comparison etc/NEWS @ 51928:c94d493b710a

Merge in the changes for versions 21.2 and 21.3 as documented on the EMACS_21_1_RC branch.

51927:6b832345cf82

(Help->More Manuals->Introduction to Emacs Lisp).

** Support for Cygwin was added.

---
** Support for AIX 5.1 was added.

---
** Support for FreeBSD/Alpha has been added.

---
** Support for BSD/OS 5.0 was added.

---
** Support for GNU/Linux systems on S390 machines was added.

---

+++
** On X, MS Windows, and Mac OS, the blinking cursor's "off" state is
now shown as a hollow box or a thin bar.  However, you can control how
it blinks off by setting the variable `blink-cursor-alist'.


+++
** Emacs now supports compound-text Extended Segments in X selections.

Some versions of X, notably XFree86, use Extended Segments to encode
in X selections characters that belong to character sets which are not
part of the list of approved standard encodings defined by the
compound text spec.  An example of such non-standard encodings is
BIG5.  The new coding system `compound-text-with-extensions' supports
these extensions, and is now used by default for encoding and decoding
X selections.  If you don't want this support, set
`selection-coding-system' to `compound-text'.

** The new variable `x-select-request-type' controls how Emacs
requests X selection.  The default value is nil, which means that
Emacs requests X selection with types COMPOUND_TEXT and UTF8_STRING,
and use the more appropriately result.

** Emacs can now indicate in the mode-line the presence of new e-mail
in a directory or in a file.  See the documentation of the user option
`display-time-mail-directory'.

+++
** The new option `Info-scroll-prefer-subnodes' causes Info to behave
like the stand-alone Info reader (from the GNU Texinfo package) as far
as motion between nodes and their subnodes is concerned.  If it is t
Emacs behaves as before when you type SPC in a menu: it visits the
subnode pointed to by the first menu entry.  If this option is nil,
SPC scrolls to the end of the current node, and only then goes to the
first menu item, like the stand-alone reader does.

This option was already introduced in Emacs 21.1, but wasn't
advertised in the NEWS.

The default is now nil.  (Prior to Emacs 21.4, it was t.)

---
** LDAP support now defaults to ldapsearch from OpenLDAP version 2.

+++

of `cursor-in-non-selected-windows' in the buffer that the cursor
appears in.

** The variable `cursor-in-non-selected-windows' can now be set to any
of the recognized cursor types.

+++
** The default values of `tooltip-delay' and `tooltip-hide-delay'
were changed.

---
** On terminals whose erase-char is ^H (Backspace), Emacs
now uses normal-erase-is-backspace-mode.

---
** The variable `auto-save-file-name-transforms' now has a third element that
controls whether or not the function `make-auto-save-file-name' will
attempt to construct a unique auto-save name (e.g. for remote files).

** New user option `isearch-resume-enabled'.
This option can be disabled, to avoid the normal behavior of isearch
which puts calls to `isearch-resume' in the command history.

---
** When the *scratch* buffer is recreated, its mode is set from
initial-major-mode, which normally is lisp-interaction-mode,
instead of using default-major-mode.

---
** Lisp mode now uses font-lock-doc-face for the docstrings.

---
** Perl mode has a new variable `perl-indent-continued-arguments'.

    (setq x-meta-keysym 'alt)

* New modes and packages in 21.4

** GDB-Script-mode is used for files like .gdbinit.
** GDB-UI is now part of the Emacs distribution.

This mode acts as an enhanced graphical user interface to GDB. You can
interact with GDB through the GUD buffer in the usual way, but there are also
further buffers which control the execution and describe the state of your
program.  It separates the input/output of your program from that of GDB and
displays expressions and their current values in their own buffers.  It also
uses features of Emacs 21 such as the display margin for breakpoints, and the
tool bar.

Use M-x gdba to start GDB-UI.

---
** Ido mode is now part of the Emacs distribution.

The ido (interactively do) package is an extension of the iswitchb

Emacs will still work on terminals that require magic cookies in order
to use standout mode, however they will not be able to display
mode-lines in inverse-video.

---
** The obsolete C mode (c-mode.el) has been removed to avoid problems
with Custom.  cplus-md.el, which required it, has also been removed.

** New package benchmark.el contains simple support for convenient
timing measurements of code (including the garbage collection component).

** The default values of paragraph-start and indent-line-function have

A file local variables list cannot specify a string with text
properties--any specified text properties are discarded.

+++
*** The meanings of scroll-up-aggressively and scroll-down-aggressively
have been interchanged, so that the former now controls scrolling up,
and the latter now controls scrolling down.

+++
** New function window-body-height.

This is like window-height but does not count the mode line
or the header line.

+++
** `provide' and `featurep' now accept an optional second argument
to test/provide subfeatures.  Also `provide' now checks `after-load-alist'
and runs any code associated with the provided feature.

---
** The variable `compilation-parse-errors-filename-function' can
be used to transform filenames found in compilation output.

+++
** Functions `file-name-sans-extension' and `file-name-extension' now
ignore the leading dots in file names, so that file names such as
`.emacs' are treated as extensionless.

display a prompt but don't use the minibuffer, now display the prompt
using the text properties (esp. the face) of the prompt string.

** New packages:

*** The new package syntax.el provides an efficient way to find the
current syntactic context (as returned by parse-partial-sexp).

*** The new package bindat.el provides functions to unpack and pack
binary data structures, such as network packets, to and from Lisp

*** The new package button.el implements simple and fast `clickable buttons'
in emacs buffers.  `buttons' are much lighter-weight than the `widgets'
implemented by widget.el, and can be used by lisp code that doesn't
require the full power of widgets.  Emacs uses buttons for such things
as help and apropos buffers.


* Installation Changes in Emacs 21.1

See the INSTALL file for information on installing extra libraries and

51928:c94d493b710a

(Help->More Manuals->Introduction to Emacs Lisp).

** Support for Cygwin was added.

---
** Support for FreeBSD/Alpha has been added.

---
** Support for GNU/Linux systems on S390 machines was added.

---

+++
** On X, MS Windows, and Mac OS, the blinking cursor's "off" state is
now shown as a hollow box or a thin bar.  However, you can control how
it blinks off by setting the variable `blink-cursor-alist'.

** The new variable `x-select-request-type' controls how Emacs
requests X selection.  The default value is nil, which means that
Emacs requests X selection with types COMPOUND_TEXT and UTF8_STRING,
and use the more appropriately result.

** Emacs can now indicate in the mode-line the presence of new e-mail
in a directory or in a file.  See the documentation of the user option
`display-time-mail-directory'.

+++
** The default value for `Info-scroll-prefer-subnodes' is now nil.

---
** LDAP support now defaults to ldapsearch from OpenLDAP version 2.

+++

of `cursor-in-non-selected-windows' in the buffer that the cursor
appears in.

** The variable `cursor-in-non-selected-windows' can now be set to any
of the recognized cursor types.

---
** The variable `auto-save-file-name-transforms' now has a third element that
controls whether or not the function `make-auto-save-file-name' will
attempt to construct a unique auto-save name (e.g. for remote files).

** New user option `isearch-resume-enabled'.
This option can be disabled, to avoid the normal behavior of isearch
which puts calls to `isearch-resume' in the command history.

---
** Lisp mode now uses font-lock-doc-face for the docstrings.

---
** Perl mode has a new variable `perl-indent-continued-arguments'.

    (setq x-meta-keysym 'alt)

* New modes and packages in 21.4

** GDB-Script-mode is used for files like .gdbinit.

---
** Ido mode is now part of the Emacs distribution.

The ido (interactively do) package is an extension of the iswitchb

Emacs will still work on terminals that require magic cookies in order
to use standout mode, however they will not be able to display
mode-lines in inverse-video.

---
** cplus-md.el has been removed to avoid problems with Custom.  

** New package benchmark.el contains simple support for convenient
timing measurements of code (including the garbage collection component).

** The default values of paragraph-start and indent-line-function have

A file local variables list cannot specify a string with text
properties--any specified text properties are discarded.

+++
** New function window-body-height.

This is like window-height but does not count the mode line
or the header line.

+++
** `provide' and `featurep' now accept an optional second argument
to test/provide subfeatures.  Also `provide' now checks `after-load-alist'
and runs any code associated with the provided feature.

+++
** Functions `file-name-sans-extension' and `file-name-extension' now
ignore the leading dots in file names, so that file names such as
`.emacs' are treated as extensionless.

display a prompt but don't use the minibuffer, now display the prompt
using the text properties (esp. the face) of the prompt string.

** New packages:

*** The new package gdb-ui.el provides an enhanced graphical interface to
GDB. You can interact with GDB through the GUD buffer in the usual way, but
there are also further buffers which control the execution and describe the
state of your program.  It separates the input/output of your program from
that of GDB and displays expressions and their current values in their own
buffers.  It also uses features of Emacs 21 such as the display margin for
breakpoints, and the toolbar.

Use M-x gdba to start GDB-UI.

*** The new package syntax.el provides an efficient way to find the
current syntactic context (as returned by parse-partial-sexp).

*** The new package bindat.el provides functions to unpack and pack
binary data structures, such as network packets, to and from Lisp

*** The new package button.el implements simple and fast `clickable buttons'
in emacs buffers.  `buttons' are much lighter-weight than the `widgets'
implemented by widget.el, and can be used by lisp code that doesn't
require the full power of widgets.  Emacs uses buttons for such things
as help and apropos buffers.


* Installation changes in Emacs 21.3

** Support for GNU/Linux on little-endian MIPS and on IBM S390 has
been added.


* Changes in Emacs 21.3

** The obsolete C mode (c-mode.el) has been removed to avoid problems
with Custom.

** UTF-16 coding systems are available, encoding the same characters
as mule-utf-8.  Coding system `utf-16-le-dos' is useful as the value
of `selection-coding-system' in MS Windows, allowing you to paste
multilingual text from the clipboard.  Set it interactively with
C-x RET x or in .emacs with `(set-selection-coding-system 'utf-16-le-dos)'.

** There is a new language environment for UTF-8 (set up automatically
in UTF-8 locales).

** Translation tables are available between equivalent characters in
different Emacs charsets -- for instance `e with acute' coming from the
Latin-1 and Latin-2 charsets.  User options `unify-8859-on-encoding-mode'
and `unify-8859-on-decoding-mode' respectively turn on translation
between ISO 8859 character sets (`unification') on encoding
(e.g. writing a file) and decoding (e.g. reading a file).  Note that
`unify-8859-on-encoding-mode' is useful and safe, but
`unify-8859-on-decoding-mode' can cause text to change when you read
it and write it out again without edits, so it is not generally advisable.
By default `unify-8859-on-encoding-mode' is turned on.

** In Emacs running on the X window system, the default value of
`selection-coding-system' is now `compound-text-with-extensions'.

If you want the old behavior, set selection-coding-system to
compound-text, which may be significantly more efficient.  Using
compound-text-with-extensions seems to be necessary only for decoding
text from applications under XFree86 4.2, whose behaviour is actually
contrary to the compound text specification.


* Installation changes in Emacs 21.2

** Support for BSD/OS 5.0 has been added.

** Support for AIX 5.1 was added.


* Changes in Emacs 21.2

** Emacs now supports compound-text extended segments in X selections.

X applications can use `extended segments' to encode characters in
compound text that belong to character sets which are not part of the
list of approved standard encodings for X, e.g. Big5.  To paste
selections with such characters into Emacs, use the new coding system
compound-text-with-extensions as the value of selection-coding-system.

** The default values of `tooltip-delay' and `tooltip-hide-delay'
were changed.

** On terminals whose erase-char is ^H (Backspace), Emacs
now uses normal-erase-is-backspace-mode.

** When the *scratch* buffer is recreated, its mode is set from
initial-major-mode, which normally is lisp-interaction-mode,
instead of using default-major-mode.

** The new option `Info-scroll-prefer-subnodes' causes Info to behave
like the stand-alone Info reader (from the GNU Texinfo package) as far
as motion between nodes and their subnodes is concerned.  If it is t
(the default), Emacs behaves as before when you type SPC in a menu: it
visits the subnode pointed to by the first menu entry.  If this option
is nil, SPC scrolls to the end of the current node, and only then goes
to the first menu item, like the stand-alone reader does.

This change was already in Emacs 21.1, but wasn't advertised in the
NEWS.


* Lisp Changes in Emacs 21.2

** The meanings of scroll-up-aggressively and scroll-down-aggressively
have been interchanged, so that the former now controls scrolling up,
and the latter now controls scrolling down.

** The variable `compilation-parse-errors-filename-function' can
be used to transform filenames found in compilation output.


* Installation Changes in Emacs 21.1

See the INSTALL file for information on installing extra libraries and