window-after-search controls this behavior.
6803
6804 ** Etags changes.
6805
6806 *** In C, C++, Objective C and Java, Etags tags global variables by
6807 default. The resulting tags files are inflated by 30% on average.
6808 Use --no-globals to turn this feature off. Etags can also tag
6809 variables which are members of structure-like constructs, but it does
6810 not by default. Use --members to turn this feature on.
6811
6812 *** C++ member functions are now recognized as tags.
6813
6814 *** Java is tagged like C++. In addition, "extends" and "implements"
6815 constructs are tagged. Files are recognised by the extension .java.
6816
6817 *** Etags can now handle programs written in Postscript. Files are
6818 recognised by the extensions .ps and .pdb (Postscript with C syntax).
6819 In Postscript, tags are lines that start with a slash.
6820
6821 *** Etags now handles Objective C and Objective C++ code. The usual C and
6822 C++ tags are recognized in these languages; in addition, etags
6823 recognizes special Objective C syntax for classes, class categories,
6824 methods and protocols.
6825
6826 *** Etags also handles Cobol. Files are recognised by the extension
6827 .cobol. The tagged lines are those containing a word that begins in
6828 column 8 and ends in a full stop, i.e. anything that could be a
6829 paragraph name.
6830
6831 *** Regexps in Etags now support intervals, as in ed or grep. The syntax of
6832 an interval is \{M,N\}, and it means to match the preceding expression
6833 at least M times and as many as N times.
6834
6835 ** The format for specifying a custom format for time-stamp to insert
6836 in files has changed slightly.
6837
6838 With the new enhancements to the functionality of format-time-string,
6839 time-stamp-format will change to be eventually compatible with it.
6840 This conversion is being done in two steps to maintain compatibility
6841 with old time-stamp-format values.
6842
6843 In the new scheme, alternate case is signified by the number-sign
6844 (`#') modifier, rather than changing the case of the format character.
6845 This feature is as yet incompletely implemented for compatibility
6846 reasons.
6847
6848 In the old time-stamp-format, all numeric fields defaulted to their
6849 natural width. (With format-time-string, each format has a
6850 fixed-width default.) In this version, you can specify the colon
6851 (`:') modifier to a numeric conversion to mean "give me the historical
6852 time-stamp-format width default." Do not use colon if you are
6853 specifying an explicit width, as in "%02d".
6854
6855 Numbers are no longer truncated to the requested width, except in the
6856 case of "%02y", which continues to give a two-digit year. Digit
6857 truncation probably wasn't being used for anything else anyway.
6858
6859 The new formats will work with old versions of Emacs. New formats are
6860 being recommended now to allow time-stamp-format to change in the
6861 future to be compatible with format-time-string. The new forms being
6862 recommended now will continue to work then.
6863
6864 See the documentation string for the variable time-stamp-format for
6865 details.
6866
6867 ** There are some additional major modes:
6868
6869 dcl-mode, for editing VMS DCL files.
6870 m4-mode, for editing files of m4 input.
6871 meta-mode, for editing MetaFont and MetaPost source files.
6872
6873 ** In Shell mode, the command shell-copy-environment-variable lets you
6874 copy the value of a specified environment variable from the subshell
6875 into Emacs.
6876
6877 ** New Lisp packages include:
6878
6879 *** battery.el displays battery status for laptops.
6880
6881 *** M-x bruce (named after Lenny Bruce) is a program that might
6882 be used for adding some indecent words to your email.
6883
6884 *** M-x crisp-mode enables an emulation for the CRiSP editor.
6885
6886 *** M-x dirtrack arranges for better tracking of directory changes
6887 in shell buffers.
6888
6889 *** The new library elint.el provides for linting of Emacs Lisp code.
6890 See the documentation for `elint-initialize', `elint-current-buffer'
6891 and `elint-defun'.
6892
6893 *** M-x expand-add-abbrevs defines a special kind of abbrev which is
6894 meant for programming constructs. These abbrevs expand like ordinary
6895 ones, when you type SPC, but only at the end of a line and not within
6896 strings or comments.
6897
6898 These abbrevs can act as templates: you can define places within an
6899 abbrev for insertion of additional text. Once you expand the abbrev,
6900 you can then use C-x a p and C-x a n to move back and forth to these
6901 insertion points. Thus you can conveniently insert additional text
6902 at these points.
6903
6904 *** filecache.el remembers the location of files so that you
6905 can visit them by short forms of their names.
6906
6907 *** find-func.el lets you find the definition of the user-loaded
6908 Emacs Lisp function at point.
6909
6910 *** M-x handwrite converts text to a "handwritten" picture.
6911
6912 *** M-x iswitchb-buffer is a command for switching to a buffer, much like
6913 switch-buffer, but it reads the argument in a more helpful way.
6914
6915 *** M-x landmark implements a neural network for landmark learning.
6916
6917 *** M-x locate provides a convenient interface to the `locate' program.
6918
6919 *** M4 mode is a new mode for editing files of m4 input.
6920
6921 *** mantemp.el creates C++ manual template instantiations
6922 from the GCC error messages which indicate which instantiations are needed.
6923
6924 *** mouse-copy.el provides a one-click copy and move feature.
6925 You can drag a region with M-mouse-1, and it is automatically
6926 inserted at point. M-Shift-mouse-1 deletes the text from its
6927 original place after inserting the copy.
6928
6929 *** mouse-drag.el lets you do scrolling by dragging Mouse-2
6930 on the buffer.
6931
6932 You click the mouse and move; that distance either translates into the
6933 velocity to scroll (with mouse-drag-throw) or the distance to scroll
6934 (with mouse-drag-drag). Horizontal scrolling is enabled when needed.
6935
6936 Enable mouse-drag with:
6937 (global-set-key [down-mouse-2] 'mouse-drag-throw)
6938 -or-
6939 (global-set-key [down-mouse-2] 'mouse-drag-drag)
6940
6941 *** mspools.el is useful for determining which mail folders have
6942 mail waiting to be read in them. It works with procmail.
6943
6944 *** Octave mode is a major mode for editing files of input for Octave.
6945 It comes with a facility for communicating with an Octave subprocess.
6946
6947 *** ogonek
6948
6949 The ogonek package provides functions for changing the coding of
6950 Polish diacritic characters in buffers. Codings known from various
6951 platforms are supported such as ISO8859-2, Mazovia, IBM Latin2, and
6952 TeX. For example, you can change the coding from Mazovia to
6953 ISO8859-2. Another example is a change of coding from ISO8859-2 to
6954 prefix notation (in which `/a' stands for the aogonek character, for
6955 instance) and vice versa.
6956
6957 To use this package load it using
6958 M-x load-library [enter] ogonek
6959 Then, you may get an explanation by calling one of
6960 M-x ogonek-jak -- in Polish
6961 M-x ogonek-how -- in English
6962 The info specifies the commands and variables provided as well as the
6963 ways of customization in `.emacs'.
6964
6965 *** Interface to ph.
6966
6967 Emacs provides a client interface to CCSO Nameservers (ph/qi)
6968
6969 The CCSO nameserver is used in many universities to provide directory
6970 services about people. ph.el provides a convenient Emacs interface to
6971 these servers.
6972
6973 *** uce.el is useful for replying to unsolicited commercial email.
6974
6975 *** vcursor.el implements a "virtual cursor" feature.
6976 You can move the virtual cursor with special commands
6977 while the real cursor does not move.
6978
6979 *** webjump.el is a "hot list" package which you can set up
6980 for visiting your favorite web sites.
6981
6982 *** M-x winner-mode is a minor mode which saves window configurations,
6983 so you can move back to other configurations that you have recently used.
6984
6985 ** movemail change
6986
6987 Movemail no longer needs to be installed setuid root in order for POP
6988 mail retrieval to function properly. This is because it no longer
6989 supports the RPOP (reserved-port POP) protocol; instead, it uses the
6990 user's POP password to authenticate to the mail server.
6991
6992 This change was made earlier, but not reported in NEWS before.
6993 \f
6994 * Emacs 20.1 changes for MS-DOS and MS-Windows.
6995
6996 ** Changes in handling MS-DOS/MS-Windows text files.
6997
6998 Emacs handles three different conventions for representing
6999 end-of-line: CRLF for MSDOS, LF for Unix and GNU, and CR (used on the
7000 Macintosh). Emacs determines which convention is used in a specific
7001 file based on the contents of that file (except for certain special
7002 file names), and when it saves the file, it uses the same convention.
7003
7004 To save the file and change the end-of-line convention, you can use
7005 C-x RET f (set-buffer-file-coding-system) to specify a different
7006 coding system for the buffer. Then, when you save the file, the newly
7007 specified coding system will take effect. For example, to save with
7008 LF, specify undecided-unix (or some other ...-unix coding system); to
7009 save with CRLF, specify undecided-dos.
7010 \f
7011 * Lisp Changes in Emacs 20.1
7012
7013 ** Byte-compiled files made with Emacs 20 will, in general, work in
7014 Emacs 19 as well, as long as the source code runs in Emacs 19. And
7015 vice versa: byte-compiled files made with Emacs 19 should also run in
7016 Emacs 20, as long as the program itself works in Emacs 20.
7017
7018 ** Windows-specific functions and variables have been renamed
7019 to start with w32- instead of win32-.
7020
7021 In hacker language, calling something a "win" is a form of praise. We
7022 don't want to praise a non-free Microsoft system, so we don't call it
7023 "win".
7024
7025 ** Basic Lisp changes
7026
7027 *** A symbol whose name starts with a colon now automatically
7028 evaluates to itself. Therefore such a symbol can be used as a constant.
7029
7030 *** The defined purpose of `defconst' has been changed. It should now
7031 be used only for values that should not be changed whether by a program
7032 or by the user.
7033
7034 The actual behavior of defconst has not been changed.
7035
7036 *** There are new macros `when' and `unless'
7037
7038 (when CONDITION BODY...) is short for (if CONDITION (progn BODY...))
7039 (unless CONDITION BODY...) is short for (if CONDITION nil BODY...)
7040
7041 *** Emacs now defines functions caar, cadr, cdar and cddr with their
7042 usual Lisp meanings. For example, caar returns the car of the car of
7043 its argument.
7044
7045 *** equal, when comparing strings, now ignores their text properties.
7046
7047 *** The new function `functionp' tests whether an object is a function.
7048
7049 *** arrayp now returns t for char-tables and bool-vectors.
7050
7051 *** Certain primitives which use characters (as integers) now get an
7052 error if the integer is not a valid character code. These primitives
7053 include insert-char, char-to-string, and the %c construct in the
7054 `format' function.
7055
7056 *** The `require' function now insists on adding a suffix, either .el
7057 or .elc, to the file name. Thus, (require 'foo) will not use a file
7058 whose name is just foo. It insists on foo.el or foo.elc.
7059
7060 *** The `autoload' function, when the file name does not contain
7061 either a directory name or the suffix .el or .elc, insists on
7062 adding one of these suffixes.
7063
7064 *** string-to-number now takes an optional second argument BASE
7065 which specifies the base to use when converting an integer.
7066 If BASE is omitted, base 10 is used.
7067
7068 We have not implemented other radices for floating point numbers,
7069 because that would be much more work and does not seem useful.
7070
7071 *** substring now handles vectors as well as strings.
7072
7073 *** The Common Lisp function eql is no longer defined normally.
7074 You must load the `cl' library to define it.
7075
7076 *** The new macro `with-current-buffer' lets you evaluate an expression
7077 conveniently with a different current buffer. It looks like this:
7078
7079 (with-current-buffer BUFFER BODY-FORMS...)
7080
7081 BUFFER is the expression that says which buffer to use.
7082 BODY-FORMS say what to do in that buffer.
7083
7084 *** The new primitive `save-current-buffer' saves and restores the
7085 choice of current buffer, like `save-excursion', but without saving or
7086 restoring the value of point or the mark. `with-current-buffer'
7087 works using `save-current-buffer'.
7088
7089 *** The new macro `with-temp-file' lets you do some work in a new buffer and
7090 write the output to a specified file. Like `progn', it returns the value
7091 of the last form.
7092
7093 *** The new macro `with-temp-buffer' lets you do some work in a new buffer,
7094 which is discarded after use. Like `progn', it returns the value of the
7095 last form. If you wish to return the buffer contents, use (buffer-string)
7096 as the last form.
7097
7098 *** The new function split-string takes a string, splits it at certain
7099 characters, and returns a list of the substrings in between the
7100 matches.
7101
7102 For example, (split-string "foo bar lose" " +") returns ("foo" "bar" "lose").
7103
7104 *** The new macro with-output-to-string executes some Lisp expressions
7105 with standard-output set up so that all output feeds into a string.
7106 Then it returns that string.
7107
7108 For example, if the current buffer name is `foo',
7109
7110 (with-output-to-string
7111 (princ "The buffer is ")
7112 (princ (buffer-name)))
7113
7114 returns "The buffer is foo".
7115
7116 ** Non-ASCII characters are now supported, if enable-multibyte-characters
7117 is non-nil.
7118
7119 These characters have character codes above 256. When inserted in the
7120 buffer or stored in a string, they are represented as multibyte
7121 characters that occupy several buffer positions each.
7122
7123 *** When enable-multibyte-characters is non-nil, a single character in
7124 a buffer or string can be two or more bytes (as many as four).
7125
7126 Buffers and strings are still made up of unibyte elements;
7127 character positions and string indices are always measured in bytes.
7128 Therefore, moving forward one character can increase the buffer
7129 position by 2, 3 or 4. The function forward-char moves by whole
7130 characters, and therefore is no longer equivalent to
7131 (lambda (n) (goto-char (+ (point) n))).
7132
7133 ASCII characters (codes 0 through 127) are still single bytes, always.
7134 Sequences of byte values 128 through 255 are used to represent
7135 non-ASCII characters. These sequences are called "multibyte
7136 characters".
7137
7138 The first byte of a multibyte character is always in the range 128
7139 through 159 (octal 0200 through 0237). These values are called
7140 "leading codes". The second and subsequent bytes are always in the
7141 range 160 through 255 (octal 0240 through 0377). The first byte, the
7142 leading code, determines how many bytes long the sequence is.
7143
7144 *** The function forward-char moves over characters, and therefore
7145 (forward-char 1) may increase point by more than 1 if it moves over a
7146 multibyte character. Likewise, delete-char always deletes a
7147 character, which may be more than one buffer position.
7148
7149 This means that some Lisp programs, which assume that a character is
7150 always one buffer position, need to be changed.
7151
7152 However, all ASCII characters are always one buffer position.
7153
7154 *** The regexp [\200-\377] no longer matches all non-ASCII characters,
7155 because when enable-multibyte-characters is non-nil, these characters
7156 have codes that are not in the range octal 200 to octal 377. However,
7157 the regexp [^\000-\177] does match all non-ASCII characters,
7158 guaranteed.
7159
7160 *** The function char-boundary-p returns non-nil if position POS is
7161 between two characters in the buffer (not in the middle of a
7162 character).
7163
7164 When the value is non-nil, it says what kind of character follows POS:
7165
7166 0 if POS is at an ASCII character or at the end of range,
7167 1 if POS is before a 2-byte length multi-byte form,
7168 2 if POS is at a head of 3-byte length multi-byte form,
7169 3 if POS is at a head of 4-byte length multi-byte form,
7170 4 if POS is at a head of multi-byte form of a composite character.
7171
7172 *** The function char-bytes returns how many bytes the character CHAR uses.
7173
7174 *** Strings can contain multibyte characters. The function
7175 `length' returns the string length counting bytes, which may be
7176 more than the number of characters.
7177
7178 You can include a multibyte character in a string constant by writing
7179 it literally. You can also represent it with a hex escape,
7180 \xNNNNNNN..., using as many digits as necessary. Any character which
7181 is not a valid hex digit terminates this construct. If you want to
7182 follow it with a character that is a hex digit, write backslash and
7183 newline in between; that will terminate the hex escape.
7184
7185 *** The function concat-chars takes arguments which are characters
7186 and returns a string containing those characters.
7187
7188 *** The function sref access a multibyte character in a string.
7189 (sref STRING INDX) returns the character in STRING at INDEX. INDEX
7190 counts from zero. If INDEX is at a position in the middle of a
7191 character, sref signals an error.
7192
7193 *** The function chars-in-string returns the number of characters
7194 in a string. This is less than the length of the string, if the
7195 string contains multibyte characters (the length counts bytes).
7196
7197 *** The function chars-in-region returns the number of characters
7198 in a region from BEG to END. This is less than (- END BEG) if the
7199 region contains multibyte characters (the length counts bytes).
7200
7201 *** The function string-to-list converts a string to a list of
7202 the characters in it. string-to-vector converts a string
7203 to a vector of the characters in it.
7204
7205 *** The function store-substring alters part of the contents
7206 of a string. You call it as follows:
7207
7208 (store-substring STRING IDX OBJ)
7209
7210 This says to alter STRING, by storing OBJ starting at index IDX in
7211 STRING. OBJ may be either a character or a (smaller) string.
7212 This function really does alter the contents of STRING.
7213 Since it is impossible to change the length of an existing string,
7214 it is an error if OBJ doesn't fit within STRING's actual length.
7215
7216 *** char-width returns the width (in columns) of the character CHAR,
7217 if it were displayed in the current buffer and the selected window.
7218
7219 *** string-width returns the width (in columns) of the text in STRING,
7220 if it were displayed in the current buffer and the selected window.
7221
7222 *** truncate-string-to-width shortens a string, if necessary,
7223 to fit within a certain number of columns. (Of course, it does
7224 not alter the string that you give it; it returns a new string
7225 which contains all or just part of the existing string.)
7226
7227 (truncate-string-to-width STR END-COLUMN &optional START-COLUMN PADDING)
7228
7229 This returns the part of STR up to column END-COLUMN.
7230
7231 The optional argument START-COLUMN specifies the starting column.
7232 If this is non-nil, then the first START-COLUMN columns of the string
7233 are not included in the resulting value.
7234
7235 The optional argument PADDING, if non-nil, is a padding character to be added
7236 at the beginning and end the resulting string, to extend it to exactly
7237 WIDTH columns. If PADDING is nil, that means do not pad; then, if STRING
7238 is narrower than WIDTH, the value is equal to STRING.
7239
7240 If PADDING and START-COLUMN are both non-nil, and if there is no clean
7241 place in STRING that corresponds to START-COLUMN (because one
7242 character extends across that column), then the padding character
7243 PADDING is added one or more times at the beginning of the result
7244 string, so that its columns line up as if it really did start at
7245 column START-COLUMN.
7246
7247 *** When the functions in the list after-change-functions are called,
7248 the third argument is the number of bytes in the pre-change text, not
7249 necessarily the number of characters. It is, in effect, the
7250 difference in buffer position between the beginning and the end of the
7251 changed text, before the change.
7252
7253 *** The characters Emacs uses are classified in various character
7254 sets, each of which has a name which is a symbol. In general there is
7255 one character set for each script, not for each language.
7256
7257 **** The function charsetp tests whether an object is a character set name.
7258
7259 **** The variable charset-list holds a list of character set names.
7260
7261 **** char-charset, given a character code, returns the name of the character
7262 set that the character belongs to. (The value is a symbol.)
7263
7264 **** split-char, given a character code, returns a list containing the
7265 name of the character set, followed by one or two byte-values
7266 which identify the character within that character set.
7267
7268 **** make-char, given a character set name and one or two subsequent
7269 byte-values, constructs a character code. This is roughly the
7270 opposite of split-char.
7271
7272 **** find-charset-region returns a list of the character sets
7273 of all the characters between BEG and END.
7274
7275 **** find-charset-string returns a list of the character sets
7276 of all the characters in a string.
7277
7278 *** Here are the Lisp facilities for working with coding systems
7279 and specifying coding systems.
7280
7281 **** The function coding-system-list returns a list of all coding
7282 system names (symbols). With optional argument t, it returns a list
7283 of all distinct base coding systems, not including variants.
7284 (Variant coding systems are those like latin-1-dos, latin-1-unix
7285 and latin-1-mac which specify the end-of-line conversion as well
7286 as what to do about code conversion.)
7287
7288 **** coding-system-p tests a symbol to see if it is a coding system
7289 name. It returns t if so, nil if not.
7290
7291 **** file-coding-system-alist specifies which coding systems to use
7292 for certain file names. It works like network-coding-system-alist,
7293 except that the PATTERN is matched against the file name.
7294
7295 Each element has the format (PATTERN . VAL), where PATTERN determines
7296 which file names the element applies to. PATTERN should be a regexp
7297 to match against a file name.
7298
7299 VAL is a coding system, a cons cell containing two coding systems, or
7300 a function symbol. If VAL is a coding system, it is used for both
7301 decoding what received from the network stream and encoding what sent
7302 to the network stream. If VAL is a cons cell containing two coding
7303 systems, the car specifies the coding system for decoding, and the cdr
7304 specifies the coding system for encoding.
7305
7306 If VAL is a function symbol, the function must return a coding system
7307 or a cons cell containing two coding systems, which is used as above.
7308
7309 **** The variable network-coding-system-alist specifies
7310 the coding system to use for network sockets.
7311
7312 Each element has the format (PATTERN . VAL), where PATTERN determines
7313 which network sockets the element applies to. PATTERN should be
7314 either a port number or a regular expression matching some network
7315 service names.
7316
7317 VAL is a coding system, a cons cell containing two coding systems, or
7318 a function symbol. If VAL is a coding system, it is used for both
7319 decoding what received from the network stream and encoding what sent
7320 to the network stream. If VAL is a cons cell containing two coding
7321 systems, the car specifies the coding system for decoding, and the cdr
7322 specifies the coding system for encoding.
7323
7324 If VAL is a function symbol, the function must return a coding system
7325 or a cons cell containing two coding systems, which is used as above.
7326
7327 **** process-coding-system-alist specifies which coding systems to use
7328 for certain subprocess. It works like network-coding-system-alist,
7329 except that the PATTERN is matched against the program name used to
7330 start the subprocess.
7331
7332 **** The variable default-process-coding-system specifies the coding
7333 systems to use for subprocess (and net connection) input and output,
7334 when nothing else specifies what to do. The value is a cons cell
7335 (OUTPUT-CODING . INPUT-CODING). OUTPUT-CODING applies to output
7336 to the subprocess, and INPUT-CODING applies to input from it.
7337
7338 **** The variable coding-system-for-write, if non-nil, specifies the
7339 coding system to use for writing a file, or for output to a synchronous
7340 subprocess.
7341
7342 It also applies to any asynchronous subprocess or network connection,
7343 but in a different way: the value of coding-system-for-write when you
7344 start the subprocess or connection affects that subprocess or
7345 connection permanently or until overridden.
7346
7347 The variable coding-system-for-write takes precedence over
7348 file-coding-system-alist, process-coding-system-alist and
7349 network-coding-system-alist, and all other methods of specifying a
7350 coding system for output. But most of the time this variable is nil.
7351 It exists so that Lisp programs can bind it to a specific coding
7352 system for one operation at a time.
7353
7354 **** coding-system-for-read applies similarly to input from
7355 files, subprocesses or network connections.
7356
7357 **** The function process-coding-system tells you what
7358 coding systems(s) an existing subprocess is using.
7359 The value is a cons cell,
7360 (DECODING-CODING-SYSTEM . ENCODING-CODING-SYSTEM)
7361 where DECODING-CODING-SYSTEM is used for decoding output from
7362 the subprocess, and ENCODING-CODING-SYSTEM is used for encoding
7363 input to the subprocess.
7364
7365 **** The function set-process-coding-system can be used to
7366 change the coding systems in use for an existing subprocess.
7367
7368 ** Emacs has a new facility to help users manage the many
7369 customization options. To make a Lisp program work with this facility,
7370 you need to use the new macros defgroup and defcustom.
7371
7372 You use defcustom instead of defvar, for defining a user option
7373 variable. The difference is that you specify two additional pieces of
7374 information (usually): the "type" which says what values are
7375 legitimate, and the "group" which specifies the hierarchy for
7376 customization.
7377
7378 Thus, instead of writing
7379
7380 (defvar foo-blurgoze nil
7381 "*Non-nil means that foo will act very blurgozely.")
7382
7383 you would now write this:
7384
7385 (defcustom foo-blurgoze nil
7386 "*Non-nil means that foo will act very blurgozely."
7387 :type 'boolean
7388 :group foo)
7389
7390 The type `boolean' means that this variable has only
7391 two meaningful states: nil and non-nil. Other type values
7392 describe other possibilities; see the manual for Custom
7393 for a description of them.
7394
7395 The "group" argument is used to specify a group which the option
7396 should belong to. You define a new group like this:
7397
7398 (defgroup ispell nil
7399 "Spell checking using Ispell."
7400 :group 'processes)
7401
7402 The "group" argument in defgroup specifies the parent group. The root
7403 group is called `emacs'; it should not contain any variables itself,
7404 but only other groups. The immediate subgroups of `emacs' correspond
7405 to the keywords used by C-h p. Under these subgroups come
7406 second-level subgroups that belong to individual packages.
7407
7408 Each Emacs package should have its own set of groups. A simple
7409 package should have just one group; a more complex package should
7410 have a hierarchy of its own groups. The sole or root group of a
7411 package should be a subgroup of one or more of the "keyword"
7412 first-level subgroups.
7413
7414 ** New `widget' library for inserting UI components in buffers.
7415
7416 This library, used by the new custom library, is documented in a
7417 separate manual that accompanies Emacs.
7418
7419 ** easy-mmode
7420
7421 The easy-mmode package provides macros and functions that make
7422 developing minor modes easier. Roughly, the programmer has to code
7423 only the functionality of the minor mode. All the rest--toggles,
7424 predicate, and documentation--can be done in one call to the macro
7425 `easy-mmode-define-minor-mode' (see the documentation). See also
7426 `easy-mmode-define-keymap'.
7427
7428 ** Text property changes
7429
7430 *** The `intangible' property now works on overlays as well as on a
7431 text property.
7432
7433 *** The new functions next-char-property-change and
7434 previous-char-property-change scan through the buffer looking for a
7435 place where either a text property or an overlay might change. The
7436 functions take two arguments, POSITION and LIMIT. POSITION is the
7437 starting position for the scan. LIMIT says where to stop the scan.
7438
7439 If no property change is found before LIMIT, the value is LIMIT. If
7440 LIMIT is nil, scan goes to the beginning or end of the accessible part
7441 of the buffer. If no property change is found, the value is the
7442 position of the beginning or end of the buffer.
7443
7444 *** In the `local-map' text property or overlay property, the property
7445 value can now be a symbol whose function definition is a keymap. This
7446 is an alternative to using the keymap itself.
7447
7448 ** Changes in invisibility features
7449
7450 *** Isearch can now temporarily show parts of the buffer which are
7451 hidden by an overlay with a invisible property, when the search match
7452 is inside that portion of the buffer. To enable this the overlay
7453 should have a isearch-open-invisible property which is a function that
7454 would be called having the overlay as an argument, the function should
7455 make the overlay visible.
7456
7457 During incremental search the overlays are shown by modifying the
7458 invisible and intangible properties, if beside this more actions are
7459 needed the overlay should have a isearch-open-invisible-temporary
7460 which is a function. The function is called with 2 arguments: one is
7461 the overlay and the second is nil when it should show the overlay and
7462 t when it should hide it.
7463
7464 *** add-to-invisibility-spec, remove-from-invisibility-spec
7465
7466 Modes that use overlays to hide portions of a buffer should set the
7467 invisible property of the overlay to the mode's name (or another symbol)
7468 and modify the `buffer-invisibility-spec' to include that symbol.
7469 Use `add-to-invisibility-spec' and `remove-from-invisibility-spec' to
7470 manipulate the `buffer-invisibility-spec'.
7471 Here is an example of how to do this:
7472
7473 ;; If we want to display an ellipsis:
7474 (add-to-invisibility-spec '(my-symbol . t))
7475 ;; If you don't want ellipsis:
7476 (add-to-invisibility-spec 'my-symbol)
7477
7478 ...
7479 (overlay-put (make-overlay beginning end) 'invisible 'my-symbol)
7480
7481 ...
7482 ;; When done with the overlays:
7483 (remove-from-invisibility-spec '(my-symbol . t))
7484 ;; Or respectively:
7485 (remove-from-invisibility-spec 'my-symbol)
7486
7487 ** Changes in syntax parsing.
7488
7489 *** The syntax-directed buffer-scan functions (such as
7490 `parse-partial-sexp', `forward-word' and similar functions) can now
7491 obey syntax information specified by text properties, if the variable
7492 `parse-sexp-lookup-properties' is non-nil.
7493
7494 If the value of `parse-sexp-lookup-properties' is nil, the behavior
7495 is as before: the syntax-table of the current buffer is always
7496 used to determine the syntax of the character at the position.
7497
7498 When `parse-sexp-lookup-properties' is non-nil, the syntax of a
7499 character in the buffer is calculated thus:
7500
7501 a) if the `syntax-table' text-property of that character
7502 is a cons, this cons becomes the syntax-type;
7503
7504 Valid values of `syntax-table' text-property are: nil, a valid
7505 syntax-table, and a valid syntax-table element, i.e.,
7506 a cons cell of the form (SYNTAX-CODE . MATCHING-CHAR).
7507
7508 b) if the character's `syntax-table' text-property
7509 is a syntax table, this syntax table is used
7510 (instead of the syntax-table of the current buffer) to
7511 determine the syntax type of the character.
7512
7513 c) otherwise the syntax-type is determined by the syntax-table
7514 of the current buffer.
7515
7516 *** The meaning of \s in regular expressions is also affected by the
7517 value of `parse-sexp-lookup-properties'. The details are the same as
7518 for the syntax-directed buffer-scan functions.
7519
7520 *** There are two new syntax-codes, `!' and `|' (numeric values 14
7521 and 15). A character with a code `!' starts a comment which is ended
7522 only by another character with the same code (unless quoted). A
7523 character with a code `|' starts a string which is ended only by
7524 another character with the same code (unless quoted).
7525
7526 These codes are mainly meant for use as values of the `syntax-table'
7527 text property.
7528
7529 *** The function `parse-partial-sexp' has new semantics for the sixth
7530 arg COMMENTSTOP. If it is `syntax-table', parse stops after the start
7531 of a comment or a string, or after end of a comment or a string.
7532
7533 *** The state-list which the return value from `parse-partial-sexp'
7534 (and can also be used as an argument) now has an optional ninth
7535 element: the character address of the start of last comment or string;
7536 nil if none. The fourth and eighth elements have special values if the
7537 string/comment is started by a "!" or "|" syntax-code.
7538
7539 *** Since new features of `parse-partial-sexp' allow a complete
7540 syntactic parsing, `font-lock' no longer supports
7541 `font-lock-comment-start-regexp'.
7542
7543 ** Changes in face features
7544
7545 *** The face functions are now unconditionally defined in Emacs, even
7546 if it does not support displaying on a device that supports faces.
7547
7548 *** The function face-documentation returns the documentation string
7549 of a face (or nil if it doesn't have one).
7550
7551 *** The function face-bold-p returns t if a face should be bold.
7552 set-face-bold-p sets that flag.
7553
7554 *** The function face-italic-p returns t if a face should be italic.
7555 set-face-italic-p sets that flag.
7556
7557 *** You can now specify foreground and background colors for text
7558 by adding elements of the form (foreground-color . COLOR-NAME)
7559 and (background-color . COLOR-NAME) to the list of faces in
7560 the `face' property (either the character's text property or an
7561 overlay property).
7562
7563 This means that you no longer need to create named faces to use
7564 arbitrary colors in a Lisp package.
7565
7566 ** Changes in file-handling functions
7567
7568 *** File-access primitive functions no longer discard an extra redundant
7569 directory name from the beginning of the file name. In other words,
7570 they no longer do anything special with // or /~. That conversion
7571 is now done only in substitute-in-file-name.
7572
7573 This makes it possible for a Lisp program to open a file whose name
7574 begins with ~.
7575
7576 *** If copy-file is unable to set the date of the output file,
7577 it now signals an error with the condition file-date-error.
7578
7579 *** The inode number returned by file-attributes may be an integer (if
7580 the number fits in a Lisp integer) or a list of integers.
7581
7582 *** insert-file-contents can now read from a special file,
7583 as long as the arguments VISIT and REPLACE are nil.
7584
7585 *** The RAWFILE arg to find-file-noselect, if non-nil, now suppresses
7586 character code conversion as well as other things.
7587
7588 Meanwhile, this feature does work with remote file names
7589 (formerly it did not).
7590
7591 *** Lisp packages which create temporary files should use the TMPDIR
7592 environment variable to decide which directory to put them in.
7593
7594 *** interpreter-mode-alist elements now specify regexps
7595 instead of constant strings.
7596
7597 *** expand-file-name no longer treats `//' or `/~' specially. It used
7598 to delete all the text of a file name up through the first slash of
7599 any `//' or `/~' sequence. Now it passes them straight through.
7600
7601 substitute-in-file-name continues to treat those sequences specially,
7602 in the same way as before.
7603
7604 *** The variable `format-alist' is more general now.
7605 The FROM-FN and TO-FN in a format definition can now be strings
7606 which specify shell commands to use as filters to perform conversion.
7607
7608 *** The new function access-file tries to open a file, and signals an
7609 error if that fails. If the open succeeds, access-file does nothing
7610 else, and returns nil.
7611
7612 *** The function insert-directory now signals an error if the specified
7613 directory cannot be listed.
7614
7615 ** Changes in minibuffer input
7616
7617 *** The functions read-buffer, read-variable, read-command, read-string
7618 read-file-name, read-from-minibuffer and completing-read now take an
7619 additional argument which specifies the default value. If this
7620 argument is non-nil, it should be a string; that string is used in two
7621 ways:
7622
7623 It is returned if the user enters empty input.
7624 It is available through the history command M-n.
7625
7626 *** The functions read-string, read-from-minibuffer,
7627 read-no-blanks-input and completing-read now take an additional
7628 argument INHERIT-INPUT-METHOD. If this is non-nil, then the
7629 minibuffer inherits the current input method and the setting of
7630 enable-multibyte-characters from the previously current buffer.
7631
7632 In an interactive spec, you can use M instead of s to read an
7633 argument in this way.
7634
7635 *** All minibuffer input functions discard text properties
7636 from the text you enter in the minibuffer, unless the variable
7637 minibuffer-allow-text-properties is non-nil.
7638
7639 ** Echo area features
7640
7641 *** Clearing the echo area now runs the normal hook
7642 echo-area-clear-hook. Note that the echo area can be used while the
7643 minibuffer is active; in that case, the minibuffer is still active
7644 after the echo area is cleared.
7645
7646 *** The function current-message returns the message currently displayed
7647 in the echo area, or nil if there is none.
7648
7649 ** Keyboard input features
7650
7651 *** tty-erase-char is a new variable that reports which character was
7652 set up as the terminal's erase character when time Emacs was started.
7653
7654 *** num-nonmacro-input-events is the total number of input events
7655 received so far from the terminal. It does not count those generated
7656 by keyboard macros.
7657
7658 ** Frame-related changes
7659
7660 *** make-frame runs the normal hook before-make-frame-hook just before
7661 creating a frame, and just after creating a frame it runs the abnormal
7662 hook after-make-frame-functions with the new frame as arg.
7663
7664 *** The new hook window-configuration-change-hook is now run every time
7665 the window configuration has changed. The frame whose configuration
7666 has changed is the selected frame when the hook is run.
7667
7668 *** Each frame now independently records the order for recently
7669 selected buffers, in its buffer-list frame parameter, so that the
7670 value of other-buffer is now based on the buffers recently displayed
7671 in the selected frame.
7672
7673 *** The value of the frame parameter vertical-scroll-bars
7674 is now `left', `right' or nil. A non-nil value specifies
7675 which side of the window to put the scroll bars on.
7676
7677 ** X Windows features
7678
7679 *** You can examine X resources for other applications by binding
7680 x-resource-class around a call to x-get-resource. The usual value of
7681 x-resource-class is "Emacs", which is the correct value for Emacs.
7682
7683 *** In menus, checkboxes and radio buttons now actually work.
7684 The menu displays the current status of the box or button.
7685
7686 *** The function x-list-fonts now takes an optional fourth argument
7687 MAXIMUM which sets a limit on how many matching fonts to return.
7688 A smaller value of MAXIMUM makes the function faster.
7689
7690 If the only question is whether *any* font matches the pattern,
7691 it is good to supply 1 for this argument.
7692
7693 ** Subprocess features
7694
7695 *** A reminder: it is no longer necessary for subprocess filter
7696 functions and sentinels to do save-match-data, because Emacs does this
7697 automatically.
7698
7699 *** The new function shell-command-to-string executes a shell command
7700 and returns the output from the command as a string.
7701
7702 *** The new function process-contact returns t for a child process,
7703 and (HOSTNAME SERVICE) for a net connection.
7704
7705 ** An error in running pre-command-hook or post-command-hook
7706 does clear the variable to nil. The documentation was wrong before.
7707
7708 ** In define-key-after, if AFTER is t, the new binding now always goes
7709 at the end of the keymap. If the keymap is a menu, this means it
7710 goes after the other menu items.
7711
7712 ** If you have a program that makes several changes in the same area
7713 of the buffer, you can use the macro combine-after-change-calls
7714 around that Lisp code to make it faster when after-change hooks
7715 are in use.
7716
7717 The macro arranges to call the after-change functions just once for a
7718 series of several changes--if that seems safe.
7719
7720 Don't alter the variables after-change-functions and
7721 after-change-function within the body of a combine-after-change-calls
7722 form.
7723
7724 ** If you define an abbrev (with define-abbrev) whose EXPANSION
7725 is not a string, then the abbrev does not expand in the usual sense,
7726 but its hook is still run.
7727
7728 ** Normally, the Lisp debugger is not used (even if you have enabled it)
7729 for errors that are handled by condition-case.
7730
7731 If you set debug-on-signal to a non-nil value, then the debugger is called
7732 regardless of whether there is a handler for the condition. This is
7733 useful for debugging problems that happen inside of a condition-case.
7734
7735 This mode of operation seems to be unreliable in other ways. Errors that
7736 are normal and ought to be handled, perhaps in timers or process
7737 filters, will instead invoke the debugger. So don't say you weren't
7738 warned.
7739
7740 ** The new variable ring-bell-function lets you specify your own
7741 way for Emacs to "ring the bell".
7742
7743 ** If run-at-time's TIME argument is t, the action is repeated at
7744 integral multiples of REPEAT from the epoch; this is useful for
7745 functions like display-time.
7746
7747 ** You can use the function locate-library to find the precise file
7748 name of a Lisp library. This isn't new, but wasn't documented before.
7749
7750 ** Commands for entering view mode have new optional arguments that
7751 can be used from Lisp. Low-level entrance to and exit from view mode
7752 is done by functions view-mode-enter and view-mode-exit.
7753
7754 ** batch-byte-compile-file now makes Emacs return a nonzero status code
7755 if there is an error in compilation.
7756
7757 ** pop-to-buffer, switch-to-buffer-other-window and
7758 switch-to-buffer-other-frame now accept an additional optional
7759 argument NORECORD, much like switch-to-buffer. If it is non-nil,
7760 they don't put the buffer at the front of the buffer list.
7761
7762 ** If your .emacs file leaves the *scratch* buffer non-empty,
7763 Emacs does not display the startup message, so as to avoid changing
7764 the *scratch* buffer.
7765
7766 ** The new function regexp-opt returns an efficient regexp to match a string.
7767 The arguments are STRINGS and (optionally) PAREN. This function can be used
7768 where regexp matching or searching is intensively used and speed is important,
7769 e.g., in Font Lock mode.
7770
7771 ** The variable buffer-display-count is local to each buffer,
7772 and is incremented each time the buffer is displayed in a window.
7773 It starts at 0 when the buffer is created.
7774
7775 ** The new function compose-mail starts composing a mail message
7776 using the user's chosen mail composition agent (specified with the
7777 variable mail-user-agent). It has variants compose-mail-other-window
7778 and compose-mail-other-frame.
7779
7780 ** The `user-full-name' function now takes an optional parameter which
7781 can either be a number (the UID) or a string (the login name). The
7782 full name of the specified user will be returned.
7783
7784 ** Lisp packages that load files of customizations, or any other sort
7785 of user profile, should obey the variable init-file-user in deciding
7786 where to find it. They should load the profile of the user name found
7787 in that variable. If init-file-user is nil, meaning that the -q
7788 option was used, then Lisp packages should not load the customization
7789 files at all.
7790
7791 ** format-time-string now allows you to specify the field width
7792 and type of padding. This works as in printf: you write the field
7793 width as digits in the middle of a %-construct. If you start
7794 the field width with 0, it means to pad with zeros.
7795
7796 For example, %S normally specifies the number of seconds since the
7797 minute; %03S means to pad this with zeros to 3 positions, %_3S to pad
7798 with spaces to 3 positions. Plain %3S pads with zeros, because that
7799 is how %S normally pads to two positions.
7800
7801 ** thing-at-point now supports a new kind of "thing": url.
7802
7803 ** imenu.el changes.
7804
7805 You can now specify a function to be run when selecting an
7806 item from menu created by imenu.
7807
7808 An example of using this feature: if we define imenu items for the
7809 #include directives in a C file, we can open the included file when we
7810 select one of those items.
7811 \f
7812 * Emacs 19.34 is a bug-fix release with no user-visible changes.
7813 \f
7814 * Changes in Emacs 19.33.
7815
7816 ** Bibtex mode no longer turns on Auto Fill automatically. (No major
7817 mode should do that--it is the user's choice.)
7818
7819 ** The variable normal-auto-fill-function specifies the function to
7820 use for auto-fill-function, if and when Auto Fill is turned on.
7821 Major modes can set this locally to alter how Auto Fill works.
7822 \f
7823 * Editing Changes in Emacs 19.32
7824
7825 ** C-x f with no argument now signals an error.
7826 To set the fill column at the current column, use C-u C-x f.
7827
7828 ** Expanding dynamic abbrevs with M-/ is now smarter about case
7829 conversion. If you type the abbreviation with mixed case, and it
7830 matches the beginning of the expansion including case, then the
7831 expansion is copied verbatim. Using SPC M-/ to copy an additional
7832 word always copies it verbatim except when the previous copied word is
7833 all caps.
7834
7835 ** On a non-windowing terminal, which can display only one Emacs frame
7836 at a time, creating a new frame with C-x 5 2 also selects that frame.
7837
7838 When using a display that can show multiple frames at once, C-x 5 2
7839 does make the frame visible, but does not select it. This is the same
7840 as in previous Emacs versions.
7841
7842 ** You can use C-x 5 2 to create multiple frames on MSDOS, just as on a
7843 non-X terminal on Unix. Of course, only one frame is visible at any
7844 time, since your terminal doesn't have the ability to display multiple
7845 frames.
7846
7847 ** On Windows, set win32-pass-alt-to-system to a non-nil value
7848 if you would like tapping the Alt key to invoke the Windows menu.
7849 This feature is not enabled by default; since the Alt key is also the
7850 Meta key, it is too easy and painful to activate this feature by
7851 accident.
7852
7853 ** The command apply-macro-to-region-lines repeats the last defined
7854 keyboard macro once for each complete line within the current region.
7855 It does this line by line, by moving point to the beginning of that
7856 line and then executing the macro.
7857
7858 This command is not new, but was never documented before.
7859
7860 ** You can now use Mouse-1 to place the region around a string constant
7861 (something surrounded by doublequote characters or other delimiter
7862 characters of like syntax) by double-clicking on one of the delimiting
7863 characters.
7864
7865 ** Font Lock mode
7866
7867 *** Font Lock support modes
7868
7869 Font Lock can be configured to use Fast Lock mode and Lazy Lock mode (see
7870 below) in a flexible way. Rather than adding the appropriate function to the
7871 hook font-lock-mode-hook, you can use the new variable font-lock-support-mode
7872 to control which modes have Fast Lock mode or Lazy Lock mode turned on when
7873 Font Lock mode is enabled.
7874
7875 For example, to use Fast Lock mode when Font Lock mode is turned on, put:
7876
7877 (setq font-lock-support-mode 'fast-lock-mode)
7878
7879 in your ~/.emacs.
7880
7881 *** lazy-lock
7882
7883 The lazy-lock package speeds up Font Lock mode by making fontification occur
7884 only when necessary, such as when a previously unfontified part of the buffer
7885 becomes visible in a window. When you create a buffer with Font Lock mode and
7886 Lazy Lock mode turned on, the buffer is not fontified. When certain events
7887 occur (such as scrolling), Lazy Lock makes sure that the visible parts of the
7888 buffer are fontified. Lazy Lock also defers on-the-fly fontification until
7889 Emacs has been idle for a given amount of time.
7890
7891 To use this package, put in your ~/.emacs:
7892
7893 (setq font-lock-support-mode 'lazy-lock-mode)
7894
7895 To control the package behaviour, see the documentation for `lazy-lock-mode'.
7896
7897 ** Changes in BibTeX mode.
7898
7899 *** For all entries allow spaces and tabs between opening brace or
7900 paren and key.
7901
7902 *** Non-escaped double-quoted characters (as in `Sch"of') are now
7903 supported.
7904
7905 ** Gnus changes.
7906
7907 Gnus, the Emacs news reader, has undergone further rewriting. Many new
7908 commands and variables have been added. There should be no
7909 significant incompatibilities between this Gnus version and the
7910 previously released version, except in the message composition area.
7911
7912 Below is a list of the more user-visible changes. Coding changes
7913 between Gnus 5.1 and 5.2 are more extensive.
7914
7915 *** A new message composition mode is used. All old customization
7916 variables for mail-mode, rnews-reply-mode and gnus-msg are now
7917 obsolete.
7918
7919 *** Gnus is now able to generate "sparse" threads -- threads where
7920 missing articles are represented by empty nodes.
7921
7922 (setq gnus-build-sparse-threads 'some)
7923
7924 *** Outgoing articles are stored on a special archive server.
7925
7926 To disable this: (setq gnus-message-archive-group nil)
7927
7928 *** Partial thread regeneration now happens when articles are
7929 referred.
7930
7931 *** Gnus can make use of GroupLens predictions:
7932
7933 (setq gnus-use-grouplens t)
7934
7935 *** A trn-line tree buffer can be displayed.
7936
7937 (setq gnus-use-trees t)
7938
7939 *** An nn-like pick-and-read minor mode is available for the summary
7940 buffers.
7941
7942 (add-hook 'gnus-summary-mode-hook 'gnus-pick-mode)
7943
7944 *** In binary groups you can use a special binary minor mode:
7945
7946 `M-x gnus-binary-mode'
7947
7948 *** Groups can be grouped in a folding topic hierarchy.
7949
7950 (add-hook 'gnus-group-mode-hook 'gnus-topic-mode)
7951
7952 *** Gnus can re-send and bounce mail.
7953
7954 Use the `S D r' and `S D b'.
7955
7956 *** Groups can now have a score, and bubbling based on entry frequency
7957 is possible.
7958
7959 (add-hook 'gnus-summary-exit-hook 'gnus-summary-bubble-group)
7960
7961 *** Groups can be process-marked, and commands can be performed on
7962 groups of groups.
7963
7964 *** Caching is possible in virtual groups.
7965
7966 *** nndoc now understands all kinds of digests, mail boxes, rnews news
7967 batches, ClariNet briefs collections, and just about everything else.
7968
7969 *** Gnus has a new backend (nnsoup) to create/read SOUP packets.
7970
7971 *** The Gnus cache is much faster.
7972
7973 *** Groups can be sorted according to many criteria.
7974
7975 For instance: (setq gnus-group-sort-function 'gnus-group-sort-by-rank)
7976
7977 *** New group parameters have been introduced to set list-address and
7978 expiration times.
7979
7980 *** All formatting specs allow specifying faces to be used.
7981
7982 *** There are several more commands for setting/removing/acting on
7983 process marked articles on the `M P' submap.
7984
7985 *** The summary buffer can be limited to show parts of the available
7986 articles based on a wide range of criteria. These commands have been
7987 bound to keys on the `/' submap.
7988
7989 *** Articles can be made persistent -- as an alternative to saving
7990 articles with the `*' command.
7991
7992 *** All functions for hiding article elements are now toggles.
7993
7994 *** Article headers can be buttonized.
7995
7996 (add-hook 'gnus-article-display-hook 'gnus-article-add-buttons-to-head)
7997
7998 *** All mail backends support fetching articles by Message-ID.
7999
8000 *** Duplicate mail can now be treated properly. See the
8001 `nnmail-treat-duplicates' variable.
8002
8003 *** All summary mode commands are available directly from the article
8004 buffer.
8005
8006 *** Frames can be part of `gnus-buffer-configuration'.
8007
8008 *** Mail can be re-scanned by a daemonic process.
8009
8010 *** Gnus can make use of NoCeM files to filter spam.
8011
8012 (setq gnus-use-nocem t)
8013
8014 *** Groups can be made permanently visible.
8015
8016 (setq gnus-permanently-visible-groups "^nnml:")
8017
8018 *** Many new hooks have been introduced to make customizing easier.
8019
8020 *** Gnus respects the Mail-Copies-To header.
8021
8022 *** Threads can be gathered by looking at the References header.
8023
8024 (setq gnus-summary-thread-gathering-function
8025 'gnus-gather-threads-by-references)
8026
8027 *** Read articles can be stored in a special backlog buffer to avoid
8028 refetching.
8029
8030 (setq gnus-keep-backlog 50)
8031
8032 *** A clean copy of the current article is always stored in a separate
8033 buffer to allow easier treatment.
8034
8035 *** Gnus can suggest where to save articles. See `gnus-split-methods'.
8036
8037 *** Gnus doesn't have to do as much prompting when saving.
8038
8039 (setq gnus-prompt-before-saving t)
8040
8041 *** gnus-uu can view decoded files asynchronously while fetching
8042 articles.
8043
8044 (setq gnus-uu-grabbed-file-functions 'gnus-uu-grab-view)
8045
8046 *** Filling in the article buffer now works properly on cited text.
8047
8048 *** Hiding cited text adds buttons to toggle hiding, and how much
8049 cited text to hide is now customizable.
8050
8051 (setq gnus-cited-lines-visible 2)
8052
8053 *** Boring headers can be hidden.
8054
8055 (add-hook 'gnus-article-display-hook 'gnus-article-hide-boring-headers)
8056
8057 *** Default scoring values can now be set from the menu bar.
8058
8059 *** Further syntax checking of outgoing articles have been added.
8060
8061 The Gnus manual has been expanded. It explains all these new features
8062 in greater detail.
8063 \f
8064 * Lisp Changes in Emacs 19.32
8065
8066 ** The function set-visited-file-name now accepts an optional
8067 second argument NO-QUERY. If it is non-nil, then the user is not
8068 asked for confirmation in the case where the specified file already
8069 exists.
8070
8071 ** The variable print-length applies to printing vectors and bitvectors,
8072 as well as lists.
8073
8074 ** The new function keymap-parent returns the parent keymap
8075 of a given keymap.
8076
8077 ** The new function set-keymap-parent specifies a new parent for a
8078 given keymap. The arguments are KEYMAP and PARENT. PARENT must be a
8079 keymap or nil.
8080
8081 ** Sometimes menu keymaps use a command name, a symbol, which is really
8082 an automatically generated alias for some other command, the "real"
8083 name. In such a case, you should give that alias symbol a non-nil
8084 menu-alias property. That property tells the menu system to look for
8085 equivalent keys for the real name instead of equivalent keys for the
8086 alias.
8087 \f
8088 * Editing Changes in Emacs 19.31
8089
8090 ** Freedom of the press restricted in the United States.
8091
8092 Emacs has been censored in accord with the Communications Decency Act.
8093 This includes removing some features of the doctor program. That law
8094 was described by its supporters as a ban on pornography, but it bans
8095 far more than that. The Emacs distribution has never contained any
8096 pornography, but parts of it were nonetheless prohibited.
8097
8098 For information on US government censorship of the Internet, and what
8099 you can do to bring back freedom of the press, see the web site
8100 `http://www.vtw.org/'.
8101
8102 ** A note about C mode indentation customization.
8103
8104 The old (Emacs 19.29) ways of specifying a C indentation style
8105 do not normally work in the new implementation of C mode.
8106 It has its own methods of customizing indentation, which are
8107 much more powerful than the old C mode. See the Editing Programs
8108 chapter of the manual for details.
8109
8110 However, you can load the library cc-compat to make the old
8111 customization variables take effect.
8112
8113 ** Marking with the mouse.
8114
8115 When you mark a region with the mouse, the region now remains
8116 highlighted until the next input event, regardless of whether you are
8117 using M-x transient-mark-mode.
8118
8119 ** Improved Windows NT/95 support.
8120
8121 *** Emacs now supports scroll bars on Windows NT and Windows 95.
8122
8123 *** Emacs now supports subprocesses on Windows 95. (Subprocesses used
8124 to work on NT only and not on 95.)
8125
8126 *** There are difficulties with subprocesses, though, due to problems
8127 in Windows, beyond the control of Emacs. They work fine as long as
8128 you run Windows applications. The problems arise when you run a DOS
8129 application in a subprocesses. Since current shells run as DOS
8130 applications, these problems are significant.
8131
8132 If you run a DOS application in a subprocess, then the application is
8133 likely to busy-wait, which means that your machine will be 100% busy.
8134 However, if you don't mind the temporary heavy load, the subprocess
8135 will work OK as long as you tell it to terminate before you start any
8136 other DOS application as a subprocess.
8137
8138 Emacs is unable to terminate or interrupt a DOS subprocess.
8139 You have to do this by providing input directly to the subprocess.
8140
8141 If you run two DOS applications at the same time in two separate
8142 subprocesses, even if one of them is asynchronous, you will probably
8143 have to reboot your machine--until then, it will remain 100% busy.
8144 Windows simply does not cope when one Windows process tries to run two
8145 separate DOS subprocesses. Typing CTL-ALT-DEL and then choosing
8146 Shutdown seems to work although it may take a few minutes.
8147
8148 ** M-x resize-minibuffer-mode.
8149
8150 This command, not previously mentioned in NEWS, toggles a mode in
8151 which the minibuffer window expands to show as many lines as the
8152 minibuffer contains.
8153
8154 ** `title' frame parameter and resource.
8155
8156 The `title' X resource now specifies just the frame title, nothing else.
8157 It does not affect the name used for looking up other X resources.
8158 It works by setting the new `title' frame parameter, which likewise
8159 affects just the displayed title of the frame.
8160
8161 The `name' parameter continues to do what it used to do:
8162 it specifies the frame name for looking up X resources,
8163 and also serves as the default for the displayed title
8164 when the `title' parameter is unspecified or nil.
8165
8166 ** Emacs now uses the X toolkit by default, if you have a new
8167 enough version of X installed (X11R5 or newer).
8168
8169 ** When you compile Emacs with the Motif widget set, Motif handles the
8170 F10 key by activating the menu bar. To avoid confusion, the usual
8171 Emacs binding of F10 is replaced with a no-op when using Motif.
8172
8173 If you want to be able to use F10 in Emacs, you can rebind the Motif
8174 menubar to some other key which you don't use. To do so, add
8175 something like this to your X resources file. This example rebinds
8176 the Motif menu bar activation key to S-F12:
8177
8178 Emacs*defaultVirtualBindings: osfMenuBar : Shift<Key>F12
8179
8180 ** In overwrite mode, DEL now inserts spaces in most cases
8181 to replace the characters it "deletes".
8182
8183 ** The Rmail summary now shows the number of lines in each message.
8184
8185 ** Rmail has a new command M-x unforward-rmail-message, which extracts
8186 a forwarded message from the message that forwarded it. To use it,
8187 select a message which contains a forwarded message and then type the command.
8188 It inserts the forwarded message as a separate Rmail message
8189 immediately after the selected one.
8190
8191 This command also undoes the textual modifications that are standardly
8192 made, as part of forwarding, by Rmail and other mail reader programs.
8193
8194 ** Turning off saving of .saves-... files in your home directory.
8195
8196 Each Emacs session writes a file named .saves-... in your home
8197 directory to record which files M-x recover-session should recover.
8198 If you exit Emacs normally with C-x C-c, it deletes that file. If
8199 Emacs or the operating system crashes, the file remains for M-x
8200 recover-session.
8201
8202 You can turn off the writing of these files by setting
8203 auto-save-list-file-name to nil. If you do this, M-x recover-session
8204 will not work.
8205
8206 Some previous Emacs versions failed to delete these files even on
8207 normal exit. This is fixed now. If you are thinking of turning off
8208 this feature because of past experiences with versions that had this
8209 bug, it would make sense to check whether you still want to do so
8210 now that the bug is fixed.
8211
8212 ** Changes to Version Control (VC)
8213
8214 There is a new variable, vc-follow-symlinks. It indicates what to do
8215 when you visit a link to a file that is under version control.
8216 Editing the file through the link bypasses the version control system,
8217 which is dangerous and probably not what you want.
8218
8219 If this variable is t, VC follows the link and visits the real file,
8220 telling you about it in the echo area. If it is `ask' (the default),
8221 VC asks for confirmation whether it should follow the link. If nil,
8222 the link is visited and a warning displayed.
8223
8224 ** iso-acc.el now lets you specify a choice of language.
8225 Languages include "latin-1" (the default) and "latin-2" (which
8226 is designed for entering ISO Latin-2 characters).
8227
8228 There are also choices for specific human languages such as French and
8229 Portuguese. These are subsets of Latin-1, which differ in that they
8230 enable only the accent characters needed for particular language.
8231 The other accent characters, not needed for the chosen language,
8232 remain normal.
8233
8234 ** Posting articles and sending mail now has M-TAB completion on various
8235 header fields (Newsgroups, To, CC, ...).
8236
8237 Completion in the Newsgroups header depends on the list of groups
8238 known to your news reader. Completion in the Followup-To header
8239 offers those groups which are in the Newsgroups header, since
8240 Followup-To usually just holds one of those.
8241
8242 Completion in fields that hold mail addresses works based on the list
8243 of local users plus your aliases. Additionally, if your site provides
8244 a mail directory or a specific host to use for any unrecognized user
8245 name, you can arrange to query that host for completion also. (See the
8246 documentation of variables `mail-directory-process' and
8247 `mail-directory-stream'.)
8248
8249 ** A greatly extended sgml-mode offers new features such as (to be configured)
8250 skeletons with completing read for tags and attributes, typing named
8251 characters including optionally all 8bit characters, making tags invisible
8252 with optional alternate display text, skipping and deleting tag(pair)s.
8253
8254 Note: since Emacs' syntax feature cannot limit the special meaning of ', " and
8255 - to inside <>, for some texts the result, especially of font locking, may be
8256 wrong (see `sgml-specials' if you get wrong results).
8257
8258 The derived html-mode configures this with tags and attributes more or
8259 less HTML3ish. It also offers optional quick keys like C-c 1 for
8260 headline or C-c u for unordered list (see `html-quick-keys'). Edit /
8261 Text Properties / Face or M-g combinations create tags as applicable.
8262 Outline minor mode is supported and level 1 font-locking tries to
8263 fontify tag contents (which only works when they fit on one line, due
8264 to a limitation in font-lock).
8265
8266 External viewing via browse-url can occur automatically upon saving.
8267
8268 ** M-x imenu-add-to-menubar now adds to the menu bar for the current
8269 buffer only. If you want to put an Imenu item in the menu bar for all
8270 buffers that use a particular major mode, use the mode hook, as in
8271 this example:
8272
8273 (add-hook 'emacs-lisp-mode-hook
8274 '(lambda () (imenu-add-to-menubar "Index")))
8275
8276 ** Changes in BibTeX mode.
8277
8278 *** Field names may now contain digits, hyphens, and underscores.
8279
8280 *** Font Lock mode is now supported.
8281
8282 *** bibtex-make-optional-field is no longer interactive.
8283
8284 *** If bibtex-maintain-sorted-entries is non-nil, inserting new
8285 entries is now done with a faster algorithm. However, inserting
8286 will fail in this case if the buffer contains invalid entries or
8287 isn't in sorted order, so you should finish each entry with C-c C-c
8288 (bibtex-close-entry) after you have inserted or modified it.
8289 The default value of bibtex-maintain-sorted-entries is nil.
8290
8291 *** Function `show-all' is no longer bound to a key, since C-u C-c C-q
8292 does the same job.
8293
8294 *** Entries with quotes inside quote-delimited fields (as `author =
8295 "Stefan Sch{\"o}f"') are now supported.
8296
8297 *** Case in field names doesn't matter anymore when searching for help
8298 text.
8299
8300 ** Font Lock mode
8301
8302 *** Global Font Lock mode
8303
8304 Font Lock mode can be turned on globally, in buffers that support it, by the
8305 new command global-font-lock-mode. You can use the new variable
8306 font-lock-global-modes to control which modes have Font Lock mode automagically
8307 turned on. By default, this variable is set so that Font Lock mode is turned
8308 on globally where the buffer mode supports it.
8309
8310 For example, to automagically turn on Font Lock mode where supported, put:
8311
8312 (global-font-lock-mode t)
8313
8314 in your ~/.emacs.
8315
8316 *** Local Refontification
8317
8318 In Font Lock mode, editing a line automatically refontifies that line only.
8319 However, if your change alters the syntactic context for following lines,
8320 those lines remain incorrectly fontified. To refontify them, use the new
8321 command M-g M-g (font-lock-fontify-block).
8322
8323 In certain major modes, M-g M-g refontifies the entire current function.
8324 (The variable font-lock-mark-block-function controls how to find the
8325 current function.) In other major modes, M-g M-g refontifies 16 lines
8326 above and below point.
8327
8328 With a prefix argument N, M-g M-g refontifies N lines above and below point.
8329
8330 ** Follow mode
8331
8332 Follow mode is a new minor mode combining windows showing the same
8333 buffer into one tall "virtual window". The windows are typically two
8334 side-by-side windows. Follow mode makes them scroll together as if
8335 they were a unit. To use it, go to a frame with just one window,
8336 split it into two side-by-side windows using C-x 3, and then type M-x
8337 follow-mode.
8338
8339 M-x follow-mode turns off Follow mode if it is already enabled.
8340
8341 To display two side-by-side windows and activate Follow mode, use the
8342 command M-x follow-delete-other-windows-and-split.
8343
8344 ** hide-show changes.
8345
8346 The hooks hs-hide-hooks and hs-show-hooks have been renamed
8347 to hs-hide-hook and hs-show-hook, to follow the convention for
8348 normal hooks.
8349
8350 ** Simula mode now has a menu containing the most important commands.
8351 The new command simula-indent-exp is bound to C-M-q.
8352
8353 ** etags can now handle programs written in Erlang. Files are
8354 recognised by the extensions .erl and .hrl. The tagged lines are
8355 those that begin a function, record, or macro.
8356
8357 ** MSDOS Changes
8358
8359 *** It is now possible to compile Emacs with the version 2 of DJGPP.
8360 Compilation with DJGPP version 1 also still works.
8361
8362 *** The documentation of DOS-specific aspects of Emacs was rewritten
8363 and expanded; see the ``MS-DOS'' node in the on-line docs.
8364
8365 *** Emacs now uses ~ for backup file names, not .bak.
8366
8367 *** You can simulate mouse-3 on two-button mice by simultaneously
8368 pressing both mouse buttons.
8369
8370 *** A number of packages and commands which previously failed or had
8371 restricted functionality on MS-DOS, now work. The most important ones
8372 are:
8373
8374 **** Printing (both with `M-x lpr-buffer' and with `ps-print' package)
8375 now works.
8376
8377 **** `Ediff' works (in a single-frame mode).
8378
8379 **** `M-x display-time' can be used on MS-DOS (due to the new
8380 implementation of Emacs timers, see below).
8381
8382 **** `Dired' supports Unix-style shell wildcards.
8383
8384 **** The `c-macro-expand' command now works as on other platforms.
8385
8386 **** `M-x recover-session' works.
8387
8388 **** `M-x list-colors-display' displays all the available colors.
8389
8390 **** The `TPU-EDT' package works.
8391 \f
8392 * Lisp changes in Emacs 19.31.
8393
8394 ** The function using-unix-filesystems on Windows NT and Windows 95
8395 tells Emacs to read and write files assuming that they reside on a
8396 remote Unix filesystem. No CR/LF translation is done on any files in
8397 this case. Invoking using-unix-filesystems with t activates this
8398 behavior, and invoking it with any other value deactivates it.
8399
8400 ** Change in system-type and system-configuration values.
8401
8402 The value of system-type on a Linux-based GNU system is now `lignux',
8403 not `linux'. This means that some programs which use `system-type'
8404 need to be changed. The value of `system-configuration' will also
8405 be different.
8406
8407 It is generally recommended to use `system-configuration' rather
8408 than `system-type'.
8409
8410 See the file LINUX-GNU in this directory for more about this.
8411
8412 ** The functions shell-command and dired-call-process
8413 now run file name handlers for default-directory, if it has them.
8414
8415 ** Undoing the deletion of text now restores the positions of markers
8416 that pointed into or next to the deleted text.
8417
8418 ** Timers created with run-at-time now work internally to Emacs, and
8419 no longer use a separate process. Therefore, they now work more
8420 reliably and can be used for shorter time delays.
8421
8422 The new function run-with-timer is a convenient way to set up a timer
8423 to run a specified amount of time after the present. A call looks
8424 like this:
8425
8426 (run-with-timer SECS REPEAT FUNCTION ARGS...)
8427
8428 SECS says how many seconds should elapse before the timer happens.
8429 It may be an integer or a floating point number. When the timer
8430 becomes ripe, the action is to call FUNCTION with arguments ARGS.
8431
8432 REPEAT gives the interval for repeating the timer (measured in
8433 seconds). It may be an integer or a floating point number. nil or 0
8434 means don't repeat at all--call FUNCTION just once.
8435
8436 *** with-timeout provides an easy way to do something but give
8437 up if too much time passes.
8438
8439 (with-timeout (SECONDS TIMEOUT-FORMS...) BODY...)
8440
8441 This executes BODY, but gives up after SECONDS seconds.
8442 If it gives up, it runs the TIMEOUT-FORMS and returns the value
8443 of the last one of them. Normally it returns the value of the last
8444 form in BODY.
8445
8446 *** You can now arrange to call a function whenever Emacs is idle for
8447 a certain length of time. To do this, call run-with-idle-timer. A
8448 call looks like this:
8449
8450 (run-with-idle-timer SECS REPEAT FUNCTION ARGS...)
8451
8452 SECS says how many seconds of idleness should elapse before the timer
8453 runs. It may be an integer or a floating point number. When the
8454 timer becomes ripe, the action is to call FUNCTION with arguments
8455 ARGS.
8456
8457 Emacs becomes idle whenever it finishes executing a keyboard or mouse
8458 command. It remains idle until it receives another keyboard or mouse
8459 command.
8460
8461 REPEAT, if non-nil, means this timer should be activated again each
8462 time Emacs becomes idle and remains idle for SECS seconds The timer
8463 does not repeat if Emacs *remains* idle; it runs at most once after
8464 each time Emacs becomes idle.
8465
8466 If REPEAT is nil, the timer runs just once, the first time Emacs is
8467 idle for SECS seconds.
8468
8469 *** post-command-idle-hook is now obsolete; you shouldn't use it at
8470 all, because it interferes with the idle timer mechanism. If your
8471 programs use post-command-idle-hook, convert them to use idle timers
8472 instead.
8473
8474 *** y-or-n-p-with-timeout lets you ask a question but give up if
8475 there is no answer within a certain time.
8476
8477 (y-or-n-p-with-timeout PROMPT SECONDS DEFAULT-VALUE)
8478
8479 asks the question PROMPT (just like y-or-n-p). If the user answers
8480 within SECONDS seconds, it returns the answer that the user gave.
8481 Otherwise it gives up after SECONDS seconds, and returns DEFAULT-VALUE.
8482
8483 ** Minor change to `encode-time': you can now pass more than seven
8484 arguments. If you do that, the first six arguments have the usual
8485 meaning, the last argument is interpreted as the time zone, and the
8486 arguments in between are ignored.
8487
8488 This means that it works to use the list returned by `decode-time' as
8489 the list of arguments for `encode-time'.
8490
8491 ** The default value of load-path now includes the directory
8492 /usr/local/share/emacs/VERSION/site-lisp In addition to
8493 /usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp. You can use this new directory for
8494 site-specific Lisp packages that belong with a particular Emacs
8495 version.
8496
8497 It is not unusual for a Lisp package that works well in one Emacs
8498 version to cause trouble in another. Sometimes packages need updating
8499 for incompatible changes; sometimes they look at internal data that
8500 has changed; sometimes the package has been installed in Emacs itself
8501 and the installed version should be used. Whatever the reason for the
8502 problem, this new feature makes it easier to solve.
8503
8504 ** When your program contains a fixed file name (like .completions or
8505 .abbrev.defs), the file name usually needs to be different on operating
8506 systems with limited file name syntax.
8507
8508 Now you can avoid ad-hoc conditionals by using the function
8509 convert-standard-filename to convert the file name to a proper form
8510 for each operating system. Here is an example of use, from the file
8511 completions.el:
8512
8513 (defvar save-completions-file-name
8514 (convert-standard-filename "~/.completions")
8515 "*The filename to save completions to.")
8516
8517 This sets the variable save-completions-file-name to a value that
8518 depends on the operating system, because the definition of
8519 convert-standard-filename depends on the operating system. On
8520 Unix-like systems, it returns the specified file name unchanged. On
8521 MS-DOS, it adapts the name to fit the limitations of that system.
8522
8523 ** The interactive spec N now returns the numeric prefix argument
8524 rather than the raw prefix argument. (It still reads a number using the
8525 minibuffer if there is no prefix argument at all.)
8526
8527 ** When a process is deleted, this no longer disconnects the process
8528 marker from its buffer position.
8529
8530 ** The variable garbage-collection-messages now controls whether
8531 Emacs displays a message at the beginning and end of garbage collection.
8532 The default is nil, meaning there are no messages.
8533
8534 ** The variable debug-ignored-errors specifies certain kinds of errors
8535 that should not enter the debugger. Its value is a list of error
8536 condition symbols and/or regular expressions. If the error has any
8537 of the condition symbols listed, or if any of the regular expressions
8538 matches the error message, then that error does not enter the debugger,
8539 regardless of the value of debug-on-error.
8540
8541 This variable is initialized to match certain common but uninteresting
8542 errors that happen often during editing.
8543
8544 ** The new function error-message-string converts an error datum
8545 into its error message. The error datum is what condition-case
8546 puts into the variable, to describe the error that happened.
8547
8548 ** Anything that changes which buffer appears in a given window
8549 now runs the window-scroll-functions for that window.
8550
8551 ** The new function get-buffer-window-list returns a list of windows displaying
8552 a buffer. The function is called with the buffer (a buffer object or a buffer
8553 name) and two optional arguments specifying the minibuffer windows and frames
8554 to search. Therefore this function takes optional args like next-window etc.,
8555 and not get-buffer-window.
8556
8557 ** buffer-substring now runs the hook buffer-access-fontify-functions,
8558 calling each function with two arguments--the range of the buffer
8559 being accessed. buffer-substring-no-properties does not call them.
8560
8561 If you use this feature, you should set the variable
8562 buffer-access-fontified-property to a non-nil symbol, which is a
8563 property name. Then, if all the characters in the buffer range have a
8564 non-nil value for that property, the buffer-access-fontify-functions
8565 are not called. When called, these functions should put a non-nil
8566 property on the text that they fontify, so that they won't get called
8567 over and over for the same text.
8568
8569 ** Changes in lisp-mnt.el
8570
8571 *** The lisp-mnt package can now recognize file headers that are written
8572 in the formats used by the `what' command and the RCS `ident' command:
8573
8574 ;; @(#) HEADER: text
8575 ;; $HEADER: text $
8576
8577 in addition to the normal
8578
8579 ;; HEADER: text
8580
8581 *** The commands lm-verify and lm-synopsis are now interactive. lm-verify
8582 checks that the library file has proper sections and headers, and
8583 lm-synopsis extracts first line "synopsis'"information.
8584
8585
8586 \f
8587 * For older news, see the file ONEWS
8588
8589 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
8590 Copyright information:
8591
8592 Copyright (C) 1999, 2000 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
8593
8594 Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim copies
8595 of this document as received, in any medium, provided that the
8596 copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved,
8597 thus giving the recipient permission to redistribute in turn.
8598
8599 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions
8600 of this document, or of portions of it,
8601 under the above conditions, provided also that they
8602 carry prominent notices stating who last changed them.
8603 \f
8604 Local variables:
8605 mode: outline
8606 paragraph-separate: "[ \f]*$"
8607 end: