comparison etc/NEWS @ 30922:6c3081f54e62

*** empty log message ***
author Gerd Moellmann <gerd@gnu.org>
date Thu, 17 Aug 2000 15:38:59 +0000
parents 3be7720ce052
children ac1cc84d89c9
comparison
equal deleted inserted replaced
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1 GNU Emacs NEWS -- history of user-visible changes. 2000-08-14 1 GNU Emacs NEWS -- history of user-visible changes. 2000-08-14
2 Copyright (C) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000 Free Software Foundation, Inc. 2 Copyright (C) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3 See the end for copying conditions. 3 See the end for copying conditions.
4 4
5 Please send Emacs bug reports to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. 5 Please send Emacs bug reports to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
6 For older news, see the file NEWS.1. 6 For older news, see the file ONEWS
7 7
8 8
9 * Installation Changes in Emacs 21.1 9 * Installation Changes in Emacs 21.1
10 10
11 ** Support for GNU/Linux on IA64 machines has been added. 11 ** Support for GNU/Linux on IA64 machines has been added.
3454 to a solid box, as it does on Unix. The `cursor-type' frame parameter 3454 to a solid box, as it does on Unix. The `cursor-type' frame parameter
3455 overrides this as it does on Unix, except that the bar cursor is 3455 overrides this as it does on Unix, except that the bar cursor is
3456 horizontal rather than vertical (since the MS-DOS display doesn't 3456 horizontal rather than vertical (since the MS-DOS display doesn't
3457 support a vertical-bar cursor). 3457 support a vertical-bar cursor).
3458 3458
3459
3460 ^L
3461 * Emacs 20.7 is a bug-fix release with few user-visible changes
3462
3463 ** It is now possible to use CCL-based coding systems for keyboard
3464 input.
3465
3466 ** ange-ftp now handles FTP security extensions, like Kerberos.
3467
3468 ** Rmail has been extended to recognize more forms of digest messages.
3469
3470 ** Now, most coding systems set in keyboard coding system work not
3471 only for character input, but also in incremental search. The
3472 exceptions are such coding systems that handle 2-byte character sets
3473 (e.g euc-kr, euc-jp) and that use ISO's escape sequence
3474 (e.g. iso-2022-jp). They are ignored in incremental search.
3475
3476 ** Support for Macintosh PowerPC-based machines running GNU/Linux has
3477 been added.
3478
3479 ^L
3480 * Emacs 20.6 is a bug-fix release with one user-visible change
3481
3482 ** Support for ARM-based non-RISCiX machines has been added.
3483
3484 ^L
3485 * Emacs 20.5 is a bug-fix release with no user-visible changes.
3486
3487 ** Not new, but not mentioned before:
3488 M-w when Transient Mark mode is enabled disables the mark.
3459 3489
3460 * For older news, see the file NEWS.1. 3490 * Changes in Emacs 20.4
3491
3492 ** Init file may be called .emacs.el.
3493
3494 You can now call the Emacs init file `.emacs.el'.
3495 Formerly the name had to be `.emacs'. If you use the name
3496 `.emacs.el', you can byte-compile the file in the usual way.
3497
3498 If both `.emacs' and `.emacs.el' exist, the latter file
3499 is the one that is used.
3500
3501 ** shell-command, and shell-command-on-region, now return
3502 the exit code of the command (unless it is asynchronous).
3503 Also, you can specify a place to put the error output,
3504 separate from the command's regular output.
3505 Interactively, the variable shell-command-default-error-buffer
3506 says where to put error output; set it to a buffer name.
3507 In calls from Lisp, an optional argument ERROR-BUFFER specifies
3508 the buffer name.
3509
3510 When you specify a non-nil error buffer (or buffer name), any error
3511 output is inserted before point in that buffer, with \f\n to separate
3512 it from the previous batch of error output. The error buffer is not
3513 cleared, so error output from successive commands accumulates there.
3514
3515 ** Setting the default value of enable-multibyte-characters to nil in
3516 the .emacs file, either explicitly using setq-default, or via Custom,
3517 is now essentially equivalent to using --unibyte: all buffers
3518 created during startup will be made unibyte after loading .emacs.
3519
3520 ** C-x C-f now handles the wildcards * and ? in file names. For
3521 example, typing C-x C-f c*.c RET visits all the files whose names
3522 match c*.c. To visit a file whose name contains * or ?, add the
3523 quoting sequence /: to the beginning of the file name.
3524
3525 ** The M-x commands keep-lines, flush-lines and count-matches
3526 now have the same feature as occur and query-replace:
3527 if the pattern contains any upper case letters, then
3528 they never ignore case.
3529
3530 ** The end-of-line format conversion feature previously mentioned
3531 under `* Emacs 20.1 changes for MS-DOS and MS-Windows' actually
3532 applies to all operating systems. Emacs recognizes from the contents
3533 of a file what convention it uses to separate lines--newline, CRLF, or
3534 just CR--and automatically converts the contents to the normal Emacs
3535 convention (using newline to separate lines) for editing. This is a
3536 part of the general feature of coding system conversion.
3537
3538 If you subsequently save the buffer, Emacs converts the text back to
3539 the same format that was used in the file before.
3540
3541 You can turn off end-of-line conversion by setting the variable
3542 `inhibit-eol-conversion' to non-nil, e.g. with Custom in the MULE group.
3543
3544 ** The character set property `prefered-coding-system' has been
3545 renamed to `preferred-coding-system', for the sake of correct spelling.
3546 This is a fairly internal feature, so few programs should be affected.
3547
3548 ** Mode-line display of end-of-line format is changed.
3549 The indication of the end-of-line format of the file visited by a
3550 buffer is now more explicit when that format is not the usual one for
3551 your operating system. For example, the DOS-style end-of-line format
3552 is displayed as "(DOS)" on Unix and GNU/Linux systems. The usual
3553 end-of-line format is still displayed as a single character (colon for
3554 Unix, backslash for DOS and Windows, and forward slash for the Mac).
3555
3556 The values of the variables eol-mnemonic-unix, eol-mnemonic-dos,
3557 eol-mnemonic-mac, and eol-mnemonic-undecided, which are strings,
3558 control what is displayed in the mode line for each end-of-line
3559 format. You can now customize these variables.
3560
3561 ** In the previous version of Emacs, tar-mode didn't work well if a
3562 filename contained non-ASCII characters. Now this is fixed. Such a
3563 filename is decoded by file-name-coding-system if the default value of
3564 enable-multibyte-characters is non-nil.
3565
3566 ** The command temp-buffer-resize-mode toggles a minor mode
3567 in which temporary buffers (such as help buffers) are given
3568 windows just big enough to hold the whole contents.
3569
3570 ** If you use completion.el, you must now run the function
3571 dynamic-completion-mode to enable it. Just loading the file
3572 doesn't have any effect.
3573
3574 ** In Flyspell mode, the default is now to make just one Ispell process,
3575 not one per buffer.
3576
3577 ** If you use iswitchb but do not call (iswitchb-default-keybindings) to
3578 use the default keybindings, you will need to add the following line:
3579 (add-hook 'minibuffer-setup-hook 'iswitchb-minibuffer-setup)
3580
3581 ** Auto-show mode is no longer enabled just by loading auto-show.el.
3582 To control it, set `auto-show-mode' via Custom or use the
3583 `auto-show-mode' command.
3584
3585 ** Handling of X fonts' ascent/descent parameters has been changed to
3586 avoid redisplay problems. As a consequence, compared with previous
3587 versions the line spacing and frame size now differ with some font
3588 choices, typically increasing by a pixel per line. This change
3589 occurred in version 20.3 but was not documented then.
3590
3591 ** If you select the bar cursor style, it uses the frame's
3592 cursor-color, rather than the cursor foreground pixel.
3593
3594 ** In multibyte mode, Rmail decodes incoming MIME messages using the
3595 character set specified in the message. If you want to disable this
3596 feature, set the variable rmail-decode-mime-charset to nil.
3597
3598 ** Not new, but not mentioned previously in NEWS: when you use #! at
3599 the beginning of a file to make it executable and specify an
3600 interpreter program, Emacs looks on the second line for the -*- mode
3601 and variable specification, as well as on the first line.
3602
3603 ** Support for IBM codepage encoding of non-ASCII characters.
3604
3605 The new command M-x codepage-setup creates a special coding system
3606 that can be used to convert text between a specific IBM codepage and
3607 one of the character sets built into Emacs which matches that
3608 codepage. For example, codepage 850 corresponds to Latin-1 character
3609 set, codepage 855 corresponds to Cyrillic-ISO character set, etc.
3610
3611 Windows codepages 1250, 1251 and some others, where Windows deviates
3612 from the corresponding ISO character set, are also supported.
3613
3614 IBM box-drawing characters and other glyphs which don't have
3615 equivalents in the corresponding ISO character set, are converted to
3616 a character defined by dos-unsupported-char-glyph on MS-DOS, and to
3617 `?' on other systems.
3618
3619 IBM codepages are widely used on MS-DOS and MS-Windows, so this
3620 feature is most useful on those platforms, but it can also be used on
3621 Unix.
3622
3623 Emacs compiled for MS-DOS automatically loads the support for the
3624 current codepage when it starts.
3625
3626 ** Mail changes
3627
3628 *** When mail is sent using compose-mail (C-x m), and if
3629 `mail-send-nonascii' is set to the new default value `mime',
3630 appropriate MIME headers are added. The headers are added only if
3631 non-ASCII characters are present in the body of the mail, and no other
3632 MIME headers are already present. For example, the following three
3633 headers are added if the coding system used in the *mail* buffer is
3634 latin-1:
3635
3636 MIME-version: 1.0
3637 Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
3638 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
3639
3640 *** The new variable default-sendmail-coding-system specifies the
3641 default way to encode outgoing mail. This has higher priority than
3642 default-buffer-file-coding-system but has lower priority than
3643 sendmail-coding-system and the local value of
3644 buffer-file-coding-system.
3645
3646 You should not set this variable manually. Instead, set
3647 sendmail-coding-system to specify a fixed encoding for all outgoing
3648 mail.
3649
3650 *** When you try to send a message that contains non-ASCII characters,
3651 if the coding system specified by those variables doesn't handle them,
3652 Emacs will ask you to select a suitable coding system while showing a
3653 list of possible coding systems.
3654
3655 ** CC Mode changes
3656
3657 *** c-default-style can now take an association list that maps major
3658 modes to style names. When this variable is an alist, Java mode no
3659 longer hardcodes a setting to "java" style. See the variable's
3660 docstring for details.
3661
3662 *** It's now possible to put a list as the offset on a syntactic
3663 symbol. The list is evaluated recursively until a non-nil offset is
3664 found. This is useful to combine several lineup functions to act in a
3665 prioritized order on a single line. However, none of the supplied
3666 lineup functions use this feature currently.
3667
3668 *** New syntactic symbol catch-clause, which is used on the "catch" and
3669 "finally" lines in try-catch constructs in C++ and Java.
3670
3671 *** New cleanup brace-catch-brace on c-cleanup-list, which does for
3672 "catch" lines what brace-elseif-brace does for "else if" lines.
3673
3674 *** The braces of Java anonymous inner classes are treated separately
3675 from the braces of other classes in auto-newline mode. Two new
3676 symbols inexpr-class-open and inexpr-class-close may be used on
3677 c-hanging-braces-alist to control the automatic newlines used for
3678 anonymous classes.
3679
3680 *** Support for the Pike language added, along with new Pike specific
3681 syntactic symbols: inlambda, lambda-intro-cont
3682
3683 *** Support for Java anonymous classes via new syntactic symbol
3684 inexpr-class. New syntactic symbol inexpr-statement for Pike
3685 support and gcc-style statements inside expressions. New lineup
3686 function c-lineup-inexpr-block.
3687
3688 *** New syntactic symbol brace-entry-open which is used in brace lists
3689 (i.e. static initializers) when a list entry starts with an open
3690 brace. These used to be recognized as brace-list-entry's.
3691 c-electric-brace also recognizes brace-entry-open braces
3692 (brace-list-entry's can no longer be electrified).
3693
3694 *** New command c-indent-line-or-region, not bound by default.
3695
3696 *** `#' is only electric when typed in the indentation of a line.
3697
3698 *** Parentheses are now electric (via the new command c-electric-paren)
3699 for auto-reindenting lines when parens are typed.
3700
3701 *** In "gnu" style, inline-open offset is now set to zero.
3702
3703 *** Uniform handling of the inclass syntactic symbol. The indentation
3704 associated with it is now always relative to the class opening brace.
3705 This means that the indentation behavior has changed in some
3706 circumstances, but only if you've put anything besides 0 on the
3707 class-open syntactic symbol (none of the default styles do that).
3708
3709 ** Gnus changes.
3710
3711 *** New functionality for using Gnus as an offline newsreader has been
3712 added. A plethora of new commands and modes have been added. See the
3713 Gnus manual for the full story.
3714
3715 *** The nndraft backend has returned, but works differently than
3716 before. All Message buffers are now also articles in the nndraft
3717 group, which is created automatically.
3718
3719 *** `gnus-alter-header-function' can now be used to alter header
3720 values.
3721
3722 *** `gnus-summary-goto-article' now accept Message-ID's.
3723
3724 *** A new Message command for deleting text in the body of a message
3725 outside the region: `C-c C-v'.
3726
3727 *** You can now post to component group in nnvirtual groups with
3728 `C-u C-c C-c'.
3729
3730 *** `nntp-rlogin-program' -- new variable to ease customization.
3731
3732 *** `C-u C-c C-c' in `gnus-article-edit-mode' will now inhibit
3733 re-highlighting of the article buffer.
3734
3735 *** New element in `gnus-boring-article-headers' -- `long-to'.
3736
3737 *** `M-i' symbolic prefix command. See the section "Symbolic
3738 Prefixes" in the Gnus manual for details.
3739
3740 *** `L' and `I' in the summary buffer now take the symbolic prefix
3741 `a' to add the score rule to the "all.SCORE" file.
3742
3743 *** `gnus-simplify-subject-functions' variable to allow greater
3744 control over simplification.
3745
3746 *** `A T' -- new command for fetching the current thread.
3747
3748 *** `/ T' -- new command for including the current thread in the
3749 limit.
3750
3751 *** `M-RET' is a new Message command for breaking cited text.
3752
3753 *** \\1-expressions are now valid in `nnmail-split-methods'.
3754
3755 *** The `custom-face-lookup' function has been removed.
3756 If you used this function in your initialization files, you must
3757 rewrite them to use `face-spec-set' instead.
3758
3759 *** Cancelling now uses the current select method. Symbolic prefix
3760 `a' forces normal posting method.
3761
3762 *** New command to translate M******** sm*rtq**t*s into proper text
3763 -- `W d'.
3764
3765 *** For easier debugging of nntp, you can set `nntp-record-commands'
3766 to a non-nil value.
3767
3768 *** nntp now uses ~/.authinfo, a .netrc-like file, for controlling
3769 where and how to send AUTHINFO to NNTP servers.
3770
3771 *** A command for editing group parameters from the summary buffer
3772 has been added.
3773
3774 *** A history of where mails have been split is available.
3775
3776 *** A new article date command has been added -- `article-date-iso8601'.
3777
3778 *** Subjects can be simplified when threading by setting
3779 `gnus-score-thread-simplify'.
3780
3781 *** A new function for citing in Message has been added --
3782 `message-cite-original-without-signature'.
3783
3784 *** `article-strip-all-blank-lines' -- new article command.
3785
3786 *** A new Message command to kill to the end of the article has
3787 been added.
3788
3789 *** A minimum adaptive score can be specified by using the
3790 `gnus-adaptive-word-minimum' variable.
3791
3792 *** The "lapsed date" article header can be kept continually
3793 updated by the `gnus-start-date-timer' command.
3794
3795 *** Web listserv archives can be read with the nnlistserv backend.
3796
3797 *** Old dejanews archives can now be read by nnweb.
3798
3799 *** `gnus-posting-styles' has been re-activated.
3800
3801 ** Changes to TeX and LaTeX mode
3802
3803 *** The new variable `tex-start-options-string' can be used to give
3804 options for the TeX run. The default value causes TeX to run in
3805 nonstopmode. For an interactive TeX run set it to nil or "".
3806
3807 *** The command `tex-feed-input' sends input to the Tex Shell. In a
3808 TeX buffer it is bound to the keys C-RET, C-c RET, and C-c C-m (some
3809 of these keys may not work on all systems). For instance, if you run
3810 TeX interactively and if the TeX run stops because of an error, you
3811 can continue it without leaving the TeX buffer by typing C-RET.
3812
3813 *** The Tex Shell Buffer is now in `compilation-shell-minor-mode'.
3814 All error-parsing commands of the Compilation major mode are available
3815 but bound to keys that don't collide with the shell. Thus you can use
3816 the Tex Shell for command line executions like a usual shell.
3817
3818 *** The commands `tex-validate-region' and `tex-validate-buffer' check
3819 the matching of braces and $'s. The errors are listed in a *Occur*
3820 buffer and you can use C-c C-c or mouse-2 to go to a particular
3821 mismatch.
3822
3823 ** Changes to RefTeX mode
3824
3825 *** The table of contents buffer can now also display labels and
3826 file boundaries in addition to sections. Use `l', `i', and `c' keys.
3827
3828 *** Labels derived from context (the section heading) are now
3829 lowercase by default. To make the label legal in LaTeX, latin-1
3830 characters will lose their accent. All Mule characters will be
3831 removed from the label.
3832
3833 *** The automatic display of cross reference information can also use
3834 a window instead of the echo area. See variable `reftex-auto-view-crossref'.
3835
3836 *** kpsewhich can be used by RefTeX to find TeX and BibTeX files. See the
3837 customization group `reftex-finding-files'.
3838
3839 *** The option `reftex-bibfile-ignore-list' has been renamed to
3840 `reftex-bibfile-ignore-regexps' and indeed can be fed with regular
3841 expressions.
3842
3843 *** Multiple Selection buffers are now hidden buffers.
3844
3845 ** New/deleted modes and packages
3846
3847 *** The package snmp-mode.el provides major modes for editing SNMP and
3848 SNMPv2 MIBs. It has entries on `auto-mode-alist'.
3849
3850 *** The package sql.el provides a major mode, M-x sql-mode, for
3851 editing SQL files, and M-x sql-interactive-mode for interacting with
3852 SQL interpreters. It has an entry on `auto-mode-alist'.
3853
3854 *** M-x highlight-changes-mode provides a minor mode displaying buffer
3855 changes with a special face.
3856
3857 *** ispell4.el has been deleted. It got in the way of ispell.el and
3858 this was hard to fix reliably. It has long been obsolete -- use
3859 Ispell 3.1 and ispell.el.
3860
3861 * MS-DOS changes in Emacs 20.4
3862
3863 ** Emacs compiled for MS-DOS now supports MULE features better.
3864 This includes support for display of all ISO 8859-N character sets,
3865 conversion to and from IBM codepage encoding of non-ASCII characters,
3866 and automatic setup of the MULE environment at startup. For details,
3867 check out the section `MS-DOS and MULE' in the manual.
3868
3869 The MS-DOS installation procedure automatically configures and builds
3870 Emacs with input method support if it finds an unpacked Leim
3871 distribution when the config.bat script is run.
3872
3873 ** Formerly, the value of lpr-command did not affect printing on
3874 MS-DOS unless print-region-function was set to nil, but now it
3875 controls whether an external program is invoked or output is written
3876 directly to a printer port. Similarly, in the previous version of
3877 Emacs, the value of ps-lpr-command did not affect PostScript printing
3878 on MS-DOS unless ps-printer-name was set to something other than a
3879 string (eg. t or `pipe'), but now it controls whether an external
3880 program is used. (These changes were made so that configuration of
3881 printing variables would be almost identical across all platforms.)
3882
3883 ** In the previous version of Emacs, PostScript and non-PostScript
3884 output was piped to external programs, but because most print programs
3885 available for MS-DOS and MS-Windows cannot read data from their standard
3886 input, on those systems the data to be output is now written to a
3887 temporary file whose name is passed as the last argument to the external
3888 program.
3889
3890 An exception is made for `print', a standard program on Windows NT,
3891 and `nprint', a standard program on Novell Netware. For both of these
3892 programs, the command line is constructed in the appropriate syntax
3893 automatically, using only the value of printer-name or ps-printer-name
3894 as appropriate--the value of the relevant `-switches' variable is
3895 ignored, as both programs have no useful switches.
3896
3897 ** The value of the variable dos-printer (cf. dos-ps-printer), if it has
3898 a value, overrides the value of printer-name (cf. ps-printer-name), on
3899 MS-DOS and MS-Windows only. This has been true since version 20.3, but
3900 was not documented clearly before.
3901
3902 ** All the Emacs games now work on MS-DOS terminals.
3903 This includes Tetris and Snake.
3904
3905 * Lisp changes in Emacs 20.4
3906
3907 ** New functions line-beginning-position and line-end-position
3908 return the position of the beginning or end of the current line.
3909 They both accept an optional argument, which has the same
3910 meaning as the argument to beginning-of-line or end-of-line.
3911
3912 ** find-file and allied functions now have an optional argument
3913 WILDCARD. If this is non-nil, they do wildcard processing,
3914 and visit all files that match the wildcard pattern.
3915
3916 ** Changes in the file-attributes function.
3917
3918 *** The file size returned by file-attributes may be an integer or a float.
3919 It is an integer if the size fits in a Lisp integer, float otherwise.
3920
3921 *** The inode number returned by file-attributes may be an integer (if
3922 the number fits in a Lisp integer) or a cons cell containing two
3923 integers.
3924
3925 ** The new function directory-files-and-attributes returns a list of
3926 files in a directory and their attributes. It accepts the same
3927 arguments as directory-files and has similar semantics, except that
3928 file names and attributes are returned.
3929
3930 ** The new function file-attributes-lessp is a helper function for
3931 sorting the list generated by directory-files-and-attributes. It
3932 accepts two arguments, each a list of a file name and its atttributes.
3933 It compares the file names of each according to string-lessp and
3934 returns the result.
3935
3936 ** The new function file-expand-wildcards expands a wildcard-pattern
3937 to produce a list of existing files that match the pattern.
3938
3939 ** New functions for base64 conversion:
3940
3941 The function base64-encode-region converts a part of the buffer
3942 into the base64 code used in MIME. base64-decode-region
3943 performs the opposite conversion. Line-breaking is supported
3944 optionally.
3945
3946 Functions base64-encode-string and base64-decode-string do a similar
3947 job on the text in a string. They return the value as a new string.
3948
3949 **
3950 The new function process-running-child-p
3951 will tell you if a subprocess has given control of its
3952 terminal to its own child process.
3953
3954 ** interrupt-process and such functions have a new feature:
3955 when the second argument is `lambda', they send a signal
3956 to the running child of the subshell, if any, but if the shell
3957 itself owns its terminal, no signal is sent.
3958
3959 ** There are new widget types `plist' and `alist' which can
3960 be used for customizing variables whose values are plists or alists.
3961
3962 ** easymenu.el Now understands `:key-sequence' and `:style button'.
3963 :included is an alias for :visible.
3964
3965 easy-menu-add-item now understands the values returned by
3966 easy-menu-remove-item and easy-menu-item-present-p. This can be used
3967 to move or copy menu entries.
3968
3969 ** Multibyte editing changes
3970
3971 *** The definitions of sref and char-bytes are changed. Now, sref is
3972 an alias of aref and char-bytes always returns 1. This change is to
3973 make some Emacs Lisp code which works on 20.2 and earlier also
3974 work on the latest Emacs. Such code uses a combination of sref and
3975 char-bytes in a loop typically as below:
3976 (setq char (sref str idx)
3977 idx (+ idx (char-bytes idx)))
3978 The byte-compiler now warns that this is obsolete.
3979
3980 If you want to know how many bytes a specific multibyte character
3981 (say, CH) occupies in a multibyte buffer, use this code:
3982 (charset-bytes (char-charset ch))
3983
3984 *** In multibyte mode, when you narrow a buffer to some region, and the
3985 region is preceded or followed by non-ASCII codes, inserting or
3986 deleting at the head or the end of the region may signal this error:
3987
3988 Byte combining across boundary of accessible buffer text inhibitted
3989
3990 This is to avoid some bytes being combined together into a character
3991 across the boundary.
3992
3993 *** The functions find-charset-region and find-charset-string include
3994 `unknown' in the returned list in the following cases:
3995 o The current buffer or the target string is unibyte and
3996 contains 8-bit characters.
3997 o The current buffer or the target string is multibyte and
3998 contains invalid characters.
3999
4000 *** The functions decode-coding-region and encode-coding-region remove
4001 text properties of the target region. Ideally, they should correctly
4002 preserve text properties, but for the moment, it's hard. Removing
4003 text properties is better than preserving them in a less-than-correct
4004 way.
4005
4006 *** prefer-coding-system sets EOL conversion of default coding systems.
4007 If the argument to prefer-coding-system specifies a certain type of
4008 end of line conversion, the default coding systems set by
4009 prefer-coding-system will specify that conversion type for end of line.
4010
4011 *** The new function thai-compose-string can be used to properly
4012 compose Thai characters in a string.
4013
4014 ** The primitive `define-prefix-command' now takes an optional third
4015 argument NAME, which should be a string. It supplies the menu name
4016 for the created keymap. Keymaps created in order to be displayed as
4017 menus should always use the third argument.
4018
4019 ** The meanings of optional second arguments for read-char,
4020 read-event, and read-char-exclusive are flipped. Now the second
4021 arguments are INHERIT-INPUT-METHOD. These functions use the current
4022 input method (if any) if and only if INHERIT-INPUT-METHOD is non-nil.
4023
4024 ** The new function clear-this-command-keys empties out the contents
4025 of the vector that (this-command-keys) returns. This is useful in
4026 programs that read passwords, to prevent the passwords from echoing
4027 inadvertently as part of the next command in certain cases.
4028
4029 ** The new macro `with-temp-message' displays a temporary message in
4030 the echo area, while executing some Lisp code. Like `progn', it
4031 returns the value of the last form, but it also restores the previous
4032 echo area contents.
4033
4034 (with-temp-message MESSAGE &rest BODY)
4035
4036 ** The function `require' now takes an optional third argument
4037 NOERROR. If it is non-nil, then there is no error if the
4038 requested feature cannot be loaded.
4039
4040 ** In the function modify-face, an argument of (nil) for the
4041 foreground color, background color or stipple pattern
4042 means to clear out that attribute.
4043
4044 ** The `outer-window-id' frame property of an X frame
4045 gives the window number of the outermost X window for the frame.
4046
4047 ** Temporary buffers made with with-output-to-temp-buffer are now
4048 read-only by default, and normally use the major mode Help mode
4049 unless you put them in some other non-Fundamental mode before the
4050 end of with-output-to-temp-buffer.
4051
4052 ** The new functions gap-position and gap-size return information on
4053 the gap of the current buffer.
4054
4055 ** The new functions position-bytes and byte-to-position provide a way
4056 to convert between character positions and byte positions in the
4057 current buffer.
4058
4059 ** vc.el defines two new macros, `edit-vc-file' and `with-vc-file', to
4060 facilitate working with version-controlled files from Lisp programs.
4061 These macros check out a given file automatically if needed, and check
4062 it back in after any modifications have been made.
4063
4064 * Installation Changes in Emacs 20.3
4065
4066 ** The default value of load-path now includes most subdirectories of
4067 the site-specific directories /usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp and
4068 /usr/local/share/emacs/VERSION/site-lisp, in addition to those
4069 directories themselves. Both immediate subdirectories and
4070 subdirectories multiple levels down are added to load-path.
4071
4072 Not all subdirectories are included, though. Subdirectories whose
4073 names do not start with a letter or digit are excluded.
4074 Subdirectories named RCS or CVS are excluded. Also, a subdirectory
4075 which contains a file named `.nosearch' is excluded. You can use
4076 these methods to prevent certain subdirectories from being searched.
4077
4078 Emacs finds these subdirectories and adds them to load-path when it
4079 starts up. While it would be cleaner to find the subdirectories each
4080 time Emacs loads a file, that would be much slower.
4081
4082 This feature is an incompatible change. If you have stored some Emacs
4083 Lisp files in a subdirectory of the site-lisp directory specifically
4084 to prevent them from being used, you will need to rename the
4085 subdirectory to start with a non-alphanumeric character, or create a
4086 `.nosearch' file in it, in order to continue to achieve the desired
4087 results.
4088
4089 ** Emacs no longer includes an old version of the C preprocessor from
4090 GCC. This was formerly used to help compile Emacs with C compilers
4091 that had limits on the significant length of an identifier, but in
4092 fact we stopped supporting such compilers some time ago.
4093
4094 * Changes in Emacs 20.3
4095
4096 ** The new command C-x z (repeat) repeats the previous command
4097 including its argument. If you repeat the z afterward,
4098 it repeats the command additional times; thus, you can
4099 perform many repetitions with one keystroke per repetition.
4100
4101 ** Emacs now supports "selective undo" which undoes only within a
4102 specified region. To do this, set point and mark around the desired
4103 region and type C-u C-x u (or C-u C-_). You can then continue undoing
4104 further, within the same region, by repeating the ordinary undo
4105 command C-x u or C-_. This will keep undoing changes that were made
4106 within the region you originally specified, until either all of them
4107 are undone, or it encounters a change which crosses the edge of that
4108 region.
4109
4110 In Transient Mark mode, undoing when a region is active requests
4111 selective undo.
4112
4113 ** If you specify --unibyte when starting Emacs, then all buffers are
4114 unibyte, except when a Lisp program specifically creates a multibyte
4115 buffer. Setting the environment variable EMACS_UNIBYTE has the same
4116 effect. The --no-unibyte option overrides EMACS_UNIBYTE and directs
4117 Emacs to run normally in multibyte mode.
4118
4119 The option --unibyte does not affect the reading of Emacs Lisp files,
4120 though. If you want a Lisp file to be read in unibyte mode, use
4121 -*-unibyte: t;-*- on its first line. That will force Emacs to
4122 load that file in unibyte mode, regardless of how Emacs was started.
4123
4124 ** toggle-enable-multibyte-characters no longer has a key binding and
4125 no longer appears in the menu bar. We've realized that changing the
4126 enable-multibyte-characters variable in an existing buffer is
4127 something that most users not do.
4128
4129 ** You can specify a coding system to use for the next cut or paste
4130 operations through the window system with the command C-x RET X.
4131 The coding system can make a difference for communication with other
4132 applications.
4133
4134 C-x RET x specifies a coding system for all subsequent cutting and
4135 pasting operations.
4136
4137 ** You can specify the printer to use for commands that do printing by
4138 setting the variable `printer-name'. Just what a printer name looks
4139 like depends on your operating system. You can specify a different
4140 printer for the Postscript printing commands by setting
4141 `ps-printer-name'.
4142
4143 ** Emacs now supports on-the-fly spell checking by the means of a
4144 minor mode. It is called M-x flyspell-mode. You don't have to remember
4145 any other special commands to use it, and you will hardly notice it
4146 except when you make a spelling error. Flyspell works by highlighting
4147 incorrect words as soon as they are completed or as soon as the cursor
4148 hits a new word.
4149
4150 Flyspell mode works with whichever dictionary you have selected for
4151 Ispell in Emacs. In TeX mode, it understands TeX syntax so as not
4152 to be confused by TeX commands.
4153
4154 You can correct a misspelled word by editing it into something
4155 correct. You can also correct it, or accept it as correct, by
4156 clicking on the word with Mouse-2; that gives you a pop-up menu
4157 of various alternative replacements and actions.
4158
4159 Flyspell mode also proposes "automatic" corrections. M-TAB replaces
4160 the current misspelled word with a possible correction. If several
4161 corrections are made possible, M-TAB cycles through them in
4162 alphabetical order, or in order of decreasing likelihood if
4163 flyspell-sort-corrections is nil.
4164
4165 Flyspell mode also flags an error when a word is repeated, if
4166 flyspell-mark-duplications-flag is non-nil.
4167
4168 ** Changes in input method usage.
4169
4170 Now you can use arrow keys (right, left, down, up) for selecting among
4171 the alternatives just the same way as you do by C-f, C-b, C-n, and C-p
4172 respectively.
4173
4174 You can use the ENTER key to accept the current conversion.
4175
4176 If you type TAB to display a list of alternatives, you can select one
4177 of the alternatives with Mouse-2.
4178
4179 The meaning of the variable `input-method-verbose-flag' is changed so
4180 that you can set it to t, nil, `default', or `complex-only'.
4181
4182 If the value is nil, extra guidance is never given.
4183
4184 If the value is t, extra guidance is always given.
4185
4186 If the value is `complex-only', extra guidance is always given only
4187 when you are using complex input methods such as chinese-py.
4188
4189 If the value is `default' (this is the default), extra guidance is
4190 given in the following case:
4191 o When you are using a complex input method.
4192 o When you are using a simple input method but not in the minibuffer.
4193
4194 If you are using Emacs through a very slow line, setting
4195 input-method-verbose-flag to nil or to complex-only is a good choice,
4196 and if you are using an input method you are not familiar with,
4197 setting it to t is helpful.
4198
4199 The old command select-input-method is now called set-input-method.
4200
4201 In the language environment "Korean", you can use the following
4202 keys:
4203 Shift-SPC toggle-korean-input-method
4204 C-F9 quail-hangul-switch-symbol-ksc
4205 F9 quail-hangul-switch-hanja
4206 These key bindings are canceled when you switch to another language
4207 environment.
4208
4209 ** The minibuffer history of file names now records the specified file
4210 names, not the entire minibuffer input. For example, if the
4211 minibuffer starts out with /usr/foo/, you might type in /etc/passwd to
4212 get
4213
4214 /usr/foo//etc/passwd
4215
4216 which stands for the file /etc/passwd.
4217
4218 Formerly, this used to put /usr/foo//etc/passwd in the history list.
4219 Now this puts just /etc/passwd in the history list.
4220
4221 ** If you are root, Emacs sets backup-by-copying-when-mismatch to t
4222 at startup, so that saving a file will be sure to preserve
4223 its owner and group.
4224
4225 ** find-func.el can now also find the place of definition of Emacs
4226 Lisp variables in user-loaded libraries.
4227
4228 ** C-x r t (string-rectangle) now deletes the existing rectangle
4229 contents before inserting the specified string on each line.
4230
4231 ** There is a new command delete-whitespace-rectangle
4232 which deletes whitespace starting from a particular column
4233 in all the lines on a rectangle. The column is specified
4234 by the left edge of the rectangle.
4235
4236 ** You can now store a number into a register with C-u NUMBER C-x r n REG,
4237 increment it by INC with C-u INC C-x r + REG (to increment by one, omit
4238 C-u INC), and insert it in the buffer with C-x r g REG. This is useful
4239 for writing keyboard macros.
4240
4241 ** The new command M-x speedbar displays a frame in which directories,
4242 files, and tags can be displayed, manipulated, and jumped to. The
4243 frame defaults to 20 characters in width, and is the same height as
4244 the frame that it was started from. Some major modes define
4245 additional commands for the speedbar, including Rmail, GUD/GDB, and
4246 info.
4247
4248 ** query-replace-regexp is now bound to C-M-%.
4249
4250 ** In Transient Mark mode, when the region is active, M-x
4251 query-replace and the other replace commands now operate on the region
4252 contents only.
4253
4254 ** M-x write-region, when used interactively, now asks for
4255 confirmation before overwriting an existing file. When you call
4256 the function from a Lisp program, a new optional argument CONFIRM
4257 says whether to ask for confirmation in this case.
4258
4259 ** If you use find-file-literally and the file is already visited
4260 non-literally, the command asks you whether to revisit the file
4261 literally. If you say no, it signals an error.
4262
4263 ** Major modes defined with the "derived mode" feature
4264 now use the proper name for the mode hook: WHATEVER-mode-hook.
4265 Formerly they used the name WHATEVER-mode-hooks, but that is
4266 inconsistent with Emacs conventions.
4267
4268 ** shell-command-on-region (and shell-command) reports success or
4269 failure if the command produces no output.
4270
4271 ** Set focus-follows-mouse to nil if your window system or window
4272 manager does not transfer focus to another window when you just move
4273 the mouse.
4274
4275 ** mouse-menu-buffer-maxlen has been renamed to
4276 mouse-buffer-menu-maxlen to be consistent with the other related
4277 function and variable names.
4278
4279 ** The new variable auto-coding-alist specifies coding systems for
4280 reading specific files. This has higher priority than
4281 file-coding-system-alist.
4282
4283 ** If you set the variable unibyte-display-via-language-environment to
4284 t, then Emacs displays non-ASCII characters are displayed by
4285 converting them to the equivalent multibyte characters according to
4286 the current language environment. As a result, they are displayed
4287 according to the current fontset.
4288
4289 ** C-q's handling of codes in the range 0200 through 0377 is changed.
4290
4291 The codes in the range 0200 through 0237 are inserted as one byte of
4292 that code regardless of the values of nonascii-translation-table and
4293 nonascii-insert-offset.
4294
4295 For the codes in the range 0240 through 0377, if
4296 enable-multibyte-characters is non-nil and nonascii-translation-table
4297 nor nonascii-insert-offset can't convert them to valid multibyte
4298 characters, they are converted to Latin-1 characters.
4299
4300 ** If you try to find a file that is not read-accessible, you now get
4301 an error, rather than an empty buffer and a warning.
4302
4303 ** In the minibuffer history commands M-r and M-s, an upper case
4304 letter in the regular expression forces case-sensitive search.
4305
4306 ** In the *Help* buffer, cross-references to commands and variables
4307 are inferred and hyperlinked. Use C-h m in Help mode for the relevant
4308 command keys.
4309
4310 ** M-x apropos-command, with a prefix argument, no longer looks for
4311 user option variables--instead it looks for noninteractive functions.
4312
4313 Meanwhile, the command apropos-variable normally searches for
4314 user option variables; with a prefix argument, it looks at
4315 all variables that have documentation.
4316
4317 ** When you type a long line in the minibuffer, and the minibuffer
4318 shows just one line, automatically scrolling works in a special way
4319 that shows you overlap with the previous line of text. The variable
4320 minibuffer-scroll-overlap controls how many characters of overlap
4321 it should show; the default is 20.
4322
4323 Meanwhile, Resize Minibuffer mode is still available; in that mode,
4324 the minibuffer grows taller (up to a point) as needed to show the whole
4325 of your input.
4326
4327 ** The new command M-x customize-changed-options lets you customize
4328 all the options whose meanings or default values have changed in
4329 recent Emacs versions. You specify a previous Emacs version number as
4330 argument, and the command creates a customization buffer showing all
4331 the customizable options which were changed since that version.
4332 Newly added options are included as well.
4333
4334 If you don't specify a particular version number argument,
4335 then the customization buffer shows all the customizable options
4336 for which Emacs versions of changes are recorded.
4337
4338 This function is also bound to the Changed Options entry in the
4339 Customize menu.
4340
4341 ** When you run M-x grep with a prefix argument, it figures out
4342 the tag around point and puts that into the default grep command.
4343
4344 ** The new command M-* (pop-tag-mark) pops back through a history of
4345 buffer positions from which M-. or other tag-finding commands were
4346 invoked.
4347
4348 ** The new variable comment-padding specifies the number of spaces
4349 that `comment-region' will insert before the actual text of the comment.
4350 The default is 1.
4351
4352 ** In Fortran mode the characters `.', `_' and `$' now have symbol
4353 syntax, not word syntax. Fortran mode now supports `imenu' and has
4354 new commands fortran-join-line (M-^) and fortran-narrow-to-subprogram
4355 (C-x n d). M-q can be used to fill a statement or comment block
4356 sensibly.
4357
4358 ** GUD now supports jdb, the Java debugger, and pdb, the Python debugger.
4359
4360 ** If you set the variable add-log-keep-changes-together to a non-nil
4361 value, the command `C-x 4 a' will automatically notice when you make
4362 two entries in one day for one file, and combine them.
4363
4364 ** You can use the command M-x diary-mail-entries to mail yourself a
4365 reminder about upcoming diary entries. See the documentation string
4366 for a sample shell script for calling this function automatically
4367 every night.
4368
4369 ** Desktop changes
4370
4371 *** All you need to do to enable use of the Desktop package, is to set
4372 the variable desktop-enable to t with Custom.
4373
4374 *** Minor modes are now restored. Which minor modes are restored
4375 and how modes are restored is controlled by `desktop-minor-mode-table'.
4376
4377 ** There is no need to do anything special, now, to enable Gnus to
4378 read and post multi-lingual articles.
4379
4380 ** Outline mode has now support for showing hidden outlines when
4381 doing an isearch. In order for this to happen search-invisible should
4382 be set to open (the default). If an isearch match is inside a hidden
4383 outline the outline is made visible. If you continue pressing C-s and
4384 the match moves outside the formerly invisible outline, the outline is
4385 made invisible again.
4386
4387 ** Mail reading and sending changes
4388
4389 *** The Rmail e command now switches to displaying the whole header of
4390 the message before it lets you edit the message. This is so that any
4391 changes you make in the header will not be lost if you subsequently
4392 toggle.
4393
4394 *** The w command in Rmail, which writes the message body into a file,
4395 now works in the summary buffer as well. (The command to delete the
4396 summary buffer is now Q.) The default file name for the w command, if
4397 the message has no subject, is stored in the variable
4398 rmail-default-body-file.
4399
4400 *** Most of the commands and modes that operate on mail and netnews no
4401 longer depend on the value of mail-header-separator. Instead, they
4402 handle whatever separator the buffer happens to use.
4403
4404 *** If you set mail-signature to a value which is not t, nil, or a string,
4405 it should be an expression. When you send a message, this expression
4406 is evaluated to insert the signature.
4407
4408 *** The new Lisp library feedmail.el (version 8) enhances processing of
4409 outbound email messages. It works in coordination with other email
4410 handling packages (e.g., rmail, VM, gnus) and is responsible for
4411 putting final touches on messages and actually submitting them for
4412 transmission. Users of the emacs program "fakemail" might be
4413 especially interested in trying feedmail.
4414
4415 feedmail is not enabled by default. See comments at the top of
4416 feedmail.el for set-up instructions. Among the bigger features
4417 provided by feedmail are:
4418
4419 **** you can park outgoing messages into a disk-based queue and
4420 stimulate sending some or all of them later (handy for laptop users);
4421 there is also a queue for draft messages
4422
4423 **** you can get one last look at the prepped outbound message and
4424 be prompted for confirmation
4425
4426 **** does smart filling of address headers
4427
4428 **** can generate a MESSAGE-ID: line and a DATE: line; the date can be
4429 the time the message was written or the time it is being sent; this
4430 can make FCC copies more closely resemble copies that recipients get
4431
4432 **** you can specify an arbitrary function for actually transmitting
4433 the message; included in feedmail are interfaces for /bin/[r]mail,
4434 /usr/lib/sendmail, and elisp smtpmail; it's easy to write a new
4435 function for something else (10-20 lines of elisp)
4436
4437 ** Dired changes
4438
4439 *** The Dired function dired-do-toggle, which toggles marked and unmarked
4440 files, is now bound to "t" instead of "T".
4441
4442 *** dired-at-point has been added to ffap.el. It allows one to easily
4443 run Dired on the directory name at point.
4444
4445 *** Dired has a new command: %g. It searches the contents of
4446 files in the directory and marks each file that contains a match
4447 for a specified regexp.
4448
4449 ** VC Changes
4450
4451 *** New option vc-ignore-vc-files lets you turn off version control
4452 conveniently.
4453
4454 *** VC Dired has been completely rewritten. It is now much
4455 faster, especially for CVS, and works very similar to ordinary
4456 Dired.
4457
4458 VC Dired is invoked by typing C-x v d and entering the name of the
4459 directory to display. By default, VC Dired gives you a recursive
4460 listing of all files at or below the given directory which are
4461 currently locked (for CVS, all files not up-to-date are shown).
4462
4463 You can change the listing format by setting vc-dired-recurse to nil,
4464 then it shows only the given directory, and you may also set
4465 vc-dired-terse-display to nil, then it shows all files under version
4466 control plus the names of any subdirectories, so that you can type `i'
4467 on such lines to insert them manually, as in ordinary Dired.
4468
4469 All Dired commands operate normally in VC Dired, except for `v', which
4470 is redefined as the version control prefix. That means you may type
4471 `v l', `v =' etc. to invoke `vc-print-log', `vc-diff' and the like on
4472 the file named in the current Dired buffer line. `v v' invokes
4473 `vc-next-action' on this file, or on all files currently marked.
4474
4475 The new command `v t' (vc-dired-toggle-terse-mode) allows you to
4476 toggle between terse display (only locked files) and full display (all
4477 VC files plus subdirectories). There is also a special command,
4478 `* l', to mark all files currently locked.
4479
4480 Giving a prefix argument to C-x v d now does the same thing as in
4481 ordinary Dired: it allows you to supply additional options for the ls
4482 command in the minibuffer, to fine-tune VC Dired's output.
4483
4484 *** Under CVS, if you merge changes from the repository into a working
4485 file, and CVS detects conflicts, VC now offers to start an ediff
4486 session to resolve them.
4487
4488 Alternatively, you can use the new command `vc-resolve-conflicts' to
4489 resolve conflicts in a file at any time. It works in any buffer that
4490 contains conflict markers as generated by rcsmerge (which is what CVS
4491 uses as well).
4492
4493 *** You can now transfer changes between branches, using the new
4494 command vc-merge (C-x v m). It is implemented for RCS and CVS. When
4495 you invoke it in a buffer under version-control, you can specify
4496 either an entire branch or a pair of versions, and the changes on that
4497 branch or between the two versions are merged into the working file.
4498 If this results in any conflicts, they may be resolved interactively,
4499 using ediff.
4500
4501 ** Changes in Font Lock
4502
4503 *** The face and variable previously known as font-lock-reference-face
4504 are now called font-lock-constant-face to better reflect their typical
4505 use for highlighting constants and labels. (Its face properties are
4506 unchanged.) The variable font-lock-reference-face remains for now for
4507 compatibility reasons, but its value is font-lock-constant-face.
4508
4509 ** Frame name display changes
4510
4511 *** The command set-frame-name lets you set the name of the current
4512 frame. You can use the new command select-frame-by-name to select and
4513 raise a frame; this is mostly useful on character-only terminals, or
4514 when many frames are invisible or iconified.
4515
4516 *** On character-only terminal (not a window system), changing the
4517 frame name is now reflected on the mode line and in the Buffers/Frames
4518 menu.
4519
4520 ** Comint (subshell) changes
4521
4522 *** In Comint modes, the commands to kill, stop or interrupt a
4523 subjob now also kill pending input. This is for compatibility
4524 with ordinary shells, where the signal characters do this.
4525
4526 *** There are new commands in Comint mode.
4527
4528 C-c C-x fetches the "next" line from the input history;
4529 that is, the line after the last line you got.
4530 You can use this command to fetch successive lines, one by one.
4531
4532 C-c SPC accumulates lines of input. More precisely, it arranges to
4533 send the current line together with the following line, when you send
4534 the following line.
4535
4536 C-c C-a if repeated twice consecutively now moves to the process mark,
4537 which separates the pending input from the subprocess output and the
4538 previously sent input.
4539
4540 C-c M-r now runs comint-previous-matching-input-from-input;
4541 it searches for a previous command, using the current pending input
4542 as the search string.
4543
4544 *** New option compilation-scroll-output can be set to scroll
4545 automatically in compilation-mode windows.
4546
4547 ** C mode changes
4548
4549 *** Multiline macros are now handled, both as they affect indentation,
4550 and as recognized syntax. New syntactic symbol cpp-macro-cont is
4551 assigned to second and subsequent lines of a multiline macro
4552 definition.
4553
4554 *** A new style "user" which captures all non-hook-ified
4555 (i.e. top-level) .emacs file variable settings and customizations.
4556 Style "cc-mode" is an alias for "user" and is deprecated. "gnu"
4557 style is still the default however.
4558
4559 *** "java" style now conforms to Sun's JDK coding style.
4560
4561 *** There are new commands c-beginning-of-defun, c-end-of-defun which
4562 are alternatives which you could bind to C-M-a and C-M-e if you prefer
4563 them. They do not have key bindings by default.
4564
4565 *** New and improved implementations of M-a (c-beginning-of-statement)
4566 and M-e (c-end-of-statement).
4567
4568 *** C++ namespace blocks are supported, with new syntactic symbols
4569 namespace-open, namespace-close, and innamespace.
4570
4571 *** File local variable settings of c-file-style and c-file-offsets
4572 makes the style variables local to that buffer only.
4573
4574 *** New indentation functions c-lineup-close-paren,
4575 c-indent-one-line-block, c-lineup-dont-change.
4576
4577 *** Improvements (hopefully!) to the way CC Mode is loaded. You
4578 should now be able to do a (require 'cc-mode) to get the entire
4579 package loaded properly for customization in your .emacs file. A new
4580 variable c-initialize-on-load controls this and is t by default.
4581
4582 ** Changes to hippie-expand.
4583
4584 *** New customization variable `hippie-expand-dabbrev-skip-space'. If
4585 non-nil, trailing spaces may be included in the abbreviation to search for,
4586 which then gives the same behavior as the original `dabbrev-expand'.
4587
4588 *** New customization variable `hippie-expand-dabbrev-as-symbol'. If
4589 non-nil, characters of syntax '_' is considered part of the word when
4590 expanding dynamically.
4591
4592 *** New customization variable `hippie-expand-no-restriction'. If
4593 non-nil, narrowed buffers are widened before they are searched.
4594
4595 *** New customization variable `hippie-expand-only-buffers'. If
4596 non-empty, buffers searched are restricted to the types specified in
4597 this list. Useful for example when constructing new special-purpose
4598 expansion functions with `make-hippie-expand-function'.
4599
4600 *** Text properties of the expansion are no longer copied.
4601
4602 ** Changes in BibTeX mode.
4603
4604 *** Any titleword matching a regexp in the new variable
4605 bibtex-autokey-titleword-ignore (case sensitive) is ignored during
4606 automatic key generation. This replaces variable
4607 bibtex-autokey-titleword-first-ignore, which only checked for matches
4608 against the first word in the title.
4609
4610 *** Autokey generation now uses all words from the title, not just
4611 capitalized words. To avoid conflicts with existing customizations,
4612 bibtex-autokey-titleword-ignore is set up such that words starting with
4613 lowerkey characters will still be ignored. Thus, if you want to use
4614 lowercase words from the title, you will have to overwrite the
4615 bibtex-autokey-titleword-ignore standard setting.
4616
4617 *** Case conversion of names and title words for automatic key
4618 generation is more flexible. Variable bibtex-autokey-preserve-case is
4619 replaced by bibtex-autokey-titleword-case-convert and
4620 bibtex-autokey-name-case-convert.
4621
4622 ** Changes in vcursor.el.
4623
4624 *** Support for character terminals is available: there is a new keymap
4625 and the vcursor will appear as an arrow between buffer text. A
4626 variable `vcursor-interpret-input' allows input from the vcursor to be
4627 entered exactly as if typed. Numerous functions, including
4628 `vcursor-compare-windows', have been rewritten to improve consistency
4629 in the selection of windows and corresponding keymaps.
4630
4631 *** vcursor options can now be altered with M-x customize under the
4632 Editing group once the package is loaded.
4633
4634 *** Loading vcursor now does not define keys by default, as this is
4635 generally a bad side effect. Use M-x customize to set
4636 vcursor-key-bindings to t to restore the old behaviour.
4637
4638 *** vcursor-auto-disable can be `copy', which turns off copying from the
4639 vcursor, but doesn't disable it, after any non-vcursor command.
4640
4641 ** Ispell changes.
4642
4643 *** You can now spell check comments and strings in the current
4644 buffer with M-x ispell-comments-and-strings. Comments and strings
4645 are identified by syntax tables in effect.
4646
4647 *** Generic region skipping implemented.
4648 A single buffer can be broken into a number of regions where text will
4649 and will not be checked. The definitions of the regions can be user
4650 defined. New applications and improvements made available by this
4651 include:
4652
4653 o URLs are automatically skipped
4654 o EMail message checking is vastly improved.
4655
4656 *** Ispell can highlight the erroneous word even on non-window terminals.
4657
4658 ** Changes to RefTeX mode
4659
4660 RefTeX has been updated in order to make it more usable with very
4661 large projects (like a several volume math book). The parser has been
4662 re-written from scratch. To get maximum speed from RefTeX, check the
4663 section `Optimizations' in the manual.
4664
4665 *** New recursive parser.
4666
4667 The old version of RefTeX created a single large buffer containing the
4668 entire multifile document in order to parse the document. The new
4669 recursive parser scans the individual files.
4670
4671 *** Parsing only part of a document.
4672
4673 Reparsing of changed document parts can now be made faster by enabling
4674 partial scans. To use this feature, read the documentation string of
4675 the variable `reftex-enable-partial-scans' and set the variable to t.
4676
4677 (setq reftex-enable-partial-scans t)
4678
4679 *** Storing parsing information in a file.
4680
4681 This can improve startup times considerably. To turn it on, use
4682
4683 (setq reftex-save-parse-info t)
4684
4685 *** Using multiple selection buffers
4686
4687 If the creation of label selection buffers is too slow (this happens
4688 for large documents), you can reuse these buffers by setting
4689
4690 (setq reftex-use-multiple-selection-buffers t)
4691
4692 *** References to external documents.
4693
4694 The LaTeX package `xr' allows to cross-reference labels in external
4695 documents. RefTeX can provide information about the external
4696 documents as well. To use this feature, set up the \externaldocument
4697 macros required by the `xr' package and rescan the document with
4698 RefTeX. The external labels can then be accessed with the `x' key in
4699 the selection buffer provided by `reftex-reference' (bound to `C-c )').
4700 The `x' key also works in the table of contents buffer.
4701
4702 *** Many more labeled LaTeX environments are recognized by default.
4703
4704 The builtin command list now covers all the standard LaTeX commands,
4705 and all of the major packages included in the LaTeX distribution.
4706
4707 Also, RefTeX now understands the \appendix macro and changes
4708 the enumeration of sections in the *toc* buffer accordingly.
4709
4710 *** Mouse support for selection and *toc* buffers
4711
4712 The mouse can now be used to select items in the selection and *toc*
4713 buffers. See also the new option `reftex-highlight-selection'.
4714
4715 *** New keymaps for selection and table of contents modes.
4716
4717 The selection processes for labels and citation keys, and the table of
4718 contents buffer now have their own keymaps: `reftex-select-label-map',
4719 `reftex-select-bib-map', `reftex-toc-map'. The selection processes
4720 have a number of new keys predefined. In particular, TAB lets you
4721 enter a label with completion. Check the on-the-fly help (press `?'
4722 at the selection prompt) or read the Info documentation to find out
4723 more.
4724
4725 *** Support for the varioref package
4726
4727 The `v' key in the label selection buffer toggles \ref versus \vref.
4728
4729 *** New hooks
4730
4731 Three new hooks can be used to redefine the way labels, references,
4732 and citations are created. These hooks are
4733 `reftex-format-label-function', `reftex-format-ref-function',
4734 `reftex-format-cite-function'.
4735
4736 *** Citations outside LaTeX
4737
4738 The command `reftex-citation' may also be used outside LaTeX (e.g. in
4739 a mail buffer). See the Info documentation for details.
4740
4741 *** Short context is no longer fontified.
4742
4743 The short context in the label menu no longer copies the
4744 fontification from the text in the buffer. If you prefer it to be
4745 fontified, use
4746
4747 (setq reftex-refontify-context t)
4748
4749 ** file-cache-minibuffer-complete now accepts a prefix argument.
4750 With a prefix argument, it does not try to do completion of
4751 the file name within its directory; it only checks for other
4752 directories that contain the same file name.
4753
4754 Thus, given the file name Makefile, and assuming that a file
4755 Makefile.in exists in the same directory, ordinary
4756 file-cache-minibuffer-complete will try to complete Makefile to
4757 Makefile.in and will therefore never look for other directories that
4758 have Makefile. A prefix argument tells it not to look for longer
4759 names such as Makefile.in, so that instead it will look for other
4760 directories--just as if the name were already complete in its present
4761 directory.
4762
4763 ** New modes and packages
4764
4765 *** There is a new alternative major mode for Perl, Cperl mode.
4766 It has many more features than Perl mode, and some people prefer
4767 it, but some do not.
4768
4769 *** There is a new major mode, M-x vhdl-mode, for editing files of VHDL
4770 code.
4771
4772 *** M-x which-function-mode enables a minor mode that displays the
4773 current function name continuously in the mode line, as you move
4774 around in a buffer.
4775
4776 Which Function mode is effective in major modes which support Imenu.
4777
4778 *** Gametree is a major mode for editing game analysis trees. The author
4779 uses it for keeping notes about his postal Chess games, but it should
4780 be helpful for other two-player games as well, as long as they have an
4781 established system of notation similar to Chess.
4782
4783 *** The new minor mode checkdoc-minor-mode provides Emacs Lisp
4784 documentation string checking for style and spelling. The style
4785 guidelines are found in the Emacs Lisp programming manual.
4786
4787 *** The net-utils package makes some common networking features
4788 available in Emacs. Some of these functions are wrappers around
4789 system utilities (ping, nslookup, etc); others are implementations of
4790 simple protocols (finger, whois) in Emacs Lisp. There are also
4791 functions to make simple connections to TCP/IP ports for debugging and
4792 the like.
4793
4794 *** highlight-changes-mode is a minor mode that uses colors to
4795 identify recently changed parts of the buffer text.
4796
4797 *** The new package `midnight' lets you specify things to be done
4798 within Emacs at midnight--by default, kill buffers that you have not
4799 used in a considerable time. To use this feature, customize
4800 the user option `midnight-mode' to t.
4801
4802 *** The file generic-x.el defines a number of simple major modes.
4803
4804 apache-generic-mode: For Apache and NCSA httpd configuration files
4805 samba-generic-mode: Samba configuration files
4806 fvwm-generic-mode: For fvwm initialization files
4807 x-resource-generic-mode: For X resource files
4808 hosts-generic-mode: For hosts files (.rhosts, /etc/hosts, etc)
4809 mailagent-rules-generic-mode: For mailagent .rules files
4810 javascript-generic-mode: For JavaScript files
4811 vrml-generic-mode: For VRML files
4812 java-manifest-generic-mode: For Java MANIFEST files
4813 java-properties-generic-mode: For Java property files
4814 mailrc-generic-mode: For .mailrc files
4815
4816 Platform-specific modes:
4817
4818 prototype-generic-mode: For Solaris/Sys V prototype files
4819 pkginfo-generic-mode: For Solaris/Sys V pkginfo files
4820 alias-generic-mode: For C shell alias files
4821 inf-generic-mode: For MS-Windows INF files
4822 ini-generic-mode: For MS-Windows INI files
4823 reg-generic-mode: For MS-Windows Registry files
4824 bat-generic-mode: For MS-Windows BAT scripts
4825 rc-generic-mode: For MS-Windows Resource files
4826 rul-generic-mode: For InstallShield scripts
4827
4828 * Lisp changes in Emacs 20.3 since the Emacs Lisp Manual was published
4829
4830 ** If you want a Lisp file to be read in unibyte mode,
4831 use -*-unibyte: t;-*- on its first line.
4832 That will force Emacs to read that file in unibyte mode.
4833 Otherwise, the file will be loaded and byte-compiled in multibyte mode.
4834
4835 Thus, each lisp file is read in a consistent way regardless of whether
4836 you started Emacs with --unibyte, so that a Lisp program gives
4837 consistent results regardless of how Emacs was started.
4838
4839 ** The new function assoc-default is useful for searching an alist,
4840 and using a default value if the key is not found there. You can
4841 specify a comparison predicate, so this function is useful for
4842 searching comparing a string against an alist of regular expressions.
4843
4844 ** The functions unibyte-char-to-multibyte and
4845 multibyte-char-to-unibyte convert between unibyte and multibyte
4846 character codes, in a way that is appropriate for the current language
4847 environment.
4848
4849 ** The functions read-event, read-char and read-char-exclusive now
4850 take two optional arguments. PROMPT, if non-nil, specifies a prompt
4851 string. SUPPRESS-INPUT-METHOD, if non-nil, says to disable the
4852 current input method for reading this one event.
4853
4854 ** Two new variables print-escape-nonascii and print-escape-multibyte
4855 now control whether to output certain characters as
4856 backslash-sequences. print-escape-nonascii applies to single-byte
4857 non-ASCII characters; print-escape-multibyte applies to multibyte
4858 characters. Both of these variables are used only when printing
4859 in readable fashion (prin1 uses them, princ does not).
4860
4861 * Lisp changes in Emacs 20.3 before the Emacs Lisp Manual was published
4862
4863 ** Compiled Emacs Lisp files made with the modified "MBSK" version
4864 of Emacs 20.2 do not work in Emacs 20.3.
4865
4866 ** Buffer positions are now measured in characters, as they were
4867 in Emacs 19 and before. This means that (forward-char 1)
4868 always increases point by 1.
4869
4870 The function chars-in-region now just subtracts its arguments. It is
4871 considered obsolete. The function char-boundary-p has been deleted.
4872
4873 See below for additional changes relating to multibyte characters.
4874
4875 ** defcustom, defface and defgroup now accept the keyword `:version'.
4876 Use this to specify in which version of Emacs a certain variable's
4877 default value changed. For example,
4878
4879 (defcustom foo-max 34 "*Maximum number of foo's allowed."
4880 :type 'integer
4881 :group 'foo
4882 :version "20.3")
4883
4884 (defgroup foo-group nil "The foo group."
4885 :version "20.3")
4886
4887 If an entire new group is added or the variables in it have the
4888 default values changed, then just add a `:version' to that group. It
4889 is recommended that new packages added to the distribution contain a
4890 `:version' in the top level group.
4891
4892 This information is used to control the customize-changed-options command.
4893
4894 ** It is now an error to change the value of a symbol whose name
4895 starts with a colon--if it is interned in the standard obarray.
4896
4897 However, setting such a symbol to its proper value, which is that
4898 symbol itself, is not an error. This is for the sake of programs that
4899 support previous Emacs versions by explicitly setting these variables
4900 to themselves.
4901
4902 If you set the variable keyword-symbols-constant-flag to nil,
4903 this error is suppressed, and you can set these symbols to any
4904 values whatever.
4905
4906 ** There is a new debugger command, R.
4907 It evaluates an expression like e, but saves the result
4908 in the buffer *Debugger-record*.
4909
4910 ** Frame-local variables.
4911
4912 You can now make a variable local to various frames. To do this, call
4913 the function make-variable-frame-local; this enables frames to have
4914 local bindings for that variable.
4915
4916 These frame-local bindings are actually frame parameters: you create a
4917 frame-local binding in a specific frame by calling
4918 modify-frame-parameters and specifying the variable name as the
4919 parameter name.
4920
4921 Buffer-local bindings take precedence over frame-local bindings.
4922 Thus, if the current buffer has a buffer-local binding, that binding is
4923 active; otherwise, if the selected frame has a frame-local binding,
4924 that binding is active; otherwise, the default binding is active.
4925
4926 It would not be hard to implement window-local bindings, but it is not
4927 clear that this would be very useful; windows tend to come and go in a
4928 very transitory fashion, so that trying to produce any specific effect
4929 through a window-local binding would not be very robust.
4930
4931 ** `sregexq' and `sregex' are two new functions for constructing
4932 "symbolic regular expressions." These are Lisp expressions that, when
4933 evaluated, yield conventional string-based regexps. The symbolic form
4934 makes it easier to construct, read, and maintain complex patterns.
4935 See the documentation in sregex.el.
4936
4937 ** parse-partial-sexp's return value has an additional element which
4938 is used to pass information along if you pass it to another call to
4939 parse-partial-sexp, starting its scan where the first call ended.
4940 The contents of this field are not yet finalized.
4941
4942 ** eval-region now accepts a fourth optional argument READ-FUNCTION.
4943 If it is non-nil, that function is used instead of `read'.
4944
4945 ** unload-feature by default removes the feature's functions from
4946 known hooks to avoid trouble, but a package providing FEATURE can
4947 define a hook FEATURE-unload-hook to be run by unload-feature instead.
4948
4949 ** read-from-minibuffer no longer returns the argument DEFAULT-VALUE
4950 when the user enters empty input. It now returns the null string, as
4951 it did in Emacs 19. The default value is made available in the
4952 history via M-n, but it is not applied here as a default.
4953
4954 The other, more specialized minibuffer-reading functions continue to
4955 return the default value (not the null string) when the user enters
4956 empty input.
4957
4958 ** The new variable read-buffer-function controls which routine to use
4959 for selecting buffers. For example, if you set this variable to
4960 `iswitchb-read-buffer', iswitchb will be used to read buffer names.
4961 Other functions can also be used if they accept the same arguments as
4962 `read-buffer' and return the selected buffer name as a string.
4963
4964 ** The new function read-passwd reads a password from the terminal,
4965 echoing a period for each character typed. It takes three arguments:
4966 a prompt string, a flag which says "read it twice to make sure", and a
4967 default password to use if the user enters nothing.
4968
4969 ** The variable fill-nobreak-predicate gives major modes a way to
4970 specify not to break a line at certain places. Its value is a
4971 function which is called with no arguments, with point located at the
4972 place where a break is being considered. If the function returns
4973 non-nil, then the line won't be broken there.
4974
4975 ** window-end now takes an optional second argument, UPDATE.
4976 If this is non-nil, then the function always returns an accurate
4977 up-to-date value for the buffer position corresponding to the
4978 end of the window, even if this requires computation.
4979
4980 ** other-buffer now takes an optional argument FRAME
4981 which specifies which frame's buffer list to use.
4982 If it is nil, that means use the selected frame's buffer list.
4983
4984 ** The new variable buffer-display-time, always local in every buffer,
4985 holds the value of (current-time) as of the last time that a window
4986 was directed to display this buffer.
4987
4988 ** It is now meaningful to compare two window-configuration objects
4989 with `equal'. Two window-configuration objects are equal if they
4990 describe equivalent arrangements of windows, in the same frame--in
4991 other words, if they would give the same results if passed to
4992 set-window-configuration.
4993
4994 ** compare-window-configurations is a new function that compares two
4995 window configurations loosely. It ignores differences in saved buffer
4996 positions and scrolling, and considers only the structure and sizes of
4997 windows and the choice of buffers to display.
4998
4999 ** The variable minor-mode-overriding-map-alist allows major modes to
5000 override the key bindings of a minor mode. The elements of this alist
5001 look like the elements of minor-mode-map-alist: (VARIABLE . KEYMAP).
5002
5003 If the VARIABLE in an element of minor-mode-overriding-map-alist has a
5004 non-nil value, the paired KEYMAP is active, and totally overrides the
5005 map (if any) specified for the same variable in minor-mode-map-alist.
5006
5007 minor-mode-overriding-map-alist is automatically local in all buffers,
5008 and it is meant to be set by major modes.
5009
5010 ** The function match-string-no-properties is like match-string
5011 except that it discards all text properties from the result.
5012
5013 ** The function load-average now accepts an optional argument
5014 USE-FLOATS. If it is non-nil, the load average values are returned as
5015 floating point numbers, rather than as integers to be divided by 100.
5016
5017 ** The new variable temporary-file-directory specifies the directory
5018 to use for creating temporary files. The default value is determined
5019 in a reasonable way for your operating system; on GNU and Unix systems
5020 it is based on the TMP and TMPDIR environment variables.
5021
5022 ** Menu changes
5023
5024 *** easymenu.el now uses the new menu item format and supports the
5025 keywords :visible and :filter. The existing keyword :keys is now
5026 better supported.
5027
5028 The variable `easy-menu-precalculate-equivalent-keybindings' controls
5029 a new feature which calculates keyboard equivalents for the menu when
5030 you define the menu. The default is t. If you rarely use menus, you
5031 can set the variable to nil to disable this precalculation feature;
5032 then the calculation is done only if you use the menu bar.
5033
5034 *** A new format for menu items is supported.
5035
5036 In a keymap, a key binding that has the format
5037 (STRING . REAL-BINDING) or (STRING HELP-STRING . REAL-BINDING)
5038 defines a menu item. Now a menu item definition may also be a list that
5039 starts with the symbol `menu-item'.
5040
5041 The format is:
5042 (menu-item ITEM-NAME) or
5043 (menu-item ITEM-NAME REAL-BINDING . ITEM-PROPERTY-LIST)
5044 where ITEM-NAME is an expression which evaluates to the menu item
5045 string, and ITEM-PROPERTY-LIST has the form of a property list.
5046 The supported properties include
5047
5048 :enable FORM Evaluate FORM to determine whether the
5049 item is enabled.
5050 :visible FORM Evaluate FORM to determine whether the
5051 item should appear in the menu.
5052 :filter FILTER-FN
5053 FILTER-FN is a function of one argument,
5054 which will be REAL-BINDING.
5055 It should return a binding to use instead.
5056 :keys DESCRIPTION
5057 DESCRIPTION is a string that describes an equivalent keyboard
5058 binding for for REAL-BINDING. DESCRIPTION is expanded with
5059 `substitute-command-keys' before it is used.
5060 :key-sequence KEY-SEQUENCE
5061 KEY-SEQUENCE is a key-sequence for an equivalent
5062 keyboard binding.
5063 :key-sequence nil
5064 This means that the command normally has no
5065 keyboard equivalent.
5066 :help HELP HELP is the extra help string (not currently used).
5067 :button (TYPE . SELECTED)
5068 TYPE is :toggle or :radio.
5069 SELECTED is a form, to be evaluated, and its
5070 value says whether this button is currently selected.
5071
5072 Buttons are at the moment only simulated by prefixes in the menu.
5073 Eventually ordinary X-buttons may be supported.
5074
5075 (menu-item ITEM-NAME) defines unselectable item.
5076
5077 ** New event types
5078
5079 *** The new event type `mouse-wheel' is generated by a wheel on a
5080 mouse (such as the MS Intellimouse). The event contains a delta that
5081 corresponds to the amount and direction that the wheel is rotated,
5082 which is typically used to implement a scroll or zoom. The format is:
5083
5084 (mouse-wheel POSITION DELTA)
5085
5086 where POSITION is a list describing the position of the event in the
5087 same format as a mouse-click event, and DELTA is a signed number
5088 indicating the number of increments by which the wheel was rotated. A
5089 negative DELTA indicates that the wheel was rotated backwards, towards
5090 the user, and a positive DELTA indicates that the wheel was rotated
5091 forward, away from the user.
5092
5093 As of now, this event type is generated only on MS Windows.
5094
5095 *** The new event type `drag-n-drop' is generated when a group of
5096 files is selected in an application outside of Emacs, and then dragged
5097 and dropped onto an Emacs frame. The event contains a list of
5098 filenames that were dragged and dropped, which are then typically
5099 loaded into Emacs. The format is:
5100
5101 (drag-n-drop POSITION FILES)
5102
5103 where POSITION is a list describing the position of the event in the
5104 same format as a mouse-click event, and FILES is the list of filenames
5105 that were dragged and dropped.
5106
5107 As of now, this event type is generated only on MS Windows.
5108
5109 ** Changes relating to multibyte characters.
5110
5111 *** The variable enable-multibyte-characters is now read-only;
5112 any attempt to set it directly signals an error. The only way
5113 to change this value in an existing buffer is with set-buffer-multibyte.
5114
5115 *** In a string constant, `\ ' now stands for "nothing at all". You
5116 can use it to terminate a hex escape which is followed by a character
5117 that could otherwise be read as part of the hex escape.
5118
5119 *** String indices are now measured in characters, as they were
5120 in Emacs 19 and before.
5121
5122 The function chars-in-string has been deleted.
5123 The function concat-chars has been renamed to `string'.
5124
5125 *** The function set-buffer-multibyte sets the flag in the current
5126 buffer that says whether the buffer uses multibyte representation or
5127 unibyte representation. If the argument is nil, it selects unibyte
5128 representation. Otherwise it selects multibyte representation.
5129
5130 This function does not change the contents of the buffer, viewed
5131 as a sequence of bytes. However, it does change the contents
5132 viewed as characters; a sequence of two bytes which is treated as
5133 one character when the buffer uses multibyte representation
5134 will count as two characters using unibyte representation.
5135
5136 This function sets enable-multibyte-characters to record which
5137 representation is in use. It also adjusts various data in the buffer
5138 (including its markers, overlays and text properties) so that they are
5139 consistent with the new representation.
5140
5141 *** string-make-multibyte takes a string and converts it to multibyte
5142 representation. Most of the time, you don't need to care
5143 about the representation, because Emacs converts when necessary;
5144 however, it makes a difference when you compare strings.
5145
5146 The conversion of non-ASCII characters works by adding the value of
5147 nonascii-insert-offset to each character, or by translating them
5148 using the table nonascii-translation-table.
5149
5150 *** string-make-unibyte takes a string and converts it to unibyte
5151 representation. Most of the time, you don't need to care about the
5152 representation, but it makes a difference when you compare strings.
5153
5154 The conversion from multibyte to unibyte representation
5155 loses information; the only time Emacs performs it automatically
5156 is when inserting a multibyte string into a unibyte buffer.
5157
5158 *** string-as-multibyte takes a string, and returns another string
5159 which contains the same bytes, but treats them as multibyte.
5160
5161 *** string-as-unibyte takes a string, and returns another string
5162 which contains the same bytes, but treats them as unibyte.
5163
5164 *** The new function compare-strings lets you compare
5165 portions of two strings. Unibyte strings are converted to multibyte,
5166 so that a unibyte string can match a multibyte string.
5167 You can specify whether to ignore case or not.
5168
5169 *** assoc-ignore-case now uses compare-strings so that
5170 it can treat unibyte and multibyte strings as equal.
5171
5172 *** Regular expression operations and buffer string searches now
5173 convert the search pattern to multibyte or unibyte to accord with the
5174 buffer or string being searched.
5175
5176 One consequence is that you cannot always use \200-\377 inside of
5177 [...] to match all non-ASCII characters. This does still work when
5178 searching or matching a unibyte buffer or string, but not when
5179 searching or matching a multibyte string. Unfortunately, there is no
5180 obvious choice of syntax to use within [...] for that job. But, what
5181 you want is just to match all non-ASCII characters, the regular
5182 expression [^\0-\177] works for it.
5183
5184 *** Structure of coding system changed.
5185
5186 All coding systems (including aliases and subsidiaries) are named
5187 by symbols; the symbol's `coding-system' property is a vector
5188 which defines the coding system. Aliases share the same vector
5189 as the principal name, so that altering the contents of this
5190 vector affects the principal name and its aliases. You can define
5191 your own alias name of a coding system by the function
5192 define-coding-system-alias.
5193
5194 The coding system definition includes a property list of its own. Use
5195 the new functions `coding-system-get' and `coding-system-put' to
5196 access such coding system properties as post-read-conversion,
5197 pre-write-conversion, character-translation-table-for-decode,
5198 character-translation-table-for-encode, mime-charset, and
5199 safe-charsets. For instance, (coding-system-get 'iso-latin-1
5200 'mime-charset) gives the corresponding MIME-charset parameter
5201 `iso-8859-1'.
5202
5203 Among the coding system properties listed above, safe-charsets is new.
5204 The value of this property is a list of character sets which this
5205 coding system can correctly encode and decode. For instance:
5206 (coding-system-get 'iso-latin-1 'safe-charsets) => (ascii latin-iso8859-1)
5207
5208 Here, "correctly encode" means that the encoded character sets can
5209 also be handled safely by systems other than Emacs as far as they
5210 are capable of that coding system. Though, Emacs itself can encode
5211 the other character sets and read it back correctly.
5212
5213 *** The new function select-safe-coding-system can be used to find a
5214 proper coding system for encoding the specified region or string.
5215 This function requires a user interaction.
5216
5217 *** The new functions find-coding-systems-region and
5218 find-coding-systems-string are helper functions used by
5219 select-safe-coding-system. They return a list of all proper coding
5220 systems to encode a text in some region or string. If you don't want
5221 a user interaction, use one of these functions instead of
5222 select-safe-coding-system.
5223
5224 *** The explicit encoding and decoding functions, such as
5225 decode-coding-region and encode-coding-string, now set
5226 last-coding-system-used to reflect the actual way encoding or decoding
5227 was done.
5228
5229 *** The new function detect-coding-with-language-environment can be
5230 used to detect a coding system of text according to priorities of
5231 coding systems used by some specific language environment.
5232
5233 *** The functions detect-coding-region and detect-coding-string always
5234 return a list if the arg HIGHEST is nil. Thus, if only ASCII
5235 characters are found, they now return a list of single element
5236 `undecided' or its subsidiaries.
5237
5238 *** The new functions coding-system-change-eol-conversion and
5239 coding-system-change-text-conversion can be used to get a different
5240 coding system than what specified only in how end-of-line or text is
5241 converted.
5242
5243 *** The new function set-selection-coding-system can be used to set a
5244 coding system for communicating with other X clients.
5245
5246 *** The function `map-char-table' now passes as argument only valid
5247 character codes, plus generic characters that stand for entire
5248 character sets or entire subrows of a character set. In other words,
5249 each time `map-char-table' calls its FUNCTION argument, the key value
5250 either will be a valid individual character code, or will stand for a
5251 range of characters.
5252
5253 *** The new function `char-valid-p' can be used for checking whether a
5254 Lisp object is a valid character code or not.
5255
5256 *** The new function `charset-after' returns a charset of a character
5257 in the current buffer at position POS.
5258
5259 *** Input methods are now implemented using the variable
5260 input-method-function. If this is non-nil, its value should be a
5261 function; then, whenever Emacs reads an input event that is a printing
5262 character with no modifier bits, it calls that function, passing the
5263 event as an argument. Often this function will read more input, first
5264 binding input-method-function to nil.
5265
5266 The return value should be a list of the events resulting from input
5267 method processing. These events will be processed sequentially as
5268 input, before resorting to unread-command-events. Events returned by
5269 the input method function are not passed to the input method function,
5270 not even if they are printing characters with no modifier bits.
5271
5272 The input method function is not called when reading the second and
5273 subsequent events of a key sequence.
5274
5275 *** You can customize any language environment by using
5276 set-language-environment-hook and exit-language-environment-hook.
5277
5278 The hook `exit-language-environment-hook' should be used to undo
5279 customizations that you made with set-language-environment-hook. For
5280 instance, if you set up a special key binding for a specific language
5281 environment by set-language-environment-hook, you should set up
5282 exit-language-environment-hook to restore the normal key binding.
5283
5284 * Changes in Emacs 20.1
5285
5286 ** Emacs has a new facility for customization of its many user
5287 options. It is called M-x customize. With this facility you can look
5288 at the many user options in an organized way; they are grouped into a
5289 tree structure.
5290
5291 M-x customize also knows what sorts of values are legitimate for each
5292 user option and ensures that you don't use invalid values.
5293
5294 With M-x customize, you can set options either for the present Emacs
5295 session or permanently. (Permanent settings are stored automatically
5296 in your .emacs file.)
5297
5298 ** Scroll bars are now on the left side of the window.
5299 You can change this with M-x customize-option scroll-bar-mode.
5300
5301 ** The mode line no longer includes the string `Emacs'.
5302 This makes more space in the mode line for other information.
5303
5304 ** When you select a region with the mouse, it is highlighted
5305 immediately afterward. At that time, if you type the DELETE key, it
5306 kills the region.
5307
5308 The BACKSPACE key, and the ASCII character DEL, do not do this; they
5309 delete the character before point, as usual.
5310
5311 ** In an incremental search the whole current match is highlighted
5312 on terminals which support this. (You can disable this feature
5313 by setting search-highlight to nil.)
5314
5315 ** In the minibuffer, in some cases, you can now use M-n to
5316 insert the default value into the minibuffer as text. In effect,
5317 the default value (if the minibuffer routines know it) is tacked
5318 onto the history "in the future". (The more normal use of the
5319 history list is to use M-p to insert minibuffer input used in the
5320 past.)
5321
5322 ** In Text mode, now only blank lines separate paragraphs.
5323 This makes it possible to get the full benefit of Adaptive Fill mode
5324 in Text mode, and other modes derived from it (such as Mail mode).
5325 TAB in Text mode now runs the command indent-relative; this
5326 makes a practical difference only when you use indented paragraphs.
5327
5328 As a result, the old Indented Text mode is now identical to Text mode,
5329 and is an alias for it.
5330
5331 If you want spaces at the beginning of a line to start a paragraph,
5332 use the new mode, Paragraph Indent Text mode.
5333
5334 ** Scrolling changes
5335
5336 *** Scroll commands to scroll a whole screen now preserve the screen
5337 position of the cursor, if scroll-preserve-screen-position is non-nil.
5338
5339 In this mode, if you scroll several screens back and forth, finishing
5340 on the same screen where you started, the cursor goes back to the line
5341 where it started.
5342
5343 *** If you set scroll-conservatively to a small number, then when you
5344 move point a short distance off the screen, Emacs will scroll the
5345 screen just far enough to bring point back on screen, provided that
5346 does not exceed `scroll-conservatively' lines.
5347
5348 *** The new variable scroll-margin says how close point can come to the
5349 top or bottom of a window. It is a number of screen lines; if point
5350 comes within that many lines of the top or bottom of the window, Emacs
5351 recenters the window.
5352
5353 ** International character set support (MULE)
5354
5355 Emacs now supports a wide variety of international character sets,
5356 including European variants of the Latin alphabet, as well as Chinese,
5357 Devanagari (Hindi and Marathi), Ethiopian, Greek, IPA, Japanese,
5358 Korean, Lao, Russian, Thai, Tibetan, and Vietnamese scripts. These
5359 features have been merged from the modified version of Emacs known as
5360 MULE (for "MULti-lingual Enhancement to GNU Emacs")
5361
5362 Users of these scripts have established many more-or-less standard
5363 coding systems for storing files. Emacs uses a single multibyte
5364 character encoding within Emacs buffers; it can translate from a wide
5365 variety of coding systems when reading a file and can translate back
5366 into any of these coding systems when saving a file.
5367
5368 Keyboards, even in the countries where these character sets are used,
5369 generally don't have keys for all the characters in them. So Emacs
5370 supports various "input methods", typically one for each script or
5371 language, to make it possible to type them.
5372
5373 The Emacs internal multibyte encoding represents a non-ASCII
5374 character as a sequence of bytes in the range 0200 through 0377.
5375
5376 The new prefix key C-x RET is used for commands that pertain
5377 to multibyte characters, coding systems, and input methods.
5378
5379 You can disable multibyte character support as follows:
5380
5381 (setq-default enable-multibyte-characters nil)
5382
5383 Calling the function standard-display-european turns off multibyte
5384 characters, unless you specify a non-nil value for the second
5385 argument, AUTO. This provides compatibility for people who are
5386 already using standard-display-european to continue using unibyte
5387 characters for their work until they want to change.
5388
5389 *** Input methods
5390
5391 An input method is a kind of character conversion which is designed
5392 specifically for interactive input. In Emacs, typically each language
5393 has its own input method (though sometimes several languages which use
5394 the same characters can share one input method). Some languages
5395 support several input methods.
5396
5397 The simplest kind of input method works by mapping ASCII letters into
5398 another alphabet. This is how the Greek and Russian input methods
5399 work.
5400
5401 A more powerful technique is composition: converting sequences of
5402 characters into one letter. Many European input methods use
5403 composition to produce a single non-ASCII letter from a sequence which
5404 consists of a letter followed by diacritics. For example, a' is one
5405 sequence of two characters that might be converted into a single
5406 letter.
5407
5408 The input methods for syllabic scripts typically use mapping followed
5409 by conversion. The input methods for Thai and Korean work this way.
5410 First, letters are mapped into symbols for particular sounds or tone
5411 marks; then, sequences of these which make up a whole syllable are
5412 mapped into one syllable sign--most often a "composite character".
5413
5414 None of these methods works very well for Chinese and Japanese, so
5415 they are handled specially. First you input a whole word using
5416 phonetic spelling; then, after the word is in the buffer, Emacs
5417 converts it into one or more characters using a large dictionary.
5418
5419 Since there is more than one way to represent a phonetically spelled
5420 word using Chinese characters, Emacs can only guess which one to use;
5421 typically these input methods give you a way to say "guess again" if
5422 the first guess is wrong.
5423
5424 *** The command C-x RET m (toggle-enable-multibyte-characters)
5425 turns multibyte character support on or off for the current buffer.
5426
5427 If multibyte character support is turned off in a buffer, then each
5428 byte is a single character, even codes 0200 through 0377--exactly as
5429 they did in Emacs 19.34. This includes the features for support for
5430 the European characters, ISO Latin-1 and ISO Latin-2.
5431
5432 However, there is no need to turn off multibyte character support to
5433 use ISO Latin-1 or ISO Latin-2; the Emacs multibyte character set
5434 includes all the characters in these character sets, and Emacs can
5435 translate automatically to and from either one.
5436
5437 *** Visiting a file in unibyte mode.
5438
5439 Turning off multibyte character support in the buffer after visiting a
5440 file with multibyte code conversion will display the multibyte
5441 sequences already in the buffer, byte by byte. This is probably not
5442 what you want.
5443
5444 If you want to edit a file of unibyte characters (Latin-1, for
5445 example), you can do it by specifying `no-conversion' as the coding
5446 system when reading the file. This coding system also turns off
5447 multibyte characters in that buffer.
5448
5449 If you turn off multibyte character support entirely, this turns off
5450 character conversion as well.
5451
5452 *** Displaying international characters on X Windows.
5453
5454 A font for X typically displays just one alphabet or script.
5455 Therefore, displaying the entire range of characters Emacs supports
5456 requires using many fonts.
5457
5458 Therefore, Emacs now supports "fontsets". Each fontset is a
5459 collection of fonts, each assigned to a range of character codes.
5460
5461 A fontset has a name, like a font. Individual fonts are defined by
5462 the X server; fontsets are defined within Emacs itself. But once you
5463 have defined a fontset, you can use it in a face or a frame just as
5464 you would use a font.
5465
5466 If a fontset specifies no font for a certain character, or if it
5467 specifies a font that does not exist on your system, then it cannot
5468 display that character. It will display an empty box instead.
5469
5470 The fontset height and width are determined by the ASCII characters
5471 (that is, by the font in the fontset which is used for ASCII
5472 characters). If another font in the fontset has a different height,
5473 or the wrong width, then characters assigned to that font are clipped,
5474 and displayed within a box if highlight-wrong-size-font is non-nil.
5475
5476 *** Defining fontsets.
5477
5478 Emacs does not use any fontset by default. Its default font is still
5479 chosen as in previous versions. You can tell Emacs to use a fontset
5480 with the `-fn' option or the `Font' X resource.
5481
5482 Emacs creates a standard fontset automatically according to the value
5483 of standard-fontset-spec. This fontset's short name is
5484 `fontset-standard'. Bold, italic, and bold-italic variants of the
5485 standard fontset are created automatically.
5486
5487 If you specify a default ASCII font with the `Font' resource or `-fn'
5488 argument, a fontset is generated from it. This works by replacing the
5489 FOUNDARY, FAMILY, ADD_STYLE, and AVERAGE_WIDTH fields of the font name
5490 with `*' then using this to specify a fontset. This fontset's short
5491 name is `fontset-startup'.
5492
5493 Emacs checks resources of the form Fontset-N where N is 0, 1, 2...
5494 The resource value should have this form:
5495 FONTSET-NAME, [CHARSET-NAME:FONT-NAME]...
5496 FONTSET-NAME should have the form of a standard X font name, except:
5497 * most fields should be just the wild card "*".
5498 * the CHARSET_REGISTRY field should be "fontset"
5499 * the CHARSET_ENCODING field can be any nickname of the fontset.
5500 The construct CHARSET-NAME:FONT-NAME can be repeated any number
5501 of times; each time specifies the font for one character set.
5502 CHARSET-NAME should be the name name of a character set, and
5503 FONT-NAME should specify an actual font to use for that character set.
5504
5505 Each of these fontsets has an alias which is made from the
5506 last two font name fields, CHARSET_REGISTRY and CHARSET_ENCODING.
5507 You can refer to the fontset by that alias or by its full name.
5508
5509 For any character sets that you don't mention, Emacs tries to choose a
5510 font by substituting into FONTSET-NAME. For instance, with the
5511 following resource,
5512 Emacs*Fontset-0: -*-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-24-*-*-*-*-*-fontset-24
5513 the font for ASCII is generated as below:
5514 -*-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-24-*-ISO8859-1
5515 Here is the substitution rule:
5516 Change CHARSET_REGISTRY and CHARSET_ENCODING to that of the charset
5517 defined in the variable x-charset-registries. For instance, ASCII has
5518 the entry (ascii . "ISO8859-1") in this variable. Then, reduce
5519 sequences of wild cards -*-...-*- with a single wildcard -*-.
5520 (This is to prevent use of auto-scaled fonts.)
5521
5522 The function which processes the fontset resource value to create the
5523 fontset is called create-fontset-from-fontset-spec. You can also call
5524 that function explicitly to create a fontset.
5525
5526 With the X resource Emacs.Font, you can specify a fontset name just
5527 like an actual font name. But be careful not to specify a fontset
5528 name in a wildcard resource like Emacs*Font--that tries to specify the
5529 fontset for other purposes including menus, and they cannot handle
5530 fontsets.
5531
5532 *** The command M-x set-language-environment sets certain global Emacs
5533 defaults for a particular choice of language.
5534
5535 Selecting a language environment typically specifies a default input
5536 method and which coding systems to recognize automatically when
5537 visiting files. However, it does not try to reread files you have
5538 already visited; the text in those buffers is not affected. The
5539 language environment may also specify a default choice of coding
5540 system for new files that you create.
5541
5542 It makes no difference which buffer is current when you use
5543 set-language-environment, because these defaults apply globally to the
5544 whole Emacs session.
5545
5546 For example, M-x set-language-environment RET Latin-1 RET
5547 chooses the Latin-1 character set. In the .emacs file, you can do this
5548 with (set-language-environment "Latin-1").
5549
5550 *** The command C-x RET f (set-buffer-file-coding-system)
5551 specifies the file coding system for the current buffer. This
5552 specifies what sort of character code translation to do when saving
5553 the file. As an argument, you must specify the name of one of the
5554 coding systems that Emacs supports.
5555
5556 *** The command C-x RET c (universal-coding-system-argument)
5557 lets you specify a coding system when you read or write a file.
5558 This command uses the minibuffer to read a coding system name.
5559 After you exit the minibuffer, the specified coding system
5560 is used for *the immediately following command*.
5561
5562 So if the immediately following command is a command to read or
5563 write a file, it uses the specified coding system for that file.
5564
5565 If the immediately following command does not use the coding system,
5566 then C-x RET c ultimately has no effect.
5567
5568 For example, C-x RET c iso-8859-1 RET C-x C-f temp RET
5569 visits the file `temp' treating it as ISO Latin-1.
5570
5571 *** You can specify the coding system for a file using the -*-
5572 construct. Include `coding: CODINGSYSTEM;' inside the -*-...-*-
5573 to specify use of coding system CODINGSYSTEM. You can also
5574 specify the coding system in a local variable list at the end
5575 of the file.
5576
5577 *** The command C-x RET t (set-terminal-coding-system) specifies
5578 the coding system for terminal output. If you specify a character
5579 code for terminal output, all characters output to the terminal are
5580 translated into that character code.
5581
5582 This feature is useful for certain character-only terminals built in
5583 various countries to support the languages of those countries.
5584
5585 By default, output to the terminal is not translated at all.
5586
5587 *** The command C-x RET k (set-keyboard-coding-system) specifies
5588 the coding system for keyboard input.
5589
5590 Character code translation of keyboard input is useful for terminals
5591 with keys that send non-ASCII graphic characters--for example,
5592 some terminals designed for ISO Latin-1 or subsets of it.
5593
5594 By default, keyboard input is not translated at all.
5595
5596 Character code translation of keyboard input is similar to using an
5597 input method, in that both define sequences of keyboard input that
5598 translate into single characters. However, input methods are designed
5599 to be convenient for interactive use, while the code translations are
5600 designed to work with terminals.
5601
5602 *** The command C-x RET p (set-buffer-process-coding-system)
5603 specifies the coding system for input and output to a subprocess.
5604 This command applies to the current buffer; normally, each subprocess
5605 has its own buffer, and thus you can use this command to specify
5606 translation to and from a particular subprocess by giving the command
5607 in the corresponding buffer.
5608
5609 By default, process input and output are not translated at all.
5610
5611 *** The variable file-name-coding-system specifies the coding system
5612 to use for encoding file names before operating on them.
5613 It is also used for decoding file names obtained from the system.
5614
5615 *** The command C-\ (toggle-input-method) activates or deactivates
5616 an input method. If no input method has been selected before, the
5617 command prompts for you to specify the language and input method you
5618 want to use.
5619
5620 C-u C-\ (select-input-method) lets you switch to a different input
5621 method. C-h C-\ (or C-h I) describes the current input method.
5622
5623 *** Some input methods remap the keyboard to emulate various keyboard
5624 layouts commonly used for particular scripts. How to do this
5625 remapping properly depends on your actual keyboard layout. To specify
5626 which layout your keyboard has, use M-x quail-set-keyboard-layout.
5627
5628 *** The command C-h C (describe-coding-system) displays
5629 the coding systems currently selected for various purposes, plus
5630 related information.
5631
5632 *** The command C-h h (view-hello-file) displays a file called
5633 HELLO, which has examples of text in many languages, using various
5634 scripts.
5635
5636 *** The command C-h L (describe-language-support) displays
5637 information about the support for a particular language.
5638 You specify the language as an argument.
5639
5640 *** The mode line now contains a letter or character that identifies
5641 the coding system used in the visited file. It normally follows the
5642 first dash.
5643
5644 A dash indicates the default state of affairs: no code conversion
5645 (except CRLF => newline if appropriate). `=' means no conversion
5646 whatsoever. The ISO 8859 coding systems are represented by digits
5647 1 through 9. Other coding systems are represented by letters:
5648
5649 A alternativnyj (Russian)
5650 B big5 (Chinese)
5651 C cn-gb-2312 (Chinese)
5652 C iso-2022-cn (Chinese)
5653 D in-is13194-devanagari (Indian languages)
5654 E euc-japan (Japanese)
5655 I iso-2022-cjk or iso-2022-ss2 (Chinese, Japanese, Korean)
5656 J junet (iso-2022-7) or old-jis (iso-2022-jp-1978-irv) (Japanese)
5657 K euc-korea (Korean)
5658 R koi8 (Russian)
5659 Q tibetan
5660 S shift_jis (Japanese)
5661 T lao
5662 T tis620 (Thai)
5663 V viscii or vscii (Vietnamese)
5664 i iso-2022-lock (Chinese, Japanese, Korean)
5665 k iso-2022-kr (Korean)
5666 v viqr (Vietnamese)
5667 z hz (Chinese)
5668
5669 When you are using a character-only terminal (not a window system),
5670 two additional characters appear in between the dash and the file
5671 coding system. These two characters describe the coding system for
5672 keyboard input, and the coding system for terminal output.
5673
5674 *** The new variable rmail-file-coding-system specifies the code
5675 conversion to use for RMAIL files. The default value is nil.
5676
5677 When you read mail with Rmail, each message is decoded automatically
5678 into Emacs' internal format. This has nothing to do with
5679 rmail-file-coding-system. That variable controls reading and writing
5680 Rmail files themselves.
5681
5682 *** The new variable sendmail-coding-system specifies the code
5683 conversion for outgoing mail. The default value is nil.
5684
5685 Actually, there are three different ways of specifying the coding system
5686 for sending mail:
5687
5688 - If you use C-x RET f in the mail buffer, that takes priority.
5689 - Otherwise, if you set sendmail-coding-system non-nil, that specifies it.
5690 - Otherwise, the default coding system for new files is used,
5691 if that is non-nil. That comes from your language environment.
5692 - Otherwise, Latin-1 is used.
5693
5694 *** The command C-h t (help-with-tutorial) accepts a prefix argument
5695 to specify the language for the tutorial file. Currently, English,
5696 Japanese, Korean and Thai are supported. We welcome additional
5697 translations.
5698
5699 ** An easy new way to visit a file with no code or format conversion
5700 of any kind: Use M-x find-file-literally. There is also a command
5701 insert-file-literally which inserts a file into the current buffer
5702 without any conversion.
5703
5704 ** C-q's handling of octal character codes is changed.
5705 You can now specify any number of octal digits.
5706 RET terminates the digits and is discarded;
5707 any other non-digit terminates the digits and is then used as input.
5708
5709 ** There are new commands for looking up Info documentation for
5710 functions, variables and file names used in your programs.
5711
5712 Type M-x info-lookup-symbol to look up a symbol in the buffer at point.
5713 Type M-x info-lookup-file to look up a file in the buffer at point.
5714
5715 Precisely which Info files are used to look it up depends on the major
5716 mode. For example, in C mode, the GNU libc manual is used.
5717
5718 ** M-TAB in most programming language modes now runs the command
5719 complete-symbol. This command performs completion on the symbol name
5720 in the buffer before point.
5721
5722 With a numeric argument, it performs completion based on the set of
5723 symbols documented in the Info files for the programming language that
5724 you are using.
5725
5726 With no argument, it does completion based on the current tags tables,
5727 just like the old binding of M-TAB (complete-tag).
5728
5729 ** File locking works with NFS now.
5730
5731 The lock file for FILENAME is now a symbolic link named .#FILENAME,
5732 in the same directory as FILENAME.
5733
5734 This means that collision detection between two different machines now
5735 works reasonably well; it also means that no file server or directory
5736 can become a bottleneck.
5737
5738 The new method does have drawbacks. It means that collision detection
5739 does not operate when you edit a file in a directory where you cannot
5740 create new files. Collision detection also doesn't operate when the
5741 file server does not support symbolic links. But these conditions are
5742 rare, and the ability to have collision detection while using NFS is
5743 so useful that the change is worth while.
5744
5745 When Emacs or a system crashes, this may leave behind lock files which
5746 are stale. So you may occasionally get warnings about spurious
5747 collisions. When you determine that the collision is spurious, just
5748 tell Emacs to go ahead anyway.
5749
5750 ** If you wish to use Show Paren mode to display matching parentheses,
5751 it is no longer sufficient to load paren.el. Instead you must call
5752 show-paren-mode.
5753
5754 ** If you wish to use Delete Selection mode to replace a highlighted
5755 selection when you insert new text, it is no longer sufficient to load
5756 delsel.el. Instead you must call the function delete-selection-mode.
5757
5758 ** If you wish to use Partial Completion mode to complete partial words
5759 within symbols or filenames, it is no longer sufficient to load
5760 complete.el. Instead you must call the function partial-completion-mode.
5761
5762 ** If you wish to use uniquify to rename buffers for you,
5763 it is no longer sufficient to load uniquify.el. You must also
5764 set uniquify-buffer-name-style to one of the non-nil legitimate values.
5765
5766 ** Changes in View mode.
5767
5768 *** Several new commands are available in View mode.
5769 Do H in view mode for a list of commands.
5770
5771 *** There are two new commands for entering View mode:
5772 view-file-other-frame and view-buffer-other-frame.
5773
5774 *** Exiting View mode does a better job of restoring windows to their
5775 previous state.
5776
5777 *** New customization variable view-scroll-auto-exit. If non-nil,
5778 scrolling past end of buffer makes view mode exit.
5779
5780 *** New customization variable view-exits-all-viewing-windows. If
5781 non-nil, view-mode will at exit restore all windows viewing buffer,
5782 not just the selected window.
5783
5784 *** New customization variable view-read-only. If non-nil, visiting a
5785 read-only file automatically enters View mode, and toggle-read-only
5786 turns View mode on or off.
5787
5788 *** New customization variable view-remove-frame-by-deleting controls
5789 how to remove a not needed frame at view mode exit. If non-nil,
5790 delete the frame, if nil make an icon of it.
5791
5792 ** C-x v l, the command to print a file's version control log,
5793 now positions point at the entry for the file's current branch version.
5794
5795 ** C-x v =, the command to compare a file with the last checked-in version,
5796 has a new feature. If the file is currently not locked, so that it is
5797 presumably identical to the last checked-in version, the command now asks
5798 which version to compare with.
5799
5800 ** When using hideshow.el, incremental search can temporarily show hidden
5801 blocks if a match is inside the block.
5802
5803 The block is hidden again if the search is continued and the next match
5804 is outside the block. By customizing the variable
5805 isearch-hide-immediately you can choose to hide all the temporarily
5806 shown blocks only when exiting from incremental search.
5807
5808 By customizing the variable hs-isearch-open you can choose what kind
5809 of blocks to temporarily show during isearch: comment blocks, code
5810 blocks, all of them or none.
5811
5812 ** The new command C-x 4 0 (kill-buffer-and-window) kills the
5813 current buffer and deletes the selected window. It asks for
5814 confirmation first.
5815
5816 ** C-x C-w, which saves the buffer into a specified file name,
5817 now changes the major mode according to that file name.
5818 However, the mode will not be changed if
5819 (1) a local variables list or the `-*-' line specifies a major mode, or
5820 (2) the current major mode is a "special" mode,
5821 not suitable for ordinary files, or
5822 (3) the new file name does not particularly specify any mode.
5823
5824 This applies to M-x set-visited-file-name as well.
5825
5826 However, if you set change-major-mode-with-file-name to nil, then
5827 these commands do not change the major mode.
5828
5829 ** M-x occur changes.
5830
5831 *** If the argument to M-x occur contains upper case letters,
5832 it performs a case-sensitive search.
5833
5834 *** In the *Occur* buffer made by M-x occur,
5835 if you type g or M-x revert-buffer, this repeats the search
5836 using the same regular expression and the same buffer as before.
5837
5838 ** In Transient Mark mode, the region in any one buffer is highlighted
5839 in just one window at a time. At first, it is highlighted in the
5840 window where you set the mark. The buffer's highlighting remains in
5841 that window unless you select to another window which shows the same
5842 buffer--then the highlighting moves to that window.
5843
5844 ** The feature to suggest key bindings when you use M-x now operates
5845 after the command finishes. The message suggesting key bindings
5846 appears temporarily in the echo area. The previous echo area contents
5847 come back after a few seconds, in case they contain useful information.
5848
5849 ** Each frame now independently records the order for recently
5850 selected buffers, so that the default for C-x b is now based on the
5851 buffers recently selected in the selected frame.
5852
5853 ** Outline mode changes.
5854
5855 *** Outline mode now uses overlays (this is the former noutline.el).
5856
5857 *** Incremental searches skip over invisible text in Outline mode.
5858
5859 ** When a minibuffer window is active but not the selected window, if
5860 you try to use the minibuffer, you used to get a nested minibuffer.
5861 Now, this not only gives an error, it also cancels the minibuffer that
5862 was already active.
5863
5864 The motive for this change is so that beginning users do not
5865 unknowingly move away from minibuffers, leaving them active, and then
5866 get confused by it.
5867
5868 If you want to be able to have recursive minibuffers, you must
5869 set enable-recursive-minibuffers to non-nil.
5870
5871 ** Changes in dynamic abbrevs.
5872
5873 *** Expanding dynamic abbrevs with M-/ is now smarter about case
5874 conversion. If the expansion has mixed case not counting the first
5875 character, and the abbreviation matches the beginning of the expansion
5876 including case, then the expansion is copied verbatim.
5877
5878 The expansion is also copied verbatim if the abbreviation itself has
5879 mixed case. And using SPC M-/ to copy an additional word always
5880 copies it verbatim except when the previous copied word is all caps.
5881
5882 *** The values of `dabbrev-case-replace' and `dabbrev-case-fold-search'
5883 are no longer Lisp expressions. They have simply three possible
5884 values.
5885
5886 `dabbrev-case-replace' has these three values: nil (don't preserve
5887 case), t (do), or `case-replace' (do like M-x query-replace).
5888 `dabbrev-case-fold-search' has these three values: nil (don't ignore
5889 case), t (do), or `case-fold-search' (do like search).
5890
5891 ** Minibuffer history lists are truncated automatically now to a
5892 certain length. The variable history-length specifies how long they
5893 can be. The default value is 30.
5894
5895 ** Changes in Mail mode.
5896
5897 *** The key C-x m no longer runs the `mail' command directly.
5898 Instead, it runs the command `compose-mail', which invokes the mail
5899 composition mechanism you have selected with the variable
5900 `mail-user-agent'. The default choice of user agent is
5901 `sendmail-user-agent', which gives behavior compatible with the old
5902 behavior.
5903
5904 C-x 4 m now runs compose-mail-other-window, and C-x 5 m runs
5905 compose-mail-other-frame.
5906
5907 *** While composing a reply to a mail message, from Rmail, you can use
5908 the command C-c C-r to cite just the region from the message you are
5909 replying to. This copies the text which is the selected region in the
5910 buffer that shows the original message.
5911
5912 *** The command C-c C-i inserts a file at the end of the message,
5913 with separator lines around the contents.
5914
5915 *** The command M-x expand-mail-aliases expands all mail aliases
5916 in suitable mail headers. Emacs automatically extracts mail alias
5917 definitions from your mail alias file (e.g., ~/.mailrc). You do not
5918 need to expand mail aliases yourself before sending mail.
5919
5920 *** New features in the mail-complete command.
5921
5922 **** The mail-complete command now inserts the user's full name,
5923 for local users or if that is known. The variable mail-complete-style
5924 controls the style to use, and whether to do this at all.
5925 Its values are like those of mail-from-style.
5926
5927 **** The variable mail-passwd-command lets you specify a shell command
5928 to run to fetch a set of password-entries that add to the ones in
5929 /etc/passwd.
5930
5931 **** The variable mail-passwd-file now specifies a list of files to read
5932 to get the list of user ids. By default, one file is used:
5933 /etc/passwd.
5934
5935 ** You can "quote" a file name to inhibit special significance of
5936 special syntax, by adding `/:' to the beginning. Thus, if you have a
5937 directory named `/foo:', you can prevent it from being treated as a
5938 reference to a remote host named `foo' by writing it as `/:/foo:'.
5939
5940 Emacs uses this new construct automatically when necessary, such as
5941 when you start it with a working directory whose name might otherwise
5942 be taken to be magic.
5943
5944 ** There is a new command M-x grep-find which uses find to select
5945 files to search through, and grep to scan them. The output is
5946 available in a Compile mode buffer, as with M-x grep.
5947
5948 M-x grep now uses the -e option if the grep program supports that.
5949 (-e prevents problems if the search pattern starts with a dash.)
5950
5951 ** In Dired, the & command now flags for deletion the files whose names
5952 suggest they are probably not needed in the long run.
5953
5954 In Dired, * is now a prefix key for mark-related commands.
5955
5956 new key dired.el binding old key
5957 ------- ---------------- -------
5958 * c dired-change-marks c
5959 * m dired-mark m
5960 * * dired-mark-executables * (binding deleted)
5961 * / dired-mark-directories / (binding deleted)
5962 * @ dired-mark-symlinks @ (binding deleted)
5963 * u dired-unmark u
5964 * DEL dired-unmark-backward DEL
5965 * ? dired-unmark-all-files M-C-?
5966 * ! dired-unmark-all-marks
5967 * % dired-mark-files-regexp % m
5968 * C-n dired-next-marked-file M-}
5969 * C-p dired-prev-marked-file M-{
5970
5971 ** Rmail changes.
5972
5973 *** When Rmail cannot convert your incoming mail into Babyl format, it
5974 saves the new mail in the file RMAILOSE.n, where n is an integer
5975 chosen to make a unique name. This way, Rmail will not keep crashing
5976 each time you run it.
5977
5978 *** In Rmail, the variable rmail-summary-line-count-flag now controls
5979 whether to include the line count in the summary. Non-nil means yes.
5980
5981 *** In Rmail summary buffers, d and C-d (the commands to delete
5982 messages) now take repeat counts as arguments. A negative argument
5983 means to move in the opposite direction.
5984
5985 *** In Rmail, the t command now takes an optional argument which lets
5986 you specify whether to show the message headers in full or pruned.
5987
5988 *** In Rmail, the new command w (rmail-output-body-to-file) writes
5989 just the body of the current message into a file, without the headers.
5990 It takes the file name from the message subject, by default, but you
5991 can edit that file name in the minibuffer before it is actually used
5992 for output.
5993
5994 ** Gnus changes.
5995
5996 *** nntp.el has been totally rewritten in an asynchronous fashion.
5997
5998 *** Article prefetching functionality has been moved up into
5999 Gnus.
6000
6001 *** Scoring can now be performed with logical operators like
6002 `and', `or', `not', and parent redirection.
6003
6004 *** Article washing status can be displayed in the
6005 article mode line.
6006
6007 *** gnus.el has been split into many smaller files.
6008
6009 *** Suppression of duplicate articles based on Message-ID.
6010
6011 (setq gnus-suppress-duplicates t)
6012
6013 *** New variables for specifying what score and adapt files
6014 are to be considered home score and adapt files. See
6015 `gnus-home-score-file' and `gnus-home-adapt-files'.
6016
6017 *** Groups can inherit group parameters from parent topics.
6018
6019 *** Article editing has been revamped and is now usable.
6020
6021 *** Signatures can be recognized in more intelligent fashions.
6022 See `gnus-signature-separator' and `gnus-signature-limit'.
6023
6024 *** Summary pick mode has been made to look more nn-like.
6025 Line numbers are displayed and the `.' command can be
6026 used to pick articles.
6027
6028 *** Commands for moving the .newsrc.eld from one server to
6029 another have been added.
6030
6031 `M-x gnus-change-server'
6032
6033 *** A way to specify that "uninteresting" fields be suppressed when
6034 generating lines in buffers.
6035
6036 *** Several commands in the group buffer can be undone with
6037 `M-C-_'.
6038
6039 *** Scoring can be done on words using the new score type `w'.
6040
6041 *** Adaptive scoring can be done on a Subject word-by-word basis:
6042
6043 (setq gnus-use-adaptive-scoring '(word))
6044
6045 *** Scores can be decayed.
6046
6047 (setq gnus-decay-scores t)
6048
6049 *** Scoring can be performed using a regexp on the Date header. The
6050 Date is normalized to compact ISO 8601 format first.
6051
6052 *** A new command has been added to remove all data on articles from
6053 the native server.
6054
6055 `M-x gnus-group-clear-data-on-native-groups'
6056
6057 *** A new command for reading collections of documents
6058 (nndoc with nnvirtual on top) has been added -- `M-C-d'.
6059
6060 *** Process mark sets can be pushed and popped.
6061
6062 *** A new mail-to-news backend makes it possible to post
6063 even when the NNTP server doesn't allow posting.
6064
6065 *** A new backend for reading searches from Web search engines
6066 (DejaNews, Alta Vista, InReference) has been added.
6067
6068 Use the `G w' command in the group buffer to create such
6069 a group.
6070
6071 *** Groups inside topics can now be sorted using the standard
6072 sorting functions, and each topic can be sorted independently.
6073
6074 See the commands under the `T S' submap.
6075
6076 *** Subsets of the groups can be sorted independently.
6077
6078 See the commands under the `G P' submap.
6079
6080 *** Cached articles can be pulled into the groups.
6081
6082 Use the `Y c' command.
6083
6084 *** Score files are now applied in a more reliable order.
6085
6086 *** Reports on where mail messages end up can be generated.
6087
6088 `M-x nnmail-split-history'
6089
6090 *** More hooks and functions have been added to remove junk
6091 from incoming mail before saving the mail.
6092
6093 See `nnmail-prepare-incoming-header-hook'.
6094
6095 *** The nnml mail backend now understands compressed article files.
6096
6097 *** To enable Gnus to read/post multi-lingual articles, you must execute
6098 the following code, for instance, in your .emacs.
6099
6100 (add-hook 'gnus-startup-hook 'gnus-mule-initialize)
6101
6102 Then, when you start Gnus, it will decode non-ASCII text automatically
6103 and show appropriate characters. (Note: if you are using gnus-mime
6104 from the SEMI package, formerly known as TM, you should NOT add this
6105 hook to gnus-startup-hook; gnus-mime has its own method of handling
6106 this issue.)
6107
6108 Since it is impossible to distinguish all coding systems
6109 automatically, you may need to specify a choice of coding system for a
6110 particular news group. This can be done by:
6111
6112 (gnus-mule-add-group NEWSGROUP 'CODING-SYSTEM)
6113
6114 Here NEWSGROUP should be a string which names a newsgroup or a tree
6115 of newsgroups. If NEWSGROUP is "XXX.YYY", all news groups under
6116 "XXX.YYY" (including "XXX.YYY.ZZZ") will use the specified coding
6117 system. CODING-SYSTEM specifies which coding system to use (for both
6118 for reading and posting).
6119
6120 CODING-SYSTEM can also be a cons cell of the form
6121 (READ-CODING-SYSTEM . POST-CODING-SYSTEM)
6122 Then READ-CODING-SYSTEM is used when you read messages from the
6123 newsgroups, while POST-CODING-SYSTEM is used when you post messages
6124 there.
6125
6126 Emacs knows the right coding systems for certain newsgroups by
6127 default. Here are some of these default settings:
6128
6129 (gnus-mule-add-group "fj" 'iso-2022-7)
6130 (gnus-mule-add-group "alt.chinese.text" 'hz-gb-2312)
6131 (gnus-mule-add-group "alt.hk" 'hz-gb-2312)
6132 (gnus-mule-add-group "alt.chinese.text.big5" 'cn-big5)
6133 (gnus-mule-add-group "soc.culture.vietnamese" '(nil . viqr))
6134
6135 When you reply by mail to an article, these settings are ignored;
6136 the mail is encoded according to sendmail-coding-system, as usual.
6137
6138 ** CC mode changes.
6139
6140 *** If you edit primarily one style of C (or C++, Objective-C, Java)
6141 code, you may want to make the CC Mode style variables have global
6142 values so that you can set them directly in your .emacs file. To do
6143 this, set c-style-variables-are-local-p to nil in your .emacs file.
6144 Note that this only takes effect if you do it *before* cc-mode.el is
6145 loaded.
6146
6147 If you typically edit more than one style of C (or C++, Objective-C,
6148 Java) code in a single Emacs session, you may want to make the CC Mode
6149 style variables have buffer local values. By default, all buffers
6150 share the same style variable settings; to make them buffer local, set
6151 c-style-variables-are-local-p to t in your .emacs file. Note that you
6152 must do this *before* CC Mode is loaded.
6153
6154 *** The new variable c-indentation-style holds the C style name
6155 of the current buffer.
6156
6157 *** The variable c-block-comments-indent-p has been deleted, because
6158 it is no longer necessary. C mode now handles all the supported styles
6159 of block comments, with no need to say which one you will use.
6160
6161 *** There is a new indentation style "python", which specifies the C
6162 style that the Python developers like.
6163
6164 *** There is a new c-cleanup-list option: brace-elseif-brace.
6165 This says to put ...} else if (...) {... on one line,
6166 just as brace-else-brace says to put ...} else {... on one line.
6167
6168 ** VC Changes [new]
6169
6170 ** In vc-retrieve-snapshot (C-x v r), if you don't specify a snapshot
6171 name, it retrieves the *latest* versions of all files in the current
6172 directory and its subdirectories (aside from files already locked).
6173
6174 This feature is useful if your RCS directory is a link to a common
6175 master directory, and you want to pick up changes made by other
6176 developers.
6177
6178 You can do the same thing for an individual file by typing C-u C-x C-q
6179 RET in a buffer visiting that file.
6180
6181 *** VC can now handle files under CVS that are being "watched" by
6182 other developers. Such files are made read-only by CVS. To get a
6183 writable copy, type C-x C-q in a buffer visiting such a file. VC then
6184 calls "cvs edit", which notifies the other developers of it.
6185
6186 *** vc-version-diff (C-u C-x v =) now suggests reasonable defaults for
6187 version numbers, based on the current state of the file.
6188
6189 ** Calendar changes.
6190
6191 A new function, list-holidays, allows you list holidays or subclasses
6192 of holidays for ranges of years. Related menu items allow you do this
6193 for the year of the selected date, or the following/previous years.
6194
6195 ** ps-print changes
6196
6197 There are some new user variables for customizing the page layout.
6198
6199 *** Paper size, paper orientation, columns
6200
6201 The variable `ps-paper-type' determines the size of paper ps-print
6202 formats for; it should contain one of the symbols:
6203 `a4' `a3' `letter' `legal' `letter-small' `tabloid'
6204 `ledger' `statement' `executive' `a4small' `b4' `b5'
6205 It defaults to `letter'.
6206 If you need other sizes, see the variable `ps-page-dimensions-database'.
6207
6208 The variable `ps-landscape-mode' determines the orientation
6209 of the printing on the page. nil, the default, means "portrait" mode,
6210 non-nil means "landscape" mode.
6211
6212 The variable `ps-number-of-columns' must be a positive integer.
6213 It determines the number of columns both in landscape and portrait mode.
6214 It defaults to 1.
6215
6216 *** Horizontal layout
6217
6218 The horizontal layout is determined by the variables
6219 `ps-left-margin', `ps-inter-column', and `ps-right-margin'.
6220 All are measured in points.
6221
6222 *** Vertical layout
6223
6224 The vertical layout is determined by the variables
6225 `ps-bottom-margin', `ps-top-margin', and `ps-header-offset'.
6226 All are measured in points.
6227
6228 *** Headers
6229
6230 If the variable `ps-print-header' is nil, no header is printed. Then
6231 `ps-header-offset' is not relevant and `ps-top-margin' represents the
6232 margin above the text.
6233
6234 If the variable `ps-print-header-frame' is non-nil, a gaudy
6235 framing box is printed around the header.
6236
6237 The contents of the header are determined by `ps-header-lines',
6238 `ps-show-n-of-n', `ps-left-header' and `ps-right-header'.
6239
6240 The height of the header is determined by `ps-header-line-pad',
6241 `ps-header-font-family', `ps-header-title-font-size' and
6242 `ps-header-font-size'.
6243
6244 *** Font managing
6245
6246 The variable `ps-font-family' determines which font family is to be
6247 used for ordinary text. Its value must be a key symbol in the alist
6248 `ps-font-info-database'. You can add other font families by adding
6249 elements to this alist.
6250
6251 The variable `ps-font-size' determines the size of the font
6252 for ordinary text. It defaults to 8.5 points.
6253
6254 ** hideshow changes.
6255
6256 *** now supports hiding of blocks of single line comments (like // for
6257 C++, ; for lisp).
6258
6259 *** Support for java-mode added.
6260
6261 *** When doing `hs-hide-all' it is now possible to also hide the comments
6262 in the file if `hs-hide-comments-when-hiding-all' is set.
6263
6264 *** The new function `hs-hide-initial-comment' hides the the comments at
6265 the beginning of the files. Finally those huge RCS logs don't stay in your
6266 way! This is run by default when entering the `hs-minor-mode'.
6267
6268 *** Now uses overlays instead of `selective-display', so is more
6269 robust and a lot faster.
6270
6271 *** A block beginning can span multiple lines.
6272
6273 *** The new variable `hs-show-hidden-short-form' if t, directs hideshow
6274 to show only the beginning of a block when it is hidden. See the
6275 documentation for more details.
6276
6277 ** Changes in Enriched mode.
6278
6279 *** When you visit a file in enriched-mode, Emacs will make sure it is
6280 filled to the current fill-column. This behavior is now independent
6281 of the size of the window. When you save the file, the fill-column in
6282 use is stored as well, so that the whole buffer need not be refilled
6283 the next time unless the fill-column is different.
6284
6285 *** use-hard-newlines is now a minor mode. When it is enabled, Emacs
6286 distinguishes between hard and soft newlines, and treats hard newlines
6287 as paragraph boundaries. Otherwise all newlines inserted are marked
6288 as soft, and paragraph boundaries are determined solely from the text.
6289
6290 ** Font Lock mode
6291
6292 *** Custom support
6293
6294 The variables font-lock-face-attributes, font-lock-display-type and
6295 font-lock-background-mode are now obsolete; the recommended way to specify the
6296 faces to use for Font Lock mode is with M-x customize-group on the new custom
6297 group font-lock-highlighting-faces. If you set font-lock-face-attributes in
6298 your ~/.emacs file, Font Lock mode will respect its value. However, you should
6299 consider converting from setting that variable to using M-x customize.
6300
6301 You can still use X resources to specify Font Lock face appearances.
6302
6303 *** Maximum decoration
6304
6305 Fontification now uses the maximum level of decoration supported by
6306 default. Previously, fontification used a mode-specific default level
6307 of decoration, which is typically the minimum level of decoration
6308 supported. You can set font-lock-maximum-decoration to nil
6309 to get the old behavior.
6310
6311 *** New support
6312
6313 Support is now provided for Java, Objective-C, AWK and SIMULA modes.
6314
6315 Note that Font Lock mode can be turned on without knowing exactly what modes
6316 support Font Lock mode, via the command global-font-lock-mode.
6317
6318 *** Configurable support
6319
6320 Support for C, C++, Objective-C and Java can be more easily configured for
6321 additional types and classes via the new variables c-font-lock-extra-types,
6322 c++-font-lock-extra-types, objc-font-lock-extra-types and, you guessed it,
6323 java-font-lock-extra-types. These value of each of these variables should be a
6324 list of regexps matching the extra type names. For example, the default value
6325 of c-font-lock-extra-types is ("\\sw+_t") which means fontification follows the
6326 convention that C type names end in _t. This results in slower fontification.
6327
6328 Of course, you can change the variables that specify fontification in whatever
6329 way you wish, typically by adding regexps. However, these new variables make
6330 it easier to make specific and common changes for the fontification of types.
6331
6332 *** Adding highlighting patterns to existing support
6333
6334 You can use the new function font-lock-add-keywords to add your own
6335 highlighting patterns, such as for project-local or user-specific constructs,
6336 for any mode.
6337
6338 For example, to highlight `FIXME:' words in C comments, put:
6339
6340 (font-lock-add-keywords 'c-mode '(("\\<FIXME:" 0 font-lock-warning-face t)))
6341
6342 in your ~/.emacs.
6343
6344 *** New faces
6345
6346 Font Lock now defines two new faces, font-lock-builtin-face and
6347 font-lock-warning-face. These are intended to highlight builtin keywords,
6348 distinct from a language's normal keywords, and objects that should be brought
6349 to user attention, respectively. Various modes now use these new faces.
6350
6351 *** Changes to fast-lock support mode
6352
6353 The fast-lock package, one of the two Font Lock support modes, can now process
6354 cache files silently. You can use the new variable fast-lock-verbose, in the
6355 same way as font-lock-verbose, to control this feature.
6356
6357 *** Changes to lazy-lock support mode
6358
6359 The lazy-lock package, one of the two Font Lock support modes, can now fontify
6360 according to the true syntactic context relative to other lines. You can use
6361 the new variable lazy-lock-defer-contextually to control this feature. If
6362 non-nil, changes to the buffer will cause subsequent lines in the buffer to be
6363 refontified after lazy-lock-defer-time seconds of idle time. If nil, then only
6364 the modified lines will be refontified; this is the same as the previous Lazy
6365 Lock mode behaviour and the behaviour of Font Lock mode.
6366
6367 This feature is useful in modes where strings or comments can span lines.
6368 For example, if a string or comment terminating character is deleted, then if
6369 this feature is enabled subsequent lines in the buffer will be correctly
6370 refontified to reflect their new syntactic context. Previously, only the line
6371 containing the deleted character would be refontified and you would have to use
6372 the command M-g M-g (font-lock-fontify-block) to refontify some lines.
6373
6374 As a consequence of this new feature, two other variables have changed:
6375
6376 Variable `lazy-lock-defer-driven' is renamed `lazy-lock-defer-on-scrolling'.
6377 Variable `lazy-lock-defer-time' can now only be a time, i.e., a number.
6378 Buffer modes for which on-the-fly deferral applies can be specified via the
6379 new variable `lazy-lock-defer-on-the-fly'.
6380
6381 If you set these variables in your ~/.emacs, then you may have to change those
6382 settings.
6383
6384 ** Ada mode changes.
6385
6386 *** There is now better support for using find-file.el with Ada mode.
6387 If you switch between spec and body, the cursor stays in the same
6388 procedure (modulo overloading). If a spec has no body file yet, but
6389 you try to switch to its body file, Ada mode now generates procedure
6390 stubs.
6391
6392 *** There are two new commands:
6393 - `ada-make-local' : invokes gnatmake on the current buffer
6394 - `ada-check-syntax' : check syntax of current buffer.
6395
6396 The user options `ada-compiler-make', `ada-make-options',
6397 `ada-language-version', `ada-compiler-syntax-check', and
6398 `ada-compile-options' are used within these commands.
6399
6400 *** Ada mode can now work with Outline minor mode. The outline level
6401 is calculated from the indenting, not from syntactic constructs.
6402 Outlining does not work if your code is not correctly indented.
6403
6404 *** The new function `ada-gnat-style' converts the buffer to the style of
6405 formatting used in GNAT. It places two blanks after a comment start,
6406 places one blank between a word end and an opening '(', and puts one
6407 space between a comma and the beginning of a word.
6408
6409 ** Scheme mode changes.
6410
6411 *** Scheme mode indentation now uses many of the facilities of Lisp
6412 mode; therefore, the variables to customize it are the variables used
6413 for Lisp mode which have names starting with `lisp-'. The variables
6414 with names starting with `scheme-' which used to do this no longer
6415 have any effect.
6416
6417 If you want to use different indentation for Scheme and Lisp, this is
6418 still possible, but now you must do it by adding a hook to
6419 scheme-mode-hook, which could work by setting the `lisp-' indentation
6420 variables as buffer-local variables.
6421
6422 *** DSSSL mode is a variant of Scheme mode, for editing DSSSL scripts.
6423 Use M-x dsssl-mode.
6424
6425 ** Changes to the emacsclient program
6426
6427 *** If a socket can't be found, and environment variables LOGNAME or
6428 USER are set, emacsclient now looks for a socket based on the UID
6429 associated with the name. That is an emacsclient running as root
6430 can connect to an Emacs server started by a non-root user.
6431
6432 *** The emacsclient program now accepts an option --no-wait which tells
6433 it to return immediately without waiting for you to "finish" the
6434 buffer in Emacs.
6435
6436 *** The new option --alternate-editor allows to specify an editor to
6437 use if Emacs is not running. The environment variable
6438 ALTERNATE_EDITOR can be used for the same effect; the command line
6439 option takes precedence.
6440
6441 ** M-x eldoc-mode enables a minor mode in which the echo area
6442 constantly shows the parameter list for function being called at point
6443 (in Emacs Lisp and Lisp Interaction modes only).
6444
6445 ** C-x n d now runs the new command narrow-to-defun,
6446 which narrows the accessible parts of the buffer to just
6447 the current defun.
6448
6449 ** Emacs now handles the `--' argument in the standard way; all
6450 following arguments are treated as ordinary file names.
6451
6452 ** On MSDOS and Windows, the bookmark file is now called _emacs.bmk,
6453 and the saved desktop file is now called _emacs.desktop (truncated if
6454 necessary).
6455
6456 ** When you kill a buffer that visits a file,
6457 if there are any registers that save positions in the file,
6458 these register values no longer become completely useless.
6459 If you try to go to such a register with C-x j, then you are
6460 asked whether to visit the file again. If you say yes,
6461 it visits the file and then goes to the same position.
6462
6463 ** When you visit a file that changes frequently outside Emacs--for
6464 example, a log of output from a process that continues to run--it may
6465 be useful for Emacs to revert the file without querying you whenever
6466 you visit the file afresh with C-x C-f.
6467
6468 You can request this behavior for certain files by setting the
6469 variable revert-without-query to a list of regular expressions. If a
6470 file's name matches any of these regular expressions, find-file and
6471 revert-buffer revert the buffer without asking for permission--but
6472 only if you have not edited the buffer text yourself.
6473
6474 ** set-default-font has been renamed to set-frame-font
6475 since it applies only to the current frame.
6476
6477 ** In TeX mode, you can use the variable tex-main-file to specify the
6478 file for tex-file to run TeX on. (By default, tex-main-file is nil,
6479 and tex-file runs TeX on the current visited file.)
6480
6481 This is useful when you are editing a document that consists of
6482 multiple files. In each of the included files, you can set up a local
6483 variable list which specifies the top-level file of your document for
6484 tex-main-file. Then tex-file will run TeX on the whole document
6485 instead of just the file you are editing.
6486
6487 ** RefTeX mode
6488
6489 RefTeX mode is a new minor mode with special support for \label, \ref
6490 and \cite macros in LaTeX documents. RefTeX distinguishes labels of
6491 different environments (equation, figure, ...) and has full support for
6492 multifile documents. To use it, select a buffer with a LaTeX document and
6493 turn the mode on with M-x reftex-mode. Here are the main user commands:
6494
6495 C-c ( reftex-label
6496 Creates a label semi-automatically. RefTeX is context sensitive and
6497 knows which kind of label is needed.
6498
6499 C-c ) reftex-reference
6500 Offers in a menu all labels in the document, along with context of the
6501 label definition. The selected label is referenced as \ref{LABEL}.
6502
6503 C-c [ reftex-citation
6504 Prompts for a regular expression and displays a list of matching BibTeX
6505 database entries. The selected entry is cited with a \cite{KEY} macro.
6506
6507 C-c & reftex-view-crossref
6508 Views the cross reference of a \ref or \cite command near point.
6509
6510 C-c = reftex-toc
6511 Shows a table of contents of the (multifile) document. From there you
6512 can quickly jump to every section.
6513
6514 Under X, RefTeX installs a "Ref" menu in the menu bar, with additional
6515 commands. Press `?' to get help when a prompt mentions this feature.
6516 Full documentation and customization examples are in the file
6517 reftex.el. You can use the finder to view the file documentation:
6518 C-h p --> tex --> reftex.el
6519
6520 ** Changes in BibTeX mode.
6521
6522 *** Info documentation is now available.
6523
6524 *** Don't allow parentheses in string constants anymore. This confused
6525 both the BibTeX program and Emacs BibTeX mode.
6526
6527 *** Renamed variable bibtex-mode-user-optional-fields to
6528 bibtex-user-optional-fields.
6529
6530 *** Removed variable bibtex-include-OPTannote
6531 (use bibtex-user-optional-fields instead).
6532
6533 *** New interactive functions to copy and kill fields and complete
6534 entries to the BibTeX kill ring, from where they can be yanked back by
6535 appropriate functions.
6536
6537 *** New interactive functions for repositioning and marking of
6538 entries. They are bound by default to M-C-l and M-C-h.
6539
6540 *** New hook bibtex-clean-entry-hook. It is called after entry has
6541 been cleaned.
6542
6543 *** New variable bibtex-field-delimiters, which replaces variables
6544 bibtex-field-{left|right}-delimiter.
6545
6546 *** New variable bibtex-entry-delimiters to determine how entries
6547 shall be delimited.
6548
6549 *** Allow preinitialization of fields. See documentation of
6550 bibtex-user-optional-fields, bibtex-entry-field-alist, and
6551 bibtex-include-OPTkey for details.
6552
6553 *** Book and InBook entries require either an author or an editor
6554 field. This is now supported by bibtex.el. Alternative fields are
6555 prefixed with `ALT'.
6556
6557 *** New variable bibtex-entry-format, which replaces variable
6558 bibtex-clean-entry-zap-empty-opts and allows specification of many
6559 formatting options performed on cleaning an entry (see variable
6560 documentation).
6561
6562 *** Even more control on how automatic keys are generated. See
6563 documentation of bibtex-generate-autokey for details. Transcriptions
6564 for foreign languages other than German are now handled, too.
6565
6566 *** New boolean user option bibtex-comma-after-last-field to decide if
6567 comma should be inserted at end of last field.
6568
6569 *** New boolean user option bibtex-align-at-equal-sign to determine if
6570 alignment should be made at left side of field contents or at equal
6571 signs. New user options to control entry layout (e.g. indentation).
6572
6573 *** New function bibtex-fill-entry to realign entries.
6574
6575 *** New function bibtex-reformat to reformat region or buffer.
6576
6577 *** New function bibtex-convert-alien to convert a BibTeX database
6578 from alien sources.
6579
6580 *** New function bibtex-complete-key (similar to bibtex-complete-string)
6581 to complete prefix to a key defined in buffer. Mainly useful in
6582 crossref entries.
6583
6584 *** New function bibtex-count-entries to count entries in buffer or
6585 region.
6586
6587 *** Added support for imenu.
6588
6589 *** The function `bibtex-validate' now checks current region instead
6590 of buffer if mark is active. Now it shows all errors of buffer in a
6591 `compilation mode' buffer. You can use the normal commands (e.g.
6592 `next-error') for compilation modes to jump to errors.
6593
6594 *** New variable `bibtex-string-file-path' to determine where the files
6595 from `bibtex-string-files' are searched.
6596
6597 ** Iso Accents mode now supports Latin-3 as an alternative.
6598
6599 ** The command next-error now opens blocks hidden by hideshow.
6600
6601 ** The function using-unix-filesystems has been replaced by the
6602 functions add-untranslated-filesystem and remove-untranslated-filesystem.
6603 Each of these functions takes the name of a drive letter or directory
6604 as an argument.
6605
6606 When a filesystem is added as untranslated, all files on it are read
6607 and written in binary mode (no cr/lf translation is performed).
6608
6609 ** browse-url changes
6610
6611 *** New methods for: Grail (browse-url-generic), MMM (browse-url-mmm),
6612 Lynx in a separate xterm (browse-url-lynx-xterm) or in an Emacs window
6613 (browse-url-lynx-emacs), remote W3 (browse-url-w3-gnudoit), generic
6614 non-remote-controlled browsers (browse-url-generic) and associated
6615 customization variables.
6616
6617 *** New commands `browse-url-of-region' and `browse-url'.
6618
6619 *** URLs marked up with <URL:...> (RFC1738) work if broken across
6620 lines. Browsing methods can be associated with URL regexps
6621 (e.g. mailto: URLs) via `browse-url-browser-function'.
6622
6623 ** Changes in Ediff
6624
6625 *** Clicking Mouse-2 on a brief command description in Ediff control panel
6626 pops up the Info file for this command.
6627
6628 *** There is now a variable, ediff-autostore-merges, which controls whether
6629 the result of a merge is saved in a file. By default, this is done only when
6630 merge is done from a session group (eg, when merging files in two different
6631 directories).
6632
6633 *** Since Emacs 19.31 (this hasn't been announced before), Ediff can compare
6634 and merge groups of files residing in different directories, or revisions of
6635 files in the same directory.
6636
6637 *** Since Emacs 19.31, Ediff can apply multi-file patches interactively.
6638 The patches must be in the context format or GNU unified format. (The bug
6639 related to the GNU format has now been fixed.)
6640
6641 ** Changes in Viper
6642
6643 *** The startup file is now .viper instead of .vip
6644 *** All variable/function names have been changed to start with viper-
6645 instead of vip-.
6646 *** C-\ now simulates the meta-key in all Viper states.
6647 *** C-z in Insert state now escapes to Vi for the duration of the next
6648 Viper command. In Vi and Insert states, C-z behaves as before.
6649 *** C-c \ escapes to Vi for one command if Viper is in Insert or Emacs states.
6650 *** _ is no longer the meta-key in Vi state.
6651 *** The variable viper-insert-state-cursor-color can be used to change cursor
6652 color when Viper is in insert state.
6653 *** If search lands the cursor near the top or the bottom of the window,
6654 Viper pulls the window up or down to expose more context. The variable
6655 viper-adjust-window-after-search controls this behavior.
6656
6657 ** Etags changes.
6658
6659 *** In C, C++, Objective C and Java, Etags tags global variables by
6660 default. The resulting tags files are inflated by 30% on average.
6661 Use --no-globals to turn this feature off. Etags can also tag
6662 variables which are members of structure-like constructs, but it does
6663 not by default. Use --members to turn this feature on.
6664
6665 *** C++ member functions are now recognized as tags.
6666
6667 *** Java is tagged like C++. In addition, "extends" and "implements"
6668 constructs are tagged. Files are recognised by the extension .java.
6669
6670 *** Etags can now handle programs written in Postscript. Files are
6671 recognised by the extensions .ps and .pdb (Postscript with C syntax).
6672 In Postscript, tags are lines that start with a slash.
6673
6674 *** Etags now handles Objective C and Objective C++ code. The usual C and
6675 C++ tags are recognized in these languages; in addition, etags
6676 recognizes special Objective C syntax for classes, class categories,
6677 methods and protocols.
6678
6679 *** Etags also handles Cobol. Files are recognised by the extension
6680 .cobol. The tagged lines are those containing a word that begins in
6681 column 8 and ends in a full stop, i.e. anything that could be a
6682 paragraph name.
6683
6684 *** Regexps in Etags now support intervals, as in ed or grep. The syntax of
6685 an interval is \{M,N\}, and it means to match the preceding expression
6686 at least M times and as many as N times.
6687
6688 ** The format for specifying a custom format for time-stamp to insert
6689 in files has changed slightly.
6690
6691 With the new enhancements to the functionality of format-time-string,
6692 time-stamp-format will change to be eventually compatible with it.
6693 This conversion is being done in two steps to maintain compatibility
6694 with old time-stamp-format values.
6695
6696 In the new scheme, alternate case is signified by the number-sign
6697 (`#') modifier, rather than changing the case of the format character.
6698 This feature is as yet incompletely implemented for compatibility
6699 reasons.
6700
6701 In the old time-stamp-format, all numeric fields defaulted to their
6702 natural width. (With format-time-string, each format has a
6703 fixed-width default.) In this version, you can specify the colon
6704 (`:') modifier to a numeric conversion to mean "give me the historical
6705 time-stamp-format width default." Do not use colon if you are
6706 specifying an explicit width, as in "%02d".
6707
6708 Numbers are no longer truncated to the requested width, except in the
6709 case of "%02y", which continues to give a two-digit year. Digit
6710 truncation probably wasn't being used for anything else anyway.
6711
6712 The new formats will work with old versions of Emacs. New formats are
6713 being recommended now to allow time-stamp-format to change in the
6714 future to be compatible with format-time-string. The new forms being
6715 recommended now will continue to work then.
6716
6717 See the documentation string for the variable time-stamp-format for
6718 details.
6719
6720 ** There are some additional major modes:
6721
6722 dcl-mode, for editing VMS DCL files.
6723 m4-mode, for editing files of m4 input.
6724 meta-mode, for editing MetaFont and MetaPost source files.
6725
6726 ** In Shell mode, the command shell-copy-environment-variable lets you
6727 copy the value of a specified environment variable from the subshell
6728 into Emacs.
6729
6730 ** New Lisp packages include:
6731
6732 *** battery.el displays battery status for laptops.
6733
6734 *** M-x bruce (named after Lenny Bruce) is a program that might
6735 be used for adding some indecent words to your email.
6736
6737 *** M-x crisp-mode enables an emulation for the CRiSP editor.
6738
6739 *** M-x dirtrack arranges for better tracking of directory changes
6740 in shell buffers.
6741
6742 *** The new library elint.el provides for linting of Emacs Lisp code.
6743 See the documentation for `elint-initialize', `elint-current-buffer'
6744 and `elint-defun'.
6745
6746 *** M-x expand-add-abbrevs defines a special kind of abbrev which is
6747 meant for programming constructs. These abbrevs expand like ordinary
6748 ones, when you type SPC, but only at the end of a line and not within
6749 strings or comments.
6750
6751 These abbrevs can act as templates: you can define places within an
6752 abbrev for insertion of additional text. Once you expand the abbrev,
6753 you can then use C-x a p and C-x a n to move back and forth to these
6754 insertion points. Thus you can conveniently insert additional text
6755 at these points.
6756
6757 *** filecache.el remembers the location of files so that you
6758 can visit them by short forms of their names.
6759
6760 *** find-func.el lets you find the definition of the user-loaded
6761 Emacs Lisp function at point.
6762
6763 *** M-x handwrite converts text to a "handwritten" picture.
6764
6765 *** M-x iswitchb-buffer is a command for switching to a buffer, much like
6766 switch-buffer, but it reads the argument in a more helpful way.
6767
6768 *** M-x landmark implements a neural network for landmark learning.
6769
6770 *** M-x locate provides a convenient interface to the `locate' program.
6771
6772 *** M4 mode is a new mode for editing files of m4 input.
6773
6774 *** mantemp.el creates C++ manual template instantiations
6775 from the GCC error messages which indicate which instantiations are needed.
6776
6777 *** mouse-copy.el provides a one-click copy and move feature.
6778 You can drag a region with M-mouse-1, and it is automatically
6779 inserted at point. M-Shift-mouse-1 deletes the text from its
6780 original place after inserting the copy.
6781
6782 *** mouse-drag.el lets you do scrolling by dragging Mouse-2
6783 on the buffer.
6784
6785 You click the mouse and move; that distance either translates into the
6786 velocity to scroll (with mouse-drag-throw) or the distance to scroll
6787 (with mouse-drag-drag). Horizontal scrolling is enabled when needed.
6788
6789 Enable mouse-drag with:
6790 (global-set-key [down-mouse-2] 'mouse-drag-throw)
6791 -or-
6792 (global-set-key [down-mouse-2] 'mouse-drag-drag)
6793
6794 *** mspools.el is useful for determining which mail folders have
6795 mail waiting to be read in them. It works with procmail.
6796
6797 *** Octave mode is a major mode for editing files of input for Octave.
6798 It comes with a facility for communicating with an Octave subprocess.
6799
6800 *** ogonek
6801
6802 The ogonek package provides functions for changing the coding of
6803 Polish diacritic characters in buffers. Codings known from various
6804 platforms are supported such as ISO8859-2, Mazovia, IBM Latin2, and
6805 TeX. For example, you can change the coding from Mazovia to
6806 ISO8859-2. Another example is a change of coding from ISO8859-2 to
6807 prefix notation (in which `/a' stands for the aogonek character, for
6808 instance) and vice versa.
6809
6810 To use this package load it using
6811 M-x load-library [enter] ogonek
6812 Then, you may get an explanation by calling one of
6813 M-x ogonek-jak -- in Polish
6814 M-x ogonek-how -- in English
6815 The info specifies the commands and variables provided as well as the
6816 ways of customization in `.emacs'.
6817
6818 *** Interface to ph.
6819
6820 Emacs provides a client interface to CCSO Nameservers (ph/qi)
6821
6822 The CCSO nameserver is used in many universities to provide directory
6823 services about people. ph.el provides a convenient Emacs interface to
6824 these servers.
6825
6826 *** uce.el is useful for replying to unsolicited commercial email.
6827
6828 *** vcursor.el implements a "virtual cursor" feature.
6829 You can move the virtual cursor with special commands
6830 while the real cursor does not move.
6831
6832 *** webjump.el is a "hot list" package which you can set up
6833 for visiting your favorite web sites.
6834
6835 *** M-x winner-mode is a minor mode which saves window configurations,
6836 so you can move back to other configurations that you have recently used.
6837
6838 ** movemail change
6839
6840 Movemail no longer needs to be installed setuid root in order for POP
6841 mail retrieval to function properly. This is because it no longer
6842 supports the RPOP (reserved-port POP) protocol; instead, it uses the
6843 user's POP password to authenticate to the mail server.
6844
6845 This change was made earlier, but not reported in NEWS before.
6846
6847 * Emacs 20.1 changes for MS-DOS and MS-Windows.
6848
6849 ** Changes in handling MS-DOS/MS-Windows text files.
6850
6851 Emacs handles three different conventions for representing
6852 end-of-line: CRLF for MSDOS, LF for Unix and GNU, and CR (used on the
6853 Macintosh). Emacs determines which convention is used in a specific
6854 file based on the contents of that file (except for certain special
6855 file names), and when it saves the file, it uses the same convention.
6856
6857 To save the file and change the end-of-line convention, you can use
6858 C-x RET f (set-buffer-file-coding-system) to specify a different
6859 coding system for the buffer. Then, when you save the file, the newly
6860 specified coding system will take effect. For example, to save with
6861 LF, specify undecided-unix (or some other ...-unix coding system); to
6862 save with CRLF, specify undecided-dos.
6863
6864 * Lisp Changes in Emacs 20.1
6865
6866 ** Byte-compiled files made with Emacs 20 will, in general, work in
6867 Emacs 19 as well, as long as the source code runs in Emacs 19. And
6868 vice versa: byte-compiled files made with Emacs 19 should also run in
6869 Emacs 20, as long as the program itself works in Emacs 20.
6870
6871 ** Windows-specific functions and variables have been renamed
6872 to start with w32- instead of win32-.
6873
6874 In hacker language, calling something a "win" is a form of praise. We
6875 don't want to praise a non-free Microsoft system, so we don't call it
6876 "win".
6877
6878 ** Basic Lisp changes
6879
6880 *** A symbol whose name starts with a colon now automatically
6881 evaluates to itself. Therefore such a symbol can be used as a constant.
6882
6883 *** The defined purpose of `defconst' has been changed. It should now
6884 be used only for values that should not be changed whether by a program
6885 or by the user.
6886
6887 The actual behavior of defconst has not been changed.
6888
6889 *** There are new macros `when' and `unless'
6890
6891 (when CONDITION BODY...) is short for (if CONDITION (progn BODY...))
6892 (unless CONDITION BODY...) is short for (if CONDITION nil BODY...)
6893
6894 *** Emacs now defines functions caar, cadr, cdar and cddr with their
6895 usual Lisp meanings. For example, caar returns the car of the car of
6896 its argument.
6897
6898 *** equal, when comparing strings, now ignores their text properties.
6899
6900 *** The new function `functionp' tests whether an object is a function.
6901
6902 *** arrayp now returns t for char-tables and bool-vectors.
6903
6904 *** Certain primitives which use characters (as integers) now get an
6905 error if the integer is not a valid character code. These primitives
6906 include insert-char, char-to-string, and the %c construct in the
6907 `format' function.
6908
6909 *** The `require' function now insists on adding a suffix, either .el
6910 or .elc, to the file name. Thus, (require 'foo) will not use a file
6911 whose name is just foo. It insists on foo.el or foo.elc.
6912
6913 *** The `autoload' function, when the file name does not contain
6914 either a directory name or the suffix .el or .elc, insists on
6915 adding one of these suffixes.
6916
6917 *** string-to-number now takes an optional second argument BASE
6918 which specifies the base to use when converting an integer.
6919 If BASE is omitted, base 10 is used.
6920
6921 We have not implemented other radices for floating point numbers,
6922 because that would be much more work and does not seem useful.
6923
6924 *** substring now handles vectors as well as strings.
6925
6926 *** The Common Lisp function eql is no longer defined normally.
6927 You must load the `cl' library to define it.
6928
6929 *** The new macro `with-current-buffer' lets you evaluate an expression
6930 conveniently with a different current buffer. It looks like this:
6931
6932 (with-current-buffer BUFFER BODY-FORMS...)
6933
6934 BUFFER is the expression that says which buffer to use.
6935 BODY-FORMS say what to do in that buffer.
6936
6937 *** The new primitive `save-current-buffer' saves and restores the
6938 choice of current buffer, like `save-excursion', but without saving or
6939 restoring the value of point or the mark. `with-current-buffer'
6940 works using `save-current-buffer'.
6941
6942 *** The new macro `with-temp-file' lets you do some work in a new buffer and
6943 write the output to a specified file. Like `progn', it returns the value
6944 of the last form.
6945
6946 *** The new macro `with-temp-buffer' lets you do some work in a new buffer,
6947 which is discarded after use. Like `progn', it returns the value of the
6948 last form. If you wish to return the buffer contents, use (buffer-string)
6949 as the last form.
6950
6951 *** The new function split-string takes a string, splits it at certain
6952 characters, and returns a list of the substrings in between the
6953 matches.
6954
6955 For example, (split-string "foo bar lose" " +") returns ("foo" "bar" "lose").
6956
6957 *** The new macro with-output-to-string executes some Lisp expressions
6958 with standard-output set up so that all output feeds into a string.
6959 Then it returns that string.
6960
6961 For example, if the current buffer name is `foo',
6962
6963 (with-output-to-string
6964 (princ "The buffer is ")
6965 (princ (buffer-name)))
6966
6967 returns "The buffer is foo".
6968
6969 ** Non-ASCII characters are now supported, if enable-multibyte-characters
6970 is non-nil.
6971
6972 These characters have character codes above 256. When inserted in the
6973 buffer or stored in a string, they are represented as multibyte
6974 characters that occupy several buffer positions each.
6975
6976 *** When enable-multibyte-characters is non-nil, a single character in
6977 a buffer or string can be two or more bytes (as many as four).
6978
6979 Buffers and strings are still made up of unibyte elements;
6980 character positions and string indices are always measured in bytes.
6981 Therefore, moving forward one character can increase the buffer
6982 position by 2, 3 or 4. The function forward-char moves by whole
6983 characters, and therefore is no longer equivalent to
6984 (lambda (n) (goto-char (+ (point) n))).
6985
6986 ASCII characters (codes 0 through 127) are still single bytes, always.
6987 Sequences of byte values 128 through 255 are used to represent
6988 non-ASCII characters. These sequences are called "multibyte
6989 characters".
6990
6991 The first byte of a multibyte character is always in the range 128
6992 through 159 (octal 0200 through 0237). These values are called
6993 "leading codes". The second and subsequent bytes are always in the
6994 range 160 through 255 (octal 0240 through 0377). The first byte, the
6995 leading code, determines how many bytes long the sequence is.
6996
6997 *** The function forward-char moves over characters, and therefore
6998 (forward-char 1) may increase point by more than 1 if it moves over a
6999 multibyte character. Likewise, delete-char always deletes a
7000 character, which may be more than one buffer position.
7001
7002 This means that some Lisp programs, which assume that a character is
7003 always one buffer position, need to be changed.
7004
7005 However, all ASCII characters are always one buffer position.
7006
7007 *** The regexp [\200-\377] no longer matches all non-ASCII characters,
7008 because when enable-multibyte-characters is non-nil, these characters
7009 have codes that are not in the range octal 200 to octal 377. However,
7010 the regexp [^\000-\177] does match all non-ASCII characters,
7011 guaranteed.
7012
7013 *** The function char-boundary-p returns non-nil if position POS is
7014 between two characters in the buffer (not in the middle of a
7015 character).
7016
7017 When the value is non-nil, it says what kind of character follows POS:
7018
7019 0 if POS is at an ASCII character or at the end of range,
7020 1 if POS is before a 2-byte length multi-byte form,
7021 2 if POS is at a head of 3-byte length multi-byte form,
7022 3 if POS is at a head of 4-byte length multi-byte form,
7023 4 if POS is at a head of multi-byte form of a composite character.
7024
7025 *** The function char-bytes returns how many bytes the character CHAR uses.
7026
7027 *** Strings can contain multibyte characters. The function
7028 `length' returns the string length counting bytes, which may be
7029 more than the number of characters.
7030
7031 You can include a multibyte character in a string constant by writing
7032 it literally. You can also represent it with a hex escape,
7033 \xNNNNNNN..., using as many digits as necessary. Any character which
7034 is not a valid hex digit terminates this construct. If you want to
7035 follow it with a character that is a hex digit, write backslash and
7036 newline in between; that will terminate the hex escape.
7037
7038 *** The function concat-chars takes arguments which are characters
7039 and returns a string containing those characters.
7040
7041 *** The function sref access a multibyte character in a string.
7042 (sref STRING INDX) returns the character in STRING at INDEX. INDEX
7043 counts from zero. If INDEX is at a position in the middle of a
7044 character, sref signals an error.
7045
7046 *** The function chars-in-string returns the number of characters
7047 in a string. This is less than the length of the string, if the
7048 string contains multibyte characters (the length counts bytes).
7049
7050 *** The function chars-in-region returns the number of characters
7051 in a region from BEG to END. This is less than (- END BEG) if the
7052 region contains multibyte characters (the length counts bytes).
7053
7054 *** The function string-to-list converts a string to a list of
7055 the characters in it. string-to-vector converts a string
7056 to a vector of the characters in it.
7057
7058 *** The function store-substring alters part of the contents
7059 of a string. You call it as follows:
7060
7061 (store-substring STRING IDX OBJ)
7062
7063 This says to alter STRING, by storing OBJ starting at index IDX in
7064 STRING. OBJ may be either a character or a (smaller) string.
7065 This function really does alter the contents of STRING.
7066 Since it is impossible to change the length of an existing string,
7067 it is an error if OBJ doesn't fit within STRING's actual length.
7068
7069 *** char-width returns the width (in columns) of the character CHAR,
7070 if it were displayed in the current buffer and the selected window.
7071
7072 *** string-width returns the width (in columns) of the text in STRING,
7073 if it were displayed in the current buffer and the selected window.
7074
7075 *** truncate-string-to-width shortens a string, if necessary,
7076 to fit within a certain number of columns. (Of course, it does
7077 not alter the string that you give it; it returns a new string
7078 which contains all or just part of the existing string.)
7079
7080 (truncate-string-to-width STR END-COLUMN &optional START-COLUMN PADDING)
7081
7082 This returns the part of STR up to column END-COLUMN.
7083
7084 The optional argument START-COLUMN specifies the starting column.
7085 If this is non-nil, then the first START-COLUMN columns of the string
7086 are not included in the resulting value.
7087
7088 The optional argument PADDING, if non-nil, is a padding character to be added
7089 at the beginning and end the resulting string, to extend it to exactly
7090 WIDTH columns. If PADDING is nil, that means do not pad; then, if STRING
7091 is narrower than WIDTH, the value is equal to STRING.
7092
7093 If PADDING and START-COLUMN are both non-nil, and if there is no clean
7094 place in STRING that corresponds to START-COLUMN (because one
7095 character extends across that column), then the padding character
7096 PADDING is added one or more times at the beginning of the result
7097 string, so that its columns line up as if it really did start at
7098 column START-COLUMN.
7099
7100 *** When the functions in the list after-change-functions are called,
7101 the third argument is the number of bytes in the pre-change text, not
7102 necessarily the number of characters. It is, in effect, the
7103 difference in buffer position between the beginning and the end of the
7104 changed text, before the change.
7105
7106 *** The characters Emacs uses are classified in various character
7107 sets, each of which has a name which is a symbol. In general there is
7108 one character set for each script, not for each language.
7109
7110 **** The function charsetp tests whether an object is a character set name.
7111
7112 **** The variable charset-list holds a list of character set names.
7113
7114 **** char-charset, given a character code, returns the name of the character
7115 set that the character belongs to. (The value is a symbol.)
7116
7117 **** split-char, given a character code, returns a list containing the
7118 name of the character set, followed by one or two byte-values
7119 which identify the character within that character set.
7120
7121 **** make-char, given a character set name and one or two subsequent
7122 byte-values, constructs a character code. This is roughly the
7123 opposite of split-char.
7124
7125 **** find-charset-region returns a list of the character sets
7126 of all the characters between BEG and END.
7127
7128 **** find-charset-string returns a list of the character sets
7129 of all the characters in a string.
7130
7131 *** Here are the Lisp facilities for working with coding systems
7132 and specifying coding systems.
7133
7134 **** The function coding-system-list returns a list of all coding
7135 system names (symbols). With optional argument t, it returns a list
7136 of all distinct base coding systems, not including variants.
7137 (Variant coding systems are those like latin-1-dos, latin-1-unix
7138 and latin-1-mac which specify the end-of-line conversion as well
7139 as what to do about code conversion.)
7140
7141 **** coding-system-p tests a symbol to see if it is a coding system
7142 name. It returns t if so, nil if not.
7143
7144 **** file-coding-system-alist specifies which coding systems to use
7145 for certain file names. It works like network-coding-system-alist,
7146 except that the PATTERN is matched against the file name.
7147
7148 Each element has the format (PATTERN . VAL), where PATTERN determines
7149 which file names the element applies to. PATTERN should be a regexp
7150 to match against a file name.
7151
7152 VAL is a coding system, a cons cell containing two coding systems, or
7153 a function symbol. If VAL is a coding system, it is used for both
7154 decoding what received from the network stream and encoding what sent
7155 to the network stream. If VAL is a cons cell containing two coding
7156 systems, the car specifies the coding system for decoding, and the cdr
7157 specifies the coding system for encoding.
7158
7159 If VAL is a function symbol, the function must return a coding system
7160 or a cons cell containing two coding systems, which is used as above.
7161
7162 **** The variable network-coding-system-alist specifies
7163 the coding system to use for network sockets.
7164
7165 Each element has the format (PATTERN . VAL), where PATTERN determines
7166 which network sockets the element applies to. PATTERN should be
7167 either a port number or a regular expression matching some network
7168 service names.
7169
7170 VAL is a coding system, a cons cell containing two coding systems, or
7171 a function symbol. If VAL is a coding system, it is used for both
7172 decoding what received from the network stream and encoding what sent
7173 to the network stream. If VAL is a cons cell containing two coding
7174 systems, the car specifies the coding system for decoding, and the cdr
7175 specifies the coding system for encoding.
7176
7177 If VAL is a function symbol, the function must return a coding system
7178 or a cons cell containing two coding systems, which is used as above.
7179
7180 **** process-coding-system-alist specifies which coding systems to use
7181 for certain subprocess. It works like network-coding-system-alist,
7182 except that the PATTERN is matched against the program name used to
7183 start the subprocess.
7184
7185 **** The variable default-process-coding-system specifies the coding
7186 systems to use for subprocess (and net connection) input and output,
7187 when nothing else specifies what to do. The value is a cons cell
7188 (OUTPUT-CODING . INPUT-CODING). OUTPUT-CODING applies to output
7189 to the subprocess, and INPUT-CODING applies to input from it.
7190
7191 **** The variable coding-system-for-write, if non-nil, specifies the
7192 coding system to use for writing a file, or for output to a synchronous
7193 subprocess.
7194
7195 It also applies to any asynchronous subprocess or network connection,
7196 but in a different way: the value of coding-system-for-write when you
7197 start the subprocess or connection affects that subprocess or
7198 connection permanently or until overridden.
7199
7200 The variable coding-system-for-write takes precedence over
7201 file-coding-system-alist, process-coding-system-alist and
7202 network-coding-system-alist, and all other methods of specifying a
7203 coding system for output. But most of the time this variable is nil.
7204 It exists so that Lisp programs can bind it to a specific coding
7205 system for one operation at a time.
7206
7207 **** coding-system-for-read applies similarly to input from
7208 files, subprocesses or network connections.
7209
7210 **** The function process-coding-system tells you what
7211 coding systems(s) an existing subprocess is using.
7212 The value is a cons cell,
7213 (DECODING-CODING-SYSTEM . ENCODING-CODING-SYSTEM)
7214 where DECODING-CODING-SYSTEM is used for decoding output from
7215 the subprocess, and ENCODING-CODING-SYSTEM is used for encoding
7216 input to the subprocess.
7217
7218 **** The function set-process-coding-system can be used to
7219 change the coding systems in use for an existing subprocess.
7220
7221 ** Emacs has a new facility to help users manage the many
7222 customization options. To make a Lisp program work with this facility,
7223 you need to use the new macros defgroup and defcustom.
7224
7225 You use defcustom instead of defvar, for defining a user option
7226 variable. The difference is that you specify two additional pieces of
7227 information (usually): the "type" which says what values are
7228 legitimate, and the "group" which specifies the hierarchy for
7229 customization.
7230
7231 Thus, instead of writing
7232
7233 (defvar foo-blurgoze nil
7234 "*Non-nil means that foo will act very blurgozely.")
7235
7236 you would now write this:
7237
7238 (defcustom foo-blurgoze nil
7239 "*Non-nil means that foo will act very blurgozely."
7240 :type 'boolean
7241 :group foo)
7242
7243 The type `boolean' means that this variable has only
7244 two meaningful states: nil and non-nil. Other type values
7245 describe other possibilities; see the manual for Custom
7246 for a description of them.
7247
7248 The "group" argument is used to specify a group which the option
7249 should belong to. You define a new group like this:
7250
7251 (defgroup ispell nil
7252 "Spell checking using Ispell."
7253 :group 'processes)
7254
7255 The "group" argument in defgroup specifies the parent group. The root
7256 group is called `emacs'; it should not contain any variables itself,
7257 but only other groups. The immediate subgroups of `emacs' correspond
7258 to the keywords used by C-h p. Under these subgroups come
7259 second-level subgroups that belong to individual packages.
7260
7261 Each Emacs package should have its own set of groups. A simple
7262 package should have just one group; a more complex package should
7263 have a hierarchy of its own groups. The sole or root group of a
7264 package should be a subgroup of one or more of the "keyword"
7265 first-level subgroups.
7266
7267 ** New `widget' library for inserting UI components in buffers.
7268
7269 This library, used by the new custom library, is documented in a
7270 separate manual that accompanies Emacs.
7271
7272 ** easy-mmode
7273
7274 The easy-mmode package provides macros and functions that make
7275 developing minor modes easier. Roughly, the programmer has to code
7276 only the functionality of the minor mode. All the rest--toggles,
7277 predicate, and documentation--can be done in one call to the macro
7278 `easy-mmode-define-minor-mode' (see the documentation). See also
7279 `easy-mmode-define-keymap'.
7280
7281 ** Text property changes
7282
7283 *** The `intangible' property now works on overlays as well as on a
7284 text property.
7285
7286 *** The new functions next-char-property-change and
7287 previous-char-property-change scan through the buffer looking for a
7288 place where either a text property or an overlay might change. The
7289 functions take two arguments, POSITION and LIMIT. POSITION is the
7290 starting position for the scan. LIMIT says where to stop the scan.
7291
7292 If no property change is found before LIMIT, the value is LIMIT. If
7293 LIMIT is nil, scan goes to the beginning or end of the accessible part
7294 of the buffer. If no property change is found, the value is the
7295 position of the beginning or end of the buffer.
7296
7297 *** In the `local-map' text property or overlay property, the property
7298 value can now be a symbol whose function definition is a keymap. This
7299 is an alternative to using the keymap itself.
7300
7301 ** Changes in invisibility features
7302
7303 *** Isearch can now temporarily show parts of the buffer which are
7304 hidden by an overlay with a invisible property, when the search match
7305 is inside that portion of the buffer. To enable this the overlay
7306 should have a isearch-open-invisible property which is a function that
7307 would be called having the overlay as an argument, the function should
7308 make the overlay visible.
7309
7310 During incremental search the overlays are shown by modifying the
7311 invisible and intangible properties, if beside this more actions are
7312 needed the overlay should have a isearch-open-invisible-temporary
7313 which is a function. The function is called with 2 arguments: one is
7314 the overlay and the second is nil when it should show the overlay and
7315 t when it should hide it.
7316
7317 *** add-to-invisibility-spec, remove-from-invisibility-spec
7318
7319 Modes that use overlays to hide portions of a buffer should set the
7320 invisible property of the overlay to the mode's name (or another symbol)
7321 and modify the `buffer-invisibility-spec' to include that symbol.
7322 Use `add-to-invisibility-spec' and `remove-from-invisibility-spec' to
7323 manipulate the `buffer-invisibility-spec'.
7324 Here is an example of how to do this:
7325
7326 ;; If we want to display an ellipsis:
7327 (add-to-invisibility-spec '(my-symbol . t))
7328 ;; If you don't want ellipsis:
7329 (add-to-invisibility-spec 'my-symbol)
7330
7331 ...
7332 (overlay-put (make-overlay beginning end) 'invisible 'my-symbol)
7333
7334 ...
7335 ;; When done with the overlays:
7336 (remove-from-invisibility-spec '(my-symbol . t))
7337 ;; Or respectively:
7338 (remove-from-invisibility-spec 'my-symbol)
7339
7340 ** Changes in syntax parsing.
7341
7342 *** The syntax-directed buffer-scan functions (such as
7343 `parse-partial-sexp', `forward-word' and similar functions) can now
7344 obey syntax information specified by text properties, if the variable
7345 `parse-sexp-lookup-properties' is non-nil.
7346
7347 If the value of `parse-sexp-lookup-properties' is nil, the behavior
7348 is as before: the syntax-table of the current buffer is always
7349 used to determine the syntax of the character at the position.
7350
7351 When `parse-sexp-lookup-properties' is non-nil, the syntax of a
7352 character in the buffer is calculated thus:
7353
7354 a) if the `syntax-table' text-property of that character
7355 is a cons, this cons becomes the syntax-type;
7356
7357 Valid values of `syntax-table' text-property are: nil, a valid
7358 syntax-table, and a valid syntax-table element, i.e.,
7359 a cons cell of the form (SYNTAX-CODE . MATCHING-CHAR).
7360
7361 b) if the character's `syntax-table' text-property
7362 is a syntax table, this syntax table is used
7363 (instead of the syntax-table of the current buffer) to
7364 determine the syntax type of the character.
7365
7366 c) otherwise the syntax-type is determined by the syntax-table
7367 of the current buffer.
7368
7369 *** The meaning of \s in regular expressions is also affected by the
7370 value of `parse-sexp-lookup-properties'. The details are the same as
7371 for the syntax-directed buffer-scan functions.
7372
7373 *** There are two new syntax-codes, `!' and `|' (numeric values 14
7374 and 15). A character with a code `!' starts a comment which is ended
7375 only by another character with the same code (unless quoted). A
7376 character with a code `|' starts a string which is ended only by
7377 another character with the same code (unless quoted).
7378
7379 These codes are mainly meant for use as values of the `syntax-table'
7380 text property.
7381
7382 *** The function `parse-partial-sexp' has new semantics for the sixth
7383 arg COMMENTSTOP. If it is `syntax-table', parse stops after the start
7384 of a comment or a string, or after end of a comment or a string.
7385
7386 *** The state-list which the return value from `parse-partial-sexp'
7387 (and can also be used as an argument) now has an optional ninth
7388 element: the character address of the start of last comment or string;
7389 nil if none. The fourth and eighth elements have special values if the
7390 string/comment is started by a "!" or "|" syntax-code.
7391
7392 *** Since new features of `parse-partial-sexp' allow a complete
7393 syntactic parsing, `font-lock' no longer supports
7394 `font-lock-comment-start-regexp'.
7395
7396 ** Changes in face features
7397
7398 *** The face functions are now unconditionally defined in Emacs, even
7399 if it does not support displaying on a device that supports faces.
7400
7401 *** The function face-documentation returns the documentation string
7402 of a face (or nil if it doesn't have one).
7403
7404 *** The function face-bold-p returns t if a face should be bold.
7405 set-face-bold-p sets that flag.
7406
7407 *** The function face-italic-p returns t if a face should be italic.
7408 set-face-italic-p sets that flag.
7409
7410 *** You can now specify foreground and background colors for text
7411 by adding elements of the form (foreground-color . COLOR-NAME)
7412 and (background-color . COLOR-NAME) to the list of faces in
7413 the `face' property (either the character's text property or an
7414 overlay property).
7415
7416 This means that you no longer need to create named faces to use
7417 arbitrary colors in a Lisp package.
7418
7419 ** Changes in file-handling functions
7420
7421 *** File-access primitive functions no longer discard an extra redundant
7422 directory name from the beginning of the file name. In other words,
7423 they no longer do anything special with // or /~. That conversion
7424 is now done only in substitute-in-file-name.
7425
7426 This makes it possible for a Lisp program to open a file whose name
7427 begins with ~.
7428
7429 *** If copy-file is unable to set the date of the output file,
7430 it now signals an error with the condition file-date-error.
7431
7432 *** The inode number returned by file-attributes may be an integer (if
7433 the number fits in a Lisp integer) or a list of integers.
7434
7435 *** insert-file-contents can now read from a special file,
7436 as long as the arguments VISIT and REPLACE are nil.
7437
7438 *** The RAWFILE arg to find-file-noselect, if non-nil, now suppresses
7439 character code conversion as well as other things.
7440
7441 Meanwhile, this feature does work with remote file names
7442 (formerly it did not).
7443
7444 *** Lisp packages which create temporary files should use the TMPDIR
7445 environment variable to decide which directory to put them in.
7446
7447 *** interpreter-mode-alist elements now specify regexps
7448 instead of constant strings.
7449
7450 *** expand-file-name no longer treats `//' or `/~' specially. It used
7451 to delete all the text of a file name up through the first slash of
7452 any `//' or `/~' sequence. Now it passes them straight through.
7453
7454 substitute-in-file-name continues to treat those sequences specially,
7455 in the same way as before.
7456
7457 *** The variable `format-alist' is more general now.
7458 The FROM-FN and TO-FN in a format definition can now be strings
7459 which specify shell commands to use as filters to perform conversion.
7460
7461 *** The new function access-file tries to open a file, and signals an
7462 error if that fails. If the open succeeds, access-file does nothing
7463 else, and returns nil.
7464
7465 *** The function insert-directory now signals an error if the specified
7466 directory cannot be listed.
7467
7468 ** Changes in minibuffer input
7469
7470 *** The functions read-buffer, read-variable, read-command, read-string
7471 read-file-name, read-from-minibuffer and completing-read now take an
7472 additional argument which specifies the default value. If this
7473 argument is non-nil, it should be a string; that string is used in two
7474 ways:
7475
7476 It is returned if the user enters empty input.
7477 It is available through the history command M-n.
7478
7479 *** The functions read-string, read-from-minibuffer,
7480 read-no-blanks-input and completing-read now take an additional
7481 argument INHERIT-INPUT-METHOD. If this is non-nil, then the
7482 minibuffer inherits the current input method and the setting of
7483 enable-multibyte-characters from the previously current buffer.
7484
7485 In an interactive spec, you can use M instead of s to read an
7486 argument in this way.
7487
7488 *** All minibuffer input functions discard text properties
7489 from the text you enter in the minibuffer, unless the variable
7490 minibuffer-allow-text-properties is non-nil.
7491
7492 ** Echo area features
7493
7494 *** Clearing the echo area now runs the normal hook
7495 echo-area-clear-hook. Note that the echo area can be used while the
7496 minibuffer is active; in that case, the minibuffer is still active
7497 after the echo area is cleared.
7498
7499 *** The function current-message returns the message currently displayed
7500 in the echo area, or nil if there is none.
7501
7502 ** Keyboard input features
7503
7504 *** tty-erase-char is a new variable that reports which character was
7505 set up as the terminal's erase character when time Emacs was started.
7506
7507 *** num-nonmacro-input-events is the total number of input events
7508 received so far from the terminal. It does not count those generated
7509 by keyboard macros.
7510
7511 ** Frame-related changes
7512
7513 *** make-frame runs the normal hook before-make-frame-hook just before
7514 creating a frame, and just after creating a frame it runs the abnormal
7515 hook after-make-frame-functions with the new frame as arg.
7516
7517 *** The new hook window-configuration-change-hook is now run every time
7518 the window configuration has changed. The frame whose configuration
7519 has changed is the selected frame when the hook is run.
7520
7521 *** Each frame now independently records the order for recently
7522 selected buffers, in its buffer-list frame parameter, so that the
7523 value of other-buffer is now based on the buffers recently displayed
7524 in the selected frame.
7525
7526 *** The value of the frame parameter vertical-scroll-bars
7527 is now `left', `right' or nil. A non-nil value specifies
7528 which side of the window to put the scroll bars on.
7529
7530 ** X Windows features
7531
7532 *** You can examine X resources for other applications by binding
7533 x-resource-class around a call to x-get-resource. The usual value of
7534 x-resource-class is "Emacs", which is the correct value for Emacs.
7535
7536 *** In menus, checkboxes and radio buttons now actually work.
7537 The menu displays the current status of the box or button.
7538
7539 *** The function x-list-fonts now takes an optional fourth argument
7540 MAXIMUM which sets a limit on how many matching fonts to return.
7541 A smaller value of MAXIMUM makes the function faster.
7542
7543 If the only question is whether *any* font matches the pattern,
7544 it is good to supply 1 for this argument.
7545
7546 ** Subprocess features
7547
7548 *** A reminder: it is no longer necessary for subprocess filter
7549 functions and sentinels to do save-match-data, because Emacs does this
7550 automatically.
7551
7552 *** The new function shell-command-to-string executes a shell command
7553 and returns the output from the command as a string.
7554
7555 *** The new function process-contact returns t for a child process,
7556 and (HOSTNAME SERVICE) for a net connection.
7557
7558 ** An error in running pre-command-hook or post-command-hook
7559 does clear the variable to nil. The documentation was wrong before.
7560
7561 ** In define-key-after, if AFTER is t, the new binding now always goes
7562 at the end of the keymap. If the keymap is a menu, this means it
7563 goes after the other menu items.
7564
7565 ** If you have a program that makes several changes in the same area
7566 of the buffer, you can use the macro combine-after-change-calls
7567 around that Lisp code to make it faster when after-change hooks
7568 are in use.
7569
7570 The macro arranges to call the after-change functions just once for a
7571 series of several changes--if that seems safe.
7572
7573 Don't alter the variables after-change-functions and
7574 after-change-function within the body of a combine-after-change-calls
7575 form.
7576
7577 ** If you define an abbrev (with define-abbrev) whose EXPANSION
7578 is not a string, then the abbrev does not expand in the usual sense,
7579 but its hook is still run.
7580
7581 ** Normally, the Lisp debugger is not used (even if you have enabled it)
7582 for errors that are handled by condition-case.
7583
7584 If you set debug-on-signal to a non-nil value, then the debugger is called
7585 regardless of whether there is a handler for the condition. This is
7586 useful for debugging problems that happen inside of a condition-case.
7587
7588 This mode of operation seems to be unreliable in other ways. Errors that
7589 are normal and ought to be handled, perhaps in timers or process
7590 filters, will instead invoke the debugger. So don't say you weren't
7591 warned.
7592
7593 ** The new variable ring-bell-function lets you specify your own
7594 way for Emacs to "ring the bell".
7595
7596 ** If run-at-time's TIME argument is t, the action is repeated at
7597 integral multiples of REPEAT from the epoch; this is useful for
7598 functions like display-time.
7599
7600 ** You can use the function locate-library to find the precise file
7601 name of a Lisp library. This isn't new, but wasn't documented before.
7602
7603 ** Commands for entering view mode have new optional arguments that
7604 can be used from Lisp. Low-level entrance to and exit from view mode
7605 is done by functions view-mode-enter and view-mode-exit.
7606
7607 ** batch-byte-compile-file now makes Emacs return a nonzero status code
7608 if there is an error in compilation.
7609
7610 ** pop-to-buffer, switch-to-buffer-other-window and
7611 switch-to-buffer-other-frame now accept an additional optional
7612 argument NORECORD, much like switch-to-buffer. If it is non-nil,
7613 they don't put the buffer at the front of the buffer list.
7614
7615 ** If your .emacs file leaves the *scratch* buffer non-empty,
7616 Emacs does not display the startup message, so as to avoid changing
7617 the *scratch* buffer.
7618
7619 ** The new function regexp-opt returns an efficient regexp to match a string.
7620 The arguments are STRINGS and (optionally) PAREN. This function can be used
7621 where regexp matching or searching is intensively used and speed is important,
7622 e.g., in Font Lock mode.
7623
7624 ** The variable buffer-display-count is local to each buffer,
7625 and is incremented each time the buffer is displayed in a window.
7626 It starts at 0 when the buffer is created.
7627
7628 ** The new function compose-mail starts composing a mail message
7629 using the user's chosen mail composition agent (specified with the
7630 variable mail-user-agent). It has variants compose-mail-other-window
7631 and compose-mail-other-frame.
7632
7633 ** The `user-full-name' function now takes an optional parameter which
7634 can either be a number (the UID) or a string (the login name). The
7635 full name of the specified user will be returned.
7636
7637 ** Lisp packages that load files of customizations, or any other sort
7638 of user profile, should obey the variable init-file-user in deciding
7639 where to find it. They should load the profile of the user name found
7640 in that variable. If init-file-user is nil, meaning that the -q
7641 option was used, then Lisp packages should not load the customization
7642 files at all.
7643
7644 ** format-time-string now allows you to specify the field width
7645 and type of padding. This works as in printf: you write the field
7646 width as digits in the middle of a %-construct. If you start
7647 the field width with 0, it means to pad with zeros.
7648
7649 For example, %S normally specifies the number of seconds since the
7650 minute; %03S means to pad this with zeros to 3 positions, %_3S to pad
7651 with spaces to 3 positions. Plain %3S pads with zeros, because that
7652 is how %S normally pads to two positions.
7653
7654 ** thing-at-point now supports a new kind of "thing": url.
7655
7656 ** imenu.el changes.
7657
7658 You can now specify a function to be run when selecting an
7659 item from menu created by imenu.
7660
7661 An example of using this feature: if we define imenu items for the
7662 #include directives in a C file, we can open the included file when we
7663 select one of those items.
7664
7665 * Emacs 19.34 is a bug-fix release with no user-visible changes.
7666
7667 * Changes in Emacs 19.33.
7668
7669 ** Bibtex mode no longer turns on Auto Fill automatically. (No major
7670 mode should do that--it is the user's choice.)
7671
7672 ** The variable normal-auto-fill-function specifies the function to
7673 use for auto-fill-function, if and when Auto Fill is turned on.
7674 Major modes can set this locally to alter how Auto Fill works.
7675
7676 * Editing Changes in Emacs 19.32
7677
7678 ** C-x f with no argument now signals an error.
7679 To set the fill column at the current column, use C-u C-x f.
7680
7681 ** Expanding dynamic abbrevs with M-/ is now smarter about case
7682 conversion. If you type the abbreviation with mixed case, and it
7683 matches the beginning of the expansion including case, then the
7684 expansion is copied verbatim. Using SPC M-/ to copy an additional
7685 word always copies it verbatim except when the previous copied word is
7686 all caps.
7687
7688 ** On a non-windowing terminal, which can display only one Emacs frame
7689 at a time, creating a new frame with C-x 5 2 also selects that frame.
7690
7691 When using a display that can show multiple frames at once, C-x 5 2
7692 does make the frame visible, but does not select it. This is the same
7693 as in previous Emacs versions.
7694
7695 ** You can use C-x 5 2 to create multiple frames on MSDOS, just as on a
7696 non-X terminal on Unix. Of course, only one frame is visible at any
7697 time, since your terminal doesn't have the ability to display multiple
7698 frames.
7699
7700 ** On Windows, set win32-pass-alt-to-system to a non-nil value
7701 if you would like tapping the Alt key to invoke the Windows menu.
7702 This feature is not enabled by default; since the Alt key is also the
7703 Meta key, it is too easy and painful to activate this feature by
7704 accident.
7705
7706 ** The command apply-macro-to-region-lines repeats the last defined
7707 keyboard macro once for each complete line within the current region.
7708 It does this line by line, by moving point to the beginning of that
7709 line and then executing the macro.
7710
7711 This command is not new, but was never documented before.
7712
7713 ** You can now use Mouse-1 to place the region around a string constant
7714 (something surrounded by doublequote characters or other delimiter
7715 characters of like syntax) by double-clicking on one of the delimiting
7716 characters.
7717
7718 ** Font Lock mode
7719
7720 *** Font Lock support modes
7721
7722 Font Lock can be configured to use Fast Lock mode and Lazy Lock mode (see
7723 below) in a flexible way. Rather than adding the appropriate function to the
7724 hook font-lock-mode-hook, you can use the new variable font-lock-support-mode
7725 to control which modes have Fast Lock mode or Lazy Lock mode turned on when
7726 Font Lock mode is enabled.
7727
7728 For example, to use Fast Lock mode when Font Lock mode is turned on, put:
7729
7730 (setq font-lock-support-mode 'fast-lock-mode)
7731
7732 in your ~/.emacs.
7733
7734 *** lazy-lock
7735
7736 The lazy-lock package speeds up Font Lock mode by making fontification occur
7737 only when necessary, such as when a previously unfontified part of the buffer
7738 becomes visible in a window. When you create a buffer with Font Lock mode and
7739 Lazy Lock mode turned on, the buffer is not fontified. When certain events
7740 occur (such as scrolling), Lazy Lock makes sure that the visible parts of the
7741 buffer are fontified. Lazy Lock also defers on-the-fly fontification until
7742 Emacs has been idle for a given amount of time.
7743
7744 To use this package, put in your ~/.emacs:
7745
7746 (setq font-lock-support-mode 'lazy-lock-mode)
7747
7748 To control the package behaviour, see the documentation for `lazy-lock-mode'.
7749
7750 ** Changes in BibTeX mode.
7751
7752 *** For all entries allow spaces and tabs between opening brace or
7753 paren and key.
7754
7755 *** Non-escaped double-quoted characters (as in `Sch"of') are now
7756 supported.
7757
7758 ** Gnus changes.
7759
7760 Gnus, the Emacs news reader, has undergone further rewriting. Many new
7761 commands and variables have been added. There should be no
7762 significant incompatibilities between this Gnus version and the
7763 previously released version, except in the message composition area.
7764
7765 Below is a list of the more user-visible changes. Coding changes
7766 between Gnus 5.1 and 5.2 are more extensive.
7767
7768 *** A new message composition mode is used. All old customization
7769 variables for mail-mode, rnews-reply-mode and gnus-msg are now
7770 obsolete.
7771
7772 *** Gnus is now able to generate "sparse" threads -- threads where
7773 missing articles are represented by empty nodes.
7774
7775 (setq gnus-build-sparse-threads 'some)
7776
7777 *** Outgoing articles are stored on a special archive server.
7778
7779 To disable this: (setq gnus-message-archive-group nil)
7780
7781 *** Partial thread regeneration now happens when articles are
7782 referred.
7783
7784 *** Gnus can make use of GroupLens predictions:
7785
7786 (setq gnus-use-grouplens t)
7787
7788 *** A trn-line tree buffer can be displayed.
7789
7790 (setq gnus-use-trees t)
7791
7792 *** An nn-like pick-and-read minor mode is available for the summary
7793 buffers.
7794
7795 (add-hook 'gnus-summary-mode-hook 'gnus-pick-mode)
7796
7797 *** In binary groups you can use a special binary minor mode:
7798
7799 `M-x gnus-binary-mode'
7800
7801 *** Groups can be grouped in a folding topic hierarchy.
7802
7803 (add-hook 'gnus-group-mode-hook 'gnus-topic-mode)
7804
7805 *** Gnus can re-send and bounce mail.
7806
7807 Use the `S D r' and `S D b'.
7808
7809 *** Groups can now have a score, and bubbling based on entry frequency
7810 is possible.
7811
7812 (add-hook 'gnus-summary-exit-hook 'gnus-summary-bubble-group)
7813
7814 *** Groups can be process-marked, and commands can be performed on
7815 groups of groups.
7816
7817 *** Caching is possible in virtual groups.
7818
7819 *** nndoc now understands all kinds of digests, mail boxes, rnews news
7820 batches, ClariNet briefs collections, and just about everything else.
7821
7822 *** Gnus has a new backend (nnsoup) to create/read SOUP packets.
7823
7824 *** The Gnus cache is much faster.
7825
7826 *** Groups can be sorted according to many criteria.
7827
7828 For instance: (setq gnus-group-sort-function 'gnus-group-sort-by-rank)
7829
7830 *** New group parameters have been introduced to set list-address and
7831 expiration times.
7832
7833 *** All formatting specs allow specifying faces to be used.
7834
7835 *** There are several more commands for setting/removing/acting on
7836 process marked articles on the `M P' submap.
7837
7838 *** The summary buffer can be limited to show parts of the available
7839 articles based on a wide range of criteria. These commands have been
7840 bound to keys on the `/' submap.
7841
7842 *** Articles can be made persistent -- as an alternative to saving
7843 articles with the `*' command.
7844
7845 *** All functions for hiding article elements are now toggles.
7846
7847 *** Article headers can be buttonized.
7848
7849 (add-hook 'gnus-article-display-hook 'gnus-article-add-buttons-to-head)
7850
7851 *** All mail backends support fetching articles by Message-ID.
7852
7853 *** Duplicate mail can now be treated properly. See the
7854 `nnmail-treat-duplicates' variable.
7855
7856 *** All summary mode commands are available directly from the article
7857 buffer.
7858
7859 *** Frames can be part of `gnus-buffer-configuration'.
7860
7861 *** Mail can be re-scanned by a daemonic process.
7862
7863 *** Gnus can make use of NoCeM files to filter spam.
7864
7865 (setq gnus-use-nocem t)
7866
7867 *** Groups can be made permanently visible.
7868
7869 (setq gnus-permanently-visible-groups "^nnml:")
7870
7871 *** Many new hooks have been introduced to make customizing easier.
7872
7873 *** Gnus respects the Mail-Copies-To header.
7874
7875 *** Threads can be gathered by looking at the References header.
7876
7877 (setq gnus-summary-thread-gathering-function
7878 'gnus-gather-threads-by-references)
7879
7880 *** Read articles can be stored in a special backlog buffer to avoid
7881 refetching.
7882
7883 (setq gnus-keep-backlog 50)
7884
7885 *** A clean copy of the current article is always stored in a separate
7886 buffer to allow easier treatment.
7887
7888 *** Gnus can suggest where to save articles. See `gnus-split-methods'.
7889
7890 *** Gnus doesn't have to do as much prompting when saving.
7891
7892 (setq gnus-prompt-before-saving t)
7893
7894 *** gnus-uu can view decoded files asynchronously while fetching
7895 articles.
7896
7897 (setq gnus-uu-grabbed-file-functions 'gnus-uu-grab-view)
7898
7899 *** Filling in the article buffer now works properly on cited text.
7900
7901 *** Hiding cited text adds buttons to toggle hiding, and how much
7902 cited text to hide is now customizable.
7903
7904 (setq gnus-cited-lines-visible 2)
7905
7906 *** Boring headers can be hidden.
7907
7908 (add-hook 'gnus-article-display-hook 'gnus-article-hide-boring-headers)
7909
7910 *** Default scoring values can now be set from the menu bar.
7911
7912 *** Further syntax checking of outgoing articles have been added.
7913
7914 The Gnus manual has been expanded. It explains all these new features
7915 in greater detail.
7916
7917 * Lisp Changes in Emacs 19.32
7918
7919 ** The function set-visited-file-name now accepts an optional
7920 second argument NO-QUERY. If it is non-nil, then the user is not
7921 asked for confirmation in the case where the specified file already
7922 exists.
7923
7924 ** The variable print-length applies to printing vectors and bitvectors,
7925 as well as lists.
7926
7927 ** The new function keymap-parent returns the parent keymap
7928 of a given keymap.
7929
7930 ** The new function set-keymap-parent specifies a new parent for a
7931 given keymap. The arguments are KEYMAP and PARENT. PARENT must be a
7932 keymap or nil.
7933
7934 ** Sometimes menu keymaps use a command name, a symbol, which is really
7935 an automatically generated alias for some other command, the "real"
7936 name. In such a case, you should give that alias symbol a non-nil
7937 menu-alias property. That property tells the menu system to look for
7938 equivalent keys for the real name instead of equivalent keys for the
7939 alias.
7940
7941 * Editing Changes in Emacs 19.31
7942
7943 ** Freedom of the press restricted in the United States.
7944
7945 Emacs has been censored in accord with the Communications Decency Act.
7946 This includes removing some features of the doctor program. That law
7947 was described by its supporters as a ban on pornography, but it bans
7948 far more than that. The Emacs distribution has never contained any
7949 pornography, but parts of it were nonetheless prohibited.
7950
7951 For information on US government censorship of the Internet, and what
7952 you can do to bring back freedom of the press, see the web site
7953 `http://www.vtw.org/'.
7954
7955 ** A note about C mode indentation customization.
7956
7957 The old (Emacs 19.29) ways of specifying a C indentation style
7958 do not normally work in the new implementation of C mode.
7959 It has its own methods of customizing indentation, which are
7960 much more powerful than the old C mode. See the Editing Programs
7961 chapter of the manual for details.
7962
7963 However, you can load the library cc-compat to make the old
7964 customization variables take effect.
7965
7966 ** Marking with the mouse.
7967
7968 When you mark a region with the mouse, the region now remains
7969 highlighted until the next input event, regardless of whether you are
7970 using M-x transient-mark-mode.
7971
7972 ** Improved Windows NT/95 support.
7973
7974 *** Emacs now supports scroll bars on Windows NT and Windows 95.
7975
7976 *** Emacs now supports subprocesses on Windows 95. (Subprocesses used
7977 to work on NT only and not on 95.)
7978
7979 *** There are difficulties with subprocesses, though, due to problems
7980 in Windows, beyond the control of Emacs. They work fine as long as
7981 you run Windows applications. The problems arise when you run a DOS
7982 application in a subprocesses. Since current shells run as DOS
7983 applications, these problems are significant.
7984
7985 If you run a DOS application in a subprocess, then the application is
7986 likely to busy-wait, which means that your machine will be 100% busy.
7987 However, if you don't mind the temporary heavy load, the subprocess
7988 will work OK as long as you tell it to terminate before you start any
7989 other DOS application as a subprocess.
7990
7991 Emacs is unable to terminate or interrupt a DOS subprocess.
7992 You have to do this by providing input directly to the subprocess.
7993
7994 If you run two DOS applications at the same time in two separate
7995 subprocesses, even if one of them is asynchronous, you will probably
7996 have to reboot your machine--until then, it will remain 100% busy.
7997 Windows simply does not cope when one Windows process tries to run two
7998 separate DOS subprocesses. Typing CTL-ALT-DEL and then choosing
7999 Shutdown seems to work although it may take a few minutes.
8000
8001 ** M-x resize-minibuffer-mode.
8002
8003 This command, not previously mentioned in NEWS, toggles a mode in
8004 which the minibuffer window expands to show as many lines as the
8005 minibuffer contains.
8006
8007 ** `title' frame parameter and resource.
8008
8009 The `title' X resource now specifies just the frame title, nothing else.
8010 It does not affect the name used for looking up other X resources.
8011 It works by setting the new `title' frame parameter, which likewise
8012 affects just the displayed title of the frame.
8013
8014 The `name' parameter continues to do what it used to do:
8015 it specifies the frame name for looking up X resources,
8016 and also serves as the default for the displayed title
8017 when the `title' parameter is unspecified or nil.
8018
8019 ** Emacs now uses the X toolkit by default, if you have a new
8020 enough version of X installed (X11R5 or newer).
8021
8022 ** When you compile Emacs with the Motif widget set, Motif handles the
8023 F10 key by activating the menu bar. To avoid confusion, the usual
8024 Emacs binding of F10 is replaced with a no-op when using Motif.
8025
8026 If you want to be able to use F10 in Emacs, you can rebind the Motif
8027 menubar to some other key which you don't use. To do so, add
8028 something like this to your X resources file. This example rebinds
8029 the Motif menu bar activation key to S-F12:
8030
8031 Emacs*defaultVirtualBindings: osfMenuBar : Shift<Key>F12
8032
8033 ** In overwrite mode, DEL now inserts spaces in most cases
8034 to replace the characters it "deletes".
8035
8036 ** The Rmail summary now shows the number of lines in each message.
8037
8038 ** Rmail has a new command M-x unforward-rmail-message, which extracts
8039 a forwarded message from the message that forwarded it. To use it,
8040 select a message which contains a forwarded message and then type the command.
8041 It inserts the forwarded message as a separate Rmail message
8042 immediately after the selected one.
8043
8044 This command also undoes the textual modifications that are standardly
8045 made, as part of forwarding, by Rmail and other mail reader programs.
8046
8047 ** Turning off saving of .saves-... files in your home directory.
8048
8049 Each Emacs session writes a file named .saves-... in your home
8050 directory to record which files M-x recover-session should recover.
8051 If you exit Emacs normally with C-x C-c, it deletes that file. If
8052 Emacs or the operating system crashes, the file remains for M-x
8053 recover-session.
8054
8055 You can turn off the writing of these files by setting
8056 auto-save-list-file-name to nil. If you do this, M-x recover-session
8057 will not work.
8058
8059 Some previous Emacs versions failed to delete these files even on
8060 normal exit. This is fixed now. If you are thinking of turning off
8061 this feature because of past experiences with versions that had this
8062 bug, it would make sense to check whether you still want to do so
8063 now that the bug is fixed.
8064
8065 ** Changes to Version Control (VC)
8066
8067 There is a new variable, vc-follow-symlinks. It indicates what to do
8068 when you visit a link to a file that is under version control.
8069 Editing the file through the link bypasses the version control system,
8070 which is dangerous and probably not what you want.
8071
8072 If this variable is t, VC follows the link and visits the real file,
8073 telling you about it in the echo area. If it is `ask' (the default),
8074 VC asks for confirmation whether it should follow the link. If nil,
8075 the link is visited and a warning displayed.
8076
8077 ** iso-acc.el now lets you specify a choice of language.
8078 Languages include "latin-1" (the default) and "latin-2" (which
8079 is designed for entering ISO Latin-2 characters).
8080
8081 There are also choices for specific human languages such as French and
8082 Portuguese. These are subsets of Latin-1, which differ in that they
8083 enable only the accent characters needed for particular language.
8084 The other accent characters, not needed for the chosen language,
8085 remain normal.
8086
8087 ** Posting articles and sending mail now has M-TAB completion on various
8088 header fields (Newsgroups, To, CC, ...).
8089
8090 Completion in the Newsgroups header depends on the list of groups
8091 known to your news reader. Completion in the Followup-To header
8092 offers those groups which are in the Newsgroups header, since
8093 Followup-To usually just holds one of those.
8094
8095 Completion in fields that hold mail addresses works based on the list
8096 of local users plus your aliases. Additionally, if your site provides
8097 a mail directory or a specific host to use for any unrecognized user
8098 name, you can arrange to query that host for completion also. (See the
8099 documentation of variables `mail-directory-process' and
8100 `mail-directory-stream'.)
8101
8102 ** A greatly extended sgml-mode offers new features such as (to be configured)
8103 skeletons with completing read for tags and attributes, typing named
8104 characters including optionally all 8bit characters, making tags invisible
8105 with optional alternate display text, skipping and deleting tag(pair)s.
8106
8107 Note: since Emacs' syntax feature cannot limit the special meaning of ', " and
8108 - to inside <>, for some texts the result, especially of font locking, may be
8109 wrong (see `sgml-specials' if you get wrong results).
8110
8111 The derived html-mode configures this with tags and attributes more or
8112 less HTML3ish. It also offers optional quick keys like C-c 1 for
8113 headline or C-c u for unordered list (see `html-quick-keys'). Edit /
8114 Text Properties / Face or M-g combinations create tags as applicable.
8115 Outline minor mode is supported and level 1 font-locking tries to
8116 fontify tag contents (which only works when they fit on one line, due
8117 to a limitation in font-lock).
8118
8119 External viewing via browse-url can occur automatically upon saving.
8120
8121 ** M-x imenu-add-to-menubar now adds to the menu bar for the current
8122 buffer only. If you want to put an Imenu item in the menu bar for all
8123 buffers that use a particular major mode, use the mode hook, as in
8124 this example:
8125
8126 (add-hook 'emacs-lisp-mode-hook
8127 '(lambda () (imenu-add-to-menubar "Index")))
8128
8129 ** Changes in BibTeX mode.
8130
8131 *** Field names may now contain digits, hyphens, and underscores.
8132
8133 *** Font Lock mode is now supported.
8134
8135 *** bibtex-make-optional-field is no longer interactive.
8136
8137 *** If bibtex-maintain-sorted-entries is non-nil, inserting new
8138 entries is now done with a faster algorithm. However, inserting
8139 will fail in this case if the buffer contains invalid entries or
8140 isn't in sorted order, so you should finish each entry with C-c C-c
8141 (bibtex-close-entry) after you have inserted or modified it.
8142 The default value of bibtex-maintain-sorted-entries is nil.
8143
8144 *** Function `show-all' is no longer bound to a key, since C-u C-c C-q
8145 does the same job.
8146
8147 *** Entries with quotes inside quote-delimited fields (as `author =
8148 "Stefan Sch{\"o}f"') are now supported.
8149
8150 *** Case in field names doesn't matter anymore when searching for help
8151 text.
8152
8153 ** Font Lock mode
8154
8155 *** Global Font Lock mode
8156
8157 Font Lock mode can be turned on globally, in buffers that support it, by the
8158 new command global-font-lock-mode. You can use the new variable
8159 font-lock-global-modes to control which modes have Font Lock mode automagically
8160 turned on. By default, this variable is set so that Font Lock mode is turned
8161 on globally where the buffer mode supports it.
8162
8163 For example, to automagically turn on Font Lock mode where supported, put:
8164
8165 (global-font-lock-mode t)
8166
8167 in your ~/.emacs.
8168
8169 *** Local Refontification
8170
8171 In Font Lock mode, editing a line automatically refontifies that line only.
8172 However, if your change alters the syntactic context for following lines,
8173 those lines remain incorrectly fontified. To refontify them, use the new
8174 command M-g M-g (font-lock-fontify-block).
8175
8176 In certain major modes, M-g M-g refontifies the entire current function.
8177 (The variable font-lock-mark-block-function controls how to find the
8178 current function.) In other major modes, M-g M-g refontifies 16 lines
8179 above and below point.
8180
8181 With a prefix argument N, M-g M-g refontifies N lines above and below point.
8182
8183 ** Follow mode
8184
8185 Follow mode is a new minor mode combining windows showing the same
8186 buffer into one tall "virtual window". The windows are typically two
8187 side-by-side windows. Follow mode makes them scroll together as if
8188 they were a unit. To use it, go to a frame with just one window,
8189 split it into two side-by-side windows using C-x 3, and then type M-x
8190 follow-mode.
8191
8192 M-x follow-mode turns off Follow mode if it is already enabled.
8193
8194 To display two side-by-side windows and activate Follow mode, use the
8195 command M-x follow-delete-other-windows-and-split.
8196
8197 ** hide-show changes.
8198
8199 The hooks hs-hide-hooks and hs-show-hooks have been renamed
8200 to hs-hide-hook and hs-show-hook, to follow the convention for
8201 normal hooks.
8202
8203 ** Simula mode now has a menu containing the most important commands.
8204 The new command simula-indent-exp is bound to C-M-q.
8205
8206 ** etags can now handle programs written in Erlang. Files are
8207 recognised by the extensions .erl and .hrl. The tagged lines are
8208 those that begin a function, record, or macro.
8209
8210 ** MSDOS Changes
8211
8212 *** It is now possible to compile Emacs with the version 2 of DJGPP.
8213 Compilation with DJGPP version 1 also still works.
8214
8215 *** The documentation of DOS-specific aspects of Emacs was rewritten
8216 and expanded; see the ``MS-DOS'' node in the on-line docs.
8217
8218 *** Emacs now uses ~ for backup file names, not .bak.
8219
8220 *** You can simulate mouse-3 on two-button mice by simultaneously
8221 pressing both mouse buttons.
8222
8223 *** A number of packages and commands which previously failed or had
8224 restricted functionality on MS-DOS, now work. The most important ones
8225 are:
8226
8227 **** Printing (both with `M-x lpr-buffer' and with `ps-print' package)
8228 now works.
8229
8230 **** `Ediff' works (in a single-frame mode).
8231
8232 **** `M-x display-time' can be used on MS-DOS (due to the new
8233 implementation of Emacs timers, see below).
8234
8235 **** `Dired' supports Unix-style shell wildcards.
8236
8237 **** The `c-macro-expand' command now works as on other platforms.
8238
8239 **** `M-x recover-session' works.
8240
8241 **** `M-x list-colors-display' displays all the available colors.
8242
8243 **** The `TPU-EDT' package works.
8244
8245 * Lisp changes in Emacs 19.31.
8246
8247 ** The function using-unix-filesystems on Windows NT and Windows 95
8248 tells Emacs to read and write files assuming that they reside on a
8249 remote Unix filesystem. No CR/LF translation is done on any files in
8250 this case. Invoking using-unix-filesystems with t activates this
8251 behavior, and invoking it with any other value deactivates it.
8252
8253 ** Change in system-type and system-configuration values.
8254
8255 The value of system-type on a Linux-based GNU system is now `lignux',
8256 not `linux'. This means that some programs which use `system-type'
8257 need to be changed. The value of `system-configuration' will also
8258 be different.
8259
8260 It is generally recommended to use `system-configuration' rather
8261 than `system-type'.
8262
8263 See the file LINUX-GNU in this directory for more about this.
8264
8265 ** The functions shell-command and dired-call-process
8266 now run file name handlers for default-directory, if it has them.
8267
8268 ** Undoing the deletion of text now restores the positions of markers
8269 that pointed into or next to the deleted text.
8270
8271 ** Timers created with run-at-time now work internally to Emacs, and
8272 no longer use a separate process. Therefore, they now work more
8273 reliably and can be used for shorter time delays.
8274
8275 The new function run-with-timer is a convenient way to set up a timer
8276 to run a specified amount of time after the present. A call looks
8277 like this:
8278
8279 (run-with-timer SECS REPEAT FUNCTION ARGS...)
8280
8281 SECS says how many seconds should elapse before the timer happens.
8282 It may be an integer or a floating point number. When the timer
8283 becomes ripe, the action is to call FUNCTION with arguments ARGS.
8284
8285 REPEAT gives the interval for repeating the timer (measured in
8286 seconds). It may be an integer or a floating point number. nil or 0
8287 means don't repeat at all--call FUNCTION just once.
8288
8289 *** with-timeout provides an easy way to do something but give
8290 up if too much time passes.
8291
8292 (with-timeout (SECONDS TIMEOUT-FORMS...) BODY...)
8293
8294 This executes BODY, but gives up after SECONDS seconds.
8295 If it gives up, it runs the TIMEOUT-FORMS and returns the value
8296 of the last one of them. Normally it returns the value of the last
8297 form in BODY.
8298
8299 *** You can now arrange to call a function whenever Emacs is idle for
8300 a certain length of time. To do this, call run-with-idle-timer. A
8301 call looks like this:
8302
8303 (run-with-idle-timer SECS REPEAT FUNCTION ARGS...)
8304
8305 SECS says how many seconds of idleness should elapse before the timer
8306 runs. It may be an integer or a floating point number. When the
8307 timer becomes ripe, the action is to call FUNCTION with arguments
8308 ARGS.
8309
8310 Emacs becomes idle whenever it finishes executing a keyboard or mouse
8311 command. It remains idle until it receives another keyboard or mouse
8312 command.
8313
8314 REPEAT, if non-nil, means this timer should be activated again each
8315 time Emacs becomes idle and remains idle for SECS seconds The timer
8316 does not repeat if Emacs *remains* idle; it runs at most once after
8317 each time Emacs becomes idle.
8318
8319 If REPEAT is nil, the timer runs just once, the first time Emacs is
8320 idle for SECS seconds.
8321
8322 *** post-command-idle-hook is now obsolete; you shouldn't use it at
8323 all, because it interferes with the idle timer mechanism. If your
8324 programs use post-command-idle-hook, convert them to use idle timers
8325 instead.
8326
8327 *** y-or-n-p-with-timeout lets you ask a question but give up if
8328 there is no answer within a certain time.
8329
8330 (y-or-n-p-with-timeout PROMPT SECONDS DEFAULT-VALUE)
8331
8332 asks the question PROMPT (just like y-or-n-p). If the user answers
8333 within SECONDS seconds, it returns the answer that the user gave.
8334 Otherwise it gives up after SECONDS seconds, and returns DEFAULT-VALUE.
8335
8336 ** Minor change to `encode-time': you can now pass more than seven
8337 arguments. If you do that, the first six arguments have the usual
8338 meaning, the last argument is interpreted as the time zone, and the
8339 arguments in between are ignored.
8340
8341 This means that it works to use the list returned by `decode-time' as
8342 the list of arguments for `encode-time'.
8343
8344 ** The default value of load-path now includes the directory
8345 /usr/local/share/emacs/VERSION/site-lisp In addition to
8346 /usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp. You can use this new directory for
8347 site-specific Lisp packages that belong with a particular Emacs
8348 version.
8349
8350 It is not unusual for a Lisp package that works well in one Emacs
8351 version to cause trouble in another. Sometimes packages need updating
8352 for incompatible changes; sometimes they look at internal data that
8353 has changed; sometimes the package has been installed in Emacs itself
8354 and the installed version should be used. Whatever the reason for the
8355 problem, this new feature makes it easier to solve.
8356
8357 ** When your program contains a fixed file name (like .completions or
8358 .abbrev.defs), the file name usually needs to be different on operating
8359 systems with limited file name syntax.
8360
8361 Now you can avoid ad-hoc conditionals by using the function
8362 convert-standard-filename to convert the file name to a proper form
8363 for each operating system. Here is an example of use, from the file
8364 completions.el:
8365
8366 (defvar save-completions-file-name
8367 (convert-standard-filename "~/.completions")
8368 "*The filename to save completions to.")
8369
8370 This sets the variable save-completions-file-name to a value that
8371 depends on the operating system, because the definition of
8372 convert-standard-filename depends on the operating system. On
8373 Unix-like systems, it returns the specified file name unchanged. On
8374 MS-DOS, it adapts the name to fit the limitations of that system.
8375
8376 ** The interactive spec N now returns the numeric prefix argument
8377 rather than the raw prefix argument. (It still reads a number using the
8378 minibuffer if there is no prefix argument at all.)
8379
8380 ** When a process is deleted, this no longer disconnects the process
8381 marker from its buffer position.
8382
8383 ** The variable garbage-collection-messages now controls whether
8384 Emacs displays a message at the beginning and end of garbage collection.
8385 The default is nil, meaning there are no messages.
8386
8387 ** The variable debug-ignored-errors specifies certain kinds of errors
8388 that should not enter the debugger. Its value is a list of error
8389 condition symbols and/or regular expressions. If the error has any
8390 of the condition symbols listed, or if any of the regular expressions
8391 matches the error message, then that error does not enter the debugger,
8392 regardless of the value of debug-on-error.
8393
8394 This variable is initialized to match certain common but uninteresting
8395 errors that happen often during editing.
8396
8397 ** The new function error-message-string converts an error datum
8398 into its error message. The error datum is what condition-case
8399 puts into the variable, to describe the error that happened.
8400
8401 ** Anything that changes which buffer appears in a given window
8402 now runs the window-scroll-functions for that window.
8403
8404 ** The new function get-buffer-window-list returns a list of windows displaying
8405 a buffer. The function is called with the buffer (a buffer object or a buffer
8406 name) and two optional arguments specifying the minibuffer windows and frames
8407 to search. Therefore this function takes optional args like next-window etc.,
8408 and not get-buffer-window.
8409
8410 ** buffer-substring now runs the hook buffer-access-fontify-functions,
8411 calling each function with two arguments--the range of the buffer
8412 being accessed. buffer-substring-no-properties does not call them.
8413
8414 If you use this feature, you should set the variable
8415 buffer-access-fontified-property to a non-nil symbol, which is a
8416 property name. Then, if all the characters in the buffer range have a
8417 non-nil value for that property, the buffer-access-fontify-functions
8418 are not called. When called, these functions should put a non-nil
8419 property on the text that they fontify, so that they won't get called
8420 over and over for the same text.
8421
8422 ** Changes in lisp-mnt.el
8423
8424 *** The lisp-mnt package can now recognize file headers that are written
8425 in the formats used by the `what' command and the RCS `ident' command:
8426
8427 ;; @(#) HEADER: text
8428 ;; $HEADER: text $
8429
8430 in addition to the normal
8431
8432 ;; HEADER: text
8433
8434 *** The commands lm-verify and lm-synopsis are now interactive. lm-verify
8435 checks that the library file has proper sections and headers, and
8436 lm-synopsis extracts first line "synopsis'"information.
8437
8438
8439
8440 * For older news, see the file ONEWS
3461 8441
3462 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 8442 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
3463 Copyright information: 8443 Copyright information:
3464 8444
3465 Copyright (C) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000 Free Software Foundation, Inc. 8445 Copyright (C) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000 Free Software Foundation, Inc.