GNU Emacs NEWS -- history of user-visible changes. 1992. Copyright (C) 1995, 2001 Free Software Foundation, Inc. See the end for copying conditions. For older news, see the file ONEWS.4. * Emacs 19.34 is a bug-fix release with no user-visible changes. * Changes in Emacs 19.33. ** Bibtex mode no longer turns on Auto Fill automatically. (No major mode should do that--it is the user's choice.) ** The variable normal-auto-fill-function specifies the function to use for auto-fill-function, if and when Auto Fill is turned on. Major modes can set this locally to alter how Auto Fill works. * Editing Changes in Emacs 19.32 ** C-x f with no argument now signals an error. To set the fill column at the current column, use C-u C-x f. ** Expanding dynamic abbrevs with M-/ is now smarter about case conversion. If you type the abbreviation with mixed case, and it matches the beginning of the expansion including case, then the expansion is copied verbatim. Using SPC M-/ to copy an additional word always copies it verbatim except when the previous copied word is all caps. ** On a non-windowing terminal, which can display only one Emacs frame at a time, creating a new frame with C-x 5 2 also selects that frame. When using a display that can show multiple frames at once, C-x 5 2 does make the frame visible, but does not select it. This is the same as in previous Emacs versions. ** You can use C-x 5 2 to create multiple frames on MSDOS, just as on a non-X terminal on Unix. Of course, only one frame is visible at any time, since your terminal doesn't have the ability to display multiple frames. ** On Windows, set win32-pass-alt-to-system to a non-nil value if you would like tapping the Alt key to invoke the Windows menu. This feature is not enabled by default; since the Alt key is also the Meta key, it is too easy and painful to activate this feature by accident. ** The command apply-macro-to-region-lines repeats the last defined keyboard macro once for each complete line within the current region. It does this line by line, by moving point to the beginning of that line and then executing the macro. This command is not new, but was never documented before. ** You can now use Mouse-1 to place the region around a string constant (something surrounded by doublequote characters or other delimiter characters of like syntax) by double-clicking on one of the delimiting characters. ** Font Lock mode *** Font Lock support modes Font Lock can be configured to use Fast Lock mode and Lazy Lock mode (see below) in a flexible way. Rather than adding the appropriate function to the hook font-lock-mode-hook, you can use the new variable font-lock-support-mode to control which modes have Fast Lock mode or Lazy Lock mode turned on when Font Lock mode is enabled. For example, to use Fast Lock mode when Font Lock mode is turned on, put: (setq font-lock-support-mode 'fast-lock-mode) in your ~/.emacs. *** lazy-lock The lazy-lock package speeds up Font Lock mode by making fontification occur only when necessary, such as when a previously unfontified part of the buffer becomes visible in a window. When you create a buffer with Font Lock mode and Lazy Lock mode turned on, the buffer is not fontified. When certain events occur (such as scrolling), Lazy Lock makes sure that the visible parts of the buffer are fontified. Lazy Lock also defers on-the-fly fontification until Emacs has been idle for a given amount of time. To use this package, put in your ~/.emacs: (setq font-lock-support-mode 'lazy-lock-mode) To control the package behaviour, see the documentation for `lazy-lock-mode'. ** Changes in BibTeX mode. *** For all entries allow spaces and tabs between opening brace or paren and key. *** Non-escaped double-quoted characters (as in `Sch"of') are now supported. ** Gnus changes. Gnus, the Emacs news reader, has undergone further rewriting. Many new commands and variables have been added. There should be no significant incompatibilities between this Gnus version and the previously released version, except in the message composition area. Below is a list of the more user-visible changes. Coding changes between Gnus 5.1 and 5.2 are more extensive. *** A new message composition mode is used. All old customization variables for mail-mode, rnews-reply-mode and gnus-msg are now obsolete. *** Gnus is now able to generate "sparse" threads -- threads where missing articles are represented by empty nodes. (setq gnus-build-sparse-threads 'some) *** Outgoing articles are stored on a special archive server. To disable this: (setq gnus-message-archive-group nil) *** Partial thread regeneration now happens when articles are referred. *** Gnus can make use of GroupLens predictions: (setq gnus-use-grouplens t) *** A trn-line tree buffer can be displayed. (setq gnus-use-trees t) *** An nn-like pick-and-read minor mode is available for the summary buffers. (add-hook 'gnus-summary-mode-hook 'gnus-pick-mode) *** In binary groups you can use a special binary minor mode: `M-x gnus-binary-mode' *** Groups can be grouped in a folding topic hierarchy. (add-hook 'gnus-group-mode-hook 'gnus-topic-mode) *** Gnus can re-send and bounce mail. Use the `S D r' and `S D b'. *** Groups can now have a score, and bubbling based on entry frequency is possible. (add-hook 'gnus-summary-exit-hook 'gnus-summary-bubble-group) *** Groups can be process-marked, and commands can be performed on groups of groups. *** Caching is possible in virtual groups. *** nndoc now understands all kinds of digests, mail boxes, rnews news batches, ClariNet briefs collections, and just about everything else. *** Gnus has a new backend (nnsoup) to create/read SOUP packets. *** The Gnus cache is much faster. *** Groups can be sorted according to many criteria. For instance: (setq gnus-group-sort-function 'gnus-group-sort-by-rank) *** New group parameters have been introduced to set list-address and expiration times. *** All formatting specs allow specifying faces to be used. *** There are several more commands for setting/removing/acting on process marked articles on the `M P' submap. *** The summary buffer can be limited to show parts of the available articles based on a wide range of criteria. These commands have been bound to keys on the `/' submap. *** Articles can be made persistent -- as an alternative to saving articles with the `*' command. *** All functions for hiding article elements are now toggles. *** Article headers can be buttonized. (add-hook 'gnus-article-display-hook 'gnus-article-add-buttons-to-head) *** All mail backends support fetching articles by Message-ID. *** Duplicate mail can now be treated properly. See the `nnmail-treat-duplicates' variable. *** All summary mode commands are available directly from the article buffer. *** Frames can be part of `gnus-buffer-configuration'. *** Mail can be re-scanned by a daemonic process. *** Gnus can make use of NoCeM files to filter spam. (setq gnus-use-nocem t) *** Groups can be made permanently visible. (setq gnus-permanently-visible-groups "^nnml:") *** Many new hooks have been introduced to make customizing easier. *** Gnus respects the Mail-Copies-To header. *** Threads can be gathered by looking at the References header. (setq gnus-summary-thread-gathering-function 'gnus-gather-threads-by-references) *** Read articles can be stored in a special backlog buffer to avoid refetching. (setq gnus-keep-backlog 50) *** A clean copy of the current article is always stored in a separate buffer to allow easier treatment. *** Gnus can suggest where to save articles. See `gnus-split-methods'. *** Gnus doesn't have to do as much prompting when saving. (setq gnus-prompt-before-saving t) *** gnus-uu can view decoded files asynchronously while fetching articles. (setq gnus-uu-grabbed-file-functions 'gnus-uu-grab-view) *** Filling in the article buffer now works properly on cited text. *** Hiding cited text adds buttons to toggle hiding, and how much cited text to hide is now customizable. (setq gnus-cited-lines-visible 2) *** Boring headers can be hidden. (add-hook 'gnus-article-display-hook 'gnus-article-hide-boring-headers) *** Default scoring values can now be set from the menu bar. *** Further syntax checking of outgoing articles have been added. The Gnus manual has been expanded. It explains all these new features in greater detail. * Lisp Changes in Emacs 19.32 ** The function set-visited-file-name now accepts an optional second argument NO-QUERY. If it is non-nil, then the user is not asked for confirmation in the case where the specified file already exists. ** The variable print-length applies to printing vectors and bitvectors, as well as lists. ** The new function keymap-parent returns the parent keymap of a given keymap. ** The new function set-keymap-parent specifies a new parent for a given keymap. The arguments are KEYMAP and PARENT. PARENT must be a keymap or nil. ** Sometimes menu keymaps use a command name, a symbol, which is really an automatically generated alias for some other command, the "real" name. In such a case, you should give that alias symbol a non-nil menu-alias property. That property tells the menu system to look for equivalent keys for the real name instead of equivalent keys for the alias. * Editing Changes in Emacs 19.31 ** Freedom of the press restricted in the United States. Emacs has been censored in accord with the Communications Decency Act. This includes removing some features of the doctor program. That law was described by its supporters as a ban on pornography, but it bans far more than that. The Emacs distribution has never contained any pornography, but parts of it were nonetheless prohibited. For information on US government censorship of the Internet, and what you can do to bring back freedom of the press, see the web site `http://www.vtw.org/'. ** A note about C mode indentation customization. The old (Emacs 19.29) ways of specifying a C indentation style do not normally work in the new implementation of C mode. It has its own methods of customizing indentation, which are much more powerful than the old C mode. See the Editing Programs chapter of the manual for details. However, you can load the library cc-compat to make the old customization variables take effect. ** Marking with the mouse. When you mark a region with the mouse, the region now remains highlighted until the next input event, regardless of whether you are using M-x transient-mark-mode. ** Improved Windows NT/95 support. *** Emacs now supports scroll bars on Windows NT and Windows 95. *** Emacs now supports subprocesses on Windows 95. (Subprocesses used to work on NT only and not on 95.) *** There are difficulties with subprocesses, though, due to problems in Windows, beyond the control of Emacs. They work fine as long as you run Windows applications. The problems arise when you run a DOS application in a subprocesses. Since current shells run as DOS applications, these problems are significant. If you run a DOS application in a subprocess, then the application is likely to busy-wait, which means that your machine will be 100% busy. However, if you don't mind the temporary heavy load, the subprocess will work OK as long as you tell it to terminate before you start any other DOS application as a subprocess. Emacs is unable to terminate or interrupt a DOS subprocess. You have to do this by providing input directly to the subprocess. If you run two DOS applications at the same time in two separate subprocesses, even if one of them is asynchronous, you will probably have to reboot your machine--until then, it will remain 100% busy. Windows simply does not cope when one Windows process tries to run two separate DOS subprocesses. Typing CTL-ALT-DEL and then choosing Shutdown seems to work although it may take a few minutes. ** M-x resize-minibuffer-mode. This command, not previously mentioned in NEWS, toggles a mode in which the minibuffer window expands to show as many lines as the minibuffer contains. ** `title' frame parameter and resource. The `title' X resource now specifies just the frame title, nothing else. It does not affect the name used for looking up other X resources. It works by setting the new `title' frame parameter, which likewise affects just the displayed title of the frame. The `name' parameter continues to do what it used to do: it specifies the frame name for looking up X resources, and also serves as the default for the displayed title when the `title' parameter is unspecified or nil. ** Emacs now uses the X toolkit by default, if you have a new enough version of X installed (X11R5 or newer). ** When you compile Emacs with the Motif widget set, Motif handles the F10 key by activating the menu bar. To avoid confusion, the usual Emacs binding of F10 is replaced with a no-op when using Motif. If you want to be able to use F10 in Emacs, you can rebind the Motif menubar to some other key which you don't use. To do so, add something like this to your X resources file. This example rebinds the Motif menu bar activation key to S-F12: Emacs*defaultVirtualBindings: osfMenuBar : ShiftF12 ** In overwrite mode, DEL now inserts spaces in most cases to replace the characters it "deletes". ** The Rmail summary now shows the number of lines in each message. ** Rmail has a new command M-x unforward-rmail-message, which extracts a forwarded message from the message that forwarded it. To use it, select a message which contains a forwarded message and then type the command. It inserts the forwarded message as a separate Rmail message immediately after the selected one. This command also undoes the textual modifications that are standardly made, as part of forwarding, by Rmail and other mail reader programs. ** Turning off saving of .saves-... files in your home directory. Each Emacs session writes a file named .saves-... in your home directory to record which files M-x recover-session should recover. If you exit Emacs normally with C-x C-c, it deletes that file. If Emacs or the operating system crashes, the file remains for M-x recover-session. You can turn off the writing of these files by setting auto-save-list-file-name to nil. If you do this, M-x recover-session will not work. Some previous Emacs versions failed to delete these files even on normal exit. This is fixed now. If you are thinking of turning off this feature because of past experiences with versions that had this bug, it would make sense to check whether you still want to do so now that the bug is fixed. ** Changes to Version Control (VC) There is a new variable, vc-follow-symlinks. It indicates what to do when you visit a link to a file that is under version control. Editing the file through the link bypasses the version control system, which is dangerous and probably not what you want. If this variable is t, VC follows the link and visits the real file, telling you about it in the echo area. If it is `ask' (the default), VC asks for confirmation whether it should follow the link. If nil, the link is visited and a warning displayed. ** iso-acc.el now lets you specify a choice of language. Languages include "latin-1" (the default) and "latin-2" (which is designed for entering ISO Latin-2 characters). There are also choices for specific human languages such as French and Portuguese. These are subsets of Latin-1, which differ in that they enable only the accent characters needed for particular language. The other accent characters, not needed for the chosen language, remain normal. ** Posting articles and sending mail now has M-TAB completion on various header fields (Newsgroups, To, CC, ...). Completion in the Newsgroups header depends on the list of groups known to your news reader. Completion in the Followup-To header offers those groups which are in the Newsgroups header, since Followup-To usually just holds one of those. Completion in fields that hold mail addresses works based on the list of local users plus your aliases. Additionally, if your site provides a mail directory or a specific host to use for any unrecognized user name, you can arrange to query that host for completion also. (See the documentation of variables `mail-directory-process' and `mail-directory-stream'.) ** A greatly extended sgml-mode offers new features such as (to be configured) skeletons with completing read for tags and attributes, typing named characters including optionally all 8bit characters, making tags invisible with optional alternate display text, skipping and deleting tag(pair)s. Note: since Emacs' syntax feature cannot limit the special meaning of ', " and - to inside <>, for some texts the result, especially of font locking, may be wrong (see `sgml-specials' if you get wrong results). The derived html-mode configures this with tags and attributes more or less HTML3ish. It also offers optional quick keys like C-c 1 for headline or C-c u for unordered list (see `html-quick-keys'). Edit / Text Properties / Face or M-g combinations create tags as applicable. Outline minor mode is supported and level 1 font-locking tries to fontify tag contents (which only works when they fit on one line, due to a limitation in font-lock). External viewing via browse-url can occur automatically upon saving. ** M-x imenu-add-to-menubar now adds to the menu bar for the current buffer only. If you want to put an Imenu item in the menu bar for all buffers that use a particular major mode, use the mode hook, as in this example: (add-hook 'emacs-lisp-mode-hook '(lambda () (imenu-add-to-menubar "Index"))) ** Changes in BibTeX mode. *** Field names may now contain digits, hyphens, and underscores. *** Font Lock mode is now supported. *** bibtex-make-optional-field is no longer interactive. *** If bibtex-maintain-sorted-entries is non-nil, inserting new entries is now done with a faster algorithm. However, inserting will fail in this case if the buffer contains invalid entries or isn't in sorted order, so you should finish each entry with C-c C-c (bibtex-close-entry) after you have inserted or modified it. The default value of bibtex-maintain-sorted-entries is nil. *** Function `show-all' is no longer bound to a key, since C-u C-c C-q does the same job. *** Entries with quotes inside quote-delimited fields (as `author = "Stefan Sch{\"o}f"') are now supported. *** Case in field names doesn't matter anymore when searching for help text. ** Font Lock mode *** Global Font Lock mode Font Lock mode can be turned on globally, in buffers that support it, by the new command global-font-lock-mode. You can use the new variable font-lock-global-modes to control which modes have Font Lock mode automagically turned on. By default, this variable is set so that Font Lock mode is turned on globally where the buffer mode supports it. For example, to automagically turn on Font Lock mode where supported, put: (global-font-lock-mode t) in your ~/.emacs. *** Local Refontification In Font Lock mode, editing a line automatically refontifies that line only. However, if your change alters the syntactic context for following lines, those lines remain incorrectly fontified. To refontify them, use the new command M-g M-g (font-lock-fontify-block). In certain major modes, M-g M-g refontifies the entire current function. (The variable font-lock-mark-block-function controls how to find the current function.) In other major modes, M-g M-g refontifies 16 lines above and below point. With a prefix argument N, M-g M-g refontifies N lines above and below point. ** Follow mode Follow mode is a new minor mode combining windows showing the same buffer into one tall "virtual window". The windows are typically two side-by-side windows. Follow mode makes them scroll together as if they were a unit. To use it, go to a frame with just one window, split it into two side-by-side windows using C-x 3, and then type M-x follow-mode. M-x follow-mode turns off Follow mode if it is already enabled. To display two side-by-side windows and activate Follow mode, use the command M-x follow-delete-other-windows-and-split. ** hide-show changes. The hooks hs-hide-hooks and hs-show-hooks have been renamed to hs-hide-hook and hs-show-hook, to follow the convention for normal hooks. ** Simula mode now has a menu containing the most important commands. The new command simula-indent-exp is bound to C-M-q. ** etags can now handle programs written in Erlang. Files are recognised by the extensions .erl and .hrl. The tagged lines are those that begin a function, record, or macro. ** MSDOS Changes *** It is now possible to compile Emacs with the version 2 of DJGPP. Compilation with DJGPP version 1 also still works. *** The documentation of DOS-specific aspects of Emacs was rewritten and expanded; see the ``MS-DOS'' node in the on-line docs. *** Emacs now uses ~ for backup file names, not .bak. *** You can simulate mouse-3 on two-button mice by simultaneously pressing both mouse buttons. *** A number of packages and commands which previously failed or had restricted functionality on MS-DOS, now work. The most important ones are: **** Printing (both with `M-x lpr-buffer' and with `ps-print' package) now works. **** `Ediff' works (in a single-frame mode). **** `M-x display-time' can be used on MS-DOS (due to the new implementation of Emacs timers, see below). **** `Dired' supports Unix-style shell wildcards. **** The `c-macro-expand' command now works as on other platforms. **** `M-x recover-session' works. **** `M-x list-colors-display' displays all the available colors. **** The `TPU-EDT' package works. * Lisp changes in Emacs 19.31. ** The function using-unix-filesystems on Windows NT and Windows 95 tells Emacs to read and write files assuming that they reside on a remote Unix filesystem. No CR/LF translation is done on any files in this case. Invoking using-unix-filesystems with t activates this behavior, and invoking it with any other value deactivates it. ** Change in system-type and system-configuration values. The value of system-type on a Linux-based GNU system is now `lignux', not `linux'. This means that some programs which use `system-type' need to be changed. The value of `system-configuration' will also be different. It is generally recommended to use `system-configuration' rather than `system-type'. See the file LINUX-GNU in this directory for more about this. ** The functions shell-command and dired-call-process now run file name handlers for default-directory, if it has them. ** Undoing the deletion of text now restores the positions of markers that pointed into or next to the deleted text. ** Timers created with run-at-time now work internally to Emacs, and no longer use a separate process. Therefore, they now work more reliably and can be used for shorter time delays. The new function run-with-timer is a convenient way to set up a timer to run a specified amount of time after the present. A call looks like this: (run-with-timer SECS REPEAT FUNCTION ARGS...) SECS says how many seconds should elapse before the timer happens. It may be an integer or a floating point number. When the timer becomes ripe, the action is to call FUNCTION with arguments ARGS. REPEAT gives the interval for repeating the timer (measured in seconds). It may be an integer or a floating point number. nil or 0 means don't repeat at all--call FUNCTION just once. *** with-timeout provides an easy way to do something but give up if too much time passes. (with-timeout (SECONDS TIMEOUT-FORMS...) BODY...) This executes BODY, but gives up after SECONDS seconds. If it gives up, it runs the TIMEOUT-FORMS and returns the value of the last one of them. Normally it returns the value of the last form in BODY. *** You can now arrange to call a function whenever Emacs is idle for a certain length of time. To do this, call run-with-idle-timer. A call looks like this: (run-with-idle-timer SECS REPEAT FUNCTION ARGS...) SECS says how many seconds of idleness should elapse before the timer runs. It may be an integer or a floating point number. When the timer becomes ripe, the action is to call FUNCTION with arguments ARGS. Emacs becomes idle whenever it finishes executing a keyboard or mouse command. It remains idle until it receives another keyboard or mouse command. REPEAT, if non-nil, means this timer should be activated again each time Emacs becomes idle and remains idle for SECS seconds The timer does not repeat if Emacs *remains* idle; it runs at most once after each time Emacs becomes idle. If REPEAT is nil, the timer runs just once, the first time Emacs is idle for SECS seconds. *** post-command-idle-hook is now obsolete; you shouldn't use it at all, because it interferes with the idle timer mechanism. If your programs use post-command-idle-hook, convert them to use idle timers instead. *** y-or-n-p-with-timeout lets you ask a question but give up if there is no answer within a certain time. (y-or-n-p-with-timeout PROMPT SECONDS DEFAULT-VALUE) asks the question PROMPT (just like y-or-n-p). If the user answers within SECONDS seconds, it returns the answer that the user gave. Otherwise it gives up after SECONDS seconds, and returns DEFAULT-VALUE. ** Minor change to `encode-time': you can now pass more than seven arguments. If you do that, the first six arguments have the usual meaning, the last argument is interpreted as the time zone, and the arguments in between are ignored. This means that it works to use the list returned by `decode-time' as the list of arguments for `encode-time'. ** The default value of load-path now includes the directory /usr/local/share/emacs/VERSION/site-lisp In addition to /usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp. You can use this new directory for site-specific Lisp packages that belong with a particular Emacs version. It is not unusual for a Lisp package that works well in one Emacs version to cause trouble in another. Sometimes packages need updating for incompatible changes; sometimes they look at internal data that has changed; sometimes the package has been installed in Emacs itself and the installed version should be used. Whatever the reason for the problem, this new feature makes it easier to solve. ** When your program contains a fixed file name (like .completions or .abbrev.defs), the file name usually needs to be different on operating systems with limited file name syntax. Now you can avoid ad-hoc conditionals by using the function convert-standard-filename to convert the file name to a proper form for each operating system. Here is an example of use, from the file completions.el: (defvar save-completions-file-name (convert-standard-filename "~/.completions") "*The filename to save completions to.") This sets the variable save-completions-file-name to a value that depends on the operating system, because the definition of convert-standard-filename depends on the operating system. On Unix-like systems, it returns the specified file name unchanged. On MS-DOS, it adapts the name to fit the limitations of that system. ** The interactive spec N now returns the numeric prefix argument rather than the raw prefix argument. (It still reads a number using the minibuffer if there is no prefix argument at all.) ** When a process is deleted, this no longer disconnects the process marker from its buffer position. ** The variable garbage-collection-messages now controls whether Emacs displays a message at the beginning and end of garbage collection. The default is nil, meaning there are no messages. ** The variable debug-ignored-errors specifies certain kinds of errors that should not enter the debugger. Its value is a list of error condition symbols and/or regular expressions. If the error has any of the condition symbols listed, or if any of the regular expressions matches the error message, then that error does not enter the debugger, regardless of the value of debug-on-error. This variable is initialized to match certain common but uninteresting errors that happen often during editing. ** The new function error-message-string converts an error datum into its error message. The error datum is what condition-case puts into the variable, to describe the error that happened. ** Anything that changes which buffer appears in a given window now runs the window-scroll-functions for that window. ** The new function get-buffer-window-list returns a list of windows displaying a buffer. The function is called with the buffer (a buffer object or a buffer name) and two optional arguments specifying the minibuffer windows and frames to search. Therefore this function takes optional args like next-window etc., and not get-buffer-window. ** buffer-substring now runs the hook buffer-access-fontify-functions, calling each function with two arguments--the range of the buffer being accessed. buffer-substring-no-properties does not call them. If you use this feature, you should set the variable buffer-access-fontified-property to a non-nil symbol, which is a property name. Then, if all the characters in the buffer range have a non-nil value for that property, the buffer-access-fontify-functions are not called. When called, these functions should put a non-nil property on the text that they fontify, so that they won't get called over and over for the same text. ** Changes in lisp-mnt.el *** The lisp-mnt package can now recognize file headers that are written in the formats used by the `what' command and the RCS `ident' command: ;; @(#) HEADER: text ;; $HEADER: text $ in addition to the normal ;; HEADER: text *** The commands lm-verify and lm-synopsis are now interactive. lm-verify checks that the library file has proper sections and headers, and lm-synopsis extracts first line "synopsis'"information. * Editing Changes in Emacs 19.30. ** Be sure to recompile your byte-compiled Emacs Lisp files if you last compiled them with Emacs 19.28 or earlier. You can use M-x byte-force-recompile to recompile all the .elc files in a specified directory. ** Emacs now provides multiple-frame support on Windows NT and Windows 95. ** M-x column-number-mode toggles a minor mode which displays the current column number in the mode line. ** Line Number mode is now enabled by default. ** M-x what-line now displays the line number in the accessible portion of the buffer as well as the line number in the full buffer, when narrowing is in effect. ** If you type a M-x command that has an equivalent key binding, the equivalent is shown in the minibuffer before the command executes. This feature is enabled by default for the sake of beginning users. You can turn the feature off by setting suggest-key-bindings to nil. ** The menu bar is now visible on text-only terminals. To choose a command from the menu bar when you have no mouse, type M-` (Meta-Backquote) or F10. To turn off menu bar display, do (menu-bar-mode -1). ** Whenever you invoke a minibuffer, it appears in the minibuffer window that the current frame uses. Emacs can only use one minibuffer window at a time. If you activate the minibuffer while a minibuffer window is active in some other frame, the outer minibuffer window disappears while the inner one is active. ** Echo area messages always appear in the minibuffer window that the current frame uses. If a minibuffer is active in some other frame, the echo area message does not hide it even temporarily. ** The minibuffer now has a menu-bar menu. You can use it to exit or abort the minibuffer, or to ask for completion. ** Dead-key and composite character processing is done in the standard X11R6 manner (through the default "input method" using the /usr/lib/X11/locale/*/Compose databases of key combinations). I.e. if it works in xterm, it should also work in emacs now. ** Mouse changes *** You can now use the mouse when running Emacs in an xterm. Use M-x xterm-mouse-mode to let emacs take control over the mouse. *** C-mouse-1 now once again provides a menu of buffers to select. S-mouse-1 is now the way to select a default font for the frame. *** There is a new mouse-scroll-min-lines variable to control the minimum number of lines scrolled by dragging the mouse outside a window's edge. *** Dragging mouse-1 on a vertical line that separates windows now moves the line, thus changing the widths of the two windows. (This feature is available only if you don't have vertical scroll bars. If you do use them, a scroll bar separates two side-by-side windows.) *** Double-click mouse-1 on a character with "symbol" syntax (such as underscore, in C mode) selects the entire symbol surrounding that character. (Double-click mouse-1 on a letter selects a whole word.) ** When incremental search wraps around to the beginning (or end) of the buffer, if you keep on searching until you go past the original starting point of the search, the echo area changes from "Wrapped" to "Overwrapped". That tells you that you are revisiting matches that you have already seen. ** Filling changes. *** If the variable colon-double-space is non-nil, the explicit fill commands put two spaces after a colon. *** Auto-Fill mode now supports Adaptive Fill mode just as the explicit fill commands do. The variable adaptive-fill-regexp specifies a regular expression to match text at the beginning of a line that should be the fill prefix. *** Adaptive Fill mode can take a fill prefix from the first line of a paragraph, *provided* that line is not a paragraph-starter line. Paragraph-starter lines are indented lines that start a new paragraph because they are indented. This indentation shouldn't be copied to additional lines. Whether indented lines are paragraph lines depends on the value of the variable paragraph-start. Some major modes set this; you can set it by hand or in mode hooks as well. For editing text in which paragraph first lines are not indented, and which contains paragraphs in which all lines are indented, you should use Indented Text mode or arrange for paragraph-start not to match these lines. *** You can specify more complex ways of choosing a fill prefix automatically by setting `adaptive-fill-function'. This function is called with point after the left margin of a line, and it should return the appropriate fill prefix based on that line. If it returns nil, that means it sees no fill prefix in that line. ** Gnus changes. Gnus, the Emacs news reader, has been rewritten and expanded. Most things that worked with the old version should still work with the new version. Code that relies heavily on Gnus internals is likely to fail, though. *** Incompatibilities with the old GNUS. **** All interactive commands have kept their names, but many internal functions have changed names. **** The summary mode gnus-uu commands have been moved from the `C-c C-v' keymap to the `X' keymap. **** There can now be several summary buffers active at once. Variables that are relevant to each summary buffer are buffer-local to that buffer. **** Old hilit code doesn't work at all. Gnus performs its own highlighting based not only on what's visible in the buffer, but on other data structures. **** Old packages like `expire-kill' will no longer work. **** `C-c C-l' in the group buffer no longer switches to a different buffer, but instead lists killed groups in the group buffer. *** New features. **** The look of all buffers can be changed by setting format-like variables. **** Local spool and several NNTP servers can be used at once. **** Groups can be combined into virtual groups. **** Different mail formats can be read much the same way as one would read newsgroups. All the mail backends implement mail expiry schemes. **** Gnus can use various strategies for gathering threads that have lost their roots (thereby gathering loose sub-threads into one thread) or it can go back and retrieve enough headers to build a complete thread. **** Killed groups can be read. **** Gnus can do partial group updates - you do not have to retrieve the entire active file just to check for new articles in a few groups. **** Gnus implements a sliding scale of subscribedness to groups. **** You can score articles according to any number of criteria. You can get Gnus to score articles for you using adaptive scoring. **** Gnus maintains a dribble buffer that is auto-saved the normal Emacs manner, so it should be difficult to lose much data on what you have read if your machine should go down. **** Gnus now has its own startup file (`.gnus.el') to avoid cluttering up the `.emacs' file. **** You can set the process mark on both groups and articles and perform operations on all the marked items. **** You can grep through a subset of groups and create a group from the results. **** You can list subsets of groups using matches on group names or group descriptions. **** You can browse foreign servers and subscribe to groups from those servers. **** Gnus can pre-fetch articles asynchronously on a second connection to the servers. **** You can cache articles locally. **** Gnus can fetch FAQs to and descriptions of groups. **** Digests (and other files) can be used as the basis for groups. **** Articles can be highlighted and customized. ** Changes to Version Control (VC) *** General changes (all backends). VC directory listings (C-x v d) are now kept up to date when you do a vc-next-action (C-x v v) on the marked files. The `g' command updates the buffer properly. `=' in a VC dired buffer produces a version control diff, not an ordinary diff. *** CVS changes. Under CVS, you no longer need to type C-x C-q before you can edit a file. VC doesn't write-protect unmodified buffers anymore; you can freely change them at any time. The mode line keeps track of the file status. If you do want unmodified files to be write-protected, set your CVSREAD environment variable. VC sees this and behaves accordingly; that will give you the behaviour of Emacs 19.29, similar to that under RCS and SCCS. In this mode, if the variable vc-mistrust-permissions is nil, VC learns the modification state from the file permissions. When setting CVSREAD for the first time, you should check out the whole module anew, so that the file permissions are set correctly. VC also works with remote repositories now. When you visit a file, it doesn't run "cvs status" anymore, so there shouldn't be any long delays. Directory listings under VC/CVS have been enhanced. Type C-x v d, and you get a list of all files in or below the current directory that are not up-to-date. The actual status (modified, merge, conflict, ...) is displayed for each file. If you give a prefix argument (C-u C-x v d), up-to-date files are also listed. You can mark any number of files, and execute the next logical version control command on them (C-x v v). *** Starting a new branch. If you try to lock a version that is not the latest on its branch, VC asks for confirmation in the minibuffer. If you say no, it offers to lock the latest version instead. *** RCS non-strict locking. VC can now handle RCS non-strict locking, too. In this mode, working files are always writable and you needn't lock the file before making changes, similar to the default mode under CVS. To enable non-strict locking for a file, use the "rcs -U" command. *** Sharing RCS master files. If you share RCS subdirs with other users (through symbolic links), and you always want to work on the latest version, set vc-consult-headers to nil and vc-mistrust-permissions to `t'. Then you see the state of the *latest* version on the mode line, not that of your working file. When you do a check out, VC overwrites your working file with the latest version from the master. *** RCS customization. There is a new variable vc-consult-headers. If it is t (the default), VC searches for RCS headers in working files (like `$Id: ONEWS,v 1.5 2001/01/31 15:19:32 gerd Exp $') and determines the state of the file from them, not from the master file. This is fast and more reliable when you use branches. (The variable was already present in Emacs 19.29, but didn't get mentioned in the NEWS.) ** Calendar changes. *** New calendars supported: Chinese, Coptic, Ethiopic Here are the commands for converting to and from these calendars: gC: calendar-goto-chinese-date gk: calendar-goto-coptic-date ge: calendar-goto-ethiopic-date pC: calendar-print-chinese-date pk: calendar-print-coptic-date pe: calendar-print-ethiopic-date *** Printed calendars Calendar mode now has commands to produce fancy printed calendars via LaTeX. You can ask for a calendar for one or more days, weeks, months or years. The commands all start with `t'; see the manual for a list of them. *** New sexp diary entry type Reminders that apply in the days leading up to an event. ** The CC-mode package now provides the default C and C++ modes. See the manual for documentation of its features. ** The uniquify package chooses buffer names differently when you visit multiple files with the same name (in different directories). ** RMAIL now always uses the movemail program when it renames an inbox file, so that it can interlock properly with the mailer no matter where it is delivering mail. ** tex-start-of-header and tex-end-of-header are now regular expressions, not strings. ** To enable automatic uncompression of compressed files, type M-x auto-compression-mode. (This command used to be called toggle-auto-compression, but was not documented before.) In Lisp, you can do (auto-compression-mode 1) to turn the mode on. ** The new pc-select package emulates the key bindings for cutting and pasting, and selection of regions, found in Windows, Motif, and the Macintosh. ** Help buffers now use a special major mode, Help mode. This mode normally turns on View mode; it also provides a hook, help-mode-hook, which you can use for other customization. ** Apropos now uses faces for enhanced legibility. It now describes symbol properties as well as their function definitions and variable values. You can use Mouse-2 or RET to get more information about a function definition, variable, or property. ** Font Lock mode *** Supports Scheme, TCL and Help modes For example, to automatically turn on Font Lock mode in the *Help* buffer, put: (add-hook 'help-mode-hook 'turn-on-font-lock) in your ~/.emacs. *** Enhanced fontification The structure of font-lock-keywords is extended to allow "anchored" keywords. Typically, a keyword item of font-lock-keywords comprises a regexp to search for and information to specify how the regexp should be highlighted. However, the highlighting information is extended so that it can be another keyword item. This keyword item, its regexp and highlighting information, is processed before resuming with the keyword item of which it is part. For example, a typical keyword item might be: ("\\" (0 anchor-face)) which fontifies each occurrence of the discrete word "anchor" in the value of the variable anchor-face. However, the highlighting information can be used to fontify text that is anchored to the word "anchor". For example: ("\\" (0 anchor-face) ("\\=[ ,]*\\(item\\)" nil nil (1 item-face))) which fontifies each occurrence of "anchor" as above, but for each occurrence of "anchor", each occurrence of "item", in any following comma separated list, is fontified in the value of the variable item-face. Thus the "item" text is anchored to the "anchor" text. See the variable documentation for further information. This feature is used to extend the level and quality of fontification in a number of modes. For example, C/C++ modes now have level 3 decoration that includes the fontification of variable and function names in declaration lists. In this instance, the "anchor" described in the above example is a type or class name, and an "item" is a variable or function name. *** Fontification levels The variables font-lock-maximum-decoration and font-lock-maximum-size are extended to specify levels and sizes for specific modes. The variable font-lock-maximum-decoration specifies the preferred level of fontification for modes that provide multiple levels (typically from "subdued" to "gaudy"). The variable font-lock-maximum-size specifies the buffer size for which buffer fontification is suppressed when Font Lock mode is turned on (typically because it would take too long). These variables can now specify values for individual modes, by supplying lists of mode names and values. For example, to use the above mentioned level 3 decoration for buffers in C/C++ modes, and default decoration otherwise, put: (setq font-lock-maximum-decoration '((c-mode . 3) (c++-mode . 3))) in your ~/.emacs. Maximum buffer size values for individual modes are specified in the same way with the variable font-lock-maximum-size. *** Font Lock configuration The mechanism to provide default settings for Font Lock mode are the variables font-lock-defaults and font-lock-maximum-decoration. Typically, you should only need to change the value of font-lock-maximum-decoration. However, to support Font Lock mode for buffers in modes that currently do not support Font Lock mode, you should set a buffer local value of font-lock-defaults for that mode, typically via its mode hook. These variables are used by Font Lock mode to set the values of the variables font-lock-keywords, font-lock-keywords-only, font-lock-syntax-table, font-lock-beginning-of-syntax-function and font-lock-keywords-case-fold-search. You need not set these variables directly, and should not set them yourself since the underlining mechanism may change in future. ** Archive mode is now the default mode for various sorts of archive files (files whose names end with .arc, .lzh, .zip, and .zoo). ** You can automatically update the years in copyright notice by means of (add-hook 'write-file-hooks 'copyright-update). Optionally it can update the GPL version as well. ** Scripts of various languages (Shell, AWK, Perl, makefiles ...) can be automatically provided with a magic number and be made executable by their respective modes under control of various user variables. The mode must call (executable-set-magic "perl") or (executable-set-magic "make" "-f"). The latter for example has no effect on [Mm]akefile. ** Shell script mode now supports over 15 different shells. The new command C-c ! executes the region, and optionally beginning of script as well, by passing them to the shell. Cases such as `sh' being a `bash' are now accounted for. Fontification now also does variables, the magic number and all builtin commands. Shell script mode no longer mingles `tab-width' and indentation style. The variable `sh-tab-width' has been renamed to `sh-indentation'. Empty lines are now indented like previous non-empty line, rather than just previous line. The annoying $ variable prompting has been eliminated. Instead, shell script mode uses `comint-dynamic-completion' for commands, variables and filenames. ** Two-column mode now automatically scrolls both buffers together, which makes it possible to eliminate the special scrolling commands that used to do so. The commands that operate in two-column mode are no longer bound to keys outside that mode. f2 o will now position at the same point in associated buffer. the new command f2 RET inserts a newline in both buffers, at point and at the corresponding position in the associated buffer. ** Skeleton commands now work smoothly as abbrev definitions. The element < no longer exists, ' is a new element. ** The autoinsert insert facility for prefilling empty files as soon as they are found has been extended to accommodate skeletons or calling functions. See the function auto-insert. ** TPU-edt Changes Loading tpu-edt no longer turns on tpu-edt mode. In fact, it is no longer necessary to explicitly load tpu-edt. All you need to do to turn on tpu-edt is run the tpu-edt function. Here's how to run tpu-edt instead of loading the file: Running Emacs: Type emacs -f tpu-edt not emacs -l tpu-edt Within Emacs: Type M-x tpu-edt not M-x load-library tpu-edt In .emacs: Use (tpu-edt) not (load "tpu-edt") The default name of the tpu-edt X key definition file has changed from ~/.tpu-gnu-keys to ~/.tpu-keys. If you don't rename the file yourself, tpu-edt will offer to rename it the first time you invoke it under x-windows. ** MS-DOS Enhancements: *** Better mouse control by adding the following functions [in dosfns.c] msdos-mouse-enable, msdos-mouse-disable, msdos-mouse-init. *** If another foreground/background color than the default is setup in your ~/_emacs, then the screen briefly flickers with the default colors before changing to the colors you have specified. To avoid this, the EMACSCOLORS environment variable exists. It shall be defined as a string with the following elements: set EMACSCOLORS=fb;fb The first set of "fb" defines the initial foreground and background colors using standard dos color numbers (0=black,.., 7=white). If specified, the second set of "fb" defines the colors which are restored when you leave emacs. *** The new SUSPEND environment variable can now be set as the shell to use when suspending emacs. This can be used to override the stupid limitation on the environment of sub-shells in MS-DOS (they are just large enough to hold the currently defined variables, not leaving room for more); to overcome this limitation, add this to autoexec.bat: set SUSPEND=%COMSPEC% /E:2000 ** The escape character can now be displayed on X frames. Try this: (aset standard-display-table 27 (vector 27)) after first creating a display table (you can do that by loading the disp-table library). ** The new command-line option --eval specifies an expression to evaluate from the command line. ** etags has now the ability to tag Perl files. They are recognised either by the .pm and .pl suffixes or by a first line which starts with `#!' and specifies a Perl interpreter. The tagged lines are those beginning with the `sub' keyword. New suffixes recognised are .hpp for C++; .f90 for Fortran; .bib, .ltx, .TeX for TeX (.bbl, .dtx removed); .ml for Lisp; .prolog for prolog (.pl is now Perl). ** The files etc/termcap.dat and etc/termcap.ucb have been replaced with a new, merged, and much more comprehensive termcap file. The new file should include all the special entries from the old one. This new file is under active development as part of the ncurses project. If you have any questions about this file, or problems with an entry in it, email terminfo@ccil.org. * Lisp changes in Emacs 19.30. ** New Data Types *** There is a new data type called a char-table which is an array indexed by a character. Currently this is mostly equivalent to a vector of length 256, but in the future, when a wider character set is in use, it will be different. To create one, call (make-char-table SUBTYPE INITIAL-VALUE) SUBTYPE is a symbol that identifies the specific use of this character table. It can be any of these values: syntax-table display-table keyboard-translate-table case-table The function `char-table-subtype' returns the subtype of a char-table. You cannot alter the subtype of an existing char-table. A char-table has an element for each character code. It also has some "extra slots". The number of extra slots depends on the subtype and their use depends on the subtype. (Each subtype symbol has a `char-table-extra-slots' property that says how many extra slots to make.) Use (char-table-extra-slot TABLE N) to access extra slot N and (set-char-table-extra-slot TABLE N VALUE) to store VALUE in slot N. A char-table T can have a parent, which should be another char-table P. If you look for the value in T for character C, and the table T actually holds nil, P's element for character C is used instead. The functions `char-table-parent' and `set-char-table-parent' let you read or set the parent of a char-table. To scan all the values in a char-table, do not try to loop through all possible character codes. That would work for now, but will not work in the future. Instead, call map-char-table. (map-char-table FUNCTION TABLE) calls FUNCTION once for each character or character set that has a distinct value in TABLE. FUNCTION gets two arguments, RANGE and VALUE. RANGE specifies a range of TABLE that has one uniform value, and VALUE is the value in TABLE for that range. Currently, RANGE is always a vector containing a single character and it refers to that character alone. In the future, other kinds of ranges will occur. You can set the value for a given range with (set-char-table-range TABLE RANGE VALUE) and examine the value for a range with (char-table-range TABLE RANGE). *** Syntax tables are now represented as char-tables. All syntax tables other than the standard syntax table normally have the standard syntax table as their parent. Their subtype is `syntax-table'. *** Display tables are now represented as char-tables. Their subtype is `display-table'. *** Case tables are now represented as char-tables. Their subtype is `case-table'. *** The value of keyboard-translate-table may now be a char-table instead of a string. Normally the char-tables used for this purpose have the subtype `keyboard-translate-table', but that is not required. *** A new data type called a bool-vector is a vector of values that are either t or nil. To create one, do (make-bool-vector LENGTH INITIAL-VALUE) ** You can now specify, for each marker, how it should relocate when text is inserted at the place where the marker points. This is called the "insertion type" of the marker. To set the insertion type, do (set-marker-insertion-type MARKER TYPE). If TYPE is t, it means the marker advances when text is inserted. If TYPE is nil, it means the marker does not advance. (In Emacs 19.29, markers did not advance.) The function marker-insertion-type reports the insertion type of a given marker. The function copy-marker takes a second argument TYPE which specifies the insertion type of the new copied marker. ** When you create an overlay, you can specify the insertion type of the beginning and of the end. To do this, you can use two new arguments to make-overlay: front-advance and rear-advance. ** The new function overlays-in returns a list of the overlays that overlap a specified range of the buffer. The returned list includes empty overlays at the beginning of this range, as well as within the range. ** The new hook window-scroll-functions is run when a window has been scrolled. The functions in this list are called just before redisplay, after the new window-start has been computed. Each function is called with two arguments--the window that has been scrolled, and its new window-start position. This hook is useful for on-the-fly fontification and other features that affect how the redisplayed text will look when it is displayed. The window-end value of the window is not valid when these functions are called. The computation of window-end is byproduct of actual redisplay of the window contents, which means it has not yet happened when the hook is run. Computing window-end specially in advance for the sake of these functions would cause a slowdown. The hook functions can determine where the text on the window will end by calling vertical-motion starting with the window-start position. ** The new hook redisplay-end-trigger-functions is run whenever redisplay in window uses text that extends past a specified end trigger position. You set the end trigger position with the function set-window-redisplay-end-trigger. The functions are called with two arguments: the window, and the end trigger position. Storing nil for the end trigger position turns off the feature, and the trigger value is automatically reset to nil just after the hook is run. You can use the function window-redisplay-end-trigger to read a window's current end trigger value. ** The new function insert-file-contents-literally inserts the contents of a file without any character set translation or decoding. ** The new function safe-length computes the length of a list. It never gets an error--it treats any non-list like nil. If given a circular list, it returns an upper bound for the number of elements before the circularity. ** replace-match now takes a fifth argument, SUBEXP. If SUBEXP is non-nil, that says to replace just subexpression number SUBEXP of the regexp that was matched, not the entire match. For example, after matching `foo \(ba*r\)' calling replace-match with 1 as SUBEXP means to replace just the text that matched `\(ba*r\)'. ** The new keymap special-event-map defines bindings for certain events that should be handled at a very low level--as soon as they are read. The read-event function processes these events itself, and never returns them. Events that are handled in this way do not echo, they are never grouped into key sequences, and they never appear in the value of last-command-event or (this-command-keys). They do not discard a numeric argument, they cannot be unread with unread-command-events, they may not appear in a keyboard macro, and they are not recorded in a keyboard macro while you are defining one. These events do, however, appear in last-input-event immediately after they are read, and this is the way for the event's definition to find the actual event. The events types iconify-frame, make-frame-visible and delete-frame are normally handled in this way. ** encode-time now supports simple date arithmetic by means of out-of-range values for its SEC, MINUTE, HOUR, DAY, and MONTH arguments; for example, day 0 means the day preceding the given month. Also, the ZONE argument can now be a TZ-style string. ** command-execute and call-interactively now accept an optional third argument KEYS. If specified and non-nil, this specifies the key sequence containing the events that were used to invoke the command. ** The environment variable NAME, if set, now specifies the value of (user-full-name), when Emacs starts up. * User Editing Changes in Emacs 19.29 ** If you run out of memory. If you get the error message "Virtual memory exhausted", type C-x s. That way of saving files has the least additional memory needs. Emacs 19.29 keeps a reserve of memory which it makes available when this error happens; that is to ensure that C-x s can complete its work. Once you have saved your data, you can exit and restart Emacs, or use M-x kill-some-buffers to free up space. If you kill buffers containing a substantial amount of text, you can go on editing. Do not use M-x buffer-menu to save or kill buffers when you are out of memory, because that needs a fair amount memory itself and you may not have enough to get it started. ** The format of compiled files has changed incompatibly. Byte-compiled files made with Emacs 19.29 normally use a new format that will not work in older Emacs versions. You can compile files in the old format if you wish; see "Changes in compilation," below. ** Emacs 19.29 supports the DEC Alpha. ** Emacs runs on Windows NT. This port does not yet support windowing features. It works like a text-only terminal, but it does support a mouse. In general, support for non-GNU-like operating systems is not a high priority for the GNU project. We merged in the support for Windows NT because that system is expected to be very widely used. ** Emacs supports Motif widgets. You can build Emacs with Motif widgets by specifying --with-x-toolkit=motif when you run configure. Motif defines collections of windows called "tab groups", and uses the tab key and the cursor keys to move between windows in a tab group. Emacs naturally does not support this--it has other uses for the tab key and cursor keys. Emacs does not support Motif accelerators either, because it uses its normal keymap event binding features. We give higher priority to operation with a free widget set than to operation with a proprietary one. ** If Emacs or the computer crashes, you can recover all the files you were editing from their auto save files by typing M-x recover-session. This first shows you a list of recorded interrupted sessions. Move point to the one you choose, and type C-c C-c. Then recover-session asks about each of the files that were being edited during that session, asking whether to recover that file. If you answer y, it calls recover-file, which works in its normal fashion. It shows the dates of the original file and its auto-save file and asks once again whether to recover that file. When recover-session is done, the files you've chosen to recover are present in Emacs buffers. You should then save them. Only this--saving them--updates the files themselves. ** Menu bar menus now stay up if you click on the menu bar item and release the mouse button within a certain amount of time. This is in the X Toolkit version. ** The menu bar menus have been rearranged and split up to make for a better organization. Two new menu bar menus, Tools and Search, contain items that were formerly in the Files and Edit menus, as well as some that did not exist in the menu bar menus before. ** Emacs can now display on more than one X display at the same time. Use the command make-frame-on-display to create a frame, specifying which display to use. ** M-x talk-connect sets up a multi-user talk connection via Emacs. Specify the X display of the person you want to talk to. You can talk to any number of people (within reason) by using this command repeatedly to specify different people. Emacs does not make a fuss about security; the people who you talk to can use all Emacs features, including visiting and editing files. If this frightens you, don't use M-x talk-connect. ** The range of integer values is now at least 2**28 on all machines. This means the maximum size of a buffer is at least 2**27-1, or 134,217,727. ** When you start Emacs, you can now specify option names in long GNU form (starting with `--') and you can abbreviate the names. You can now specify the options in any order. The previous requirements about the order of options have been eliminated. The -L or --directory option lets you specify an additional directory to search for Lisp libraries (including libraries that you specify with the -l or --load options). ** Incremental search in Transient Mark mode, if the mark is already active, now leaves the mark active and does not change its position. You can make incremental search deactivate the mark once again with this expression. (add-hook 'isearch-mode-hook 'deactivate-mark) ** C-delete now deletes a word backwards. This is for compatibility with some editors in the PC world. (This key is not available on ordinary ASCII terminals, because C-delete is not a distinct character on those terminals.) ** ESC ESC ESC is now a command to escape from various temporary modes and states. ** M-x pc-bindings-mode sets up bindings compatible with many PC editors. In particular, Delete and its variants delete forward instead of backward. Use Backspace to delete backward. C-Backspace kills backward a word (as C-Delete normally would). M-Backspace does undo. Home and End move to beginning and end of line C-Home and C-End move to beginning and end of buffer. ** The key sequence for evaluating a Lisp expression using the minibuffer is now ESC :. It used to be ESC ESC, but we moved it to make way for the ESC ESC ESC feature, on the grounds that people who evaluate Lisp expressions are experienced users and can cope with a change. If you prefer the old ESC ESC binding, put in your `~/.emacs': (global-set-key "\e\e" 'eval-expression) ** The f1 function key is now equivalent to the help key. This is done with key-translation-map; delete the binding for f1 in that map if you want to use f1 for something else. ** Mouse-3, in the simplest case, still sets the region. But now, it places the mark where point was, and sets point where you click. (It used to set the mark where you click and leave point alone.) If you position point with Mouse-1, then scroll with the scroll bar and use Mouse-3, Mouse-3 uses the position you specified with Mouse-1 even if it has scrolled off the screen (and point is no longer there). This makes it easier to select a region with the mouse which is bigger than a screenful. Any editing of the buffer, and any cursor motion or scrolling for any reason other than the scroll bar, cancels the special state set up by Mouse-1--so that a subsequent Mouse-3 click will use the actual value of point. ** C-mouse-3 now pops up a mode-specific menu of commands--normally the same ones available in the mode's own menu bar menus. ** C-mouse-2 now pops up a menu of faces, indentation, justification, and certain other text properties. This menu is also available through the menu-bar Edit menu. It is meant for use with Enriched mode. *** You can use this menu to change the face of the region. You can also set the face of the region with the new M-g command. *** The menu also includes commands for indenting the region, which locally changes the values of left-margin and fill-column that are used. *** All fill functions now indent every line to the left-margin. If there is also a fill-prefix, that goes after the margin indentation. *** Open-line and newline also make sure that the lines they create are indented to the left margin. *** It also allows you to set the "justification" of the region: whether it should be centered, flush right, and so forth. The fill functions (including auto-fill-mode) will maintain the justification and indentation that you request. *** The new function `list-colors-display' shows you what colors are available. This is also accessible from the C-mouse-2 menu. ** You can now save and load files including their faces and other text-properties by using Enriched-mode. Files are saved in an extended version of the MIME text/enriched format. You can use the menus described above, or M-g and other keyboard commands, to alter the formatting information. ** C-mouse-1 now pops up the menu for changing the frame's default font. ** You can input Hyper, Super, Meta, and Alt characters, as well as non-ASCII control characters, on an ASCII-only terminal. To do this, use C-x @ h -- hyper C-x @ s -- super C-x @ m -- meta C-x @ a -- alt C-x @ S -- shift C-x @ c -- control These are not ordinary key sequences; they operate through function-key-map, which means they can be used even in the middle of an ordinary key sequence. ** Outline minor mode and Hideif mode now use C-c @ as their prefix character. ** Echo area messages are now logged in the "*Messages*" buffer. The size of this buffer is limited to message-log-max lines. ** RET in various special modes for read-only buffers that contain lists of items now selects the item point is on. These modes include Dired, Compilation buffers, Buffer-menu, Tar mode, and Occur mode. (In Info, RET follows the reference near point; in completion list buffers, RET chooses the completion around point.) ** set-background-color now updates the modeline face in a special way. If that face was previously set up to be reverse video, the reverse of the default face, then set-background-color updates it so that it remains the reverse of the default face. ** The functions raise-frame and lower-frame are now commands. When used interactively, they apply to the selected frame. ** M-x buffer-menu now displays the buffer list in the selected window. Use M-x buffer-menu-other-window to display it in another window. ** M-w followed by a kill command now *does not* append the text in the kill ring. In consequence, M-w followed by C-w works as you would expect: it leaves the top of the kill ring matching the region that you killed. ** In Lisp mode, the C-M-x command now executes defvar forms in a special way: it unconditionally sets the variable to the specified default value, if there is one. Normal execution of defvar does not alter the variable if it already has a non-void value. ** In completion list buffers, the left and right arrow keys run the new commands previous-completion and next-completion. They move one completion at a time. ** While doing completion in the minibuffer, the `prior' or `pageup' key switches to the completion list window. ** When you exit the minibuffer with empty contents, the empty string is not put in the minibuffer history. ** The default buffer for insert-buffer is now the "first" buffer other than the current one. If you have more than one window, this is a buffer visible in another window. (Usually it is the buffer that C-M-v would scroll.) ** The etags program is now capable of recording tags based on regular expressions provided on the command line. This new feature allows easy support for constructs not normally handled by etags, such as the macros frequently used in big C/C++ projects to define project-specific structures. It also enables the use of etags and TAGS files for languages not supported by etags. The Emacs manual section on Tags contains explanations and examples for Emacs's DEFVAR, VHDL, Cobol, Postscript and TCL. ** Various mode-specific commands that used to be bound to C-c LETTER have been moved. *** In gnus-uu mode, gnus-uu-interactive-scan-directory is now on C-c C-d, and gnus-uu-interactive-save-current-file is on C-c C-z. *** In Scribe mode, scribe-insert-environment is now on C-c C-v, scribe-chapter is on C-c C-c, scribe-subsection is on C-c C-s, scribe-section is on C-c C-t, scribe-bracket-region-be is on C-c C-e, scribe-italicize-word is on C-c C-i, scribe-bold-word is on C-c C-b, and scribe-underline-word is on C-c C-u. *** In Gomoku mode, gomoku-human-takes-back is now on C-c C-b, gomoku-human-plays is on C-c C-p, gomoku-human-resigns is on C-c C-r, and gomoku-emacs-plays is on C-c C-e. *** In the Outline mode defined in allout.el, outline-rebullet-current-heading is now on C-c *. ** M-s in Info now searches through the nodes of the Info file, just like s. The alias M-s was added so that you can use the same command for searches in both Info and Rmail. ** iso-acc.el now lets you enter inverted-! and inverted-? with the sequences ~! and ~?. ** M-x compare-windows now pushes mark in both windows before it starts moving point. ** There are two new commands in Dired, A (dired-do-search) and Q (dired-do-query-replace). These are similar to tags-search and tags-query-replace, but instead of searching the list of files that appears in a tags table, they search all the files marked in Dired. ** Changes to dabbrev. A new function, `dabbrev-completion' (bound to M-C-/), expands the unique part of an abbreviation. Dabbrev now looks for expansions in other buffers, looks for symbols instead of words and it works in the minibuffer. Dabbrev can be customized to work for shell scripts, with variables that sometimes have and sometimes haven't a leading "$". See the variable 'dabbrev-abbrev-skip-leading-regexp'. ** In Rmail, the command rmail-input-menu has been eliminated. The feature of selecting an Rmail file from a menu is now implemented in another way. ** Bookmarks changes. *** It now works to set bookmarks in Info nodes. *** Bookmarks can have annotations; type "C-h m" after doing "M-x list-bookmarks", for more information on annotations. *** The bookmark-jump popup menu function is now `bookmark-menu-jump', for those who bind it to a mouse click. *** The default bookmarks file name is now "~/.emacs.bmk". If you already have a bookmarks file, it will be renamed automagically when you next load it. ** New package, ps-print. The ps-print package generates PostScript printouts of buffers or regions, and includes face attributes such as color, underlining, boldface and italics in the printed output. ** New package, msb. The msb package provides a buffer-menu in the menubar with separate menus for different types of buffers. ** `cpp.el' is a new library that can highlight or hide parts of a C file according to C preprocessor conditionals. To try it, run the command M-x cpp-highlight-buffer. ** Changes in CC mode. *** c-set-offset and related functions and variables can now accept variable symbols. Also ++ and -- which mean 2* positive and negative c-basic-offset respectively. *** New variable, c-recognize-knr-p, which controls whether K&R C constructs will be recognized. Trying to recognize K&R constructs is a time hog so if you're programming strictly in ANSI C, set this variable to nil (it should already be nil in c++-mode). *** New variable, c-hanging-comment-ender-p for controlling c-fill-paragraph's behavior. *** New syntactic symbol: statement-case-open. This is assigned to lines containing an open brace just after a case/default label. *** New variable, c-progress-interval, which controls minibuffer update message displays during long re-indention. This is a new feature which prints percentage complete messages at specified intervals. ** Makefile mode changes. *** The electric keys are not enabled by default. *** There is now a mode-specific menu bar menu. *** The mode supports font-lock, add-log, and imenu. *** The command M-TAB does completion of target names and variable names. ** icomplete.el now works more like a minor mode. Use M-x icomplete-mode to turn it on and off. Icomplete now supports an `icomplete-minibuffer-setup-hook', which is run on minibuffer setup whenever icompletion will be occurring. This hook can be used to customize interoperation of icomplete with other minibuffer-specific packages, eg rsz-mini. See the doc string for more info. ** Ediff change. Use ediff-revision instead of vc-ediff. It also replaces rcs-ediff, for those who use that; if you want to use a version control package other than vc.el, you must set the variable ediff-version-control-package to specify which package. ** VC now supports branches with RCS. You can use C-u C-x C-q to select any branch or version by number. It reads the version number or branch number with the minibuffer, then checks out the file unlocked. Type C-x C-q again to lock the selected branch or version. When you check in changes to that branch or version, there are two possibilities: -- If you've selected a branch, or a version at the tip of a branch, then the new version adds to that branch. If you wish to create a new branch, use C-u C-x C-q to specify a version number when you check in the new version. -- If you've selected an inner version which is not the latest in its branch, then the new version automatically creates a new branch. ** VC now supports CVS as well as RCS and SCCS. Since there are no locks in CVS, some things behave slightly different when the backend is CVS. When vc-next-action is invoked in a directory handled by CVS, it does the following: If the file is not already registered, this registers it for version control. This does a "cvs add", but no "cvs commit". If the file is added but not committed, it is committed. If the file has not been changed, neither in your working area or in the repository, a message is printed and nothing is done. If your working file is changed, but the repository file is unchanged, this pops up a buffer for entry of a log message; when you finish the log message with C-c C-c, that checks in the resulting changes along with the log message as change commentary. A writable file remains in existence. If vc-next-action changes the repository file, it asks you whether to merge in the changes into your working copy. vc-directory, when started in a CVS file hierarchy, reports all files that are modified (and thus need to be committed). (When the backend is RCS or SCCS vc-directory reports all locked files). VC has no support for running the initial "cvs checkout" to get a working copy of a module. You can only use VC in a working copy of a module. You can disable the CVS support as follows: (setq vc-master-templates (delq 'vc-find-cvs-master vc-master-templates)) or by setting vc-handle-cvs to nil. This may be desirable if you run a non-standard version of CVS, or if CVS was compiled with FORCE_USE_EDITOR or (possibly) RELATIVE_REPOS. ** Comint and shell mode changes: *** Completion works with file names containing quoted characters. File names containing special characters (such as " ", "!", etc.) that are quoted with a "\" character are recognised during completion. Special characters are quoted when they are inserted during completion. *** You can use M-x comint-truncate-buffer to truncate the buffer. When this command is run, the buffer is truncated to a maximum number of lines, specified by the variable comint-buffer-maximum-size. Just like the command comint-strip-ctrl-m, this can be run automatically during process output by doing this: (add-hook 'comint-output-filter-functions 'comint-truncate-buffer) ** Telnet mode buffer name changed. The buffer name for a Telnet buffer is now *telnet-HOST*, not *HOST-telnet*. This is for consistency with other Emacs packages. ** M-x man (man) is now faster and more robust. On systems where the entire man page is indented, the indentation is removed. The user option names that used to end in -p now end in -flag. The new names are: Man-reuse-okay-flag, Man-downcase-section-letters-flag, Man-circular-pages-flag. The Man-notify user option has been renamed to Man-notify-method and accepts one more value, `pushy', that just switches the current buffer to the manpage buffer, without switching frames nor changing your windows configuration. A new user option Man-fontify-manpage-flag disables fontification (thus speeding up man) when set to nil. Default is to fontify if a window system is used. Two new user options Man-overstrike-face (default 'bold) and Man-underline-face (default 'underline) can be set to the preferred faces to be used for the words that man overstrikes and underlines. Useful for those who like coloured man pages. Two new interactive functions are provided: Man-cleanup-manpage and Man-fontify-manpage. Both can be used on a buffer that contains the output of a `rsh host man manpage' command, or the output of an `nroff -man -Tman manpage' command to make them readable. Man-cleanup-manpage is faster, but does not fontify. ** The new function modify-face makes it easy to specify all the attributes of a face, all at once. ** Faces now support background stippling. Use the command set-face-stipple to specify the stipple-pattern for a face. Use face-stipple to access the specified stipple pattern. The existing face functions now handle the stipple pattern when appropriate. If you specify one of the standard gray colors as a face background color, and your display doesn't handle gray, Emacs automatically uses stipple instead to get the same effect. ** Changes in Font Lock mode. *** Fontification Two new default faces are provided; `font-lock-variable-name-face' and `font-lock-reference-face'. The face `font-lock-doc-string-face' has been removed since it is the same as the existing `font-lock-string-face'. Where appropriate, fontification automatically uses these new faces. Fontification via commands `font-lock-mode' and `font-lock-fontify-buffer' is now cleanly interruptible (i.e., with C-g). If you interrupt during the fontification process, the buffer remains in its previous modified state and all highlighting is removed from the buffer. For C/C++ modes, Font Lock mode is much faster but highlights much more. Other modes are faster/more extensive/more discriminatory, or a combination of these. To enable Font Lock mode, add the new function `turn-on-font-lock' in one of the following ways: (add-hook 'c-mode-hook 'turn-on-font-lock) Or for any visited file with: (add-hook 'find-file-hooks 'turn-on-font-lock) *** Supports color and grayscale displays Font Lock mode supports different ways of highlighting, depending on the type of display and background shade. Attributes (face color, bold, italic and underline, and display type and background mode) can be controlled either from Emacs Lisp or X resources. See the new variables `font-lock-display-type' and `font-lock-face-attributes'. *** Supports more modes The following modes are directly supported: ada-mode, asm-mode, bibtex-mode, c++-c-mode, c++-mode, c-mode, change-log-mode, compilation-mode, dired-mode, emacs-lisp-mode, fortran-mode, latex-mode, lisp-mode, mail-mode, makefile-mode, outline-mode, pascal-mode, perl-mode, plain-tex-mode, rmail-mode, rmail-summary-mode, scheme-mode, shell-mode, slitex-mode, tex-mode, texinfo-mode. See the new variables `font-lock-defaults-alist' and `font-lock-defaults'. Some modes support different levels of fontification. You can choose to use the minimum or maximum available decoration by changing the value of the new variable `font-lock-maximum-decoration'. Programmers are urged to make available to the community their own keywords for modes not yet supported. See font-lock.el for information about efficiency. *** fast-lock The fast-lock package speeds up Font Lock mode by saving font choices in associated cache files. When you visit a file with Font Lock mode and Fast Lock mode turned on for the first time, the file's buffer is fontified as normal. When certain events occur (such as exiting Emacs), Fast Lock saves the highlighting in a cache file. When you subsequently visit this file, its cache is used to restore the highlighting. To use this package, put in your `~/.emacs': (add-hook 'font-lock-mode-hook 'turn-on-fast-lock) To control the use of caches, see the documentation for `fast-lock-mode'. ** You can tell pop-to-buffer to display certain buffers in the selected window rather than finding some other window to display them in. There are two variables you can use to specify these buffers. same-window-buffer-names holds a list of buffer names; if a buffer's name appears in this list, pop-to-buffer puts it in the selected window. same-window-regexps holds a list of regexps--if any one of them matches a buffer's name, then pop-to-buffer puts that buffer in the selected window. The default values of these variables are not nil: they list various buffers that normally appear, when you as for them, in the selected window. These include shell buffers, mail buffers, telnet buffers, and others. By removing elements from these variables, you can ask Emacs to display those buffers in separate windows. ** The special-display-buffer-names and special-display-regexps lists have been generalized. An element may now be a list. The car of the list is the buffer name or regular expression for matching buffer names. The cdr of the list can be an alist specifying additional frame parameters for use in constructing the special display frame. Alternatively, the cdr can have this form: (FUNCTION ARGS...) where FUNCTION is a symbol. Then the frame is constructed by calling FUNCTION; its first argument is the buffer, and its remaining arguments are ARGS. ** If the environment variable REPLYTO is set, its value is the default for mail-default-reply-to. ** When you send a message in Emacs, if you specify an Rmail file with the FCC: header field, Emacs converts the message to Rmail format before writing it. Thus, the file never contains anything but Rmail format messages. ** The new variable mail-from-style controls whether the From: header should include the sender's full name, and if so, which format to use. ** The new variable mail-personal-alias-file specifies the name of the user's personal aliases. This defaults to the file ~/.mailrc. mailabbrev.el used to have its own variable for this purpose (mail-abbrev-mailrc-file). That variable is no longer used. ** In Buffer-Menu mode, the d and C-d commands (which mark buffers for deletion) now accept a prefix argument which serves as a repeat count. ** Changes in BibTeX mode. *** Reference keys can now be entered with TAB completion. All reference keys defined in that buffer and all labels that appear in crossreference entries are object to completion. *** Braces are supported as field delimiters in addition to quotes. BibTeX entries may have brace-delimited and quote-delimited fields intermixed. The delimiters generated for new entries are specified by the variables bibtex-field-left-delimiter and bibtex-field-right-delimiter on a buffer-local basis. Those variables default to braces, since it is easier to put quote accented characters (as the german umlauts) into a brace-delimited entry. *** The function bibtex-clean-entry can now be invoked with a prefix argument. In this case, a label is automatically generated from various fields in the record. If bibtex-clean-entry is invoked on a record without label, a label is also generated automatically. Various variables (all beginning with `bibtex-autokey-') control the creation of that key. The variable bibtex-autokey-edit-before-use determines, if the user is allowed to edit auto-generated reference keys before they are used. *** A New function bibtex-complete-string completes strings with respect to the strings defined in this buffer and a set of predefined strings (initialized to the string macros defined in the standard BibTeX style files) in the same way in which ispell-complete-word works with respect to words in a dictionary. Candidates for bibtex-complete-string are initialized from variable bibtex-predefined-strings and by parsing the files found in bibtex-string-files for @String definitions. *** Every reference/field pair has now attached a comment which appears in the echo area when this field is edited. These comments should provide useful hints for BibTeX usage, especially for BibTeX beginners. New variable bibtex-help-message determines if these help messages are to appear in the minibuffer when moving to a text entry. *** Inscriptions of menu bar changed from "Entry Types" to "Entry-Types" and "Bibtex Edit" to "BibTeX-Edit". *** The variable bibtex-include-OPTcrossref is now not longer a binary switch but a list of reference names which should contain a crossref field. E.g., you can tell bibtex-mode you want a crossref field for @InProceedings and @InBook entries but for no other. *** The function validate-bibtex-buffer was completely rewritten to validate if a buffer is syntactically correct. find-bibtex-duplicates is no longer a function itself but was moved into validate-bibtex-buffer. *** Cleaning a BibTeX entry tests, if necessary fields are there. E.g., if you tell bibtex-mode to include a crossref entry, some fields are optional which would be required without the crossref entry. If you now leave the crossref entry empty and do a bibtex-clean-entry with some now required fields left empty, version 2.0 of bibtex.el complains about the absence of these fields, whereas version 1.3 didn't. *** Default value for variables bibtex-maintain-sorted-entries and bibtex-sort-ignore-string-entries is now t. *** All interactive functions are renamed to begin with `bibtex-'. *** Keybindings with \C-c\C-e entry changed for unification. Often used reference types are now on control-modified keys, mediocre used types are on unmodified keys, seldom used types are on shift-modified keys and almost never used types on meta-modified keys. * Configuration Changes in Emacs 19.29 ** Emacs now uses directory /usr/local/share for most of its installed files. This follows a GNU convention for directory usage. ** The option --with-x11 is no longer supported. X11 is the only version of X that Emacs 19.29 supports; use --with-x if you need to request X support explicitly. (Normally this should not be necessary, since configure should automatically enable X support if X is installed on your machine.) ** If you use the site-init.el file to set the variable mail-host-address to a string in the dumped Emacs, that string becomes the default host address for initializing user-mail-address. It is used instead of the value of (system-name). * Lisp-Level Changes in Emacs 19.29 ** Basic Lisp *** The range of integer values is now at least 2**28 on all machines. This means the maximum size of a buffer is at least 2**27-1, or 134,217,727. *** You can now use Common Lisp syntax for the backquote and comma macros. Thus, you can now write `(x ,y z) instead of (` (x (, y) z)). The old syntax is still accepted. *** The new function rassoc is like assoc, except that it compares the key against the cdr of each alist element, where assoc would compare it against the car of each alist element. *** The new function unintern deletes a symbol from an obarray. The first argument can be the symbol to delete, or a string giving its name. The second argument specifies the obarray (nil means the current default obarray). If the specified symbol is not in the obarray, or if there's no symbol in the obarray matching the specified string, unintern does nothing and returns nil. If it does delete a symbol, it returns t. *** You can specify an alternative read function for use by load and eval-region by binding the variable load-read-function to some other function. This function should accept one argument just like read. If load-read-function is nil, load and eval-region use ordinary read. *** The new function `type-of' takes any object as argument, and returns a symbol identifying the type of that object--one of `symbol', `integer', `float', `string', `cons', `vector', `marker', `overlay', `window', `buffer', `subr', `compiled-function', `window-configuration', `process'. *** When you use eval-after-load for a file that is already loaded, it executes the FORM right away. As before, if the file is not yet loaded, it arranges to execute FORM if and when the file is loaded later. The result is: if you have called eval-after-load for a file, and if that file has been loaded, then regardless of the order of these two events, the specified form has been evaluated. *** The Lisp construct #@NUMBER now skips the next NUMBER characters, treating them as a comment. You would not want to use this in a file you edit by hand, but it is useful for commenting out parts of machine-generated files. *** Two new functions, `plist-get' and `plist-put', allow you to modify and retrieve values from lists formatted as property-lists. They work like `get' and `put', but operate on any list. `plist-put' returns the modified property-list; you must store it back where you got it. *** The new function add-to-list is called with two elements, a variable that holds a list and a new element. It adds the element to the list unless it is already present. It compares elements using `equal'. Here is an example: (setq foo '(a b)) => (a b) (add-to-list 'foo 'c) => (c a b) (add-to-list 'foo 'b) => (c a b) foo => (c a b) ** Changes in compilation. Functions and variables loaded from a byte-compiled file now refer to the file for their doc strings. This has a few consequences: -- Loading the file is faster and uses less memory. -- Reference to doc strings is a little slower (the same speed as reference to the doc strings of primitive and preloaded functions). -- The compiled files will not work in old versions of Emacs. -- If you move the compiled file after loading it, Emacs can no longer find these doc strings. -- If you alter the compiled file (such as by compiling a new version), then further access to documentation strings will get nonsense results. The byte compiler now optionally supports lazy loading of compiled functions' definitions. If you enable this feature when you compile, loading the compiled file does not actually bring the function definitions into core. Instead it creates references to the compiled file, and brings each function's definition into core the first time you call that function, or when you force it with the new function `fetch-bytecode'. Using the lazy loading feature has a few consequences: -- Loading the file is faster and uses less memory. -- Calling any function in the file for the first time is slower. -- If you move the compiled file after loading it, Emacs can no longer find the function definitions. -- If you alter the compiled file (such as by compiling a new version), then further access to functions not already loaded will get nonsense results. To enable the lazy loading feature, set up a non-nil file local variable binding for the variable `byte-compile-dynamic' in the Lisp source file. For example, put this on the first line: -*-byte-compile-dynamic: t;-*- It's a good idea to use the lazy loading feature for a file that contains many functions, most of which are not actually used by a given user in a given session. To turn off the basic feature of referring to the file for doc strings, set byte-compile-dynamic-docstrings to nil. You can do this globally, or for one source file by adding this to the first line: -*-byte-compile-dynamic-docstrings: nil;-*- ** Strings *** Do not pass integer arguments to `concat' (or `vconcat' or `append'). We are phasing out the old unrecommended support for integers as arguments to these functions, in preparation for treating numbers as single characters in a future release. To concatenate numbers in string form, use `number-to-string' first, or rewrite the call to use `format' instead of `concat'. *** The new function match-string returns the string of text matched at the given parenthesized expression by the last regexp search, or nil if there was no match. If the last match was by `string-match' on a string, the string must be given. Therefore, this function can be used in place of `buffer-substring' and `substring', when using `match-beginning' and `match-end' to find match positions. (match-string N) or (match-string N STRING) *** The function replace-match now accepts an optional fourth argument, STRING. Use this after performing string-match on STRING, to replace the portion of STRING that was matched. When used in this way, replace-match returns a newly created string which is the same as STRING except for the matched portion. *** The new function buffer-substring-no-properties is like buffer-substring except that the string it returns has no text properties. *** The function `equal' now considers two strings to be different if they don't have the same text properties. ** Completion *** all-completions now takes an optional fourth argument. If that argument is non-nil, completions that start with a space are ignored unless the initial string also starts with a space. (This used to happen unconditionally.) ** Local Variables *** Local hook variables. There is now a clean way to give a hook variable a buffer-local value. Call the function `make-local-hook' to do this. Once a hook variable is buffer-local, you can add hooks to it either globally or locally. run-hooks runs the local hook functions of the current buffer, then all the global hook functions. The functions add-hook and remove-hook take an additional optional argument LOCAL which says whether to add (or remove) a local hook function or a global one. Local hooks use t as an element of the (local) value of the hook variable as a flag meaning to use the global value also. *** The new function local-variable-p tells you whether a particular variable is buffer-local in the current buffer or a specified buffer. ** Editing Facilities *** The function copy-region-as-kill no longer sets this-command; as a result, a following kill command will not normally append to the text saved by copy-region-as-kill. *** Regular expression searching and matching no longer performs full Posix backtracking by default. They now stop with the first match found instead of looking for the longest match--just as they did in Emacs 18. The reason for this change is to get higher speed. There are new functions you can use if you really want to search or match with Posix behavior: posix-search-forward, posix-search-backward, posix-looking-at, and posix-string-match. Call these just like re-search-forward, re-search-backward, looking-at, and string-match. ** Files *** The new variable `format-alist' defines file formats, which are ways of translating between the data in a file and things (text, text-properties, and possibly other information) in a buffer. `format-alist' has one element for each format. Each element is a list like this: (NAME DOC-STRING REGEXP FROM-FN TO-FN MODIFY MODE-FN) containing the name of the format, a documentation string, a regular expression which is used to recognize files in that format, a decoding function, an encoding function, a flag that indicates whether the encoding function modifies the buffer, and a mode function. FROM-FN is called to decode files in that format; it gets two args, BEGIN and END, and can make any modifications it likes, returning the new end position. It must make sure that the beginning of the file no longer matches REGEXP, or else it will get called again. TO-FN is called to encode a region into that format; it is also passed BEGIN and END, and either returns a list of annotations as in `write-region-annotate-functions', or modifies the region and returns the new end position. MODIFY, if non-nil, means the TO-FN modifies the region. If nil, TO-FN may not make any changes and should return a list of annotations. `insert-file-contents' checks the beginning of the file that it is inserting to see if it matches one of the regexps. If so, then it calls the decoding function, and then looks for another match. When visiting a file, it also calls the mode function, and sets the variable `buffer-file-format' to the list of formats that the file used. `write-region' calls the encoding functions for each format in `buffer-file-format' before it writes the file. To save a file in a different format, either set `buffer-file-format' to a different value, or call the new function `format-write-file'. Since some encoding functions may be slow, you can request that auto-save use a format different from the buffer's default by setting the variable `auto-save-file-format' to the desired format. This will determine the format of all auto-save files. *** The new function file-ownership-preserved-p tells you whether deleting a file and recreating it would keep the file's owner unchanged. *** The new function file-regular-p returns t if a file is a "regular" file (not a directory, symlink, named pipe, terminal, or other I/O device). *** The new function file-name-sans-extension discards the extension of a file name. You call it with a file name, and returns a string lacking the extension. *** The variable path-separator is a string which says which character separates directories in a search path. It is ":" for Unix and GNU systems, ";" for MSDOG and Windows NT. ** Commands and Key Sequences *** Key sequences consisting of C-c followed by {, }, <, >, : or ; are now reserved for major modes. Sequences consisting of C-c followed by any other punctuation character are now meant for minor modes. We don't plan to convert all existing major modes to stop using those sequences, but we hope to keep them to a minimum. *** When the post-command-hook or the pre-command-hook gets an error, the error is silently ignored. Emacs no longer sets the hook variable to nil when this happens. Meanwhile, the hook functions can now alter the hook variable in a normal fashion; there is no need to do anything special. *** define-key, lookup-key, and various other functions for changing or looking up key bindings now let you write an event type with a list like (ctrl meta newline) or (meta ?d), as in XEmacs. (ctrl meta newline) is equivalent to the event type symbol C-M-newline, and (meta ?d) is equivalent to the character ?\M-d. *** The function event-convert-list converts a list such as (meta ?d) into the corresponding event type (a symbol or integer). *** In an interactive spec, `k' means to read a key sequence. In this key sequence, upper case characters and shifted function keys which have no bindings are converted to lower case if that makes them defined. The new interactive code `K' reads a key sequence similarly, but does not convert the last event. `K' is useful for reading a key sequence to be given a binding. *** The variable overriding-local-map now has no effect on the menu bar display unless overriding-local-map-menu-flag is non-nil. This is why incremental search no longer temporarily changes the menu bars. Note that overriding-local-map does still affect the execution of key sequences entered using the menu bar. So if you use overriding-local-map, and a menu bar key sequence comes in, you should make sure to clear overriding-local-map before that key sequence gets looked up and executed. But this is what you'd normally do anyway: programs that use overriding-local-map normally exit and "put back" any event such as menu-bar that they do not handle specially. *** The new variable `overriding-terminal-local-map' is like overriding-local-map, but is specific to a single terminal. *** delete-frame events. When you use the X window manager's "delete window" command, this now generates a delete-frame event. The standard definition of this event is a command that deletes the frame that received the event, and kills Emacs when the last visible or iconified frame is deleted. You can rebind the event to some other command if you wish. *** Two new types of events, iconify-frame and make-frame-visible, indicate that the user iconified or deiconified a frame with the window manager. Since the window manager has already done the work, the default definition for both event types in Emacs is to do nothing. ** Frames and X *** Certain Lisp variables are now local to an X terminal (in other words, all the screens of a single X server). The value in effect, at any given time, is the one that belongs to the terminal of the selected frame. The terminal-local variables are default-minibuffer-frame, system-key-alist, defining-kbd-macro, and last-kbd-macro. There is no way for Lisp programs to create others. The terminal-local variables cannot be buffer-local. *** When you create an X frame, for the `top' and `left' frame parameters, you can now use values of the form (+ N) or (- N), where N is an integer. (+ N) means N pixels to the right of the left edge of the screen and (- N) means N pixels to the left of the right edge. In both cases, N may be zero (exactly at the edge) or negative (putting the window partly off the screen). The function x-parse-geometry can return values of these forms for certain inputs. *** The variable menu-bar-file-menu has been renamed to menu-bar-files-menu to match the actual item that appears in the menu. (All the other such variable names do match.) *** The new function active-minibuffer-window returns the minibuffer window currently active, or nil if none is now active. *** In the functions next-window, previous-window, next-frame, previous-frame, get-buffer-window, get-lru-window, get-largest-window and delete-windows-on, if you specify 0 for the last argument, it means to consider all visible and iconified frames. *** When you set a frame's cursor type with modify-frame-parameters, you can now specify (bar . INTEGER) as the cursor type. This stands for a bar cursor of width INTEGER. *** The new function facep returns t if its argument is a face name (or if it is a vector such as is used internally by the Lisp code to represent a face). *** Each frame can now have a buffer-predicate function, which is the `buffer-predicate' frame parameter. When `other-buffer' looks for an alternative buffer, it considers only the buffers that fit the selected frame's buffer predicate (if it has one). This is useful for applications that make their own frames. *** When you create an X frame, you can now specify the frame parameter `display'. This says which display to put the frame on. The value should be a display name--a string of the form "HOST:DPYNUMBER.SCREENNUMBER". The functions x-server-... and x-display-... now take an optional argument which specifies the display to ask about. You can use either a display name string or a frame. A value of nil stands for the selected frame. To close the connection to an X display, use the function x-close-connection. Specify which display with a display name. You cannot close the connection if Emacs still has frames open on that display. x-display-list returns a list indicating which displays Emacs has connections to. Its elements are display names (strings). *** The icon-type frame parameter may now be a file name. Then the contents of that file specify the icon bitmap to use for that frame. *** The title of an Emacs frame, displayed by most window managers, is set from frame-title-format or icon-title-format. These have the same structure as mode-line-format. *** x-display-grayscale-p is a new function that returns non-nil if your X server can display shades of gray. Currently it returns non-nil for color displays (because they can display shades of gray); we may change it in the next version to return nil for color displays. *** The frame parameter scroll-bar-width specifies the width of the scrollbar in pixels. ** Buffers *** Creating a buffer with get-buffer-create does not obey default-major-mode. That variable is now handled in a separate function, set-buffer-major-mode. get-buffer-create and generate-new-buffer always leave the newly created buffer in Fundamental mode. Creating a new buffer by visiting a file or with switch-to-buffer, pop-to-buffer, and similar functions does call set-buffer-major-mode to select the default major mode specified with default-major-mode. *** You can now create an "indirect buffer". An indirect buffer shares its text, including text properties, with another buffer (the "base buffer"), but has its own major mode, local variables, overlays, and narrowing. An indirect buffer has a name of its own, distinct from those of the base buffer and all other buffers. An indirect buffer cannot itself be visiting a file (though its base buffer can be). The base buffer cannot itself be indirect. Use (make-indirect-buffer BASE-BUFFER NAME) to make an indirect buffer named NAME whose base is BASE-BUFFER. If BASE-BUFFER is an indirect buffer, its base buffer is used as the base for the new buffer. You can make an indirect buffer current, or switch to it in a window, just as you would a non-indirect buffer. The function buffer-base-buffer, given an indirect buffer, returns its base buffer. It returns nil when given an ordinary buffer (not indirect). The library `noutline' has versions of Outline mode and Outline minor mode which let you display different parts of the outline in different indirect buffers. ** Subprocesses *** The functions call-process and call-process-region now allow you to direct error message output from the subprocess into a separate destination, instead of mixing it with ordinary output. To do this, specify for the third argument, BUFFER, a list of the form (BUFFER-OR-NAME ERROR-DESTINATION) BUFFER-OR-NAME specifies where to put ordinary output; it should be a buffer or buffer name, or t, nil or 0. This is what would have been the BUFFER argument, ordinarily. ERROR-DESTINATION specifies where to put the error output. nil means discard it, t means mix it with the ordinary output, and a string specifies a file name to write this output into. You can't specify a buffer to put the error output in; that is not easy to implement directly. You can put the error output into a buffer by sending it to a temporary file and then inserting the file into a buffer. *** Comint mode changes: **** The variable comint-completion-addsuffix can also be a cons pair of the form (DIRSUFFIX . FILESUFFIX), where DIRSUFFIX and FILESUFFIX are strings added on unambiguous or exact completion of directories and file names, respectively. ** Text properties *** You can now specify which values of the `invisible' property make text invisible in a given buffer. The variable `buffer-invisibility-spec', which is always local in all buffers, controls this. If its value is t, then any non-nil `invisible' property makes a character invisible. If its value is a list, then a character is invisible if its `invisible' property value appears as a member of the list, or if it appears as the car of a member of the list. When the `invisible' property value appears as the car of a member of the `buffer-invisibility-spec' list, then the cdr of that member has an effect. If it is non-nil, then an ellipsis appears in place of the character. (This happens only for the *last* invisible character in a series of consecutive invisible characters, and only at the end of a line.) If a character's `invisible' property is a list, then Emacs checks each element of the list against `buffer-invisibility-spec'. If any element matches, the character is invisible. *** The command `list-text-properties-at' shows what text properties are in effect at point. *** Frame objects now exist in Emacs even on systems that don't support X Windows. You can create multiple frames, and switch between them using select-frame. The selected frame is actually displayed on your terminal; other frames are not displayed at all. The selected frame number appears in the mode line after `Emacs', except for frame 1. Switching frames on ASCII terminals is therefore more or less equivalent to switching between different window configurations. *** The new variable window-size-change-functions holds a list of functions to be called if window sizes change (or if windows are created or deleted). The functions are called once for each frame on which changes have occurred, with the frame as the sole argument. This takes place shortly before redisplay. *** The modification hook functions of overlays now work differently. They are called both before and after each change. This makes it possible for the functions to determine exactly what the change was. This change affects three overlay properties: the modification-hooks property, a list of functions called for deletions overlapping the overlay's range and for insertions inside it; the insert-in-front-hooks, a list of functions called for insertions at the beginning of the overlay; and the insert-behind-hooks, a list of functions called for insertions at the end of the overlay. Each function is called both before and after each change that it applies to. Before the change, it is called with four arguments: (funcall FUNCTION OVERLAY nil START END) START and END are the same arguments that the before-change-functions receive. After the change, each function is called with five arguments: (funcall FUNCTION OVERLAY t START END OLDSIZE) The last arguments, START and END and OLDSIZE, are the same arguments that the after-change-functions receive. This means the function must accept either four or five arguments. *** You can set defaults for text-properties with the new variable `default-text-properties'. Its value is a property list; the values specified there are used whenever a character (or its category) does not specify a value. *** The `face' property of a character or an overlay can now be a list of face names. Formerly it had to be just one face name. *** Changes in handling the `intangible' text property. **** If inhibit-point-motion-hooks is non-nil, then `intangible' properties are ignored. **** Moving to just before a stretch of intangible text is no longer special in any way. Point stays at that place. **** When you move point backwards into the midst of intangible text, point moves back to the beginning of that text. (It used to move forward to the end of that text, which was not very useful.) **** When moving across intangible text, Emacs stops wherever the property value changes. So if you have two stretches of intangible text, with different non-nil intangible properties, it is possible to place point between them. ** Overlays *** Overlay changes. **** The new function previous-overlay-change returns the position of the previous overlay start or end, before a specified position. This is the backwards-moving counterpart of next-overlay-change. **** overlay-get now supports category properties on an overlay the same way get-text-property supports them as text properties. Specifically, if an overlay does not have the property PROP that you ask for, but it does have a `category' property which is a symbol, then that symbol's PROP property is used. **** If an overlay has a non-nil `evaporate' property, it will be deleted if it ever becomes empty (i.e., when it spans no characters). **** If an overlay has a `before-string' and/or `after-string' property, these strings are displayed at the overlay's endpoints. ** Filling *** The new variable fill-paragraph-function provides a way for major modes to override the filling of paragraphs. If this is non-nil, fill-paragraph calls it as a function, passing along its sole argument. If the function returns non-nil, fill-paragraph assumes it has done the job and simply passes on whatever value it returned. The usual use of this feature is to fill comments in programming language modes. *** Text filling and justification changes: **** The new variable use-hard-newlines can be used to make a distinction between "hard" and "soft" newlines; the fill functions will then never remove a newline that was manually inserted. Hard newlines are marked with a non-nil `hard' text-property. **** The fill-column and left-margin can now be modified by text-properties. Most lisp programs should use the new functions (current-fill-column) and (current-left-margin), which return the proper values to use for the current line. **** There are new functions for dealing with margins: ***** Set-left-margin and set-right-margin (set the value for a region and re-fill). These functions take three arguments: two to specify a region, and the desired margin value. ***** Increase-left-margin, decrease-left-margin, increase-right-margin, and decrease-right-margin (change settings relative to current values, and re-fill). ***** move-to-left-margin moves point there, optionally adding indentation or changing tabs to spaces in order to make that possible. beginning-of-line-text also moves past the fill-prefix and any indentation added to center or right-justify a line, to the beginning of the text that the user actually typed. ***** delete-to-left-margin removes any left-margin indentation, but does not change the property. **** The paragraph-movement functions look for the paragraph-start and paragraph-separate regexps at the current left margin, not at the beginning of the line. This means that those regexps should NOT use ^ to anchor the search. However, for backwards compatibility, a ^ at the beginning of the regexp will be ignored, so most packages won't break. **** justify-current-line is now capable of doing left, center, or right justification as well as full justification. **** The fill functions can do any kind of justification based on the new `justification' text-property and `default-justification' variable, or arguments to the functions. They also have a new option which defeats the normal removal of extra whitespace. **** The new function `current-justification' returns the kind of justification used for the current line. The new function `set-justification' can be used to change it, including re-justifying the text of the region according to the new value. **** Filling and auto-fill are disabled if justification is `none'. **** The auto-fill-function is now called regardless of whether the fill-column has been exceeded; the function can determine on its own whether filling (or justification) is necessary. ** Processes *** process-tty-name is a new function that returns the name of the terminal that the process itself reads and writes on (not the name of the pty that Emacs uses to talk with that terminal). *** Errors in process filters and sentinels are now normally caught automatically, so that they don't abort other Lisp programs. Setting debug-on-error non-nil turns off this feature; then errors in filters and sentinels are not caught. As a result, they can invoke the debugger, under the control of debug-on-error. *** Emacs now preserves the match data around the execution of process filters and sentinels. You can use search and match functions freely in filters and sentinels without explicitly bothering to save the match data. ** Display *** The variable message-log-max controls how messages are logged in the "*Messages*" buffer. An integer value means to keep that many lines; t means to log with no limit; nil means disable message logging. Lisp code that calls `message' excessively (e.g. isearch.el) should probably bind this variable to nil. *** Display tables now have a new element, at index 261, specifying the glyph to use for the separator between two side-by-side windows. By default, this is the vertical bar character `|'. Probably the only other useful character to store for this element is a space, to make less visual separation between two side-by-side windows displaying related information. *** The new mode-line-format spec %c displays the current column number. *** The new variable blink-matching-delay specifies how long to keep the cursor at the matching open-paren, after you insert a close-paren. This is useful mainly on systems which can wait for a fraction of a second--you can then specify fractional values such as 0.5. *** Faster processing of buffers with long lines The new variable cache-long-line-scans determines whether Emacs should use caches to handle long lines more quickly. This variable is buffer-local, in all buffers. Normally, the line-motion functions work by scanning the buffer for newlines. Columnar operations (like `move-to-column' and `compute-motion') also work by scanning the buffer, summing character widths as they go. This works well for ordinary text, but if the buffer's lines are very long (say, more than 500 characters), these motion functions will take longer to execute. Emacs may also take longer to update the display. If cache-long-line-scans is non-nil, these motion functions cache the results of their scans, and consult the cache to avoid rescanning regions of the buffer until the text is modified. The caches are most beneficial when they prevent the most searching---that is, when the buffer contains long lines and large regions of characters with the same, fixed screen width. When cache-long-line-scans is non-nil, processing short lines will become slightly slower (because of the overhead of consulting the cache), and the caches will use memory roughly proportional to the number of newlines and characters whose screen width varies. The caches require no explicit maintenance; their accuracy is maintained internally by the Emacs primitives. Enabling or disabling the cache should not affect the behavior of any of the motion functions; it should only affect their performance. ** System Interface *** The function user-login-name now accepts an optional argument uid. If the argument is non-nil, user-login-name returns the login name for that user id. *** system-name, user-name, user-full-name and user-real-name are now variables as well as functions. The variables hold the same values that the functions would return. The new variable multiple-frames is non-nil if at least two non-minibuffer frames are visible. These variables may be useful in constructing the value of frame-title-format or icon-title-format. *** Changes in time-conversion functions. **** The new function format-time-string takes a format string and a time value. It converts the time to a string, according to the format specified. You can specify what kind of conversion to use with %-specifications. **** The new function decode-time converts a time value into a list of specific items of information: the year, month, day of week, day of month, hour, minute and second. (A time value is a list of two or three integers.) **** The new function encode-time converts specific items of time information--the second, minute, hour, day, month, year, and time zone--into a time value. * Changes in Emacs 19.27 There are no changes; however, here is one bug fix made in 19.26 that users think should be documented here. ** SPC and DEL in Info now handle menus consistently. SPC and DEL scroll through an entire subtree an Info manual. Once you scroll through a node far enough to reach a menu, SPC begins moving into the subnodes of the menu, starting with the first one. When you reach the end of a subnode, SPC moves into the next subnode, and so on. DEL more or less scrolls through the same text in reverse order. * User Editing Changes in Emacs 19.26 ** In the X toolkit version, if you click on a menu bar item and release the button quickly outside the menu, the menu remains visible until you click or type something else. If you click on the menu, you select from the menu. Any other mouse click makes the menu disappear. Keyboard input gets rid of the menu and then is processed normally. "Quickly" means within double-click-time milliseconds. ** The C-x 5 commands to select a buffer in "another frame" now use an existing iconified frame, if any, deiconifying it. They also raise the frame. ** Region highlighting on a black-and-white-only display now uses underlining. Inverse-video had the problem that you couldn't see the cursor. ** You can now change the height of a window by pressing mouse-1 on the mode line and dragging it up and down. ** If you set the environment variable LC_CTYPE to iso_8859_1 or iso-8859-1, Emacs automatically sets up for display and syntactic handling of the ISO Latin-1 character set. This does not automatically load any of the packages for input of these characters, because it's not yet clear what is right to do. You must still explicitly load either iso-transl or iso-acc. ** For a read-only buffer that is also modified, the mode line now displays %* instead of %%. ** M-prior (scroll-other-window-down) is a new command that works like M-next (and C-M-v) but scrolls in the opposite direction. M-home moves to the beginning of the buffer, in the other window. M-end moves to the end of the buffer, in the other window. These two commands, along with M-next and M-prior, form a series of commands for moving around in the other window. ** In change logs, the mail address is now delimited with <...> instead of (...). This makes it a little more convenient to extract the mail address for use in mailing a message. ** In Shell mode and other comint modes, C-a has now returned to its ordinary meaning: move to the beginning of the line. Use C-c C-a to move to the end of the prompt. ** If you set mail-signature to t to cause automatic insertion of your .signature file, you now get a -- before the signature. ** Setting rmail-highlighted-headers to nil entirely turns off highlighting in Rmail. However, if your motivation for doing this is that the highlighted text doesn't look good on your display, it might be better to change the appearance of the `highlight' face. Once you've done that, you may find Rmail highlighting is useful. ** In the calendar, mouse-2 is now used only for commands that apply to a date. If you click it when not on a date, it gives an immediate error. Mouse-3 in the calendar now gives a menu of commands that do not apply to a particular date. The D command displays diary entries from a specified diary file (not your standard diary file). ** In the gnus-uu package, the binding for gnus-uu-threaded-decode-and-view is now C-c C-v C-d, not C-c C-v C-h. Thus, C-c C-v C-h is now available for asking for a list of the subcommands of C-c C-v. ** You can now specify "who you are" for various Emacs packages by setting just one variable, user-mail-address. This currently applies to posting news with GNUS and to making change log entries. It may apply to additional Emacs features in the future. * Lisp-Level Changes in Emacs 19.26: ** The function insert-char now takes an optional third argument which, if non-nil, says the inserted characters should inherit sticky text properties from the surrounding text. ** The `diary' library has been renamed to `diary-lib'. If you refer to this library in your Lisp code, you must update the references. ** Sending text to a subprocess can read input from subprocesses if it has to wait because the destination subprocess's terminal input buffer is full. It was already possible in unusual occasions for this operation to read subprocess input, but it did not happen very often. It is now more likely to happen. ** last-nonmenu-event is now bound to t around filter functions and sentinels. This is to ensure that y-or-n-p and yes-or-no-p use the keyboard by default. ** In mode lines, %+ now displays as % for unmodified read-only buffers. It is now the same as %* except in the case of a modified read-only buffer; in that case, %+ displays as *. The old meaning of %+ is now available on %&. It displays * for a modified buffer and - for an unmodified buffer, regardless of read-only status. ** You can now use `underline' in the color list of a face. It serves as a last resort, and says to underline the face (if previous color list elements can't be used). ** The new function x-color-values returns the list of color values for a given color name (a string). The list contains three integers which give the amounts of red, green and blue in the color: (R G B). ** In run-at-time, 0 as the repeat interval means "don't repeat". ** The variable trim-versions-without-asking has been renamed to delete-old-versions. ** The new function other-window-for-scrolling returns the choice of other window for C-M-v to scroll. ** Note that the function fceiling was mistakenly documented as fceil before. * Changes in cc-mode.el in Emacs 19.26: ** A new syntactic symbol has been added: substatement-open. It defines the open brace of a substatement block. These used to get: ((block-open ...) (substatement . ...)). Non-block substatement lines still get just ((substatement . ...)) Note that the custom indent function c-adaptive-block-open has been removed as obsolete. ** You can now specify the `hanginess' of closing braces. See c-hanging-braces-alist. ** Recognizes try and catch blocks in C++. They are given the substatement syntactic symbol. ** should be generally more forgiving about non-GNU standard top-level construct definition styles (i.e. where the function/class/struct opening brace does not start in column zero). If you hang the braces that open a top-level construct on the right edge, and you find you still need to define defun-open-prompt (Emacs 19) please let me know. Note that there may still be performance issues related to non-column zero opening braces. ** c-macro-expand is put on C-c C-e ** New style: "Default". Resets indentation to those shipped with cc-mode.el. ** internal defun c-indent-via-language-element has been renamed c-indent-line for compatibility with c-mode.el and awk-mode. ** new buffer-local variable c-comment-start-regexp for (potential) flexibility in adding new modes based on cc-mode.el * Changes in Emacs 19.25 The variable x-cross-pointer-shape (which didn't really exist) has been renamed to x-sensitive-text-pointer-shape, and now does exist. * Changes in Emacs 19.24 Here is a list of new Lisp packages introduced since 19.22. derived.el Define new major modes based on old ones. dired-x.el Extra Dired features. double.el New mode for conveniently inputting non-beyond chars. easymenu.el Create menus easily. ediff.el Snazzy diff interface. foldout.el A kind of outline mode designed for editing programs. gnus-uu.el UUdecode in GNUS buffers. ielm.el Interactively evaluate Lisp. This is a replacement for Lisp Interaction Mode. iso-cvt.el Conversion of beyond-ASCII characters between various different representations. jka-compr.el Automatic compression/decompression. mldrag.el Drag modeline to change heights of windows. mail-hist.el Provides history for headers of outgoing mail. rsz-mini.el Automatically resizing minibuffers. s-region.el Set region by holding shift. skeleton.el Templates for statement insertion. soundex.el Classifying words by how they sound. tempo.el Template insertion with hotspots. * User Editing Changes in 19.23. ** Emacs 19.23 uses Ispell version 3. Previous Emacs 19 versions used Ispell version 4. That version had improvements in storing the dictionary compactly, but these are not very important nowadays. Meanwhile, in parallel to the work on Ispell 4, many useful features were added to Ispell 3. Until a few months ago, the terms on Ispell 3 did not let us use it; but they have now been changed, so now we are using it. We are dropping Ispell 4. ** Emacs 19.23 can run on MS-DOG. See the file MSDOS in the same directory as this file. ** Emacs 19.23 can work with an X toolkit. You must specify toolkit operation when you configure Emacs: use the option --with-x-toolkit=yes. (This option uses code developed by Lucid; thanks to Frederic Pierresteguy for helping to adapt it.) ** Emacs now has dialog boxes; yes/no and y/n questions automatically use them in commands invoked with the mouse. For more information, see below under "Lisp programming changes". ** Menus now display the keyboard equivalents (if any) of the menu commands in parentheses after the menu item. ** Kill commands, used in a read-only buffer, now move point across the text they would otherwise have killed. This way, you can use repeated kill commands to transfer text into the kill ring. ** There is now a global mark ring in addition to the mark ring that is local to each buffer. The global mark ring stores positions in any buffer. Any time the mark is set and the current buffer is different from the last time the mark was set, the new mark is pushed on the global mark ring as well. T