GNU Emacs NEWS -- history of user-visible changes. 2006-05-31 Copyright (C) 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc. See the end of the file for license conditions. This file is about changes in emacs version 21. * Emacs 21.4 is a bug-fix release with no user-visible changes. * Installation changes in Emacs 21.3 ** Support for GNU/Linux on little-endian MIPS and on IBM S390 has been added. * Changes in Emacs 21.3 ** The obsolete C mode (c-mode.el) has been removed to avoid problems with Custom. ** UTF-16 coding systems are available, encoding the same characters as mule-utf-8. ** There is a new language environment for UTF-8 (set up automatically in UTF-8 locales). ** Translation tables are available between equivalent characters in different Emacs charsets -- for instance `e with acute' coming from the Latin-1 and Latin-2 charsets. User options `unify-8859-on-encoding-mode' and `unify-8859-on-decoding-mode' respectively turn on translation between ISO 8859 character sets (`unification') on encoding (e.g. writing a file) and decoding (e.g. reading a file). Note that `unify-8859-on-encoding-mode' is useful and safe, but `unify-8859-on-decoding-mode' can cause text to change when you read it and write it out again without edits, so it is not generally advisable. By default `unify-8859-on-encoding-mode' is turned on. ** In Emacs running on the X window system, the default value of `selection-coding-system' is now `compound-text-with-extensions'. If you want the old behavior, set selection-coding-system to compound-text, which may be significantly more efficient. Using compound-text-with-extensions seems to be necessary only for decoding text from applications under XFree86 4.2, whose behavior is actually contrary to the compound text specification. * Installation changes in Emacs 21.2 ** Support for BSD/OS 5.0 has been added. ** Support for AIX 5.1 was added. * Changes in Emacs 21.2 ** Emacs now supports compound-text extended segments in X selections. X applications can use `extended segments' to encode characters in compound text that belong to character sets which are not part of the list of approved standard encodings for X, e.g. Big5. To paste selections with such characters into Emacs, use the new coding system compound-text-with-extensions as the value of selection-coding-system. ** The default values of `tooltip-delay' and `tooltip-hide-delay' were changed. ** On terminals whose erase-char is ^H (Backspace), Emacs now uses normal-erase-is-backspace-mode. ** When the *scratch* buffer is recreated, its mode is set from initial-major-mode, which normally is lisp-interaction-mode, instead of using default-major-mode. ** The new option `Info-scroll-prefer-subnodes' causes Info to behave like the stand-alone Info reader (from the GNU Texinfo package) as far as motion between nodes and their subnodes is concerned. If it is t (the default), Emacs behaves as before when you type SPC in a menu: it visits the subnode pointed to by the first menu entry. If this option is nil, SPC scrolls to the end of the current node, and only then goes to the first menu item, like the stand-alone reader does. This change was already in Emacs 21.1, but wasn't advertised in the NEWS. * Lisp Changes in Emacs 21.2 ** The meanings of scroll-up-aggressively and scroll-down-aggressively have been interchanged, so that the former now controls scrolling up, and the latter now controls scrolling down. ** The variable `compilation-parse-errors-filename-function' can be used to transform filenames found in compilation output. * Installation Changes in Emacs 21.1 See the INSTALL file for information on installing extra libraries and fonts to take advantage of the new graphical features and extra charsets in this release. ** Support for GNU/Linux on IA64 machines has been added. ** Support for LynxOS has been added. ** There are new configure options associated with the support for images and toolkit scrollbars. Use the --help option in `configure' to list them. ** You can build a 64-bit Emacs for SPARC/Solaris systems which support 64-bit executables and also on Irix 6.5. This increases the maximum buffer size. See etc/MACHINES for instructions. Changes to build on other 64-bit systems should be straightforward modulo any necessary changes to unexec. ** There is a new configure option `--disable-largefile' to omit Unix-98-style support for large files if that is available. ** There is a new configure option `--without-xim' that instructs Emacs to not use X Input Methods (XIM), if these are available. ** `movemail' defaults to supporting POP. You can turn this off using the --without-pop configure option, should that be necessary. ** This version can be built for the Macintosh, but does not implement all of the new display features described below. The port currently lacks unexec, asynchronous processes, and networking support. See the "Emacs and the Mac OS" appendix in the Emacs manual, for the description of aspects specific to the Mac. ** Note that the MS-Windows port does not yet implement various of the new display features described below. * Changes in Emacs 21.1 ** Emacs has a new redisplay engine. The new redisplay handles characters of variable width and height. Italic text can be used without redisplay problems. Fonts containing oversized characters, i.e. characters larger than the logical height of a font can be used. Images of various formats can be displayed in the text. ** Emacs has a new face implementation. The new faces no longer fundamentally use X font names to specify the font. Instead, each face has several independent attributes--family, height, width, weight and slant--that it may or may not specify. These attributes can be merged from various faces, and then together specify a font. Faces are supported on terminals that can display color or fonts. These terminal capabilities are auto-detected. Details can be found under Lisp changes, below. ** Emacs can display faces on TTY frames. Emacs automatically detects terminals that are able to display colors. Faces with a weight greater than normal are displayed extra-bright, if the terminal supports it. Faces with a weight less than normal and italic faces are displayed dimmed, if the terminal supports it. Underlined faces are displayed underlined if possible. Other face attributes such as `overline', `strike-through', and `box' are ignored on terminals. The command-line options `-fg COLOR', `-bg COLOR', and `-rv' are now supported on character terminals. Emacs automatically remaps all X-style color specifications to one of the colors supported by the terminal. This means you could have the same color customizations that work both on a windowed display and on a TTY or when Emacs is invoked with the -nw option. ** New default font is Courier 12pt under X. ** Sound support Emacs supports playing sound files on GNU/Linux and FreeBSD (Voxware driver and native BSD driver, a.k.a. Luigi's driver). Currently supported file formats are RIFF-WAVE (*.wav) and Sun Audio (*.au). You must configure Emacs with the option `--with-sound=yes' to enable sound support. ** Emacs now resizes mini-windows if appropriate. If a message is longer than one line, or minibuffer contents are longer than one line, Emacs can resize the minibuffer window unless it is on a frame of its own. You can control resizing and the maximum minibuffer window size by setting the following variables: - User option: max-mini-window-height Maximum height for resizing mini-windows. If a float, it specifies a fraction of the mini-window frame's height. If an integer, it specifies a number of lines. Default is 0.25. - User option: resize-mini-windows How to resize mini-windows. If nil, don't resize. If t, always resize to fit the size of the text. If `grow-only', let mini-windows grow only, until they become empty, at which point they are shrunk again. Default is `grow-only'. ** LessTif support. Emacs now runs with the LessTif toolkit (see ). You will need version 0.92.26, or later. ** LessTif/Motif file selection dialog. When Emacs is configured to use LessTif or Motif, reading a file name from a menu will pop up a file selection dialog if `use-dialog-box' is non-nil. ** File selection dialog on MS-Windows is supported. When a file is visited by clicking File->Open, the MS-Windows version now pops up a standard file selection dialog where you can select a file to visit. File->Save As also pops up that dialog. ** Toolkit scroll bars. Emacs now uses toolkit scroll bars if available. When configured for LessTif/Motif, it will use that toolkit's scroll bar. Otherwise, when configured for Lucid and Athena widgets, it will use the Xaw3d scroll bar if Xaw3d is available. You can turn off the use of toolkit scroll bars by specifying `--with-toolkit-scroll-bars=no' when configuring Emacs. When you encounter problems with the Xaw3d scroll bar, watch out how Xaw3d is compiled on your system. If the Makefile generated from Xaw3d's Imakefile contains a `-DNARROWPROTO' compiler option, and your Emacs system configuration file `s/your-system.h' does not contain a define for NARROWPROTO, you might consider adding it. Take `s/freebsd.h' as an example. Alternatively, if you don't have access to the Xaw3d source code, take a look at your system's imake configuration file, for example in the directory `/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/config' (paths are different on different systems). You will find files `*.cf' there. If your system's cf-file contains a line like `#define NeedWidePrototypes NO', add a `#define NARROWPROTO' to your Emacs system configuration file. The reason for this is that one Xaw3d function uses `double' or `float' function parameters depending on the setting of NARROWPROTO. This is not a problem when Imakefiles are used because each system's imake configuration file contains the necessary information. Since Emacs doesn't use imake, this has do be done manually. ** Tool bar support. Emacs supports a tool bar at the top of a frame under X. For details of how to define a tool bar, see the page describing Lisp-level changes. Tool-bar global minor mode controls whether or not it is displayed and is on by default. The appearance of the bar is improved if Emacs has been built with XPM image support. Otherwise monochrome icons will be used. To make the tool bar more useful, we need contributions of extra icons for specific modes (with copyright assignments). ** Tooltips. Tooltips are small X windows displaying a help string at the current mouse position. The Lisp package `tooltip' implements them. You can turn them off via the user option `tooltip-mode'. Tooltips also provides support for GUD debugging. If activated, variable values can be displayed in tooltips by pointing at them with the mouse in source buffers. You can customize various aspects of the tooltip display in the group `tooltip'. ** Automatic Hscrolling Horizontal scrolling now happens automatically if `automatic-hscrolling' is set (the default). This setting can be customized. If a window is scrolled horizontally with set-window-hscroll, or scroll-left/scroll-right (C-x <, C-x >), this serves as a lower bound for automatic horizontal scrolling. Automatic scrolling will scroll the text more to the left if necessary, but won't scroll the text more to the right than the column set with set-window-hscroll etc. ** When using a windowing terminal, each Emacs window now has a cursor of its own. By default, when a window is selected, the cursor is solid; otherwise, it is hollow. The user-option `cursor-in-non-selected-windows' controls how to display the cursor in non-selected windows. If nil, no cursor is shown, if non-nil a hollow box cursor is shown. ** Fringes to the left and right of windows are used to display truncation marks, continuation marks, overlay arrows and alike. The foreground, background, and stipple of these areas can be changed by customizing face `fringe'. ** The mode line under X is now drawn with shadows by default. You can change its appearance by modifying the face `mode-line'. In particular, setting the `:box' attribute to nil turns off the 3D appearance of the mode line. (The 3D appearance makes the mode line occupy more space, and thus might cause the first or the last line of the window to be partially obscured.) The variable `mode-line-inverse-video', which was used in older versions of emacs to make the mode-line stand out, is now deprecated. However, setting it to nil will cause the `mode-line' face to be ignored, and mode-lines to be drawn using the default text face. ** Mouse-sensitive mode line. Different parts of the mode line have been made mouse-sensitive on all systems which support the mouse. Moving the mouse to a mouse-sensitive part in the mode line changes the appearance of the mouse pointer to an arrow, and help about available mouse actions is displayed either in the echo area, or in the tooltip window if you have enabled one. Currently, the following actions have been defined: - Mouse-1 on the buffer name in the mode line goes to the next buffer. - Mouse-3 on the buffer-name goes to the previous buffer. - Mouse-2 on the read-only or modified status in the mode line (`%' or `*') toggles the status. - Mouse-3 on the major mode name displays a major mode menu. - Mouse-3 on the mode name displays a minor-mode menu. ** Hourglass pointer Emacs can optionally display an hourglass pointer under X. You can turn the display on or off by customizing group `cursor'. ** Blinking cursor M-x blink-cursor-mode toggles a blinking cursor under X and on terminals having terminal capabilities `vi', `vs', and `ve'. Blinking and related parameters like frequency and delay can be customized in the group `cursor'. ** New font-lock support mode `jit-lock-mode'. This support mode is roughly equivalent to `lazy-lock' but is generally faster. It supports stealth and deferred fontification. See the documentation of the function `jit-lock-mode' for more details. Font-lock uses jit-lock-mode as default support mode, so you don't have to do anything to activate it. ** The default binding of the Delete key has changed. The new user-option `normal-erase-is-backspace' can be set to determine the effect of the Delete and Backspace function keys. On window systems, the default value of this option is chosen according to the keyboard used. If the keyboard has both a Backspace key and a Delete key, and both are mapped to their usual meanings, the option's default value is set to t, so that Backspace can be used to delete backward, and Delete can be used to delete forward. On keyboards which either have only one key (usually labeled DEL), or two keys DEL and BS which produce the same effect, the option's value is set to nil, and these keys delete backward. If not running under a window system, setting this option accomplishes a similar effect by mapping C-h, which is usually generated by the Backspace key, to DEL, and by mapping DEL to C-d via `keyboard-translate'. The former functionality of C-h is available on the F1 key. You should probably not use this setting on a text-only terminal if you don't have both Backspace, Delete and F1 keys. Programmatically, you can call function normal-erase-is-backspace-mode to toggle the behavior of the Delete and Backspace keys. ** The default for user-option `next-line-add-newlines' has been changed to nil, i.e. C-n will no longer add newlines at the end of a buffer by default. ** The and keys now move to the beginning or end of the current line, respectively. C- and C- move to the beginning and end of the buffer. ** Emacs now checks for recursive loads of Lisp files. If the recursion depth exceeds `recursive-load-depth-limit', an error is signaled. ** When an error is signaled during the loading of the user's init file, Emacs now pops up the *Messages* buffer. ** Emacs now refuses to load compiled Lisp files which weren't compiled with Emacs. Set `load-dangerous-libraries' to t to change this behavior. The reason for this change is an incompatible change in XEmacs's byte compiler. Files compiled with XEmacs can contain byte codes that let Emacs dump core. ** Toggle buttons and radio buttons in menus. When compiled with LessTif (or Motif) support, Emacs uses toolkit widgets for radio and toggle buttons in menus. When configured for Lucid, Emacs draws radio buttons and toggle buttons similar to Motif. ** The menu bar configuration has changed. The new configuration is more CUA-compliant. The most significant change is that Options is now a separate menu-bar item, with Mule and Customize as its submenus. ** Item Save Options on the Options menu allows saving options set using that menu. ** Highlighting of trailing whitespace. When `show-trailing-whitespace' is non-nil, Emacs displays trailing whitespace in the face `trailing-whitespace'. Trailing whitespace is defined as spaces or tabs at the end of a line. To avoid busy highlighting when entering new text, trailing whitespace is not displayed if point is at the end of the line containing the whitespace. ** C-x 5 1 runs the new command delete-other-frames which deletes all frames except the selected one. ** The new user-option `confirm-kill-emacs' can be customized to let Emacs ask for confirmation before exiting. ** The header line in an Info buffer is now displayed as an emacs header-line (which is like a mode-line, but at the top of the window), so that it remains visible even when the buffer has been scrolled. This behavior may be disabled by customizing the option `Info-use-header-line'. ** Polish, Czech, German, and French translations of Emacs' reference card have been added. They are named `pl-refcard.tex', `cs-refcard.tex', `de-refcard.tex' and `fr-refcard.tex'. Postscript files are included. ** An `Emacs Survival Guide', etc/survival.tex, is available. ** A reference card for Dired has been added. Its name is `dired-ref.tex'. A French translation is available in `fr-drdref.tex'. ** C-down-mouse-3 is bound differently. Now if the menu bar is not displayed it pops up a menu containing the items which would be on the menu bar. If the menu bar is displayed, it pops up the major mode menu or the Edit menu if there is no major mode menu. ** Variable `load-path' is no longer customizable through Customize. You can no longer use `M-x customize-variable' to customize `load-path' because it now contains a version-dependent component. You can still use `add-to-list' and `setq' to customize this variable in your `~/.emacs' init file or to modify it from any Lisp program in general. ** C-u C-x = provides detailed information about the character at point in a pop-up window. ** Emacs can now support 'wheeled' mice (such as the MS IntelliMouse) under XFree86. To enable this, use the `mouse-wheel-mode' command, or customize the variable `mouse-wheel-mode'. The variables `mouse-wheel-follow-mouse' and `mouse-wheel-scroll-amount' determine where and by how much buffers are scrolled. ** Emacs' auto-save list files are now by default stored in a sub-directory `.emacs.d/auto-save-list/' of the user's home directory. (On MS-DOS, this subdirectory's name is `_emacs.d/auto-save.list/'.) You can customize `auto-save-list-file-prefix' to change this location. ** The function `getenv' is now callable interactively. ** The new user-option `even-window-heights' can be set to nil to prevent `display-buffer' from evening out window heights. ** The new command M-x delete-trailing-whitespace RET will delete the trailing whitespace within the current restriction. You can also add this function to `write-file-hooks' or `local-write-file-hooks'. ** When visiting a file with M-x find-file-literally, no newlines will be added to the end of the buffer even if `require-final-newline' is non-nil. ** The new user-option `find-file-suppress-same-file-warnings' can be set to suppress warnings ``X and Y are the same file'' when visiting a file that is already visited under a different name. ** The new user-option `electric-help-shrink-window' can be set to nil to prevent adjusting the help window size to the buffer size. ** New command M-x describe-character-set reads a character set name and displays information about that. ** The new variable `auto-mode-interpreter-regexp' contains a regular expression matching interpreters, for file mode determination. This regular expression is matched against the first line of a file to determine the file's mode in `set-auto-mode' when Emacs can't deduce a mode from the file's name. If it matches, the file is assumed to be interpreted by the interpreter matched by the second group of the regular expression. The mode is then determined as the mode associated with that interpreter in `interpreter-mode-alist'. ** New function executable-make-buffer-file-executable-if-script-p is suitable as an after-save-hook as an alternative to `executable-chmod'. ** The most preferred coding-system is now used to save a buffer if buffer-file-coding-system is `undecided' and it is safe for the buffer contents. (The most preferred is set by set-language-environment or by M-x prefer-coding-system.) Thus if you visit an ASCII file and insert a non-ASCII character from your current language environment, the file will be saved silently with the appropriate coding. Previously you would be prompted for a safe coding system. ** The many obsolete language `setup-...-environment' commands have been removed -- use `set-language-environment'. ** The new Custom option `keyboard-coding-system' specifies a coding system for keyboard input. ** New variable `inhibit-iso-escape-detection' determines if Emacs' coding system detection algorithm should pay attention to ISO2022's escape sequences. If this variable is non-nil, the algorithm ignores such escape sequences. The default value is nil, and it is recommended not to change it except for the special case that you always want to read any escape code verbatim. If you just want to read a specific file without decoding escape codes, use C-x RET c (`universal-coding-system-argument'). For instance, C-x RET c latin-1 RET C-x C-f filename RET. ** Variable `default-korean-keyboard' is initialized properly from the environment variable `HANGUL_KEYBOARD_TYPE'. ** New command M-x list-charset-chars reads a character set name and displays all characters in that character set. ** M-x set-terminal-coding-system (C-x RET t) now allows CCL-based coding systems such as cpXXX and cyrillic-koi8. ** Emacs now attempts to determine the initial language environment and preferred and locale coding systems systematically from the LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, and LANG environment variables during startup. ** New language environments `Polish', `Latin-8' and `Latin-9'. Latin-8 and Latin-9 correspond respectively to the ISO character sets 8859-14 (Celtic) and 8859-15 (updated Latin-1, with the Euro sign). GNU Intlfonts doesn't support these yet but recent X releases have 8859-15. See etc/INSTALL for information on obtaining extra fonts. There are new Leim input methods for Latin-8 and Latin-9 prefix (only) and Polish `slash'. ** New language environments `Dutch' and `Spanish'. These new environments mainly select appropriate translations of the tutorial. ** In Ethiopic language environment, special key bindings for function keys are changed as follows. This is to conform to "Emacs Lisp Coding Convention". new command old-binding --- ------- ----------- f3 ethio-fidel-to-sera-buffer f5 S-f3 ethio-fidel-to-sera-region f5 C-f3 ethio-fidel-to-sera-mail-or-marker f5 f4 ethio-sera-to-fidel-buffer unchanged S-f4 ethio-sera-to-fidel-region unchanged C-f4 ethio-sera-to-fidel-mail-or-marker unchanged S-f5 ethio-toggle-punctuation f3 S-f6 ethio-modify-vowel f6 S-f7 ethio-replace-space f7 S-f8 ethio-input-special-character f8 S-f9 ethio-replace-space unchanged C-f9 ethio-toggle-space f2 ** There are new Leim input methods. New input methods "turkish-postfix", "turkish-alt-postfix", "greek-mizuochi", "TeX", and "greek-babel" are now part of the Leim package. ** The rule of input method "slovak" is slightly changed. Now the rules for translating "q" and "Q" to "`" (backquote) are deleted, thus typing them inserts "q" and "Q" respectively. Rules for translating "=q", "+q", "=Q", and "+Q" to "`" are also deleted. Now, to input "`", you must type "=q". ** When your terminal can't display characters from some of the ISO 8859 character sets but can display Latin-1, you can display more-or-less mnemonic sequences of ASCII/Latin-1 characters instead of empty boxes (under a window system) or question marks (not under a window system). Customize the option `latin1-display' to turn this on. ** M-; now calls comment-dwim which tries to do something clever based on the context. M-x kill-comment is now an alias to comment-kill, defined in newcomment.el. You can choose different styles of region commenting with the variable `comment-style'. ** New user options `display-time-mail-face' and `display-time-use-mail-icon' control the appearance of mode-line mail indicator used by the display-time package. On a suitable display the indicator can be an icon and is mouse-sensitive. ** On window-systems, additional space can be put between text lines on the display using several methods - By setting frame parameter `line-spacing' to PIXELS. PIXELS must be a positive integer, and specifies that PIXELS number of pixels should be put below text lines on the affected frame or frames. - By setting X resource `lineSpacing', class `LineSpacing'. This is equivalent to specifying the frame parameter. - By specifying `--line-spacing=N' or `-lsp N' on the command line. - By setting buffer-local variable `line-spacing'. The meaning is the same, but applies to the a particular buffer only. ** The new command `clone-indirect-buffer' can be used to create an indirect buffer that is a twin copy of the current buffer. The command `clone-indirect-buffer-other-window', bound to C-x 4 c, does the same but displays the indirect buffer in another window. ** New user options `backup-directory-alist' and `make-backup-file-name-function' control the placement of backups, typically in a single directory or in an invisible sub-directory. ** New commands iso-iso2sgml and iso-sgml2iso convert between Latin-1 characters and the corresponding SGML (HTML) entities. ** New X resources recognized *** The X resource `synchronous', class `Synchronous', specifies whether Emacs should run in synchronous mode. Synchronous mode is useful for debugging X problems. Example: emacs.synchronous: true *** The X resource `visualClass, class `VisualClass', specifies the visual Emacs should use. The resource's value should be a string of the form `CLASS-DEPTH', where CLASS is the name of the visual class, and DEPTH is the requested color depth as a decimal number. Valid visual class names are TrueColor PseudoColor DirectColor StaticColor GrayScale StaticGray Visual class names specified as X resource are case-insensitive, i.e. `pseudocolor', `Pseudocolor' and `PseudoColor' all have the same meaning. The program `xdpyinfo' can be used to list the visual classes supported on your display, and which depths they have. If `visualClass' is not specified, Emacs uses the display's default visual. Example: emacs.visualClass: TrueColor-8 *** The X resource `privateColormap', class `PrivateColormap', specifies that Emacs should use a private colormap if it is using the default visual, and that visual is of class PseudoColor. Recognized resource values are `true' or `on'. Example: emacs.privateColormap: true ** Faces and frame parameters. There are four new faces `scroll-bar', `border', `cursor' and `mouse'. Setting the frame parameters `scroll-bar-foreground' and `scroll-bar-background' sets foreground and background color of face `scroll-bar' and vice versa. Setting frame parameter `border-color' sets the background color of face `border' and vice versa. Likewise for frame parameters `cursor-color' and face `cursor', and frame parameter `mouse-color' and face `mouse'. Changing frame parameter `font' sets font-related attributes of the `default' face and vice versa. Setting frame parameters `foreground-color' or `background-color' sets the colors of the `default' face and vice versa. ** New face `menu'. The face `menu' can be used to change colors and font of Emacs' menus. ** New frame parameter `screen-gamma' for gamma correction. The new frame parameter `screen-gamma' specifies gamma-correction for colors. Its value may be nil, the default, in which case no gamma correction occurs, or a number > 0, usually a float, that specifies the screen gamma of a frame's display. PC monitors usually have a screen gamma of 2.2. smaller values result in darker colors. You might want to try a screen gamma of 1.5 for LCD color displays. The viewing gamma Emacs uses is 0.4545. (1/2.2). The X resource name of this parameter is `screenGamma', class `ScreenGamma'. ** Tabs and variable-width text. Tabs are now displayed with stretch properties; the width of a tab is defined as a multiple of the normal character width of a frame, and is independent of the fonts used in the text where the tab appears. Thus, tabs can be used to line up text in different fonts. ** Enhancements of the Lucid menu bar *** The Lucid menu bar now supports the resource "margin". emacs.pane.menubar.margin: 5 The default margin is 4 which makes the menu bar appear like the LessTif/Motif one. *** Arrows that indicate sub-menus are now drawn with shadows, as in LessTif and Motif. ** A block cursor can be drawn as wide as the glyph under it under X. As an example: if a block cursor is over a tab character, it will be drawn as wide as that tab on the display. To do this, set `x-stretch-cursor' to a non-nil value. ** Empty display lines at the end of a buffer may be marked with a bitmap (this is similar to the tilde displayed by vi and Less). This behavior is activated by setting the buffer-local variable `indicate-empty-lines' to a non-nil value. The default value of this variable is found in `default-indicate-empty-lines'. ** There is a new "aggressive" scrolling method. When scrolling up because point is above the window start, if the value of the buffer-local variable `scroll-up-aggressively' is a number, Emacs chooses a new window start so that point ends up that fraction of the window's height from the top of the window. When scrolling down because point is below the window end, if the value of the buffer-local variable `scroll-down-aggressively' is a number, Emacs chooses a new window start so that point ends up that fraction of the window's height from the bottom of the window. ** You can now easily create new *Info* buffers using either M-x clone-buffer, C-u m RET or C-u g RET. M-x clone-buffer can also be used on *Help* and several other special buffers. ** The command `Info-search' now uses a search history. ** Listing buffers with M-x list-buffers (C-x C-b) now shows abbreviated file names. Abbreviations can be customized by changing `directory-abbrev-alist'. ** A new variable, backup-by-copying-when-privileged-mismatch, gives the highest file uid for which backup-by-copying-when-mismatch will be forced on. The assumption is that uids less than or equal to this value are special uids (root, bin, daemon, etc.--not real system users) and that files owned by these users should not change ownership, even if your system policy allows users other than root to edit them. The default is 200; set the variable to nil to disable the feature. ** The rectangle commands now avoid inserting undesirable spaces, notably at the end of lines. All these functions have been rewritten to avoid inserting unwanted spaces, and an optional prefix now allows them to behave the old way. ** The function `replace-rectangle' is an alias for `string-rectangle'. ** The new command M-x string-insert-rectangle is like `string-rectangle', but inserts text instead of replacing it. ** The new command M-x query-replace-regexp-eval acts like query-replace-regexp, but takes a Lisp expression which is evaluated after each match to get the replacement text. ** M-x query-replace recognizes a new command `e' (or `E') that lets you edit the replacement string. ** The new command mail-abbrev-complete-alias, bound to `M-TAB' (if you load the library `mailabbrev'), lets you complete mail aliases in the text, analogous to lisp-complete-symbol. ** The variable `echo-keystrokes' may now have a floating point value. ** If your init file is compiled (.emacs.elc), `user-init-file' is set to the source name (.emacs.el), if that exists, after loading it. ** The help string specified for a menu-item whose definition contains the property `:help HELP' is now displayed under X, on MS-Windows, and MS-DOS, either in the echo area or with tooltips. Many standard menus displayed by Emacs now have help strings. -- ** New user option `read-mail-command' specifies a command to use to read mail from the menu etc. ** The environment variable `EMACSLOCKDIR' is no longer used on MS-Windows. This environment variable was used when creating lock files. Emacs on MS-Windows does not use this variable anymore. This change was made before Emacs 21.1, but wasn't documented until now. ** Highlighting of mouse-sensitive regions is now supported in the MS-DOS version of Emacs. ** The new command `msdos-set-mouse-buttons' forces the MS-DOS version of Emacs to behave as if the mouse had a specified number of buttons. This comes handy with mice that don't report their number of buttons correctly. One example is the wheeled mice, which report 3 buttons, but clicks on the middle button are not passed to the MS-DOS version of Emacs. ** Customize changes *** Customize now supports comments about customized items. Use the `State' menu to add comments, or give a prefix argument to M-x customize-set-variable or M-x customize-set-value. Note that customization comments will cause the customizations to fail in earlier versions of Emacs. *** The new option `custom-buffer-done-function' says whether to kill Custom buffers when you've done with them or just bury them (the default). *** If Emacs was invoked with the `-q' or `--no-init-file' options, it does not allow you to save customizations in your `~/.emacs' init file. This is because saving customizations from such a session would wipe out all the other customizationss you might have on your init file. ** If Emacs was invoked with the `-q' or `--no-init-file' options, it does not save disabled and enabled commands for future sessions, to avoid overwriting existing customizations of this kind that are already in your init file. ** New features in evaluation commands *** The commands to evaluate Lisp expressions, such as C-M-x in Lisp modes, C-j in Lisp Interaction mode, and M-:, now bind the variables print-level, print-length, and debug-on-error based on the new customizable variables eval-expression-print-level, eval-expression-print-length, and eval-expression-debug-on-error. The default values for the first two of these variables are 12 and 4 respectively, which means that `eval-expression' now prints at most the first 12 members of a list and at most 4 nesting levels deep (if the list is longer or deeper than that, an ellipsis `...' is printed). or on the printed text toggles between an abbreviated printed representation and an unabbreviated one. The default value of eval-expression-debug-on-error is t, so any error during evaluation produces a backtrace. *** The function `eval-defun' (C-M-x) now loads Edebug and instruments code when called with a prefix argument. ** CC mode changes. Note: This release contains changes that might not be compatible with current user setups (although it's believed that these incompatibilities will only show in very uncommon circumstances). However, since the impact is uncertain, these changes may be rolled back depending on user feedback. Therefore there's no forward compatibility guarantee wrt the new features introduced in this release. *** The hardcoded switch to "java" style in Java mode is gone. CC Mode used to automatically set the style to "java" when Java mode is entered. This has now been removed since it caused too much confusion. However, to keep backward compatibility to a certain extent, the default value for c-default-style now specifies the "java" style for java-mode, but "gnu" for all other modes (as before). So you won't notice the change if you haven't touched that variable. *** New cleanups, space-before-funcall and compact-empty-funcall. Two new cleanups have been added to c-cleanup-list: space-before-funcall causes a space to be inserted before the opening parenthesis of a function call, which gives the style "foo (bar)". compact-empty-funcall causes any space before a function call opening parenthesis to be removed if there are no arguments to the function. It's typically useful together with space-before-funcall to get the style "foo (bar)" and "foo()". *** Some keywords now automatically trigger reindentation. Keywords like "else", "while", "catch" and "finally" have been made "electric" to make them reindent automatically when they continue an earlier statement. An example: for (i = 0; i < 17; i++) if (a[i]) res += a[i]->offset; else Here, the "else" should be indented like the preceding "if", since it continues that statement. CC Mode will automatically reindent it after the "else" has been typed in full, since it's not until then it's possible to decide whether it's a new statement or a continuation of the preceding "if". CC Mode uses Abbrev mode to achieve this, which is therefore turned on by default. *** M-a and M-e now moves by sentence in multiline strings. Previously these two keys only moved by sentence in comments, which meant that sentence movement didn't work in strings containing documentation or other natural language text. The reason it's only activated in multiline strings (i.e. strings that contain a newline, even when escaped by a '\') is to avoid stopping in the short strings that often reside inside statements. Multiline strings almost always contain text in a natural language, as opposed to other strings that typically contain format specifications, commands, etc. Also, it's not that bothersome that M-a and M-e misses sentences in single line strings, since they're short anyway. *** Support for autodoc comments in Pike mode. Autodoc comments for Pike are used to extract documentation from the source, like Javadoc in Java. Pike mode now recognize this markup in comment prefixes and paragraph starts. *** The comment prefix regexps on c-comment-prefix may be mode specific. When c-comment-prefix is an association list, it specifies the comment line prefix on a per-mode basis, like c-default-style does. This change came about to support the special autodoc comment prefix in Pike mode only. *** Better handling of syntactic errors. The recovery after unbalanced parens earlier in the buffer has been improved; CC Mode now reports them by dinging and giving a message stating the offending line, but still recovers and indent the following lines in a sane way (most of the time). An "else" with no matching "if" is handled similarly. If an error is discovered while indenting a region, the whole region is still indented and the error is reported afterwards. *** Lineup functions may now return absolute columns. A lineup function can give an absolute column to indent the line to by returning a vector with the desired column as the first element. *** More robust and warning-free byte compilation. Although this is strictly not a user visible change (well, depending on the view of a user), it's still worth mentioning that CC Mode now can be compiled in the standard ways without causing trouble. Some code have also been moved between the subpackages to enhance the modularity somewhat. Thanks to Martin Buchholz for doing the groundwork. *** c-style-variables-are-local-p now defaults to t. This is an incompatible change that has been made to make the behavior of the style system wrt global variable settings less confusing for non-advanced users. If you know what this variable does you might want to set it to nil in your .emacs, otherwise you probably don't have to bother. Defaulting c-style-variables-are-local-p to t avoids the confusing situation that occurs when a user sets some style variables globally and edits both a Java and a non-Java file in the same Emacs session. If the style variables aren't buffer local in this case, loading of the second file will cause the default style (either "gnu" or "java" by default) to override the global settings made by the user. *** New initialization procedure for the style system. When the initial style for a buffer is determined by CC Mode (from the variable c-default-style), the global values of style variables now take precedence over the values specified by the chosen style. This is different than the old behavior: previously, the style-specific settings would override the global settings. This change makes it possible to do simple configuration in the intuitive way with Customize or with setq lines in one's .emacs file. By default, the global value of every style variable is the new special symbol set-from-style, which causes the value to be taken from the style system. This means that in effect, only an explicit setting of a style variable will cause the "overriding" behavior described above. Also note that global settings override style-specific settings *only* when the initial style of a buffer is chosen by a CC Mode major mode function. When a style is chosen in other ways --- for example, by a call like (c-set-style "gnu") in a hook, or via M-x c-set-style --- then the style-specific values take precedence over any global style values. In Lisp terms, global values override style-specific values only when the new second argument to c-set-style is non-nil; see the function documentation for more info. The purpose of these changes is to make it easier for users, especially novice users, to do simple customizations with Customize or with setq in their .emacs files. On the other hand, the new system is intended to be compatible with advanced users' customizations as well, such as those that choose styles in hooks or whatnot. This new system is believed to be almost entirely compatible with current configurations, in spite of the changed precedence between style and global variable settings when a buffer's default style is set. (Thanks to Eric Eide for clarifying this explanation a bit.) **** c-offsets-alist is now a customizable variable. This became possible as a result of the new initialization behavior. This variable is treated slightly differently from the other style variables; instead of using the symbol set-from-style, it will be completed with the syntactic symbols it doesn't already contain when the style is first initialized. This means it now defaults to the empty list to make all syntactic elements get their values from the style system. **** Compatibility variable to restore the old behavior. In case your configuration doesn't work with this change, you can set c-old-style-variable-behavior to non-nil to get the old behavior back as far as possible. *** Improvements to line breaking and text filling. CC Mode now handles this more intelligently and seamlessly wrt the surrounding code, especially inside comments. For details see the new chapter about this in the manual. **** New variable to recognize comment line prefix decorations. The variable c-comment-prefix-regexp has been added to properly recognize the line prefix in both block and line comments. It's primarily used to initialize the various paragraph recognition and adaptive filling variables that the text handling functions uses. **** New variable c-block-comment-prefix. This is a generalization of the now obsolete variable c-comment-continuation-stars to handle arbitrary strings. **** CC Mode now uses adaptive fill mode. This to make it adapt better to the paragraph style inside comments. It's also possible to use other adaptive filling packages inside CC Mode, notably Kyle E. Jones' Filladapt mode (http://wonderworks.com/). A new convenience function c-setup-filladapt sets up Filladapt for use inside CC Mode. Note though that the 2.12 version of Filladapt lacks a feature that causes it to work suboptimally when c-comment-prefix-regexp can match the empty string (which it commonly does). A patch for that is available from the CC Mode web site (http://www.python.org/emacs/ cc-mode/). **** The variables `c-hanging-comment-starter-p' and `c-hanging-comment-ender-p', which controlled how comment starters and enders were filled, are not used anymore. The new version of the function `c-fill-paragraph' keeps the comment starters and enders as they were before the filling. **** It's now possible to selectively turn off auto filling. The variable c-ignore-auto-fill is used to ignore auto fill mode in specific contexts, e.g. in preprocessor directives and in string literals. **** New context sensitive line break function c-context-line-break. It works like newline-and-indent in normal code, and adapts the line prefix according to the comment style when used inside comments. If you're normally using newline-and-indent, you might want to switch to this function. *** Fixes to IDL mode. It now does a better job in recognizing only the constructs relevant to IDL. E.g. it no longer matches "class" as the beginning of a struct block, but it does match the CORBA 2.3 "valuetype" keyword. Thanks to Eric Eide. *** Improvements to the Whitesmith style. It now keeps the style consistently on all levels and both when opening braces hangs and when they don't. **** New lineup function c-lineup-whitesmith-in-block. *** New lineup functions c-lineup-template-args and c-indent-multi-line-block. See their docstrings for details. c-lineup-template-args does a better job of tracking the brackets used as parens in C++ templates, and is used by default to line up continued template arguments. *** c-lineup-comment now preserves alignment with a comment on the previous line. It used to instead preserve comments that started in the column specified by comment-column. *** c-lineup-C-comments handles "free form" text comments. In comments with a long delimiter line at the start, the indentation is kept unchanged for lines that start with an empty comment line prefix. This is intended for the type of large block comments that contain documentation with its own formatting. In these you normally don't want CC Mode to change the indentation. *** The `c' syntactic symbol is now relative to the comment start instead of the previous line, to make integers usable as lineup arguments. *** All lineup functions have gotten docstrings. *** More preprocessor directive movement functions. c-down-conditional does the reverse of c-up-conditional. c-up-conditional-with-else and c-down-conditional-with-else are variants of these that also stops at "#else" lines (suggested by Don Provan). *** Minor improvements to many movement functions in tricky situations. ** Dired changes *** New variable `dired-recursive-deletes' determines if the delete command will delete non-empty directories recursively. The default is, delete only empty directories. *** New variable `dired-recursive-copies' determines if the copy command will copy directories recursively. The default is, do not copy directories recursively. *** In command `dired-do-shell-command' (usually bound to `!') a `?' in the shell command has a special meaning similar to `*', but with the difference that the command will be run on each file individually. *** The new command `dired-find-alternate-file' (usually bound to `a') replaces the Dired buffer with the buffer for an alternate file or directory. *** The new command `dired-show-file-type' (usually bound to `y') shows a message in the echo area describing what type of file the point is on. This command invokes the external program `file' do its work, and so will only work on systems with that program, and will be only as accurate or inaccurate as it is. *** Dired now properly handles undo changes of adding/removing `-R' from ls switches. *** Dired commands that prompt for a destination file now allow the use of the `M-n' command in the minibuffer to insert the source filename, which the user can then edit. This only works if there is a single source file, not when operating on multiple marked files. ** Gnus changes. The Gnus NEWS entries are short, but they reflect sweeping changes in four areas: Article display treatment, MIME treatment, internationalization and mail-fetching. *** The mail-fetching functions have changed. See the manual for the many details. In particular, all procmail fetching variables are gone. If you used procmail like in (setq nnmail-use-procmail t) (setq nnmail-spool-file 'procmail) (setq nnmail-procmail-directory "~/mail/incoming/") (setq nnmail-procmail-suffix "\\.in") this now has changed to (setq mail-sources '((directory :path "~/mail/incoming/" :suffix ".in"))) More information is available in the info doc at Select Methods -> Getting Mail -> Mail Sources *** Gnus is now a MIME-capable reader. This affects many parts of Gnus, and adds a slew of new commands. See the manual for details. Separate MIME packages like RMIME, mime-compose etc., will probably no longer work; remove them and use the native facilities. The FLIM/SEMI package still works with Emacs 21, but if you want to use the native facilities, you must remove any mailcap.el[c] that was installed by FLIM/SEMI version 1.13 or earlier. *** Gnus has also been multilingualized. This also affects too many parts of Gnus to summarize here, and adds many new variables. There are built-in facilities equivalent to those of gnus-mule.el, which is now just a compatibility layer. *** gnus-mule.el is now just a compatibility layer over the built-in Gnus facilities. *** gnus-auto-select-first can now be a function to be called to position point. *** The user can now decide which extra headers should be included in summary buffers and NOV files. *** `gnus-article-display-hook' has been removed. Instead, a number of variables starting with `gnus-treat-' have been added. *** The Gnus posting styles have been redone again and now work in a subtly different manner. *** New web-based backends have been added: nnslashdot, nnwarchive and nnultimate. nnweb has been revamped, again, to keep up with ever-changing layouts. *** Gnus can now read IMAP mail via nnimap. *** There is image support of various kinds and some sound support. ** Changes in Texinfo mode. *** A couple of new key bindings have been added for inserting Texinfo macros Key binding Macro ------------------------- C-c C-c C-s @strong C-c C-c C-e @emph C-c C-c u @uref C-c C-c q @quotation C-c C-c m @email C-c C-o @ ... @end M-RET @item *** The " key now inserts either " or `` or '' depending on context. ** Changes in Outline mode. There is now support for Imenu to index headings. A new command `outline-headers-as-kill' copies the visible headings in the region to the kill ring, e.g. to produce a table of contents. ** Changes to Emacs Server *** The new option `server-kill-new-buffers' specifies what to do with buffers when done with them. If non-nil, the default, buffers are killed, unless they were already present before visiting them with Emacs Server. If nil, `server-temp-file-regexp' specifies which buffers to kill, as before. Please note that only buffers are killed that still have a client, i.e. buffers visited with `emacsclient --no-wait' are never killed in this way. ** Both emacsclient and Emacs itself now accept command line options of the form +LINE:COLUMN in addition to +LINE. ** Changes to Show Paren mode. *** Overlays used by Show Paren mode now use a priority property. The new user option show-paren-priority specifies the priority to use. Default is 1000. ** New command M-x check-parens can be used to find unbalanced paren groups and strings in buffers in Lisp mode (or other modes). ** Changes to hideshow.el *** Generalized block selection and traversal A block is now recognized by its start and end regexps (both strings), and an integer specifying which sub-expression in the start regexp serves as the place where a `forward-sexp'-like function can operate. See the documentation of variable `hs-special-modes-alist'. *** During incremental search, if Hideshow minor mode is active, hidden blocks are temporarily shown. The variable `hs-headline' can be used in the mode line format to show the line at the beginning of the open block. *** User option `hs-hide-all-non-comment-function' specifies a function to be called at each top-level block beginning, instead of the normal block-hiding function. *** The command `hs-show-region' has been removed. *** The key bindings have changed to fit the Emacs conventions, roughly imitating those of Outline minor mode. Notably, the prefix for all bindings is now `C-c @'. For details, see the documentation for `hs-minor-mode'. *** The variable `hs-show-hidden-short-form' has been removed, and hideshow.el now always behaves as if this variable were set to t. ** Changes to Change Log mode and Add-Log functions *** If you invoke `add-change-log-entry' from a backup file, it makes an entry appropriate for the file's parent. This is useful for making log entries by comparing a version with deleted functions. **** New command M-x change-log-merge merges another log into the current buffer. *** New command M-x change-log-redate fixes any old-style date entries in a log file. *** Change Log mode now adds a file's version number to change log entries if user-option `change-log-version-info-enabled' is non-nil. Unless the file is under version control the search for a file's version number is performed based on regular expressions from `change-log-version-number-regexp-list' which can be customized. Version numbers are only found in the first 10 percent of a file. *** Change Log mode now defines its own faces for font-lock highlighting. ** Changes to cmuscheme *** The user-option `scheme-program-name' has been renamed `cmuscheme-program-name' due to conflicts with xscheme.el. ** Changes in Font Lock *** The new function `font-lock-remove-keywords' can be used to remove font-lock keywords from the current buffer or from a specific major mode. *** Multi-line patterns are now supported. Modes using this, should set font-lock-multiline to t in their font-lock-defaults. *** `font-lock-syntactic-face-function' allows major-modes to choose the face used for each string/comment. *** A new standard face `font-lock-doc-face'. Meant for Lisp docstrings, Javadoc comments and other "documentation in code". ** Changes to Shell mode *** The `shell' command now accepts an optional argument to specify the buffer to use, which defaults to "*shell*". When used interactively, a non-default buffer may be specified by giving the `shell' command a prefix argument (causing it to prompt for the buffer name). ** Comint (subshell) changes These changes generally affect all modes derived from comint mode, which include shell-mode, gdb-mode, scheme-interaction-mode, etc. *** Comint now by default interprets some carriage-control characters. Comint now removes CRs from CR LF sequences, and treats single CRs and BSs in the output in a way similar to a terminal (by deleting to the beginning of the line, or deleting the previous character, respectively). This is achieved by adding `comint-carriage-motion' to the `comint-output-filter-functions' hook by default. *** By default, comint no longer uses the variable `comint-prompt-regexp' to distinguish prompts from user-input. Instead, it notices which parts of the text were output by the process, and which entered by the user, and attaches `field' properties to allow emacs commands to use this information. Common movement commands, notably beginning-of-line, respect field boundaries in a fairly natural manner. To disable this feature, and use the old behavior, customize the user option `comint-use-prompt-regexp-instead-of-fields'. *** Comint now includes new features to send commands to running processes and redirect the output to a designated buffer or buffers. *** The command M-x comint-redirect-send-command reads a command and buffer name from the mini-buffer. The command is sent to the current buffer's process, and its output is inserted into the specified buffer. The command M-x comint-redirect-send-command-to-process acts like M-x comint-redirect-send-command but additionally reads the name of the buffer whose process should be used from the mini-buffer. *** Packages based on comint now highlight user input and program prompts, and support choosing previous input with mouse-2. To control these features, see the user-options `comint-highlight-input' and `comint-highlight-prompt'. *** The new command `comint-write-output' (usually bound to `C-c C-s') saves the output from the most recent command to a file. With a prefix argument, it appends to the file. *** The command `comint-kill-output' has been renamed `comint-delete-output' (usually bound to `C-c C-o'); the old name is aliased to it for compatibility. *** The new function `comint-add-to-input-history' adds commands to the input ring (history). *** The new variable `comint-input-history-ignore' is a regexp for identifying history lines that should be ignored, like tcsh time-stamp strings, starting with a `#'. The default value of this variable is "^#". ** Changes to Rmail mode *** The new user-option rmail-user-mail-address-regexp can be set to fine tune the identification of the correspondent when receiving new mail. If it matches the address of the sender, the recipient is taken as correspondent of a mail. If nil, the default, `user-login-name' and `user-mail-address' are used to exclude yourself as correspondent. Usually you don't have to set this variable, except if you collect mails sent by you under different user names. Then it should be a regexp matching your mail addresses. *** The new user-option rmail-confirm-expunge controls whether and how to ask for confirmation before expunging deleted messages from an Rmail file. You can choose between no confirmation, confirmation with y-or-n-p, or confirmation with yes-or-no-p. Default is to ask for confirmation with yes-or-no-p. *** RET is now bound in the Rmail summary to rmail-summary-goto-msg, like `j'. *** There is a new user option `rmail-digest-end-regexps' that specifies the regular expressions to detect the line that ends a digest message. *** The new user option `rmail-automatic-folder-directives' specifies in which folder to put messages automatically. *** The new function `rmail-redecode-body' allows to fix a message with non-ASCII characters if Emacs happens to decode it incorrectly due to missing or malformed "charset=" header. ** The new user-option `mail-envelope-from' can be used to specify an envelope-from address different from user-mail-address. ** The variable mail-specify-envelope-from controls whether to use the -f option when sending mail. ** The Rmail command `o' (`rmail-output-to-rmail-file') now writes the current message in the internal `emacs-mule' encoding, rather than in the encoding taken from the variable `buffer-file-coding-system'. This allows to save messages whose characters cannot be safely encoded by the buffer's coding system, and makes sure the message will be displayed correctly when you later visit the target Rmail file. If you want your Rmail files be encoded in a specific coding system other than `emacs-mule', you can customize the variable `rmail-file-coding-system' to set its value to that coding system. ** Changes to TeX mode *** The default mode has been changed from `plain-tex-mode' to `latex-mode'. *** latex-mode now has a simple indentation algorithm. *** M-f and M-p jump around \begin...\end pairs. *** Added support for outline-minor-mode. ** Changes to RefTeX mode *** RefTeX has new support for index generation. Index entries can be created with `C-c <', with completion available on index keys. Pressing `C-c /' indexes the word at the cursor with a default macro. `C-c >' compiles all index entries into an alphabetically sorted *Index* buffer which looks like the final index. Entries can be edited from that buffer. *** Label and citation key selection now allow to select several items and reference them together (use `m' to mark items, `a' or `A' to use all marked entries). *** reftex.el has been split into a number of smaller files to reduce memory use when only a part of RefTeX is being used. *** a new command `reftex-view-crossref-from-bibtex' (bound to `C-c &' in BibTeX-mode) can be called in a BibTeX database buffer in order to show locations in LaTeX documents where a particular entry has been cited. ** Emacs Lisp mode now allows multiple levels of outline headings. The level of a heading is determined from the number of leading semicolons in a heading line. Toplevel forms starting with a `(' in column 1 are always made leaves. ** The M-x time-stamp command (most commonly used on write-file-hooks) has the following new features: *** The patterns for finding the time stamp and for updating a pattern may match text spanning multiple lines. For example, some people like to have the filename and date on separate lines. The new variable time-stamp-inserts-lines controls the matching for multi-line patterns. *** More than one time stamp can be updated in the same file. This feature is useful if you need separate time stamps in a program source file to both include in formatted documentation and insert in the compiled binary. The same time-stamp will be written at each matching pattern. The variable time-stamp-count enables this new feature; it defaults to 1. ** Partial Completion mode now completes environment variables in file names. ** Ispell changes *** The command `ispell' now spell-checks a region if transient-mark-mode is on, and the mark is active. Otherwise it spell-checks the current buffer. *** Support for synchronous subprocesses - DOS/Windoze - has been added. *** An "alignment error" bug was fixed when a manual spelling correction is made and re-checked. *** Italian, Portuguese, and Slovak dictionary definitions have been added. *** Region skipping performance has been vastly improved in some cases. *** Spell checking HTML buffers has been improved and isn't so strict on syntax errors. *** The buffer-local words are now always placed on a new line at the end of the buffer. *** Spell checking now works in the MS-DOS version of Emacs. *** The variable `ispell-format-word' has been renamed to `ispell-format-word-function'. The old name is still available as alias. ** Makefile mode changes *** The mode now uses the abbrev table `makefile-mode-abbrev-table'. *** Conditionals and include statements are now highlighted when Fontlock mode is active. ** Isearch changes *** Isearch now puts a call to `isearch-resume' in the command history, so that searches can be resumed. *** In Isearch mode, C-M-s and C-M-r are now bound like C-s and C-r, respectively, i.e. you can repeat a regexp isearch with the same keys that started the search. *** In Isearch mode, mouse-2 in the echo area now yanks the current selection into the search string rather than giving an error. *** There is a new lazy highlighting feature in incremental search. Lazy highlighting is switched on/off by customizing variable `isearch-lazy-highlight'. When active, all matches for the current search string are highlighted. The current match is highlighted as before using face `isearch' or `region'. All other matches are highlighted using face `isearch-lazy-highlight-face' which defaults to `secondary-selection'. The extra highlighting makes it easier to anticipate where the cursor will end up each time you press C-s or C-r to repeat a pending search. Highlighting of these additional matches happens in a deferred fashion using "idle timers," so the cycles needed do not rob isearch of its usual snappy response. If `isearch-lazy-highlight-cleanup' is set to t, highlights for matches are automatically cleared when you end the search. If it is set to nil, you can remove the highlights manually with `M-x isearch-lazy-highlight-cleanup'. ** VC Changes VC has been overhauled internally. It is now modular, making it easier to plug-in arbitrary version control backends. (See Lisp Changes for details on the new structure.) As a result, the mechanism to enable and disable support for particular version systems has changed: everything is now controlled by the new variable `vc-handled-backends'. Its value is a list of symbols that identify version systems; the default is '(RCS CVS SCCS). When finding a file, each of the backends in that list is tried in order to see whether the file is registered in that backend. When registering a new file, VC first tries each of the listed backends to see if any of them considers itself "responsible" for the directory of the file (e.g. because a corresponding subdirectory for master files exists). If none of the backends is responsible, then the first backend in the list that could register the file is chosen. As a consequence, the variable `vc-default-back-end' is now obsolete. The old variable `vc-master-templates' is also obsolete, although VC still supports it for backward compatibility. To define templates for RCS or SCCS, you should rather use the new variables vc-{rcs,sccs}-master-templates. (There is no such feature under CVS where it doesn't make sense.) The variables `vc-ignore-vc-files' and `vc-handle-cvs' are also obsolete now, you must set `vc-handled-backends' to nil or exclude `CVS' from the list, respectively, to achieve their effect now. *** General Changes The variable `vc-checkout-carefully' is obsolete: the corresponding checks are always done now. VC Dired buffers are now kept up-to-date during all version control operations. `vc-diff' output is now displayed in `diff-mode'. `vc-print-log' uses `log-view-mode'. `vc-log-mode' (used for *VC-Log*) has been replaced by `log-edit-mode'. The command C-x v m (vc-merge) now accepts an empty argument as the first revision number. This means that any recent changes on the current branch should be picked up from the repository and merged into the working file (``merge news''). The commands C-x v s (vc-create-snapshot) and C-x v r (vc-retrieve-snapshot) now ask for a directory name from which to work downwards. *** Multiple Backends VC now lets you register files in more than one backend. This is useful, for example, if you are working with a slow remote CVS repository. You can then use RCS for local editing, and occasionally commit your changes back to CVS, or pick up changes from CVS into your local RCS archives. To make this work, the ``more local'' backend (RCS in our example) should come first in `vc-handled-backends', and the ``more remote'' backend (CVS) should come later. (The default value of `vc-handled-backends' already has it that way.) You can then commit changes to another backend (say, RCS), by typing C-u C-x v v RCS RET (i.e. vc-next-action now accepts a backend name as a revision number). VC registers the file in the more local backend if that hasn't already happened, and commits to a branch based on the current revision number from the more remote backend. If a file is registered in multiple backends, you can switch to another one using C-x v b (vc-switch-backend). This does not change any files, it only changes VC's perspective on the file. Use this to pick up changes from CVS while working under RCS locally. After you are done with your local RCS editing, you can commit your changes back to CVS using C-u C-x v v CVS RET. In this case, the local RCS archive is removed after the commit, and the log entry buffer is initialized to contain the entire RCS change log of the file. *** Changes for CVS There is a new user option, `vc-cvs-stay-local'. If it is `t' (the default), then VC avoids network queries for files registered in remote repositories. The state of such files is then only determined by heuristics and past information. `vc-cvs-stay-local' can also be a regexp to match against repository hostnames; only files from hosts that match it are treated locally. If the variable is nil, then VC queries the repository just as often as it does for local files. If `vc-cvs-stay-local' is on, then VC also makes local backups of repository versions. This means that ordinary diffs (C-x v =) and revert operations (C-x v u) can be done completely locally, without any repository interactions at all. The name of a local version backup of FILE is FILE.~REV.~, where REV is the repository version number. This format is similar to that used by C-x v ~ (vc-version-other-window), except for the trailing dot. As a matter of fact, the two features can each use the files created by the other, the only difference being that files with a trailing `.' are deleted automatically after commit. (This feature doesn't work on MS-DOS, since DOS disallows more than a single dot in the trunk of a file name.) If `vc-cvs-stay-local' is on, and there have been changes in the repository, VC notifies you about it when you actually try to commit. If you want to check for updates from the repository without trying to commit, you can either use C-x v m RET to perform an update on the current file, or you can use C-x v r RET to get an update for an entire directory tree. The new user option `vc-cvs-use-edit' indicates whether VC should call "cvs edit" to make files writeable; it defaults to `t'. (This option is only meaningful if the CVSREAD variable is set, or if files are "watched" by other developers.) The commands C-x v s (vc-create-snapshot) and C-x v r (vc-retrieve-snapshot) are now also implemented for CVS. If you give an empty snapshot name to the latter, that performs a `cvs update', starting at the given directory. *** Lisp Changes in VC VC has been restructured internally to make it modular. You can now add support for arbitrary version control backends by writing a library that provides a certain set of backend-specific functions, and then telling VC to use that library. For example, to add support for a version system named SYS, you write a library named vc-sys.el, which provides a number of functions vc-sys-... (see commentary at the top of vc.el for a detailed list of them). To make VC use that library, you need to put it somewhere into Emacs' load path and add the symbol `SYS' to the list `vc-handled-backends'. ** The customizable EDT emulation package now supports the EDT SUBS command and EDT scroll margins. It also works with more terminal/keyboard configurations and it now works under XEmacs. See etc/edt-user.doc for more information. ** New modes and packages *** The new global minor mode `minibuffer-electric-default-mode' automatically hides the `(default ...)' part of minibuffer prompts when the default is not applicable. *** Artist is an Emacs lisp package that allows you to draw lines, rectangles and ellipses by using your mouse and/or keyboard. The shapes are made up with the ascii characters |, -, / and \. Features are: - Intersecting: When a `|' intersects with a `-', a `+' is drawn, like this: | \ / --+-- X | / \ - Rubber-banding: When drawing lines you can interactively see the result while holding the mouse button down and moving the mouse. If your machine is not fast enough (a 386 is a bit too slow, but a pentium is well enough), you can turn this feature off. You will then see 1's and 2's which mark the 1st and 2nd endpoint of the line you are drawing. - Arrows: After having drawn a (straight) line or a (straight) poly-line, you can set arrows on the line-ends by typing < or >. - Flood-filling: You can fill any area with a certain character by flood-filling. - Cut copy and paste: You can cut, copy and paste rectangular regions. Artist also interfaces with the rect package (this can be turned off if it causes you any trouble) so anything you cut in artist can be yanked with C-x r y and vice versa. - Drawing with keys: Everything you can do with the mouse, you can also do without the mouse. - Aspect-ratio: You can set the variable artist-aspect-ratio to reflect the height-width ratio for the font you are using. Squares and circles are then drawn square/round. Note, that once your ascii-file is shown with font with a different height-width ratio, the squares won't be square and the circles won't be round. - Drawing operations: The following drawing operations are implemented: lines straight-lines rectangles squares poly-lines straight poly-lines ellipses circles text (see-thru) text (overwrite) spray-can setting size for spraying vaporize line vaporize lines erase characters erase rectangles Straight lines are lines that go horizontally, vertically or diagonally. Plain lines go in any direction. The operations in the right column are accessed by holding down the shift key while drawing. It is possible to vaporize (erase) entire lines and connected lines (rectangles for example) as long as the lines being vaporized are straight and connected at their endpoints. Vaporizing is inspired by the drawrect package by Jari Aalto . - Picture mode compatibility: Artist is picture mode compatible (this can be turned off). *** The new package Eshell is an operating system command shell implemented entirely in Emacs Lisp. Use `M-x eshell' to invoke it. It functions similarly to bash and zsh, and allows running of Lisp functions and external commands using the same syntax. It supports history lists, aliases, extended globbing, smart scrolling, etc. It will work on any platform Emacs has been ported to. And since most of the basic commands -- ls, rm, mv, cp, ln, du, cat, etc. -- have been rewritten in Lisp, it offers an operating-system independent shell, all within the scope of your Emacs process. *** The new package timeclock.el is a mode is for keeping track of time intervals. You can use it for whatever purpose you like, but the typical scenario is to keep track of how much time you spend working on certain projects. *** The new package hi-lock.el provides commands to highlight matches of interactively entered regexps. For example, M-x highlight-regexp RET clearly RET RET will highlight all occurrences of `clearly' using a yellow background face. New occurrences of `clearly' will be highlighted as they are typed. `M-x unhighlight-regexp RET' will remove the highlighting. Any existing face can be used for highlighting and a set of appropriate faces is provided. The regexps can be written into the current buffer in a form that will be recognized the next time the corresponding file is read. There are commands to highlight matches to phrases and to highlight entire lines containing a match. *** The new package zone.el plays games with Emacs' display when Emacs is idle. *** The new package tildify.el allows to add hard spaces or other text fragments in accordance with the current major mode. *** The new package xml.el provides a simple but generic XML parser. It doesn't parse the DTDs however. *** The comment operations are now provided by the newcomment.el package which allows different styles of comment-region and should be more robust while offering the same functionality. `comment-region' now doesn't always comment a-line-at-a-time, but only comments the region, breaking the line at point if necessary. *** The Ebrowse package implements a C++ class browser and tags facilities tailored for use with C++. It is documented in a separate Texinfo file. *** The PCL-CVS package available by either running M-x cvs-examine or by visiting a CVS administrative directory (with a prefix argument) provides an alternative interface to VC-dired for CVS. It comes with `log-view-mode' to view RCS and SCCS logs and `log-edit-mode' used to enter check-in log messages. *** The new package called `woman' allows to browse Unix man pages without invoking external programs. The command `M-x woman' formats manual pages entirely in Emacs Lisp and then displays them, like `M-x manual-entry' does. Unlike `manual-entry', `woman' does not invoke any external programs, so it is useful on systems such as MS-DOS/MS-Windows where the `man' and Groff or `troff' commands are not readily available. The command `M-x woman-find-file' asks for the file name of a man page, then formats and displays it like `M-x woman' does. *** The new command M-x re-builder offers a convenient interface for authoring regular expressions with immediate visual feedback. The buffer from which the command was called becomes the target for the regexp editor popping up in a separate window. Matching text in the target buffer is immediately color marked during the editing. Each sub-expression of the regexp will show up in a different face so even complex regexps can be edited and verified on target data in a single step. On displays not supporting faces the matches instead blink like matching parens to make them stand out. On such a setup you will probably also want to use the sub-expression mode when the regexp contains such to get feedback about their respective limits. *** glasses-mode is a minor mode that makes unreadableIdentifiersLikeThis readable. It works as glasses, without actually modifying content of a buffer. *** The package ebnf2ps translates an EBNF to a syntactic chart in PostScript. Currently accepts ad-hoc EBNF, ISO EBNF and Bison/Yacc. The ad-hoc default EBNF syntax has the following elements: ; comment (until end of line) A non-terminal "C" terminal ?C? special $A default non-terminal $"C" default terminal $?C? default special A = B. production (A is the header and B the body) C D sequence (C occurs before D) C | D alternative (C or D occurs) A - B exception (A excluding B, B without any non-terminal) n * A repetition (A repeats n (integer) times) (C) group (expression C is grouped together) [C] optional (C may or not occurs) C+ one or more occurrences of C {C}+ one or more occurrences of C {C}* zero or more occurrences of C {C} zero or more occurrences of C C / D equivalent to: C {D C}* {C || D}+ equivalent to: C {D C}* {C || D}* equivalent to: [C {D C}*] {C || D} equivalent to: [C {D C}*] Please, see ebnf2ps documentation for EBNF syntax and how to use it. *** The package align.el will align columns within a region, using M-x align. Its mode-specific rules, based on regular expressions, determine where the columns should be split. In C and C++, for example, it will align variable names in declaration lists, or the equal signs of assignments. *** `paragraph-indent-minor-mode' is a new minor mode supporting paragraphs in the same style as `paragraph-indent-text-mode'. *** bs.el is a new package for buffer selection similar to list-buffers or electric-buffer-list. Use M-x bs-show to display a buffer menu with this package. See the Custom group `bs'. *** find-lisp.el is a package emulating the Unix find command in Lisp. *** calculator.el is a small calculator package that is intended to replace desktop calculators such as xcalc and calc.exe. Actually, it is not too small - it has more features than most desktop calculators, and can be customized easily to get many more functions. It should not be confused with "calc" which is a much bigger mathematical tool which answers different needs. *** The minor modes cwarn-mode and global-cwarn-mode highlights suspicious C and C++ constructions. Currently, assignments inside expressions, semicolon following `if', `for' and `while' (except, of course, after a `do .. while' statement), and C++ functions with reference parameters are recognized. The modes require font-lock mode to be enabled. *** smerge-mode.el provides `smerge-mode', a simple minor-mode for files containing diff3-style conflict markers, such as generated by RCS. *** 5x5.el is a simple puzzle game. *** hl-line.el provides `hl-line-mode', a minor mode to highlight the current line in the current buffer. It also provides `global-hl-line-mode' to provide the same behavior in all buffers. *** ansi-color.el translates ANSI terminal escapes into text-properties. Please note: if `ansi-color-for-comint-mode' and `global-font-lock-mode' are non-nil, loading ansi-color.el will disable font-lock and add `ansi-color-apply' to `comint-preoutput-filter-functions' for all shell-mode buffers. This displays the output of "ls --color=yes" using the correct foreground and background colors. *** delphi.el provides a major mode for editing the Delphi (Object Pascal) language. *** quickurl.el provides a simple method of inserting a URL based on the text at point. *** sql.el provides an interface to SQL data bases. *** fortune.el uses the fortune program to create mail/news signatures. *** whitespace.el is a package for warning about and cleaning bogus whitespace in a file. *** PostScript mode (ps-mode) is a new major mode for editing PostScript files. It offers: interaction with a PostScript interpreter, including (very basic) error handling; fontification, easily customizable for interpreter messages; auto-indentation; insertion of EPSF templates and often used code snippets; viewing of BoundingBox; commenting out / uncommenting regions; conversion of 8bit characters to PostScript octal codes. All functionality is accessible through a menu. *** delim-col helps to prettify columns in a text region or rectangle. Here is an example of columns: horse apple bus dog pineapple car EXTRA porcupine strawberry airplane Doing the following settings: (setq delimit-columns-str-before "[ ") (setq delimit-columns-str-after " ]") (setq delimit-columns-str-separator ", ") (setq delimit-columns-separator "\t") Selecting the lines above and typing: M-x delimit-columns-region It results: [ horse , apple , bus , ] [ dog , pineapple , car , EXTRA ] [ porcupine, strawberry, airplane, ] delim-col has the following options: delimit-columns-str-before Specify a string to be inserted before all columns. delimit-columns-str-separator Specify a string to be inserted between each column. delimit-columns-str-after Specify a string to be inserted after all columns. delimit-columns-separator Specify a regexp which separates each column. delim-col has the following commands: delimit-columns-region Prettify all columns in a text region. delimit-columns-rectangle Prettify all columns in a text rectangle. *** Recentf mode maintains a menu for visiting files that were operated on recently. User option recentf-menu-filter specifies a menu filter function to change the menu appearance. For example, the recent file list can be displayed: - organized by major modes, directories or user defined rules. - sorted by file paths, file names, ascending or descending. - showing paths relative to the current default-directory The `recentf-filter-changer' menu filter function allows to dynamically change the menu appearance. *** elide-head.el provides a mechanism for eliding boilerplate header text. *** footnote.el provides `footnote-mode', a minor mode supporting use of footnotes. It is intended for use with Message mode, but isn't specific to Message mode. *** diff-mode.el provides `diff-mode', a major mode for viewing/editing context diffs (patches). It is selected for files with extension `.diff', `.diffs', `.patch' and `.rej'. *** EUDC, the Emacs Unified Directory Client, provides a common user interface to access directory servers using different directory protocols. It has a separate manual. *** autoconf.el provides a major mode for editing configure.in files for Autoconf, selected automatically. *** windmove.el provides moving between windows. *** crm.el provides a facility to read multiple strings from the minibuffer with completion. *** todo-mode.el provides management of TODO lists and integration with the diary features. *** autoarg.el provides a feature reported from Twenex Emacs whereby numeric keys supply prefix args rather than self inserting. *** The function `turn-off-auto-fill' unconditionally turns off Auto Fill mode. *** pcomplete.el is a library that provides programmable completion facilities for Emacs, similar to what zsh and tcsh offer. The main difference is that completion functions are written in Lisp, meaning they can be profiled, debugged, etc. *** antlr-mode is a new major mode for editing ANTLR grammar files. It is automatically turned on for files whose names have the extension `.g'. ** Changes in sort.el The function sort-numeric-fields interprets numbers starting with `0' as octal and numbers starting with `0x' or `0X' as hexadecimal. The new user-option sort-numeric-base can be used to specify a default numeric base. ** Changes to Ange-ftp *** Ange-ftp allows you to specify of a port number in remote file names cleanly. It is appended to the host name, separated by a hash sign, e.g. `/foo@bar.org#666:mumble'. (This syntax comes from EFS.) *** If the new user-option `ange-ftp-try-passive-mode' is set, passive ftp mode will be used if the ftp client supports that. *** Ange-ftp handles the output of the w32-style clients which output ^M at the end of lines. ** The recommended way of using Iswitchb is via the new global minor mode `iswitchb-mode'. ** Just loading the msb package doesn't switch on Msb mode anymore. If you have `(require 'msb)' in your .emacs, please replace it with `(msb-mode 1)'. ** Changes in Flyspell mode *** Flyspell mode has various new options. See the `flyspell' Custom group. *** The variable `flyspell-generic-check-word-p' has been renamed to `flyspell-generic-check-word-predicate'. The old name is still available as alias. ** The user option `backward-delete-char-untabify-method' controls the behavior of `backward-delete-char-untabify'. The following values are recognized: `untabify' -- turn a tab to many spaces, then delete one space; `hungry' -- delete all whitespace, both tabs and spaces; `all' -- delete all whitespace, including tabs, spaces and newlines; nil -- just delete one character. Default value is `untabify'. [This change was made in Emacs 20.3 but not mentioned then.] ** In Cperl mode `cperl-invalid-face' should now be a normal face symbol, not double-quoted. ** Some packages are declared obsolete, to be removed in a future version. They are: auto-show, c-mode, hilit19, hscroll, ooutline, profile, rnews, rnewspost, and sc. Their implementations have been moved to lisp/obsolete. ** auto-compression mode is no longer enabled just by loading jka-compr.el. To control it, set `auto-compression-mode' via Custom or use the `auto-compression-mode' command. ** `browse-url-gnome-moz' is a new option for `browse-url-browser-function', invoking Mozilla in GNOME, and `browse-url-kde' can be chosen for invoking the KDE browser. ** The user-option `browse-url-new-window-p' has been renamed to `browse-url-new-window-flag'. ** The functions `keep-lines', `flush-lines' and `how-many' now operate on the active region in Transient Mark mode. ** `gnus-user-agent' is a new possibility for `mail-user-agent'. It is like `message-user-agent', but with all the Gnus paraphernalia. ** The Strokes package has been updated. If your Emacs has XPM support, you can use it for pictographic editing. In Strokes mode, use C-mouse-2 to compose a complex stoke and insert it into the buffer. You can encode or decode a strokes buffer with new commands M-x strokes-encode-buffer and M-x strokes-decode-buffer. There is a new command M-x strokes-list-strokes. ** Hexl contains a new command `hexl-insert-hex-string' which inserts a string of hexadecimal numbers read from the mini-buffer. ** Hexl mode allows to insert non-ASCII characters. The non-ASCII characters are encoded using the same encoding as the file you are visiting in Hexl mode. ** Shell script mode changes. Shell script mode (sh-script) can now indent scripts for shells derived from sh and rc. The indentation style is customizable, and sh-script can attempt to "learn" the current buffer's style. ** Etags changes. *** In DOS, etags looks for file.cgz if it cannot find file.c. *** New option --ignore-case-regex is an alternative to --regex. It is now possible to bind a regexp to a language, by prepending the regexp with {lang}, where lang is one of the languages that `etags --help' prints out. This feature is useful especially for regex files, where each line contains a regular expression. The manual contains details. *** In C and derived languages, etags creates tags for function declarations when given the --declarations option. *** In C++, tags are created for "operator". The tags have the form "operator+", without spaces between the keyword and the operator. *** You shouldn't generally need any more the -C or -c++ option: etags automatically switches to C++ parsing when it meets the `class' or `template' keywords. *** Etags now is able to delve at arbitrary deeps into nested structures in C-like languages. Previously, it was limited to one or two brace levels. *** New language Ada: tags are functions, procedures, packages, tasks, and types. *** In Fortran, `procedure' is not tagged. *** In Java, tags are created for "interface". *** In Lisp, "(defstruct (foo", "(defun (operator" and similar constructs are now tagged. *** In makefiles, tags the targets. *** In Perl, the --globals option tags global variables. my and local variables are tagged. *** New language Python: def and class at the beginning of a line are tags. *** .ss files are Scheme files, .pdb is Postscript with C syntax, .psw is for PSWrap. ** Changes in etags.el *** The new user-option tags-case-fold-search can be used to make tags operations case-sensitive or case-insensitive. The default is to use the same setting as case-fold-search. *** You can display additional output with M-x tags-apropos by setting the new variable tags-apropos-additional-actions. If non-nil, the variable's value should be a list of triples (TITLE FUNCTION TO-SEARCH). For each triple, M-x tags-apropos processes TO-SEARCH and lists tags from it. TO-SEARCH should be an alist, obarray, or symbol. If it is a symbol, the symbol's value is used. TITLE is a string to use to label the list of tags from TO-SEARCH. FUNCTION is a function to call when an entry is selected in the Tags List buffer. It is called with one argument, the selected symbol. A useful example value for this variable might be something like: '(("Emacs Lisp" Info-goto-emacs-command-node obarray) ("Common Lisp" common-lisp-hyperspec common-lisp-hyperspec-obarray) ("SCWM" scwm-documentation scwm-obarray)) *** The face tags-tag-face can be used to customize the appearance of tags in the output of M-x tags-apropos. *** Setting tags-apropos-verbose to a non-nil value displays the names of tags files in the *Tags List* buffer. *** You can now search for tags that are part of the filename itself. If you have tagged the files topfile.c subdir/subfile.c /tmp/tempfile.c, you can now search for tags "topfile.c", "subfile.c", "dir/sub", "tempfile", "tempfile.c". If the tag matches the file name, point will go to the beginning of the file. *** Compressed files are now transparently supported if auto-compression-mode is active. You can tag (with Etags) and search (with find-tag) both compressed and uncompressed files. *** Tags commands like M-x tags-search no longer change point in buffers where no match is found. In buffers where a match is found, the original value of point is pushed on the marker ring. ** Fortran mode has a new command `fortran-strip-sequence-nos' to remove text past column 72. The syntax class of `\' in Fortran is now appropriate for C-style escape sequences in strings. ** SGML mode's default `sgml-validate-command' is now `nsgmls'. ** A new command `view-emacs-problems' (C-h P) displays the PROBLEMS file. ** The Dabbrev package has a new user-option `dabbrev-ignored-regexps' containing a list of regular expressions. Buffers matching a regular expression from that list, are not checked. ** Emacs can now figure out modification times of remote files. When you do C-x C-f /user@host:/path/file RET and edit the file, and someone else modifies the file, you will be prompted to revert the buffer, just like for the local files. ** The buffer menu (C-x C-b) no longer lists the *Buffer List* buffer. ** When invoked with a prefix argument, the command `list-abbrevs' now displays local abbrevs, only. ** Refill minor mode provides preliminary support for keeping paragraphs filled as you modify them. ** The variable `double-click-fuzz' specifies how much the mouse may be moved between clicks that are recognized as a pair. Its value is measured in pixels. ** The new global minor mode `auto-image-file-mode' allows image files to be visited as images. ** Two new user-options `grep-command' and `grep-find-command' were added to compile.el. ** Withdrawn packages *** mldrag.el has been removed. mouse.el provides the same functionality with aliases for the mldrag functions. *** eval-reg.el has been obsoleted by changes to edebug.el and removed. *** ph.el has been obsoleted by EUDC and removed. * Incompatible Lisp changes in 21.1 There are a few Lisp changes which are not backwards-compatible and may require changes to existing code. Here is a list for reference. See the sections below for details. ** Since `format' preserves text properties, the idiom `(format "%s" foo)' no longer works to copy and remove properties. Use `copy-sequence' to copy the string, then use `set-text-properties' to remove the properties of the copy. ** Since the `keymap' text property now has significance, some code which uses both `local-map' and `keymap' properties (for portability) may, for instance, give rise to duplicate menus when the keymaps from these properties are active. ** The change in the treatment of non-ASCII characters in search ranges may affect some code. ** A non-nil value for the LOCAL arg of add-hook makes the hook buffer-local even if `make-local-hook' hasn't been called, which might make a difference to some code. ** The new treatment of the minibuffer prompt might affect code which operates on the minibuffer. ** The new character sets `eight-bit-control' and `eight-bit-graphic' cause `no-conversion' and `emacs-mule-unix' coding systems to produce different results when reading files with non-ASCII characters (previously, both coding systems would produce the same results). Specifically, `no-conversion' interprets each 8-bit byte as a separate character. This makes `no-conversion' inappropriate for reading multibyte text, e.g. buffers written to disk in their internal MULE encoding (auto-saving does that, for example). If a Lisp program reads such files with `no-conversion', each byte of the multibyte sequence, including the MULE leading codes such as \201, is treated as a separate character, which prevents them from being interpreted in the buffer as multibyte characters. Therefore, Lisp programs that read files which contain the internal MULE encoding should use `emacs-mule-unix'. `no-conversion' is only appropriate for reading truly binary files. ** Code that relies on the obsolete `before-change-function' and `after-change-function' to detect buffer changes will now fail. Use `before-change-functions' and `after-change-functions' instead. ** Code that uses `concat' with integer args now gets an error, as long promised. So does any code that uses derivatives of `concat', such as `mapconcat'. ** The function base64-decode-string now always returns a unibyte string. ** Not a Lisp incompatibility as such but, with the introduction of extra private charsets, there is now only one slot free for a new dimension-2 private charset. User code which tries to add more than one extra will fail unless you rebuild Emacs with some standard charset(s) removed; that is probably inadvisable because it changes the emacs-mule encoding. Also, files stored in the emacs-mule encoding using Emacs 20 with additional private charsets defined will probably not be read correctly by Emacs 21. ** The variable `directory-sep-char' is slated for removal. Not really a change (yet), but a projected one that you should be aware of: The variable `directory-sep-char' is deprecated, and should not be used. It was always ignored on GNU/Linux and Unix systems and on MS-DOS, but the MS-Windows port tried to support it by adapting the behavior of certain primitives to the value of this variable. It turned out that such support cannot be reliable, so it was decided to remove this variable in the near future. Lisp programs are well advised not to set it to anything but '/', because any different value will not have any effect when support for this variable is removed. * Lisp changes made after edition 2.6 of the Emacs Lisp Manual, (Display-related features are described in a page of their own below.) ** Function assq-delete-all replaces function assoc-delete-all. ** The new function animate-string, from lisp/play/animate.el allows the animated display of strings. ** The new function `interactive-form' can be used to obtain the interactive form of a function. ** The keyword :set-after in defcustom allows to specify dependencies between custom options. Example: (defcustom default-input-method nil "*Default input method for multilingual text (a string). This is the input method activated automatically by the command `toggle-input-method' (\\[toggle-input-method])." :group 'mule :type '(choice (const nil) string) :set-after '(current-language-environment)) This specifies that default-input-method should be set after current-language-environment even if default-input-method appears first in a custom-set-variables statement. ** The new hook `kbd-macro-termination-hook' is run at the end of function execute-kbd-macro. Functions on this hook are called with no args. The hook is run independent of how the macro was terminated (signal or normal termination). ** Functions `butlast' and `nbutlast' for removing trailing elements from a list are now available without requiring the CL package. ** The new user-option `even-window-heights' can be set to nil to prevent `display-buffer' from evening out window heights. ** The user-option `face-font-registry-alternatives' specifies alternative font registry names to try when looking for a font. ** Function `md5' calculates the MD5 "message digest"/"checksum". ** Function `delete-frame' runs `delete-frame-hook' before actually deleting the frame. The hook is called with one arg, the frame being deleted. ** `add-hook' now makes the hook local if called with a non-nil LOCAL arg. ** The treatment of non-ASCII characters in search ranges has changed. If a range in a regular expression or the arg of skip-chars-forward/backward starts with a unibyte character C and ends with a multibyte character C2, the range is divided into two: one is C..?\377, the other is C1..C2, where C1 is the first character of C2's charset. ** The new function `display-message-or-buffer' displays a message in the echo area or pops up a buffer, depending on the length of the message. ** The new macro `with-auto-compression-mode' allows evaluating an expression with auto-compression-mode enabled. ** In image specifications, `:heuristic-mask' has been replaced with the more general `:mask' property. ** Image specifications accept more `:conversion's. ** A `?' can be used in a symbol name without escaping it with a backslash. ** Reading from the mini-buffer now reads from standard input if Emacs is running in batch mode. For example, (message "%s" (read t)) will read a Lisp expression from standard input and print the result to standard output. ** The argument of `down-list', `backward-up-list', `up-list', `kill-sexp', `backward-kill-sexp' and `mark-sexp' is now optional. ** If `display-buffer-reuse-frames' is set, function `display-buffer' will raise frames displaying a buffer, instead of creating a new frame or window. ** Two new functions for removing elements from lists/sequences were added - Function: remove ELT SEQ Return a copy of SEQ with all occurrences of ELT removed. SEQ must be a list, vector, or string. The comparison is done with `equal'. - Function: remq ELT LIST Return a copy of LIST with all occurrences of ELT removed. The comparison is done with `eq'. ** The function `delete' now also works with vectors and strings. ** The meaning of the `:weakness WEAK' argument of make-hash-table has been changed: WEAK can now have new values `key-or-value' and `key-and-value', in addition to `nil', `key', `value', and `t'. ** Function `aset' stores any multibyte character in any string without signaling "Attempt to change char length of a string". It may convert a unibyte string to multibyte if necessary. ** The value of the `help-echo' text property is called as a function or evaluated, if it is not a string already, to obtain a help string. ** Function `make-obsolete' now has an optional arg to say when the function was declared obsolete. ** Function `plist-member' is renamed from `widget-plist-member' (which is retained as an alias). ** Easy-menu's :filter now takes the unconverted form of the menu and the result is automatically converted to Emacs' form. ** The new function `window-list' has been defined - Function: window-list &optional FRAME WINDOW MINIBUF Return a list of windows on FRAME, starting with WINDOW. FRAME nil or omitted means use the selected frame. WINDOW nil or omitted means use the selected window. MINIBUF t means include the minibuffer window, even if it isn't active. MINIBUF nil or omitted means include the minibuffer window only if it's active. MINIBUF neither nil nor t means never include the minibuffer window. ** There's a new function `get-window-with-predicate' defined as follows - Function: get-window-with-predicate PREDICATE &optional MINIBUF ALL-FRAMES DEFAULT Return a window satisfying PREDICATE. This function cycles through all visible windows using `walk-windows', calling PREDICATE on each one. PREDICATE is called with a window as argument. The first window for which PREDICATE returns a non-nil value is returned. If no window satisfies PREDICATE, DEFAULT is returned. Optional second arg MINIBUF t means count the minibuffer window even if not active. MINIBUF nil or omitted means count the minibuffer if it is active. MINIBUF neither t nor nil means not to count the minibuffer even if it is active. Several frames may share a single minibuffer; if the minibuffer counts, all windows on all frames that share that minibuffer count too. Therefore, if you are using a separate minibuffer frame and the minibuffer is active and MINIBUF says it counts, `walk-windows' includes the windows in the frame from which you entered the minibuffer, as well as the minibuffer window. ALL-FRAMES is the optional third argument. ALL-FRAMES nil or omitted means cycle within the frames as specified above. ALL-FRAMES = `visible' means include windows on all visible frames. ALL-FRAMES = 0 means include windows on all visible and iconified frames. ALL-FRAMES = t means include windows on all frames including invisible frames. If ALL-FRAMES is a frame, it means include windows on that frame. Anything else means restrict to the selected frame. ** The function `single-key-description' now encloses function key and event names in angle brackets. When called with a second optional argument non-nil, angle brackets won't be printed. ** If the variable `message-truncate-lines' is bound to t around a call to `message', the echo area will not be resized to display that message; it will be truncated instead, as it was done in 20.x. Default value is nil. ** The user option `line-number-display-limit' can now be set to nil, meaning no limit. ** The new user option `line-number-display-limit-width' controls the maximum width of lines in a buffer for which Emacs displays line numbers in the mode line. The default is 200. ** `select-safe-coding-system' now also checks the most preferred coding-system if buffer-file-coding-system is `undecided' and DEFAULT-CODING-SYSTEM is not specified, ** The function `subr-arity' provides information about the argument list of a primitive. ** `where-is-internal' now also accepts a list of keymaps. ** The text property `keymap' specifies a key map which overrides the buffer's local map and the map specified by the `local-map' property. This is probably what most current uses of `local-map' want, rather than replacing the local map. ** The obsolete variables `before-change-function' and `after-change-function' are no longer acted upon and have been removed. Use `before-change-functions' and `after-change-functions' instead. ** The function `apropos-mode' runs the hook `apropos-mode-hook'. ** `concat' no longer accepts individual integer arguments, as promised long ago. ** The new function `float-time' returns the current time as a float. ** The new variable auto-coding-regexp-alist specifies coding systems for reading specific files, analogous to auto-coding-alist, but patterns are checked against file contents instead of file names. * Lisp changes in Emacs 21.1 (see following page for display-related features) ** The new package rx.el provides an alternative sexp notation for regular expressions. - Function: rx-to-string SEXP Translate SEXP into a regular expression in string notation. - Macro: rx SEXP Translate SEXP into a regular expression in string notation. The following are valid subforms of regular expressions in sexp notation. STRING matches string STRING literally. CHAR matches character CHAR literally. `not-newline' matches any character except a newline. . `anything' matches any character `(any SET)' matches any character in SET. SET may be a character or string. Ranges of characters can be specified as `A-Z' in strings. '(in SET)' like `any'. `(not (any SET))' matches any character not in SET `line-start' matches the empty string, but only at the beginning of a line in the text being matched `line-end' is similar to `line-start' but matches only at the end of a line `string-start' matches the empty string, but only at the beginning of the string being matched against. `string-end' matches the empty string, but only at the end of the string being matched against. `buffer-start' matches the empty string, but only at the beginning of the buffer being matched against. `buffer-end' matches the empty string, but only at the end of the buffer being matched against. `point' matches the empty string, but only at point. `word-start' matches the empty string, but only at the beginning or end of a word. `word-end' matches the empty string, but only at the end of a word. `word-boundary' matches the empty string, but only at the beginning or end of a word. `(not word-boundary)' matches the empty string, but not at the beginning or end of a word. `digit' matches 0 through 9. `control' matches ASCII control characters. `hex-digit' matches 0 through 9, a through f and A through F. `blank' matches space and tab only. `graphic' matches graphic characters--everything except ASCII control chars, space, and DEL. `printing' matches printing characters--everything except ASCII control chars and DEL. `alphanumeric' matches letters and digits. (But at present, for multibyte characters, it matches anything that has word syntax.) `letter' matches letters. (But at present, for multibyte characters, it matches anything that has word syntax.) `ascii' matches ASCII (unibyte) characters. `nonascii' matches non-ASCII (multibyte) characters. `lower' matches anything lower-case. `upper' matches anything upper-case. `punctuation' matches punctuation. (But at present, for multibyte characters, it matches anything that has non-word syntax.) `space' matches anything that has whitespace syntax. `word' matches anything that has word syntax. `(syntax SYNTAX)' matches a character with syntax SYNTAX. SYNTAX must be one of the following symbols. `whitespace' (\\s- in string notation) `punctuation' (\\s.) `word' (\\sw) `symbol' (\\s_) `open-parenthesis' (\\s() `close-parenthesis' (\\s)) `expression-prefix' (\\s') `string-quote' (\\s\") `paired-delimiter' (\\s$) `escape' (\\s\\) `character-quote' (\\s/) `comment-start' (\\s<) `comment-end' (\\s>) `(not (syntax SYNTAX))' matches a character that has not syntax SYNTAX. `(category CATEGORY)' matches a character with category CATEGORY. CATEGORY must be either a character to use for C, or one of the following symbols. `consonant' (\\c0 in string notation) `base-vowel' (\\c1) `upper-diacritical-mark' (\\c2) `lower-diacritical-mark' (\\c3) `tone-mark' (\\c4) `symbol' (\\c5) `digit' (\\c6) `vowel-modifying-diacritical-mark' (\\c7) `vowel-sign' (\\c8) `semivowel-lower' (\\c9) `not-at-end-of-line' (\\c<) `not-at-beginning-of-line' (\\c>) `alpha-numeric-two-byte' (\\cA) `chinse-two-byte' (\\cC) `greek-two-byte' (\\cG) `japanese-hiragana-two-byte' (\\cH) `indian-two-byte' (\\cI) `japanese-katakana-two-byte' (\\cK) `korean-hangul-two-byte' (\\cN) `cyrillic-two-byte' (\\cY) `ascii' (\\ca) `arabic' (\\cb) `chinese' (\\cc) `ethiopic' (\\ce) `greek' (\\cg) `korean' (\\ch) `indian' (\\ci) `japanese' (\\cj) `japanese-katakana' (\\ck) `latin' (\\cl) `lao' (\\co) `tibetan' (\\cq) `japanese-roman' (\\cr) `thai' (\\ct) `vietnamese' (\\cv) `hebrew' (\\cw) `cyrillic' (\\cy) `can-break' (\\c|) `(not (category CATEGORY))' matches a character that has not category CATEGORY. `(and SEXP1 SEXP2 ...)' matches what SEXP1 matches, followed by what SEXP2 matches, etc. `(submatch SEXP1 SEXP2 ...)' like `and', but makes the match accessible with `match-end', `match-beginning', and `match-string'. `(group SEXP1 SEXP2 ...)' another name for `submatch'. `(or SEXP1 SEXP2 ...)' matches anything that matches SEXP1 or SEXP2, etc. If all args are strings, use `regexp-opt' to optimize the resulting regular expression. `(minimal-match SEXP)' produce a non-greedy regexp for SEXP. Normally, regexps matching zero or more occurrences of something are \"greedy\" in that they match as much as they can, as long as the overall regexp can still match. A non-greedy regexp matches as little as possible. `(maximal-match SEXP)' produce a greedy regexp for SEXP. This is the default. `(zero-or-more SEXP)' matches zero or more occurrences of what SEXP matches. `(0+ SEXP)' like `zero-or-more'. `(* SEXP)' like `zero-or-more', but always produces a greedy regexp. `(*? SEXP)' like `zero-or-more', but always produces a non-greedy regexp. `(one-or-more SEXP)' matches one or more occurrences of A. `(1+ SEXP)' like `one-or-more'. `(+ SEXP)' like `one-or-more', but always produces a greedy regexp. `(+? SEXP)' like `one-or-more', but always produces a non-greedy regexp. `(zero-or-one SEXP)' matches zero or one occurrences of A. `(optional SEXP)' like `zero-or-one'. `(? SEXP)' like `zero-or-one', but always produces a greedy regexp. `(?? SEXP)' like `zero-or-one', but always produces a non-greedy regexp. `(repeat N SEXP)' matches N occurrences of what SEXP matches. `(repeat N M SEXP)' matches N to M occurrences of what SEXP matches. `(eval FORM)' evaluate FORM and insert result. If result is a string, `regexp-quote' it. `(regexp REGEXP)' include REGEXP in string notation in the result. *** The features `md5' and `overlay' are now provided by default. *** The special form `save-restriction' now works correctly even if the buffer is widened inside the save-restriction and changes made outside the original restriction. Previously, doing this would cause the saved restriction to be restored incorrectly. *** The functions `find-charset-region' and `find-charset-string' include `eight-bit-control' and/or `eight-bit-graphic' in the returned list when they find 8-bit characters. Previously, they included `ascii' in a multibyte buffer and `unknown' in a unibyte buffer. *** The functions `set-buffer-multibyte', `string-as-multibyte' and `string-as-unibyte' change the byte sequence of a buffer or a string if it contains a character from the `eight-bit-control' character set. *** The handling of multibyte sequences in a multibyte buffer is changed. Previously, a byte sequence matching the pattern [\200-\237][\240-\377]+ was interpreted as a single character regardless of the length of the trailing bytes [\240-\377]+. Thus, if the sequence was longer than what the leading byte indicated, the extra trailing bytes were ignored by Lisp functions. Now such extra bytes are independent 8-bit characters belonging to the charset eight-bit-graphic. ** Fontsets are now implemented using char-tables. A fontset can now be specified for each independent character, for a group of characters or for a character set rather than just for a character set as previously. *** The arguments of the function `set-fontset-font' are changed. They are NAME, CHARACTER, FONTNAME, and optional FRAME. The function modifies fontset NAME to use FONTNAME for CHARACTER. CHARACTER may be a cons (FROM . TO), where FROM and TO are non-generic characters. In that case FONTNAME is used for all characters in the range FROM and TO (inclusive). CHARACTER may be a charset. In that case FONTNAME is used for all character in the charset. FONTNAME may be a cons (FAMILY . REGISTRY), where FAMILY is the family name of a font and REGISTRY is a registry name of a font. *** Variable x-charset-registry has been deleted. The default charset registries of character sets are set in the default fontset "fontset-default". *** The function `create-fontset-from-fontset-spec' ignores the second argument STYLE-VARIANT. It never creates style-variant fontsets. ** The method of composing characters is changed. Now character composition is done by a special text property `composition' in buffers and strings. *** Charset composition is deleted. Emacs never creates a `composite character' which is an independent character with a unique character code. Thus the following functions handling `composite characters' have been deleted: composite-char-component, composite-char-component-count, composite-char-composition-rule, composite-char-composition-rule and decompose-composite-char delete. The variables leading-code-composition and min-composite-char have also been deleted. *** Three more glyph reference points are added. They can be used to specify a composition rule. See the documentation of the variable `reference-point-alist' for more detail. *** The function `compose-region' takes new arguments COMPONENTS and MODIFICATION-FUNC. With COMPONENTS, you can specify not only a composition rule but also characters to be composed. Such characters may differ between buffer and string text. *** The function `compose-string' takes new arguments START, END, COMPONENTS, and MODIFICATION-FUNC. *** The function `compose-string' puts text property `composition' directly on the argument STRING instead of returning a new string. Likewise, the function `decompose-string' just removes text property `composition' from STRING. *** The new function `find-composition' returns information about a composition at a specified position in a buffer or a string. *** The function `decompose-composite-char' is now labeled as obsolete. ** The new coding system `mac-roman' is primarily intended for use on the Macintosh but may be used generally for Macintosh-encoded text. ** The new character sets `mule-unicode-0100-24ff', `mule-unicode-2500-33ff', and `mule-unicode-e000-ffff' have been introduced for Unicode characters in the range U+0100..U+24FF, U+2500..U+33FF, U+E000..U+FFFF respectively. Note that the character sets are not yet unified in Emacs, so characters which belong to charsets such as Latin-2, Greek, Hebrew, etc. and the same characters in the `mule-unicode-*' charsets are different characters, as far as Emacs is concerned. For example, text which includes Unicode characters from the Latin-2 locale cannot be encoded by Emacs with ISO 8859-2 coding system. ** The new coding system `mule-utf-8' has been added. It provides limited support for decoding/encoding UTF-8 text. For details, please see the documentation string of this coding system. ** The new character sets `japanese-jisx0213-1' and `japanese-jisx0213-2' have been introduced for the new Japanese standard JIS X 0213 Plane 1 and Plane 2. ** The new character sets `latin-iso8859-14' and `latin-iso8859-15' have been introduced. ** The new character sets `eight-bit-control' and `eight-bit-graphic' have been introduced for 8-bit characters in the ranges 0x80..0x9F and 0xA0..0xFF respectively. Note that the multibyte representation of eight-bit-control is never exposed; this leads to an exception in the emacs-mule coding system, which encodes everything else to the buffer/string internal representation. Note that to search for eight-bit-graphic characters in a multibyte buffer, the search string must be multibyte, otherwise such characters will be converted to their multibyte equivalent. ** If the APPEND argument of `write-region' is an integer, it seeks to that offset in the file before writing. ** The function `add-minor-mode' has been added for convenience and compatibility with XEmacs (and is used internally by define-minor-mode). ** The function `shell-command' now sets the default directory of the `*Shell Command Output*' buffer to the default directory of the buffer from which the command was issued. ** The functions `query-replace', `query-replace-regexp', `query-replace-regexp-eval' `map-query-replace-regexp', `replace-string', `replace-regexp', and `perform-replace' take two additional optional arguments START and END that specify the region to operate on. ** The new function `count-screen-lines' is a more flexible alternative to `window-buffer-height'. - Function: count-screen-lines &optional BEG END COUNT-FINAL-NEWLINE WINDOW Return the number of screen lines in the region between BEG and END. The number of screen lines may be different from the number of actual lines, due to line breaking, display table, etc. Optional arguments BEG and END default to `point-min' and `point-max' respectively. If region ends with a newline, ignore it unless optional third argument COUNT-FINAL-NEWLINE is non-nil. The optional fourth argument WINDOW specifies the window used for obtaining parameters such as width, horizontal scrolling, and so on. The default is to use the selected window's parameters. Like `vertical-motion', `count-screen-lines' always uses the current buffer, regardless of which buffer is displayed in WINDOW. This makes possible to use `count-screen-lines' in any buffer, whether or not it is currently displayed in some window. ** The new function `mapc' is like `mapcar' but doesn't collect the argument function's results. ** The functions base64-decode-region and base64-decode-string now signal an error instead of returning nil if decoding fails. Also, `base64-decode-string' now always returns a unibyte string (in Emacs 20, it returned a multibyte string when the result was a valid multibyte sequence). ** The function sendmail-user-agent-compose now recognizes a `body' header in the list of headers passed to it. ** The new function member-ignore-case works like `member', but ignores differences in case and text representation. ** The buffer-local variable cursor-type can be used to specify the cursor to use in windows displaying a buffer. Values are interpreted as follows: t use the cursor specified for the frame (default) nil don't display a cursor `bar' display a bar cursor with default width (bar . WIDTH) display a bar cursor with width WIDTH others display a box cursor. ** The variable open-paren-in-column-0-is-defun-start controls whether an open parenthesis in column 0 is considered to be the start of a defun. If set, the default, it is considered a defun start. If not set, an open parenthesis in column 0 has no special meaning. ** The new function `string-to-syntax' can be used to translate syntax specifications in string form as accepted by `modify-syntax-entry' to the cons-cell form that is used for the values of the `syntax-table' text property, and in `font-lock-syntactic-keywords'. Example: (string-to-syntax "()") => (4 . 41) ** Emacs' reader supports CL read syntax for integers in bases other than 10. *** `#BINTEGER' or `#bINTEGER' reads INTEGER in binary (radix 2). INTEGER optionally contains a sign. #b1111 => 15 #b-1111 => -15 *** `#OINTEGER' or `#oINTEGER' reads INTEGER in octal (radix 8). #o666 => 438 *** `#XINTEGER' or `#xINTEGER' reads INTEGER in hexadecimal (radix 16). #xbeef => 48815 *** `#RADIXrINTEGER' reads INTEGER in radix RADIX, 2 <= RADIX <= 36. #2R-111 => -7 #25rah => 267 ** The function `documentation-property' now evaluates the value of the given property to obtain a string if it doesn't refer to etc/DOC and isn't a string. ** If called for a symbol, the function `documentation' now looks for a `function-documentation' property of that symbol. If it has a non-nil value, the documentation is taken from that value. If the value is not a string, it is evaluated to obtain a string. ** The last argument of `define-key-after' defaults to t for convenience. ** The new function `replace-regexp-in-string' replaces all matches for a regexp in a string. ** `mouse-position' now runs the abnormal hook `mouse-position-function'. ** The function string-to-number now returns a float for numbers that don't fit into a Lisp integer. ** The variable keyword-symbols-constants-flag has been removed. Keywords are now always considered constants. ** The new function `delete-and-extract-region' deletes text and returns it. ** The function `clear-this-command-keys' now also clears the vector returned by function `recent-keys'. ** Variables `beginning-of-defun-function' and `end-of-defun-function' can be used to define handlers for the functions that find defuns. Major modes can define these locally instead of rebinding C-M-a etc. if the normal conventions for defuns are not appropriate for the mode. ** easy-mmode-define-minor-mode now takes an additional BODY argument and is renamed `define-minor-mode'. ** If an abbrev has a hook function which is a symbol, and that symbol has a non-nil `no-self-insert' property, the return value of the hook function specifies whether an expansion has been done or not. If it returns nil, abbrev-expand also returns nil, meaning "no expansion has been performed." When abbrev expansion is done by typing a self-inserting character, and the abbrev has a hook with the `no-self-insert' property, and the hook function returns non-nil meaning expansion has been done, then the self-inserting character is not inserted. ** The function `intern-soft' now accepts a symbol as first argument. In this case, that exact symbol is looked up in the specified obarray, and the function's value is nil if it is not found. ** The new macro `with-syntax-table' can be used to evaluate forms with the syntax table of the current buffer temporarily set to a specified table. (with-syntax-table TABLE &rest BODY) Evaluate BODY with syntax table of current buffer set to a copy of TABLE. The current syntax table is saved, BODY is evaluated, and the saved table is restored, even in case of an abnormal exit. Value is what BODY returns. ** Regular expressions now support intervals \{n,m\} as well as Perl's shy-groups \(?:...\) and non-greedy *? +? and ?? operators. Also back-references like \2 are now considered as an error if the corresponding subgroup does not exist (or is not closed yet). Previously it would have been silently turned into `2' (ignoring the `\'). ** The optional argument BUFFER of function file-local-copy has been removed since it wasn't used by anything. ** The file name argument of function `file-locked-p' is now required instead of being optional. ** The new built-in error `text-read-only' is signaled when trying to modify read-only text. ** New functions and variables for locales. The new variable `locale-coding-system' specifies how to encode and decode strings passed to low-level message functions like strerror and time functions like strftime. The new variables `system-messages-locale' and `system-time-locale' give the system locales to be used when invoking these two types of functions. The new function `set-locale-environment' sets the language environment, preferred coding system, and locale coding system from the system locale as specified by the LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, and LANG environment variables. Normally, it is invoked during startup and need not be invoked thereafter. It uses the new variables `locale-language-names', `locale-charset-language-names', and `locale-preferred-coding-systems' to make its decisions. ** syntax tables now understand nested comments. To declare a comment syntax as allowing nesting, just add an `n' modifier to either of the characters of the comment end and the comment start sequences. ** The function `pixmap-spec-p' has been renamed `bitmap-spec-p' because `bitmap' is more in line with the usual X terminology. ** New function `propertize' The new function `propertize' can be used to conveniently construct strings with text properties. - Function: propertize STRING &rest PROPERTIES Value is a copy of STRING with text properties assigned as specified by PROPERTIES. PROPERTIES is a sequence of pairs PROPERTY VALUE, with PROPERTY being the name of a text property and VALUE being the specified value of that property. Example: (propertize "foo" 'face 'bold 'read-only t) ** push and pop macros. Simple versions of the push and pop macros of Common Lisp are now defined in Emacs Lisp. These macros allow only symbols as the place that holds the list to be changed. (push NEWELT LISTNAME) add NEWELT to the front of LISTNAME's value. (pop LISTNAME) return first elt of LISTNAME, and remove it (thus altering the value of LISTNAME). ** New dolist and dotimes macros. Simple versions of the dolist and dotimes macros of Common Lisp are now defined in Emacs Lisp. (dolist (VAR LIST [RESULT]) BODY...) Execute body once for each element of LIST, using the variable VAR to hold the current element. Then return the value of RESULT, or nil if RESULT is omitted. (dotimes (VAR COUNT [RESULT]) BODY...) Execute BODY with VAR bound to successive integers running from 0, inclusive, to COUNT, exclusive. Then return the value of RESULT, or nil if RESULT is omitted. ** Regular expressions now support Posix character classes such as [:alpha:], [:space:] and so on. These must be used within a character class--for instance, [-[:digit:].+] matches digits or a period or a sign. [:digit:] matches 0 through 9 [:cntrl:] matches ASCII control characters [:xdigit:] matches 0 through 9, a through f and A through F. [:blank:] matches space and tab only [:graph:] matches graphic characters--everything except ASCII control chars, space, and DEL. [:print:] matches printing characters--everything except ASCII control chars and DEL. [:alnum:] matches letters and digits. (But at present, for multibyte characters, it matches anything that has word syntax.) [:alpha:] matches letters. (But at present, for multibyte characters, it matches anything that has word syntax.) [:ascii:] matches ASCII (unibyte) characters. [:nonascii:] matches non-ASCII (multibyte) characters. [:lower:] matches anything lower-case. [:punct:] matches punctuation. (But at present, for multibyte characters, it matches anything that has non-word syntax.) [:space:] matches anything that has whitespace syntax. [:upper:] matches anything upper-case. [:word:] matches anything that has word syntax. ** Emacs now has built-in hash tables. The following functions are defined for hash tables: - Function: make-hash-table ARGS The argument list ARGS consists of keyword/argument pairs. All arguments are optional. The following arguments are defined: :test TEST TEST must be a symbol specifying how to compare keys. Default is `eql'. Predefined are `eq', `eql' and `equal'. If TEST is not predefined, it must have been defined with `define-hash-table-test'. :size SIZE SIZE must be an integer > 0 giving a hint to the implementation how many elements will be put in the hash table