1 GNU Emacs NEWS -- history of user-visible changes. 2006-05-31
3 Copyright (C) 1999-2001, 2006-2014 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
4 See the end of the file for license conditions.
7 Please send Emacs bug reports to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
8 If possible, use M-x report-emacs-bug.
10 This file is about changes in emacs version 20.
14 * Emacs 20.7 is a bug-fix release with few user-visible changes
16 ** It is now possible to use CCL-based coding systems for keyboard
19 ** ange-ftp now handles FTP security extensions, like Kerberos.
21 ** Rmail has been extended to recognize more forms of digest messages.
23 ** Now, most coding systems set in keyboard coding system work not
24 only for character input, but also in incremental search. The
25 exceptions are such coding systems that handle 2-byte character sets
26 (e.g euc-kr, euc-jp) and that use ISO's escape sequence
27 (e.g. iso-2022-jp). They are ignored in incremental search.
29 ** Support for Macintosh PowerPC-based machines running GNU/Linux has
34 * Emacs 20.6 is a bug-fix release with one user-visible change
36 ** Support for ARM-based non-RISCiX machines has been added.
40 * Emacs 20.5 is a bug-fix release with no user-visible changes.
42 ** Not new, but not mentioned before:
43 M-w when Transient Mark mode is enabled disables the mark.
47 * Changes in Emacs 20.4
49 ** Init file may be called .emacs.el.
51 You can now call the Emacs init file `.emacs.el'.
52 Formerly the name had to be `.emacs'. If you use the name
53 `.emacs.el', you can byte-compile the file in the usual way.
55 If both `.emacs' and `.emacs.el' exist, the latter file
56 is the one that is used.
58 ** shell-command, and shell-command-on-region, now return
59 the exit code of the command (unless it is asynchronous).
60 Also, you can specify a place to put the error output,
61 separate from the command's regular output.
62 Interactively, the variable shell-command-default-error-buffer
63 says where to put error output; set it to a buffer name.
64 In calls from Lisp, an optional argument ERROR-BUFFER specifies
67 When you specify a non-nil error buffer (or buffer name), any error
68 output is inserted before point in that buffer, with \f\n to separate
69 it from the previous batch of error output. The error buffer is not
70 cleared, so error output from successive commands accumulates there.
72 ** Setting the default value of enable-multibyte-characters to nil in
73 the .emacs file, either explicitly using setq-default, or via Custom,
74 is now essentially equivalent to using --unibyte: all buffers
75 created during startup will be made unibyte after loading .emacs.
77 ** C-x C-f now handles the wildcards * and ? in file names. For
78 example, typing C-x C-f c*.c RET visits all the files whose names
79 match c*.c. To visit a file whose name contains * or ?, add the
80 quoting sequence /: to the beginning of the file name.
82 ** The M-x commands keep-lines, flush-lines and count-matches
83 now have the same feature as occur and query-replace:
84 if the pattern contains any upper case letters, then
85 they never ignore case.
87 ** The end-of-line format conversion feature previously mentioned
88 under `* Emacs 20.1 changes for MS-DOS and MS-Windows' actually
89 applies to all operating systems. Emacs recognizes from the contents
90 of a file what convention it uses to separate lines--newline, CRLF, or
91 just CR--and automatically converts the contents to the normal Emacs
92 convention (using newline to separate lines) for editing. This is a
93 part of the general feature of coding system conversion.
95 If you subsequently save the buffer, Emacs converts the text back to
96 the same format that was used in the file before.
98 You can turn off end-of-line conversion by setting the variable
99 `inhibit-eol-conversion' to non-nil, e.g. with Custom in the MULE group.
101 ** The character set property `prefered-coding-system' has been
102 renamed to `preferred-coding-system', for the sake of correct spelling.
103 This is a fairly internal feature, so few programs should be affected.
105 ** Mode-line display of end-of-line format is changed.
106 The indication of the end-of-line format of the file visited by a
107 buffer is now more explicit when that format is not the usual one for
108 your operating system. For example, the DOS-style end-of-line format
109 is displayed as "(DOS)" on Unix and GNU/Linux systems. The usual
110 end-of-line format is still displayed as a single character (colon for
111 Unix, backslash for DOS and Windows, and forward slash for the Mac).
113 The values of the variables eol-mnemonic-unix, eol-mnemonic-dos,
114 eol-mnemonic-mac, and eol-mnemonic-undecided, which are strings,
115 control what is displayed in the mode line for each end-of-line
116 format. You can now customize these variables.
118 ** In the previous version of Emacs, tar-mode didn't work well if a
119 filename contained non-ASCII characters. Now this is fixed. Such a
120 filename is decoded by file-name-coding-system if the default value of
121 enable-multibyte-characters is non-nil.
123 ** The command temp-buffer-resize-mode toggles a minor mode
124 in which temporary buffers (such as help buffers) are given
125 windows just big enough to hold the whole contents.
127 ** If you use completion.el, you must now run the function
128 dynamic-completion-mode to enable it. Just loading the file
129 doesn't have any effect.
131 ** In Flyspell mode, the default is now to make just one Ispell process,
134 ** If you use iswitchb but do not call (iswitchb-default-keybindings) to
135 use the default keybindings, you will need to add the following line:
136 (add-hook 'minibuffer-setup-hook 'iswitchb-minibuffer-setup)
138 ** Auto-show mode is no longer enabled just by loading auto-show.el.
139 To control it, set `auto-show-mode' via Custom or use the
140 `auto-show-mode' command.
142 ** Handling of X fonts' ascent/descent parameters has been changed to
143 avoid redisplay problems. As a consequence, compared with previous
144 versions the line spacing and frame size now differ with some font
145 choices, typically increasing by a pixel per line. This change
146 occurred in version 20.3 but was not documented then.
148 ** If you select the bar cursor style, it uses the frame's
149 cursor-color, rather than the cursor foreground pixel.
151 ** In multibyte mode, Rmail decodes incoming MIME messages using the
152 character set specified in the message. If you want to disable this
153 feature, set the variable rmail-decode-mime-charset to nil.
155 ** Not new, but not mentioned previously in NEWS: when you use #! at
156 the beginning of a file to make it executable and specify an
157 interpreter program, Emacs looks on the second line for the -*- mode
158 and variable specification, as well as on the first line.
160 ** Support for IBM codepage encoding of non-ASCII characters.
162 The new command M-x codepage-setup creates a special coding system
163 that can be used to convert text between a specific IBM codepage and
164 one of the character sets built into Emacs which matches that
165 codepage. For example, codepage 850 corresponds to Latin-1 character
166 set, codepage 855 corresponds to Cyrillic-ISO character set, etc.
168 Windows codepages 1250, 1251 and some others, where Windows deviates
169 from the corresponding ISO character set, are also supported.
171 IBM box-drawing characters and other glyphs which don't have
172 equivalents in the corresponding ISO character set, are converted to
173 a character defined by dos-unsupported-char-glyph on MS-DOS, and to
174 `?' on other systems.
176 IBM codepages are widely used on MS-DOS and MS-Windows, so this
177 feature is most useful on those platforms, but it can also be used on
180 Emacs compiled for MS-DOS automatically loads the support for the
181 current codepage when it starts.
185 *** When mail is sent using compose-mail (C-x m), and if
186 `mail-send-nonascii' is set to the new default value `mime',
187 appropriate MIME headers are added. The headers are added only if
188 non-ASCII characters are present in the body of the mail, and no other
189 MIME headers are already present. For example, the following three
190 headers are added if the coding system used in the *mail* buffer is
194 Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
195 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
197 *** The new variable default-sendmail-coding-system specifies the
198 default way to encode outgoing mail. This has higher priority than
199 default-buffer-file-coding-system but has lower priority than
200 sendmail-coding-system and the local value of
201 buffer-file-coding-system.
203 You should not set this variable manually. Instead, set
204 sendmail-coding-system to specify a fixed encoding for all outgoing
207 *** When you try to send a message that contains non-ASCII characters,
208 if the coding system specified by those variables doesn't handle them,
209 Emacs will ask you to select a suitable coding system while showing a
210 list of possible coding systems.
214 *** c-default-style can now take an association list that maps major
215 modes to style names. When this variable is an alist, Java mode no
216 longer hardcodes a setting to "java" style. See the variable's
217 docstring for details.
219 *** It's now possible to put a list as the offset on a syntactic
220 symbol. The list is evaluated recursively until a non-nil offset is
221 found. This is useful to combine several lineup functions to act in a
222 prioritized order on a single line. However, none of the supplied
223 lineup functions use this feature currently.
225 *** New syntactic symbol catch-clause, which is used on the "catch" and
226 "finally" lines in try-catch constructs in C++ and Java.
228 *** New cleanup brace-catch-brace on c-cleanup-list, which does for
229 "catch" lines what brace-elseif-brace does for "else if" lines.
231 *** The braces of Java anonymous inner classes are treated separately
232 from the braces of other classes in auto-newline mode. Two new
233 symbols inexpr-class-open and inexpr-class-close may be used on
234 c-hanging-braces-alist to control the automatic newlines used for
237 *** Support for the Pike language added, along with new Pike specific
238 syntactic symbols: inlambda, lambda-intro-cont
240 *** Support for Java anonymous classes via new syntactic symbol
241 inexpr-class. New syntactic symbol inexpr-statement for Pike
242 support and gcc-style statements inside expressions. New lineup
243 function c-lineup-inexpr-block.
245 *** New syntactic symbol brace-entry-open which is used in brace lists
246 (i.e. static initializers) when a list entry starts with an open
247 brace. These used to be recognized as brace-list-entry's.
248 c-electric-brace also recognizes brace-entry-open braces
249 (brace-list-entry's can no longer be electrified).
251 *** New command c-indent-line-or-region, not bound by default.
253 *** `#' is only electric when typed in the indentation of a line.
255 *** Parentheses are now electric (via the new command c-electric-paren)
256 for auto-reindenting lines when parens are typed.
258 *** In "gnu" style, inline-open offset is now set to zero.
260 *** Uniform handling of the inclass syntactic symbol. The indentation
261 associated with it is now always relative to the class opening brace.
262 This means that the indentation behavior has changed in some
263 circumstances, but only if you've put anything besides 0 on the
264 class-open syntactic symbol (none of the default styles do that).
268 *** New functionality for using Gnus as an offline newsreader has been
269 added. A plethora of new commands and modes have been added. See the
270 Gnus manual for the full story.
272 *** The nndraft backend has returned, but works differently than
273 before. All Message buffers are now also articles in the nndraft
274 group, which is created automatically.
276 *** `gnus-alter-header-function' can now be used to alter header
279 *** `gnus-summary-goto-article' now accept Message-ID's.
281 *** A new Message command for deleting text in the body of a message
282 outside the region: `C-c C-v'.
284 *** You can now post to component group in nnvirtual groups with
287 *** `nntp-rlogin-program' -- new variable to ease customization.
289 *** `C-u C-c C-c' in `gnus-article-edit-mode' will now inhibit
290 re-highlighting of the article buffer.
292 *** New element in `gnus-boring-article-headers' -- `long-to'.
294 *** `M-i' symbolic prefix command. See the section "Symbolic
295 Prefixes" in the Gnus manual for details.
297 *** `L' and `I' in the summary buffer now take the symbolic prefix
298 `a' to add the score rule to the "all.SCORE" file.
300 *** `gnus-simplify-subject-functions' variable to allow greater
301 control over simplification.
303 *** `A T' -- new command for fetching the current thread.
305 *** `/ T' -- new command for including the current thread in the
308 *** `M-RET' is a new Message command for breaking cited text.
310 *** \\1-expressions are now valid in `nnmail-split-methods'.
312 *** The `custom-face-lookup' function has been removed.
313 If you used this function in your initialization files, you must
314 rewrite them to use `face-spec-set' instead.
316 *** Canceling now uses the current select method. Symbolic prefix
317 `a' forces normal posting method.
319 *** New command to translate M******** sm*rtq**t*s into proper text
322 *** For easier debugging of nntp, you can set `nntp-record-commands'
325 *** nntp now uses ~/.authinfo, a .netrc-like file, for controlling
326 where and how to send AUTHINFO to NNTP servers.
328 *** A command for editing group parameters from the summary buffer
331 *** A history of where mails have been split is available.
333 *** A new article date command has been added -- `article-date-iso8601'.
335 *** Subjects can be simplified when threading by setting
336 `gnus-score-thread-simplify'.
338 *** A new function for citing in Message has been added --
339 `message-cite-original-without-signature'.
341 *** `article-strip-all-blank-lines' -- new article command.
343 *** A new Message command to kill to the end of the article has
346 *** A minimum adaptive score can be specified by using the
347 `gnus-adaptive-word-minimum' variable.
349 *** The "lapsed date" article header can be kept continually
350 updated by the `gnus-start-date-timer' command.
352 *** Web listserv archives can be read with the nnlistserv backend.
354 *** Old dejanews archives can now be read by nnweb.
356 *** `gnus-posting-styles' has been re-activated.
358 ** Changes to TeX and LaTeX mode
360 *** The new variable `tex-start-options-string' can be used to give
361 options for the TeX run. The default value causes TeX to run in
362 nonstopmode. For an interactive TeX run set it to nil or "".
364 *** The command `tex-feed-input' sends input to the Tex Shell. In a
365 TeX buffer it is bound to the keys C-RET, C-c RET, and C-c C-m (some
366 of these keys may not work on all systems). For instance, if you run
367 TeX interactively and if the TeX run stops because of an error, you
368 can continue it without leaving the TeX buffer by typing C-RET.
370 *** The Tex Shell Buffer is now in `compilation-shell-minor-mode'.
371 All error-parsing commands of the Compilation major mode are available
372 but bound to keys that don't collide with the shell. Thus you can use
373 the Tex Shell for command line executions like a usual shell.
375 *** The commands `tex-validate-region' and `tex-validate-buffer' check
376 the matching of braces and $'s. The errors are listed in a *Occur*
377 buffer and you can use C-c C-c or mouse-2 to go to a particular
380 ** Changes to RefTeX mode
382 *** The table of contents buffer can now also display labels and
383 file boundaries in addition to sections. Use `l', `i', and `c' keys.
385 *** Labels derived from context (the section heading) are now
386 lowercase by default. To make the label legal in LaTeX, latin-1
387 characters will lose their accent. All Mule characters will be
388 removed from the label.
390 *** The automatic display of cross reference information can also use
391 a window instead of the echo area. See variable `reftex-auto-view-crossref'.
393 *** kpsewhich can be used by RefTeX to find TeX and BibTeX files. See the
394 customization group `reftex-finding-files'.
396 *** The option `reftex-bibfile-ignore-list' has been renamed to
397 `reftex-bibfile-ignore-regexps' and indeed can be fed with regular
400 *** Multiple Selection buffers are now hidden buffers.
402 ** New/deleted modes and packages
404 *** The package snmp-mode.el provides major modes for editing SNMP and
405 SNMPv2 MIBs. It has entries on `auto-mode-alist'.
407 *** The package sql.el provides a major mode, M-x sql-mode, for
408 editing SQL files, and M-x sql-interactive-mode for interacting with
409 SQL interpreters. It has an entry on `auto-mode-alist'.
411 *** ispell4.el has been deleted. It got in the way of ispell.el and
412 this was hard to fix reliably. It has long been obsolete -- use
413 Ispell 3.1 and ispell.el.
416 * MS-DOS changes in Emacs 20.4
418 ** Emacs compiled for MS-DOS now supports MULE features better.
419 This includes support for display of all ISO 8859-N character sets,
420 conversion to and from IBM codepage encoding of non-ASCII characters,
421 and automatic setup of the MULE environment at startup. For details,
422 check out the section `MS-DOS and MULE' in the manual.
424 The MS-DOS installation procedure automatically configures and builds
425 Emacs with input method support if it finds an unpacked Leim
426 distribution when the config.bat script is run.
428 ** Formerly, the value of lpr-command did not affect printing on
429 MS-DOS unless print-region-function was set to nil, but now it
430 controls whether an external program is invoked or output is written
431 directly to a printer port. Similarly, in the previous version of
432 Emacs, the value of ps-lpr-command did not affect PostScript printing
433 on MS-DOS unless ps-printer-name was set to something other than a
434 string (eg. t or `pipe'), but now it controls whether an external
435 program is used. (These changes were made so that configuration of
436 printing variables would be almost identical across all platforms.)
438 ** In the previous version of Emacs, PostScript and non-PostScript
439 output was piped to external programs, but because most print programs
440 available for MS-DOS and MS-Windows cannot read data from their standard
441 input, on those systems the data to be output is now written to a
442 temporary file whose name is passed as the last argument to the external
445 An exception is made for `print', a standard program on Windows NT,
446 and `nprint', a standard program on Novell Netware. For both of these
447 programs, the command line is constructed in the appropriate syntax
448 automatically, using only the value of printer-name or ps-printer-name
449 as appropriate--the value of the relevant `-switches' variable is
450 ignored, as both programs have no useful switches.
452 ** The value of the variable dos-printer (cf. dos-ps-printer), if it has
453 a value, overrides the value of printer-name (cf. ps-printer-name), on
454 MS-DOS and MS-Windows only. This has been true since version 20.3, but
455 was not documented clearly before.
457 ** All the Emacs games now work on MS-DOS terminals.
458 This includes Tetris and Snake.
461 * Lisp changes in Emacs 20.4
463 ** New functions line-beginning-position and line-end-position
464 return the position of the beginning or end of the current line.
465 They both accept an optional argument, which has the same
466 meaning as the argument to beginning-of-line or end-of-line.
468 ** find-file and allied functions now have an optional argument
469 WILDCARD. If this is non-nil, they do wildcard processing,
470 and visit all files that match the wildcard pattern.
472 ** Changes in the file-attributes function.
474 *** The file size returned by file-attributes may be an integer or a float.
475 It is an integer if the size fits in a Lisp integer, float otherwise.
477 *** The inode number returned by file-attributes may be an integer (if
478 the number fits in a Lisp integer) or a cons cell containing two
481 ** The new function directory-files-and-attributes returns a list of
482 files in a directory and their attributes. It accepts the same
483 arguments as directory-files and has similar semantics, except that
484 file names and attributes are returned.
486 ** The new function file-attributes-lessp is a helper function for
487 sorting the list generated by directory-files-and-attributes. It
488 accepts two arguments, each a list of a file name and its attributes.
489 It compares the file names of each according to string-lessp and
492 ** The new function file-expand-wildcards expands a wildcard-pattern
493 to produce a list of existing files that match the pattern.
495 ** New functions for base64 conversion:
497 The function base64-encode-region converts a part of the buffer
498 into the base64 code used in MIME. base64-decode-region
499 performs the opposite conversion. Line-breaking is supported
502 Functions base64-encode-string and base64-decode-string do a similar
503 job on the text in a string. They return the value as a new string.
506 The new function process-running-child-p
507 will tell you if a subprocess has given control of its
508 terminal to its own child process.
510 ** interrupt-process and such functions have a new feature:
511 when the second argument is `lambda', they send a signal
512 to the running child of the subshell, if any, but if the shell
513 itself owns its terminal, no signal is sent.
515 ** There are new widget types `plist' and `alist' which can
516 be used for customizing variables whose values are plists or alists.
518 ** easymenu.el now understands `:key-sequence' and `:style button'.
519 :included is an alias for :visible.
521 easy-menu-add-item now understands the values returned by
522 easy-menu-remove-item and easy-menu-item-present-p. This can be used
523 to move or copy menu entries.
525 ** Multibyte editing changes
527 *** The definitions of sref and char-bytes are changed. Now, sref is
528 an alias of aref and char-bytes always returns 1. This change is to
529 make some Emacs Lisp code which works on 20.2 and earlier also
530 work on the latest Emacs. Such code uses a combination of sref and
531 char-bytes in a loop typically as below:
532 (setq char (sref str idx)
533 idx (+ idx (char-bytes idx)))
534 The byte-compiler now warns that this is obsolete.
536 If you want to know how many bytes a specific multibyte character
537 (say, CH) occupies in a multibyte buffer, use this code:
538 (charset-bytes (char-charset ch))
540 *** In multibyte mode, when you narrow a buffer to some region, and the
541 region is preceded or followed by non-ASCII codes, inserting or
542 deleting at the head or the end of the region may signal this error:
544 Byte combining across boundary of accessible buffer text inhibited
546 This is to avoid some bytes being combined together into a character
549 *** The functions find-charset-region and find-charset-string include
550 `unknown' in the returned list in the following cases:
551 o The current buffer or the target string is unibyte and
552 contains 8-bit characters.
553 o The current buffer or the target string is multibyte and
554 contains invalid characters.
556 *** The functions decode-coding-region and encode-coding-region remove
557 text properties of the target region. Ideally, they should correctly
558 preserve text properties, but for the moment, it's hard. Removing
559 text properties is better than preserving them in a less-than-correct
562 *** prefer-coding-system sets EOL conversion of default coding systems.
563 If the argument to prefer-coding-system specifies a certain type of
564 end of line conversion, the default coding systems set by
565 prefer-coding-system will specify that conversion type for end of line.
567 *** The new function thai-compose-string can be used to properly
568 compose Thai characters in a string.
570 ** The primitive `define-prefix-command' now takes an optional third
571 argument NAME, which should be a string. It supplies the menu name
572 for the created keymap. Keymaps created in order to be displayed as
573 menus should always use the third argument.
575 ** The meanings of optional second arguments for read-char,
576 read-event, and read-char-exclusive are flipped. Now the second
577 arguments are INHERIT-INPUT-METHOD. These functions use the current
578 input method (if any) if and only if INHERIT-INPUT-METHOD is non-nil.
580 ** The new function clear-this-command-keys empties out the contents
581 of the vector that (this-command-keys) returns. This is useful in
582 programs that read passwords, to prevent the passwords from echoing
583 inadvertently as part of the next command in certain cases.
585 ** The new macro `with-temp-message' displays a temporary message in
586 the echo area, while executing some Lisp code. Like `progn', it
587 returns the value of the last form, but it also restores the previous
590 (with-temp-message MESSAGE &rest BODY)
592 ** The function `require' now takes an optional third argument
593 NOERROR. If it is non-nil, then there is no error if the
594 requested feature cannot be loaded.
596 ** In the function modify-face, an argument of (nil) for the
597 foreground color, background color or stipple pattern
598 means to clear out that attribute.
600 ** The `outer-window-id' frame property of an X frame
601 gives the window number of the outermost X window for the frame.
603 ** Temporary buffers made with with-output-to-temp-buffer are now
604 read-only by default, and normally use the major mode Help mode
605 unless you put them in some other non-Fundamental mode before the
606 end of with-output-to-temp-buffer.
608 ** The new functions gap-position and gap-size return information on
609 the gap of the current buffer.
611 ** The new functions position-bytes and byte-to-position provide a way
612 to convert between character positions and byte positions in the
615 ** vc.el defines two new macros, `edit-vc-file' and `with-vc-file', to
616 facilitate working with version-controlled files from Lisp programs.
617 These macros check out a given file automatically if needed, and check
618 it back in after any modifications have been made.
622 * Installation Changes in Emacs 20.3
624 ** The default value of load-path now includes most subdirectories of
625 the site-specific directories /usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp and
626 /usr/local/share/emacs/VERSION/site-lisp, in addition to those
627 directories themselves. Both immediate subdirectories and
628 subdirectories multiple levels down are added to load-path.
630 Not all subdirectories are included, though. Subdirectories whose
631 names do not start with a letter or digit are excluded.
632 Subdirectories named RCS or CVS are excluded. Also, a subdirectory
633 which contains a file named `.nosearch' is excluded. You can use
634 these methods to prevent certain subdirectories from being searched.
636 Emacs finds these subdirectories and adds them to load-path when it
637 starts up. While it would be cleaner to find the subdirectories each
638 time Emacs loads a file, that would be much slower.
640 This feature is an incompatible change. If you have stored some Emacs
641 Lisp files in a subdirectory of the site-lisp directory specifically
642 to prevent them from being used, you will need to rename the
643 subdirectory to start with a non-alphanumeric character, or create a
644 `.nosearch' file in it, in order to continue to achieve the desired
647 ** Emacs no longer includes an old version of the C preprocessor from
648 GCC. This was formerly used to help compile Emacs with C compilers
649 that had limits on the significant length of an identifier, but in
650 fact we stopped supporting such compilers some time ago.
653 * Changes in Emacs 20.3
655 ** The new command C-x z (repeat) repeats the previous command
656 including its argument. If you repeat the z afterward,
657 it repeats the command additional times; thus, you can
658 perform many repetitions with one keystroke per repetition.
660 ** Emacs now supports "selective undo" which undoes only within a
661 specified region. To do this, set point and mark around the desired
662 region and type C-u C-x u (or C-u C-_). You can then continue undoing
663 further, within the same region, by repeating the ordinary undo
664 command C-x u or C-_. This will keep undoing changes that were made
665 within the region you originally specified, until either all of them
666 are undone, or it encounters a change which crosses the edge of that
669 In Transient Mark mode, undoing when a region is active requests
672 ** If you specify --unibyte when starting Emacs, then all buffers are
673 unibyte, except when a Lisp program specifically creates a multibyte
674 buffer. Setting the environment variable EMACS_UNIBYTE has the same
675 effect. The --no-unibyte option overrides EMACS_UNIBYTE and directs
676 Emacs to run normally in multibyte mode.
678 The option --unibyte does not affect the reading of Emacs Lisp files,
679 though. If you want a Lisp file to be read in unibyte mode, use
680 -*-unibyte: t;-*- on its first line. That will force Emacs to
681 load that file in unibyte mode, regardless of how Emacs was started.
683 ** toggle-enable-multibyte-characters no longer has a key binding and
684 no longer appears in the menu bar. We've realized that changing the
685 enable-multibyte-characters variable in an existing buffer is
686 something that most users not do.
688 ** You can specify a coding system to use for the next cut or paste
689 operations through the window system with the command C-x RET X.
690 The coding system can make a difference for communication with other
693 C-x RET x specifies a coding system for all subsequent cutting and
696 ** You can specify the printer to use for commands that do printing by
697 setting the variable `printer-name'. Just what a printer name looks
698 like depends on your operating system. You can specify a different
699 printer for the PostScript printing commands by setting
702 ** Emacs now supports on-the-fly spell checking by the means of a
703 minor mode. It is called M-x flyspell-mode. You don't have to remember
704 any other special commands to use it, and you will hardly notice it
705 except when you make a spelling error. Flyspell works by highlighting
706 incorrect words as soon as they are completed or as soon as the cursor
709 Flyspell mode works with whichever dictionary you have selected for
710 Ispell in Emacs. In TeX mode, it understands TeX syntax so as not
711 to be confused by TeX commands.
713 You can correct a misspelled word by editing it into something
714 correct. You can also correct it, or accept it as correct, by
715 clicking on the word with Mouse-2; that gives you a pop-up menu
716 of various alternative replacements and actions.
718 Flyspell mode also proposes "automatic" corrections. M-TAB replaces
719 the current misspelled word with a possible correction. If several
720 corrections are made possible, M-TAB cycles through them in
721 alphabetical order, or in order of decreasing likelihood if
722 flyspell-sort-corrections is nil.
724 Flyspell mode also flags an error when a word is repeated, if
725 flyspell-mark-duplications-flag is non-nil.
727 ** Changes in input method usage.
729 Now you can use arrow keys (right, left, down, up) for selecting among
730 the alternatives just the same way as you do by C-f, C-b, C-n, and C-p
733 You can use the ENTER key to accept the current conversion.
735 If you type TAB to display a list of alternatives, you can select one
736 of the alternatives with Mouse-2.
738 The meaning of the variable `input-method-verbose-flag' is changed so
739 that you can set it to t, nil, `default', or `complex-only'.
741 If the value is nil, extra guidance is never given.
743 If the value is t, extra guidance is always given.
745 If the value is `complex-only', extra guidance is always given only
746 when you are using complex input methods such as chinese-py.
748 If the value is `default' (this is the default), extra guidance is
749 given in the following case:
750 o When you are using a complex input method.
751 o When you are using a simple input method but not in the minibuffer.
753 If you are using Emacs through a very slow line, setting
754 input-method-verbose-flag to nil or to complex-only is a good choice,
755 and if you are using an input method you are not familiar with,
756 setting it to t is helpful.
758 The old command select-input-method is now called set-input-method.
760 In the language environment "Korean", you can use the following
762 Shift-SPC toggle-korean-input-method
763 C-F9 quail-hangul-switch-symbol-ksc
764 F9 quail-hangul-switch-hanja
765 These key bindings are canceled when you switch to another language
768 ** The minibuffer history of file names now records the specified file
769 names, not the entire minibuffer input. For example, if the
770 minibuffer starts out with /usr/foo/, you might type in /etc/passwd to
775 which stands for the file /etc/passwd.
777 Formerly, this used to put /usr/foo//etc/passwd in the history list.
778 Now this puts just /etc/passwd in the history list.
780 ** If you are root, Emacs sets backup-by-copying-when-mismatch to t
781 at startup, so that saving a file will be sure to preserve
784 ** find-func.el can now also find the place of definition of Emacs
785 Lisp variables in user-loaded libraries.
787 ** C-x r t (string-rectangle) now deletes the existing rectangle
788 contents before inserting the specified string on each line.
790 ** There is a new command delete-whitespace-rectangle
791 which deletes whitespace starting from a particular column
792 in all the lines on a rectangle. The column is specified
793 by the left edge of the rectangle.
795 ** You can now store a number into a register with C-u NUMBER C-x r n REG,
796 increment it by INC with C-u INC C-x r + REG (to increment by one, omit
797 C-u INC), and insert it in the buffer with C-x r g REG. This is useful
798 for writing keyboard macros.
800 ** The new command M-x speedbar displays a frame in which directories,
801 files, and tags can be displayed, manipulated, and jumped to. The
802 frame defaults to 20 characters in width, and is the same height as
803 the frame that it was started from. Some major modes define
804 additional commands for the speedbar, including Rmail, GUD/GDB, and
807 ** query-replace-regexp is now bound to C-M-%.
809 ** In Transient Mark mode, when the region is active, M-x
810 query-replace and the other replace commands now operate on the region
813 ** M-x write-region, when used interactively, now asks for
814 confirmation before overwriting an existing file. When you call
815 the function from a Lisp program, a new optional argument CONFIRM
816 says whether to ask for confirmation in this case.
818 ** If you use find-file-literally and the file is already visited
819 non-literally, the command asks you whether to revisit the file
820 literally. If you say no, it signals an error.
822 ** Major modes defined with the "derived mode" feature
823 now use the proper name for the mode hook: WHATEVER-mode-hook.
824 Formerly they used the name WHATEVER-mode-hooks, but that is
825 inconsistent with Emacs conventions.
827 ** shell-command-on-region (and shell-command) reports success or
828 failure if the command produces no output.
830 ** Set focus-follows-mouse to nil if your window system or window
831 manager does not transfer focus to another window when you just move
834 ** mouse-menu-buffer-maxlen has been renamed to
835 mouse-buffer-menu-maxlen to be consistent with the other related
836 function and variable names.
838 ** The new variable auto-coding-alist specifies coding systems for
839 reading specific files. This has higher priority than
840 file-coding-system-alist.
842 ** If you set the variable unibyte-display-via-language-environment to
843 t, then Emacs displays non-ASCII characters are displayed by
844 converting them to the equivalent multibyte characters according to
845 the current language environment. As a result, they are displayed
846 according to the current fontset.
848 ** C-q's handling of codes in the range 0200 through 0377 is changed.
850 The codes in the range 0200 through 0237 are inserted as one byte of
851 that code regardless of the values of nonascii-translation-table and
852 nonascii-insert-offset.
854 For the codes in the range 0240 through 0377, if
855 enable-multibyte-characters is non-nil and nonascii-translation-table
856 nor nonascii-insert-offset can't convert them to valid multibyte
857 characters, they are converted to Latin-1 characters.
859 ** If you try to find a file that is not read-accessible, you now get
860 an error, rather than an empty buffer and a warning.
862 ** In the minibuffer history commands M-r and M-s, an upper case
863 letter in the regular expression forces case-sensitive search.
865 ** In the *Help* buffer, cross-references to commands and variables
866 are inferred and hyperlinked. Use C-h m in Help mode for the relevant
869 ** M-x apropos-command, with a prefix argument, no longer looks for
870 user option variables--instead it looks for noninteractive functions.
872 Meanwhile, the command apropos-variable normally searches for
873 user option variables; with a prefix argument, it looks at
874 all variables that have documentation.
876 ** When you type a long line in the minibuffer, and the minibuffer
877 shows just one line, automatically scrolling works in a special way
878 that shows you overlap with the previous line of text. The variable
879 minibuffer-scroll-overlap controls how many characters of overlap
880 it should show; the default is 20.
882 Meanwhile, Resize Minibuffer mode is still available; in that mode,
883 the minibuffer grows taller (up to a point) as needed to show the whole
886 ** The new command M-x customize-changed-options lets you customize
887 all the options whose meanings or default values have changed in
888 recent Emacs versions. You specify a previous Emacs version number as
889 argument, and the command creates a customization buffer showing all
890 the customizable options which were changed since that version.
891 Newly added options are included as well.
893 If you don't specify a particular version number argument,
894 then the customization buffer shows all the customizable options
895 for which Emacs versions of changes are recorded.
897 This function is also bound to the Changed Options entry in the
900 ** When you run M-x grep with a prefix argument, it figures out
901 the tag around point and puts that into the default grep command.
903 ** The new command M-* (pop-tag-mark) pops back through a history of
904 buffer positions from which M-. or other tag-finding commands were
907 ** The new variable comment-padding specifies the number of spaces
908 that `comment-region' will insert before the actual text of the comment.
911 ** In Fortran mode the characters `.', `_' and `$' now have symbol
912 syntax, not word syntax. Fortran mode now supports `imenu' and has
913 new commands fortran-join-line (M-^) and fortran-narrow-to-subprogram
914 (C-x n d). M-q can be used to fill a statement or comment block
917 ** GUD now supports jdb, the Java debugger, and pdb, the Python debugger.
919 ** If you set the variable add-log-keep-changes-together to a non-nil
920 value, the command `C-x 4 a' will automatically notice when you make
921 two entries in one day for one file, and combine them.
923 ** You can use the command M-x diary-mail-entries to mail yourself a
924 reminder about upcoming diary entries. See the documentation string
925 for a sample shell script for calling this function automatically
930 *** All you need to do to enable use of the Desktop package, is to set
931 the variable desktop-enable to t with Custom.
933 *** Minor modes are now restored. Which minor modes are restored
934 and how modes are restored is controlled by `desktop-minor-mode-table'.
936 ** There is no need to do anything special, now, to enable Gnus to
937 read and post multi-lingual articles.
939 ** Outline mode has now support for showing hidden outlines when
940 doing an isearch. In order for this to happen search-invisible should
941 be set to open (the default). If an isearch match is inside a hidden
942 outline the outline is made visible. If you continue pressing C-s and
943 the match moves outside the formerly invisible outline, the outline is
944 made invisible again.
946 ** Mail reading and sending changes
948 *** The Rmail e command now switches to displaying the whole header of
949 the message before it lets you edit the message. This is so that any
950 changes you make in the header will not be lost if you subsequently
953 *** The w command in Rmail, which writes the message body into a file,
954 now works in the summary buffer as well. (The command to delete the
955 summary buffer is now Q.) The default file name for the w command, if
956 the message has no subject, is stored in the variable
957 rmail-default-body-file.
959 *** Most of the commands and modes that operate on mail and netnews no
960 longer depend on the value of mail-header-separator. Instead, they
961 handle whatever separator the buffer happens to use.
963 *** If you set mail-signature to a value which is not t, nil, or a string,
964 it should be an expression. When you send a message, this expression
965 is evaluated to insert the signature.
967 *** The new Lisp library feedmail.el (version 8) enhances processing of
968 outbound email messages. It works in coordination with other email
969 handling packages (e.g., rmail, VM, gnus) and is responsible for
970 putting final touches on messages and actually submitting them for
971 transmission. Users of the emacs program "fakemail" might be
972 especially interested in trying feedmail.
974 feedmail is not enabled by default. See comments at the top of
975 feedmail.el for set-up instructions. Among the bigger features
976 provided by feedmail are:
978 **** you can park outgoing messages into a disk-based queue and
979 stimulate sending some or all of them later (handy for laptop users);
980 there is also a queue for draft messages
982 **** you can get one last look at the prepped outbound message and
983 be prompted for confirmation
985 **** does smart filling of address headers
987 **** can generate a MESSAGE-ID: line and a DATE: line; the date can be
988 the time the message was written or the time it is being sent; this
989 can make FCC copies more closely resemble copies that recipients get
991 **** you can specify an arbitrary function for actually transmitting
992 the message; included in feedmail are interfaces for /bin/[r]mail,
993 /usr/lib/sendmail, and Emacs Lisp smtpmail; it's easy to write a new
994 function for something else (10-20 lines of Lisp code).
998 *** The Dired function dired-do-toggle, which toggles marked and unmarked
999 files, is now bound to "t" instead of "T".
1001 *** dired-at-point has been added to ffap.el. It allows one to easily
1002 run Dired on the directory name at point.
1004 *** Dired has a new command: %g. It searches the contents of
1005 files in the directory and marks each file that contains a match
1006 for a specified regexp.
1010 *** New option vc-ignore-vc-files lets you turn off version control
1013 *** VC Dired has been completely rewritten. It is now much
1014 faster, especially for CVS, and works very similar to ordinary
1017 VC Dired is invoked by typing C-x v d and entering the name of the
1018 directory to display. By default, VC Dired gives you a recursive
1019 listing of all files at or below the given directory which are
1020 currently locked (for CVS, all files not up-to-date are shown).
1022 You can change the listing format by setting vc-dired-recurse to nil,
1023 then it shows only the given directory, and you may also set
1024 vc-dired-terse-display to nil, then it shows all files under version
1025 control plus the names of any subdirectories, so that you can type `i'
1026 on such lines to insert them manually, as in ordinary Dired.
1028 All Dired commands operate normally in VC Dired, except for `v', which
1029 is redefined as the version control prefix. That means you may type
1030 `v l', `v =' etc. to invoke `vc-print-log', `vc-diff' and the like on
1031 the file named in the current Dired buffer line. `v v' invokes
1032 `vc-next-action' on this file, or on all files currently marked.
1034 The new command `v t' (vc-dired-toggle-terse-mode) allows you to
1035 toggle between terse display (only locked files) and full display (all
1036 VC files plus subdirectories). There is also a special command,
1037 `* l', to mark all files currently locked.
1039 Giving a prefix argument to C-x v d now does the same thing as in
1040 ordinary Dired: it allows you to supply additional options for the ls
1041 command in the minibuffer, to fine-tune VC Dired's output.
1043 *** Under CVS, if you merge changes from the repository into a working
1044 file, and CVS detects conflicts, VC now offers to start an ediff
1045 session to resolve them.
1047 Alternatively, you can use the new command `vc-resolve-conflicts' to
1048 resolve conflicts in a file at any time. It works in any buffer that
1049 contains conflict markers as generated by rcsmerge (which is what CVS
1052 *** You can now transfer changes between branches, using the new
1053 command vc-merge (C-x v m). It is implemented for RCS and CVS. When
1054 you invoke it in a buffer under version-control, you can specify
1055 either an entire branch or a pair of versions, and the changes on that
1056 branch or between the two versions are merged into the working file.
1057 If this results in any conflicts, they may be resolved interactively,
1060 ** Changes in Font Lock
1062 *** The face and variable previously known as font-lock-reference-face
1063 are now called font-lock-constant-face to better reflect their typical
1064 use for highlighting constants and labels. (Its face properties are
1065 unchanged.) The variable font-lock-reference-face remains for now for
1066 compatibility reasons, but its value is font-lock-constant-face.
1068 ** Frame name display changes
1070 *** The command set-frame-name lets you set the name of the current
1071 frame. You can use the new command select-frame-by-name to select and
1072 raise a frame; this is mostly useful on character-only terminals, or
1073 when many frames are invisible or iconified.
1075 *** On character-only terminal (not a window system), changing the
1076 frame name is now reflected on the mode line and in the Buffers/Frames
1079 ** Comint (subshell) changes
1081 *** In Comint modes, the commands to kill, stop or interrupt a
1082 subjob now also kill pending input. This is for compatibility
1083 with ordinary shells, where the signal characters do this.
1085 *** There are new commands in Comint mode.
1087 C-c C-x fetches the "next" line from the input history;
1088 that is, the line after the last line you got.
1089 You can use this command to fetch successive lines, one by one.
1091 C-c SPC accumulates lines of input. More precisely, it arranges to
1092 send the current line together with the following line, when you send
1095 C-c C-a if repeated twice consecutively now moves to the process mark,
1096 which separates the pending input from the subprocess output and the
1097 previously sent input.
1099 C-c M-r now runs comint-previous-matching-input-from-input;
1100 it searches for a previous command, using the current pending input
1101 as the search string.
1103 *** New option compilation-scroll-output can be set to scroll
1104 automatically in compilation-mode windows.
1108 *** Multiline macros are now handled, both as they affect indentation,
1109 and as recognized syntax. New syntactic symbol cpp-macro-cont is
1110 assigned to second and subsequent lines of a multiline macro
1113 *** A new style "user" which captures all non-hook-ified
1114 (i.e. top-level) .emacs file variable settings and customizations.
1115 Style "cc-mode" is an alias for "user" and is deprecated. "gnu"
1116 style is still the default however.
1118 *** "java" style now conforms to Sun's JDK coding style.
1120 *** There are new commands c-beginning-of-defun, c-end-of-defun which
1121 are alternatives which you could bind to C-M-a and C-M-e if you prefer
1122 them. They do not have key bindings by default.
1124 *** New and improved implementations of M-a (c-beginning-of-statement)
1125 and M-e (c-end-of-statement).
1127 *** C++ namespace blocks are supported, with new syntactic symbols
1128 namespace-open, namespace-close, and innamespace.
1130 *** File local variable settings of c-file-style and c-file-offsets
1131 makes the style variables local to that buffer only.
1133 *** New indentation functions c-lineup-close-paren,
1134 c-indent-one-line-block, c-lineup-dont-change.
1136 *** Improvements (hopefully!) to the way CC Mode is loaded. You
1137 should now be able to do a (require 'cc-mode) to get the entire
1138 package loaded properly for customization in your .emacs file. A new
1139 variable c-initialize-on-load controls this and is t by default.
1141 ** Changes to hippie-expand.
1143 *** New customization variable `hippie-expand-dabbrev-skip-space'. If
1144 non-nil, trailing spaces may be included in the abbreviation to search for,
1145 which then gives the same behavior as the original `dabbrev-expand'.
1147 *** New customization variable `hippie-expand-dabbrev-as-symbol'. If
1148 non-nil, characters of syntax '_' is considered part of the word when
1149 expanding dynamically.
1151 *** New customization variable `hippie-expand-no-restriction'. If
1152 non-nil, narrowed buffers are widened before they are searched.
1154 *** New customization variable `hippie-expand-only-buffers'. If
1155 non-empty, buffers searched are restricted to the types specified in
1156 this list. Useful for example when constructing new special-purpose
1157 expansion functions with `make-hippie-expand-function'.
1159 *** Text properties of the expansion are no longer copied.
1161 ** Changes in BibTeX mode.
1163 *** Any titleword matching a regexp in the new variable
1164 bibtex-autokey-titleword-ignore (case sensitive) is ignored during
1165 automatic key generation. This replaces variable
1166 bibtex-autokey-titleword-first-ignore, which only checked for matches
1167 against the first word in the title.
1169 *** Autokey generation now uses all words from the title, not just
1170 capitalized words. To avoid conflicts with existing customizations,
1171 bibtex-autokey-titleword-ignore is set up such that words starting with
1172 lowerkey characters will still be ignored. Thus, if you want to use
1173 lowercase words from the title, you will have to overwrite the
1174 bibtex-autokey-titleword-ignore standard setting.
1176 *** Case conversion of names and title words for automatic key
1177 generation is more flexible. Variable bibtex-autokey-preserve-case is
1178 replaced by bibtex-autokey-titleword-case-convert and
1179 bibtex-autokey-name-case-convert.
1181 ** Changes in vcursor.el.
1183 *** Support for character terminals is available: there is a new keymap
1184 and the vcursor will appear as an arrow between buffer text. A
1185 variable `vcursor-interpret-input' allows input from the vcursor to be
1186 entered exactly as if typed. Numerous functions, including
1187 `vcursor-compare-windows', have been rewritten to improve consistency
1188 in the selection of windows and corresponding keymaps.
1190 *** vcursor options can now be altered with M-x customize under the
1191 Editing group once the package is loaded.
1193 *** Loading vcursor now does not define keys by default, as this is
1194 generally a bad side effect. Use M-x customize to set
1195 vcursor-key-bindings to t to restore the old behavior.
1197 *** vcursor-auto-disable can be `copy', which turns off copying from the
1198 vcursor, but doesn't disable it, after any non-vcursor command.
1202 *** You can now spell check comments and strings in the current
1203 buffer with M-x ispell-comments-and-strings. Comments and strings
1204 are identified by syntax tables in effect.
1206 *** Generic region skipping implemented.
1207 A single buffer can be broken into a number of regions where text will
1208 and will not be checked. The definitions of the regions can be user
1209 defined. New applications and improvements made available by this
1212 o URLs are automatically skipped
1213 o EMail message checking is vastly improved.
1215 *** Ispell can highlight the erroneous word even on non-window terminals.
1217 ** Changes to RefTeX mode
1219 RefTeX has been updated in order to make it more usable with very
1220 large projects (like a several volume math book). The parser has been
1221 re-written from scratch. To get maximum speed from RefTeX, check the
1222 section `Optimizations' in the manual.
1224 *** New recursive parser.
1226 The old version of RefTeX created a single large buffer containing the
1227 entire multifile document in order to parse the document. The new
1228 recursive parser scans the individual files.
1230 *** Parsing only part of a document.
1232 Reparsing of changed document parts can now be made faster by enabling
1233 partial scans. To use this feature, read the documentation string of
1234 the variable `reftex-enable-partial-scans' and set the variable to t.
1236 (setq reftex-enable-partial-scans t)
1238 *** Storing parsing information in a file.
1240 This can improve startup times considerably. To turn it on, use
1242 (setq reftex-save-parse-info t)
1244 *** Using multiple selection buffers
1246 If the creation of label selection buffers is too slow (this happens
1247 for large documents), you can reuse these buffers by setting
1249 (setq reftex-use-multiple-selection-buffers t)
1251 *** References to external documents.
1253 The LaTeX package `xr' allows to cross-reference labels in external
1254 documents. RefTeX can provide information about the external
1255 documents as well. To use this feature, set up the \externaldocument
1256 macros required by the `xr' package and rescan the document with
1257 RefTeX. The external labels can then be accessed with the `x' key in
1258 the selection buffer provided by `reftex-reference' (bound to `C-c )').
1259 The `x' key also works in the table of contents buffer.
1261 *** Many more labeled LaTeX environments are recognized by default.
1263 The built-in command list now covers all the standard LaTeX commands,
1264 and all of the major packages included in the LaTeX distribution.
1266 Also, RefTeX now understands the \appendix macro and changes
1267 the enumeration of sections in the *toc* buffer accordingly.
1269 *** Mouse support for selection and *toc* buffers
1271 The mouse can now be used to select items in the selection and *toc*
1272 buffers. See also the new option `reftex-highlight-selection'.
1274 *** New keymaps for selection and table of contents modes.
1276 The selection processes for labels and citation keys, and the table of
1277 contents buffer now have their own keymaps: `reftex-select-label-map',
1278 `reftex-select-bib-map', `reftex-toc-map'. The selection processes
1279 have a number of new keys predefined. In particular, TAB lets you
1280 enter a label with completion. Check the on-the-fly help (press `?'
1281 at the selection prompt) or read the Info documentation to find out
1284 *** Support for the varioref package
1286 The `v' key in the label selection buffer toggles \ref versus \vref.
1290 Three new hooks can be used to redefine the way labels, references,
1291 and citations are created. These hooks are
1292 `reftex-format-label-function', `reftex-format-ref-function',
1293 `reftex-format-cite-function'.
1295 *** Citations outside LaTeX
1297 The command `reftex-citation' may also be used outside LaTeX (e.g. in
1298 a mail buffer). See the Info documentation for details.
1300 *** Short context is no longer fontified.
1302 The short context in the label menu no longer copies the
1303 fontification from the text in the buffer. If you prefer it to be
1306 (setq reftex-refontify-context t)
1308 ** file-cache-minibuffer-complete now accepts a prefix argument.
1309 With a prefix argument, it does not try to do completion of
1310 the file name within its directory; it only checks for other
1311 directories that contain the same file name.
1313 Thus, given the file name Makefile, and assuming that a file
1314 Makefile.in exists in the same directory, ordinary
1315 file-cache-minibuffer-complete will try to complete Makefile to
1316 Makefile.in and will therefore never look for other directories that
1317 have Makefile. A prefix argument tells it not to look for longer
1318 names such as Makefile.in, so that instead it will look for other
1319 directories--just as if the name were already complete in its present
1322 ** New modes and packages
1324 *** There is a new alternative major mode for Perl, Cperl mode.
1325 It has many more features than Perl mode, and some people prefer
1326 it, but some do not.
1328 *** There is a new major mode, M-x vhdl-mode, for editing files of VHDL
1331 *** M-x which-function-mode enables a minor mode that displays the
1332 current function name continuously in the mode line, as you move
1335 Which Function mode is effective in major modes which support Imenu.
1337 *** Gametree is a major mode for editing game analysis trees. The author
1338 uses it for keeping notes about his postal Chess games, but it should
1339 be helpful for other two-player games as well, as long as they have an
1340 established system of notation similar to Chess.
1342 *** The new minor mode checkdoc-minor-mode provides Emacs Lisp
1343 documentation string checking for style and spelling. The style
1344 guidelines are found in the Emacs Lisp programming manual.
1346 *** The net-utils package makes some common networking features
1347 available in Emacs. Some of these functions are wrappers around
1348 system utilities (ping, nslookup, etc.); others are implementations of
1349 simple protocols (finger, whois) in Emacs Lisp. There are also
1350 functions to make simple connections to TCP/IP ports for debugging and
1353 *** highlight-changes-mode is a minor mode that uses colors to
1354 identify recently changed parts of the buffer text.
1356 *** The new package `midnight' lets you specify things to be done
1357 within Emacs at midnight--by default, kill buffers that you have not
1358 used in a considerable time. To use this feature, customize
1359 the user option `midnight-mode' to t.
1361 *** The file generic-x.el defines a number of simple major modes.
1363 apache-generic-mode: For Apache and NCSA httpd configuration files
1364 samba-generic-mode: Samba configuration files
1365 fvwm-generic-mode: For fvwm initialization files
1366 x-resource-generic-mode: For X resource files
1367 hosts-generic-mode: For hosts files (.rhosts, /etc/hosts, etc.)
1368 mailagent-rules-generic-mode: For mailagent .rules files
1369 javascript-generic-mode: For JavaScript files
1370 vrml-generic-mode: For VRML files
1371 java-manifest-generic-mode: For Java MANIFEST files
1372 java-properties-generic-mode: For Java property files
1373 mailrc-generic-mode: For .mailrc files
1375 Platform-specific modes:
1377 prototype-generic-mode: For Solaris/Sys V prototype files
1378 pkginfo-generic-mode: For Solaris/Sys V pkginfo files
1379 alias-generic-mode: For C shell alias files
1380 inf-generic-mode: For MS-Windows INF files
1381 ini-generic-mode: For MS-Windows INI files
1382 reg-generic-mode: For MS-Windows Registry files
1383 bat-generic-mode: For MS-Windows BAT scripts
1384 rc-generic-mode: For MS-Windows Resource files
1385 rul-generic-mode: For InstallShield scripts
1388 * Lisp changes in Emacs 20.3 since the Emacs Lisp Manual was published
1390 ** If you want a Lisp file to be read in unibyte mode,
1391 use -*-unibyte: t;-*- on its first line.
1392 That will force Emacs to read that file in unibyte mode.
1393 Otherwise, the file will be loaded and byte-compiled in multibyte mode.
1395 Thus, each lisp file is read in a consistent way regardless of whether
1396 you started Emacs with --unibyte, so that a Lisp program gives
1397 consistent results regardless of how Emacs was started.
1399 ** The new function assoc-default is useful for searching an alist,
1400 and using a default value if the key is not found there. You can
1401 specify a comparison predicate, so this function is useful for
1402 searching comparing a string against an alist of regular expressions.
1404 ** The functions unibyte-char-to-multibyte and
1405 multibyte-char-to-unibyte convert between unibyte and multibyte
1406 character codes, in a way that is appropriate for the current language
1409 ** The functions read-event, read-char and read-char-exclusive now
1410 take two optional arguments. PROMPT, if non-nil, specifies a prompt
1411 string. SUPPRESS-INPUT-METHOD, if non-nil, says to disable the
1412 current input method for reading this one event.
1414 ** Two new variables print-escape-nonascii and print-escape-multibyte
1415 now control whether to output certain characters as
1416 backslash-sequences. print-escape-nonascii applies to single-byte
1417 non-ASCII characters; print-escape-multibyte applies to multibyte
1418 characters. Both of these variables are used only when printing
1419 in readable fashion (prin1 uses them, princ does not).
1422 * Lisp changes in Emacs 20.3 before the Emacs Lisp Manual was published
1424 ** Compiled Emacs Lisp files made with the modified "MBSK" version
1425 of Emacs 20.2 do not work in Emacs 20.3.
1427 ** Buffer positions are now measured in characters, as they were
1428 in Emacs 19 and before. This means that (forward-char 1)
1429 always increases point by 1.
1431 The function chars-in-region now just subtracts its arguments. It is
1432 considered obsolete. The function char-boundary-p has been deleted.
1434 See below for additional changes relating to multibyte characters.
1436 ** defcustom, defface and defgroup now accept the keyword `:version'.
1437 Use this to specify in which version of Emacs a certain variable's
1438 default value changed. For example,
1440 (defcustom foo-max 34 "*Maximum number of foo's allowed."
1445 (defgroup foo-group nil "The foo group."
1448 If an entire new group is added or the variables in it have the
1449 default values changed, then just add a `:version' to that group. It
1450 is recommended that new packages added to the distribution contain a
1451 `:version' in the top level group.
1453 This information is used to control the customize-changed-options command.
1455 ** It is now an error to change the value of a symbol whose name
1456 starts with a colon--if it is interned in the standard obarray.
1458 However, setting such a symbol to its proper value, which is that
1459 symbol itself, is not an error. This is for the sake of programs that
1460 support previous Emacs versions by explicitly setting these variables
1463 If you set the variable keyword-symbols-constant-flag to nil,
1464 this error is suppressed, and you can set these symbols to any
1467 ** There is a new debugger command, R.
1468 It evaluates an expression like e, but saves the result
1469 in the buffer *Debugger-record*.
1471 ** Frame-local variables.
1473 You can now make a variable local to various frames. To do this, call
1474 the function make-variable-frame-local; this enables frames to have
1475 local bindings for that variable.
1477 These frame-local bindings are actually frame parameters: you create a
1478 frame-local binding in a specific frame by calling
1479 modify-frame-parameters and specifying the variable name as the
1482 Buffer-local bindings take precedence over frame-local bindings.
1483 Thus, if the current buffer has a buffer-local binding, that binding is
1484 active; otherwise, if the selected frame has a frame-local binding,
1485 that binding is active; otherwise, the default binding is active.
1487 It would not be hard to implement window-local bindings, but it is not
1488 clear that this would be very useful; windows tend to come and go in a
1489 very transitory fashion, so that trying to produce any specific effect
1490 through a window-local binding would not be very robust.
1492 ** `sregexq' and `sregex' are two new functions for constructing
1493 "symbolic regular expressions." These are Lisp expressions that, when
1494 evaluated, yield conventional string-based regexps. The symbolic form
1495 makes it easier to construct, read, and maintain complex patterns.
1496 See the documentation in sregex.el.
1498 ** parse-partial-sexp's return value has an additional element which
1499 is used to pass information along if you pass it to another call to
1500 parse-partial-sexp, starting its scan where the first call ended.
1501 The contents of this field are not yet finalized.
1503 ** eval-region now accepts a fourth optional argument READ-FUNCTION.
1504 If it is non-nil, that function is used instead of `read'.
1506 ** unload-feature by default removes the feature's functions from
1507 known hooks to avoid trouble, but a package providing FEATURE can
1508 define a hook FEATURE-unload-hook to be run by unload-feature instead.
1510 ** read-from-minibuffer no longer returns the argument DEFAULT-VALUE
1511 when the user enters empty input. It now returns the null string, as
1512 it did in Emacs 19. The default value is made available in the
1513 history via M-n, but it is not applied here as a default.
1515 The other, more specialized minibuffer-reading functions continue to
1516 return the default value (not the null string) when the user enters
1519 ** The new variable read-buffer-function controls which routine to use
1520 for selecting buffers. For example, if you set this variable to
1521 `iswitchb-read-buffer', iswitchb will be used to read buffer names.
1522 Other functions can also be used if they accept the same arguments as
1523 `read-buffer' and return the selected buffer name as a string.
1525 ** The new function read-passwd reads a password from the terminal,
1526 echoing a period for each character typed. It takes three arguments:
1527 a prompt string, a flag which says "read it twice to make sure", and a
1528 default password to use if the user enters nothing.
1530 ** The variable fill-nobreak-predicate gives major modes a way to
1531 specify not to break a line at certain places. Its value is a
1532 function which is called with no arguments, with point located at the
1533 place where a break is being considered. If the function returns
1534 non-nil, then the line won't be broken there.
1536 ** window-end now takes an optional second argument, UPDATE.
1537 If this is non-nil, then the function always returns an accurate
1538 up-to-date value for the buffer position corresponding to the
1539 end of the window, even if this requires computation.
1541 ** other-buffer now takes an optional argument FRAME
1542 which specifies which frame's buffer list to use.
1543 If it is nil, that means use the selected frame's buffer list.
1545 ** The new variable buffer-display-time, always local in every buffer,
1546 holds the value of (current-time) as of the last time that a window
1547 was directed to display this buffer.
1549 ** It is now meaningful to compare two window-configuration objects
1550 with `equal'. Two window-configuration objects are equal if they
1551 describe equivalent arrangements of windows, in the same frame--in
1552 other words, if they would give the same results if passed to
1553 set-window-configuration.
1555 ** compare-window-configurations is a new function that compares two
1556 window configurations loosely. It ignores differences in saved buffer
1557 positions and scrolling, and considers only the structure and sizes of
1558 windows and the choice of buffers to display.
1560 ** The variable minor-mode-overriding-map-alist allows major modes to
1561 override the key bindings of a minor mode. The elements of this alist
1562 look like the elements of minor-mode-map-alist: (VARIABLE . KEYMAP).
1564 If the VARIABLE in an element of minor-mode-overriding-map-alist has a
1565 non-nil value, the paired KEYMAP is active, and totally overrides the
1566 map (if any) specified for the same variable in minor-mode-map-alist.
1568 minor-mode-overriding-map-alist is automatically local in all buffers,
1569 and it is meant to be set by major modes.
1571 ** The function match-string-no-properties is like match-string
1572 except that it discards all text properties from the result.
1574 ** The function load-average now accepts an optional argument
1575 USE-FLOATS. If it is non-nil, the load average values are returned as
1576 floating point numbers, rather than as integers to be divided by 100.
1578 ** The new variable temporary-file-directory specifies the directory
1579 to use for creating temporary files. The default value is determined
1580 in a reasonable way for your operating system; on GNU and Unix systems
1581 it is based on the TMP and TMPDIR environment variables.
1585 *** easymenu.el now uses the new menu item format and supports the
1586 keywords :visible and :filter. The existing keyword :keys is now
1589 The variable `easy-menu-precalculate-equivalent-keybindings' controls
1590 a new feature which calculates keyboard equivalents for the menu when
1591 you define the menu. The default is t. If you rarely use menus, you
1592 can set the variable to nil to disable this precalculation feature;
1593 then the calculation is done only if you use the menu bar.
1595 *** A new format for menu items is supported.
1597 In a keymap, a key binding that has the format
1598 (STRING . REAL-BINDING) or (STRING HELP-STRING . REAL-BINDING)
1599 defines a menu item. Now a menu item definition may also be a list that
1600 starts with the symbol `menu-item'.
1603 (menu-item ITEM-NAME) or
1604 (menu-item ITEM-NAME REAL-BINDING . ITEM-PROPERTY-LIST)
1605 where ITEM-NAME is an expression which evaluates to the menu item
1606 string, and ITEM-PROPERTY-LIST has the form of a property list.
1607 The supported properties include
1609 :enable FORM Evaluate FORM to determine whether the
1611 :visible FORM Evaluate FORM to determine whether the
1612 item should appear in the menu.
1614 FILTER-FN is a function of one argument,
1615 which will be REAL-BINDING.
1616 It should return a binding to use instead.
1618 DESCRIPTION is a string that describes an equivalent keyboard
1619 binding for REAL-BINDING. DESCRIPTION is expanded with
1620 `substitute-command-keys' before it is used.
1621 :key-sequence KEY-SEQUENCE
1622 KEY-SEQUENCE is a key-sequence for an equivalent
1625 This means that the command normally has no
1626 keyboard equivalent.
1627 :help HELP HELP is the extra help string (not currently used).
1628 :button (TYPE . SELECTED)
1629 TYPE is :toggle or :radio.
1630 SELECTED is a form, to be evaluated, and its
1631 value says whether this button is currently selected.
1633 Buttons are at the moment only simulated by prefixes in the menu.
1634 Eventually ordinary X-buttons may be supported.
1636 (menu-item ITEM-NAME) defines unselectable item.
1640 *** The new event type `mouse-wheel' is generated by a wheel on a
1641 mouse (such as the MS Intellimouse). The event contains a delta that
1642 corresponds to the amount and direction that the wheel is rotated,
1643 which is typically used to implement a scroll or zoom. The format is:
1645 (mouse-wheel POSITION DELTA)
1647 where POSITION is a list describing the position of the event in the
1648 same format as a mouse-click event, and DELTA is a signed number
1649 indicating the number of increments by which the wheel was rotated. A
1650 negative DELTA indicates that the wheel was rotated backwards, towards
1651 the user, and a positive DELTA indicates that the wheel was rotated
1652 forward, away from the user.
1654 As of now, this event type is generated only on MS Windows.
1656 *** The new event type `drag-n-drop' is generated when a group of
1657 files is selected in an application outside of Emacs, and then dragged
1658 and dropped onto an Emacs frame. The event contains a list of
1659 filenames that were dragged and dropped, which are then typically
1660 loaded into Emacs. The format is:
1662 (drag-n-drop POSITION FILES)
1664 where POSITION is a list describing the position of the event in the
1665 same format as a mouse-click event, and FILES is the list of filenames
1666 that were dragged and dropped.
1668 As of now, this event type is generated only on MS Windows.
1670 ** Changes relating to multibyte characters.
1672 *** The variable enable-multibyte-characters is now read-only;
1673 any attempt to set it directly signals an error. The only way
1674 to change this value in an existing buffer is with set-buffer-multibyte.
1676 *** In a string constant, `\ ' now stands for "nothing at all". You
1677 can use it to terminate a hex escape which is followed by a character
1678 that could otherwise be read as part of the hex escape.
1680 *** String indices are now measured in characters, as they were
1681 in Emacs 19 and before.
1683 The function chars-in-string has been deleted.
1684 The function concat-chars has been renamed to `string'.
1686 *** The function set-buffer-multibyte sets the flag in the current
1687 buffer that says whether the buffer uses multibyte representation or
1688 unibyte representation. If the argument is nil, it selects unibyte
1689 representation. Otherwise it selects multibyte representation.
1691 This function does not change the contents of the buffer, viewed
1692 as a sequence of bytes. However, it does change the contents
1693 viewed as characters; a sequence of two bytes which is treated as
1694 one character when the buffer uses multibyte representation
1695 will count as two characters using unibyte representation.
1697 This function sets enable-multibyte-characters to record which
1698 representation is in use. It also adjusts various data in the buffer
1699 (including its markers, overlays and text properties) so that they are
1700 consistent with the new representation.
1702 *** string-make-multibyte takes a string and converts it to multibyte
1703 representation. Most of the time, you don't need to care
1704 about the representation, because Emacs converts when necessary;
1705 however, it makes a difference when you compare strings.
1707 The conversion of non-ASCII characters works by adding the value of
1708 nonascii-insert-offset to each character, or by translating them
1709 using the table nonascii-translation-table.
1711 *** string-make-unibyte takes a string and converts it to unibyte
1712 representation. Most of the time, you don't need to care about the
1713 representation, but it makes a difference when you compare strings.
1715 The conversion from multibyte to unibyte representation
1716 loses information; the only time Emacs performs it automatically
1717 is when inserting a multibyte string into a unibyte buffer.
1719 *** string-as-multibyte takes a string, and returns another string
1720 which contains the same bytes, but treats them as multibyte.
1722 *** string-as-unibyte takes a string, and returns another string
1723 which contains the same bytes, but treats them as unibyte.
1725 *** The new function compare-strings lets you compare
1726 portions of two strings. Unibyte strings are converted to multibyte,
1727 so that a unibyte string can match a multibyte string.
1728 You can specify whether to ignore case or not.
1730 *** assoc-ignore-case now uses compare-strings so that
1731 it can treat unibyte and multibyte strings as equal.
1733 *** Regular expression operations and buffer string searches now
1734 convert the search pattern to multibyte or unibyte to accord with the
1735 buffer or string being searched.
1737 One consequence is that you cannot always use \200-\377 inside of
1738 [...] to match all non-ASCII characters. This does still work when
1739 searching or matching a unibyte buffer or string, but not when
1740 searching or matching a multibyte string. Unfortunately, there is no
1741 obvious choice of syntax to use within [...] for that job. But, what
1742 you want is just to match all non-ASCII characters, the regular
1743 expression [^\0-\177] works for it.
1745 *** Structure of coding system changed.
1747 All coding systems (including aliases and subsidiaries) are named
1748 by symbols; the symbol's `coding-system' property is a vector
1749 which defines the coding system. Aliases share the same vector
1750 as the principal name, so that altering the contents of this
1751 vector affects the principal name and its aliases. You can define
1752 your own alias name of a coding system by the function
1753 define-coding-system-alias.
1755 The coding system definition includes a property list of its own. Use
1756 the new functions `coding-system-get' and `coding-system-put' to
1757 access such coding system properties as post-read-conversion,
1758 pre-write-conversion, character-translation-table-for-decode,
1759 character-translation-table-for-encode, mime-charset, and
1760 safe-charsets. For instance, (coding-system-get 'iso-latin-1
1761 'mime-charset) gives the corresponding MIME-charset parameter
1764 Among the coding system properties listed above, safe-charsets is new.
1765 The value of this property is a list of character sets which this
1766 coding system can correctly encode and decode. For instance:
1767 (coding-system-get 'iso-latin-1 'safe-charsets) => (ascii latin-iso8859-1)
1769 Here, "correctly encode" means that the encoded character sets can
1770 also be handled safely by systems other than Emacs as far as they
1771 are capable of that coding system. Though, Emacs itself can encode
1772 the other character sets and read it back correctly.
1774 *** The new function select-safe-coding-system can be used to find a
1775 proper coding system for encoding the specified region or string.
1776 This function requires a user interaction.
1778 *** The new functions find-coding-systems-region and
1779 find-coding-systems-string are helper functions used by
1780 select-safe-coding-system. They return a list of all proper coding
1781 systems to encode a text in some region or string. If you don't want
1782 a user interaction, use one of these functions instead of
1783 select-safe-coding-system.
1785 *** The explicit encoding and decoding functions, such as
1786 decode-coding-region and encode-coding-string, now set
1787 last-coding-system-used to reflect the actual way encoding or decoding
1790 *** The new function detect-coding-with-language-environment can be
1791 used to detect a coding system of text according to priorities of
1792 coding systems used by some specific language environment.
1794 *** The functions detect-coding-region and detect-coding-string always
1795 return a list if the arg HIGHEST is nil. Thus, if only ASCII
1796 characters are found, they now return a list of single element
1797 `undecided' or its subsidiaries.
1799 *** The new functions coding-system-change-eol-conversion and
1800 coding-system-change-text-conversion can be used to get a different
1801 coding system than what specified only in how end-of-line or text is
1804 *** The new function set-selection-coding-system can be used to set a
1805 coding system for communicating with other X clients.
1807 *** The function `map-char-table' now passes as argument only valid
1808 character codes, plus generic characters that stand for entire
1809 character sets or entire subrows of a character set. In other words,
1810 each time `map-char-table' calls its FUNCTION argument, the key value
1811 either will be a valid individual character code, or will stand for a
1812 range of characters.
1814 *** The new function `char-valid-p' can be used for checking whether a
1815 Lisp object is a valid character code or not.
1817 *** The new function `charset-after' returns a charset of a character
1818 in the current buffer at position POS.
1820 *** Input methods are now implemented using the variable
1821 input-method-function. If this is non-nil, its value should be a
1822 function; then, whenever Emacs reads an input event that is a printing
1823 character with no modifier bits, it calls that function, passing the
1824 event as an argument. Often this function will read more input, first
1825 binding input-method-function to nil.
1827 The return value should be a list of the events resulting from input
1828 method processing. These events will be processed sequentially as
1829 input, before resorting to unread-command-events. Events returned by
1830 the input method function are not passed to the input method function,
1831 not even if they are printing characters with no modifier bits.
1833 The input method function is not called when reading the second and
1834 subsequent events of a key sequence.
1836 *** You can customize any language environment by using
1837 set-language-environment-hook and exit-language-environment-hook.
1839 The hook `exit-language-environment-hook' should be used to undo
1840 customizations that you made with set-language-environment-hook. For
1841 instance, if you set up a special key binding for a specific language
1842 environment by set-language-environment-hook, you should set up
1843 exit-language-environment-hook to restore the normal key binding.
1847 * Changes in Emacs 20.1
1849 ** Emacs has a new facility for customization of its many user
1850 options. It is called M-x customize. With this facility you can look
1851 at the many user options in an organized way; they are grouped into a
1854 M-x customize also knows what sorts of values are legitimate for each
1855 user option and ensures that you don't use invalid values.
1857 With M-x customize, you can set options either for the present Emacs
1858 session or permanently. (Permanent settings are stored automatically
1859 in your .emacs file.)
1861 ** Scroll bars are now on the left side of the window.
1862 You can change this with M-x customize-option scroll-bar-mode.
1864 ** The mode line no longer includes the string `Emacs'.
1865 This makes more space in the mode line for other information.
1867 ** When you select a region with the mouse, it is highlighted
1868 immediately afterward. At that time, if you type the DELETE key, it
1871 The BACKSPACE key, and the ASCII character DEL, do not do this; they
1872 delete the character before point, as usual.
1874 ** In an incremental search the whole current match is highlighted
1875 on terminals which support this. (You can disable this feature
1876 by setting search-highlight to nil.)
1878 ** In the minibuffer, in some cases, you can now use M-n to
1879 insert the default value into the minibuffer as text. In effect,
1880 the default value (if the minibuffer routines know it) is tacked
1881 onto the history "in the future". (The more normal use of the
1882 history list is to use M-p to insert minibuffer input used in the
1885 ** In Text mode, now only blank lines separate paragraphs.
1886 This makes it possible to get the full benefit of Adaptive Fill mode
1887 in Text mode, and other modes derived from it (such as Mail mode).
1888 TAB in Text mode now runs the command indent-relative; this
1889 makes a practical difference only when you use indented paragraphs.
1891 As a result, the old Indented Text mode is now identical to Text mode,
1892 and is an alias for it.
1894 If you want spaces at the beginning of a line to start a paragraph,
1895 use the new mode, Paragraph Indent Text mode.
1897 ** Scrolling changes
1899 *** Scroll commands to scroll a whole screen now preserve the screen
1900 position of the cursor, if scroll-preserve-screen-position is non-nil.
1902 In this mode, if you scroll several screens back and forth, finishing
1903 on the same screen where you started, the cursor goes back to the line
1906 *** If you set scroll-conservatively to a small number, then when you
1907 move point a short distance off the screen, Emacs will scroll the
1908 screen just far enough to bring point back on screen, provided that
1909 does not exceed `scroll-conservatively' lines.
1911 *** The new variable scroll-margin says how close point can come to the
1912 top or bottom of a window. It is a number of screen lines; if point
1913 comes within that many lines of the top or bottom of the window, Emacs
1914 recenters the window.
1916 ** International character set support (MULE)
1918 Emacs now supports a wide variety of international character sets,
1919 including European variants of the Latin alphabet, as well as Chinese,
1920 Devanagari (Hindi and Marathi), Ethiopian, Greek, IPA, Japanese,
1921 Korean, Lao, Russian, Thai, Tibetan, and Vietnamese scripts. These
1922 features have been merged from the modified version of Emacs known as
1923 MULE (for "MULti-lingual Enhancement to GNU Emacs")
1925 Users of these scripts have established many more-or-less standard
1926 coding systems for storing files. Emacs uses a single multibyte
1927 character encoding within Emacs buffers; it can translate from a wide
1928 variety of coding systems when reading a file and can translate back
1929 into any of these coding systems when saving a file.
1931 Keyboards, even in the countries where these character sets are used,
1932 generally don't have keys for all the characters in them. So Emacs
1933 supports various "input methods", typically one for each script or
1934 language, to make it possible to type them.
1936 The Emacs internal multibyte encoding represents a non-ASCII
1937 character as a sequence of bytes in the range 0200 through 0377.
1939 The new prefix key C-x RET is used for commands that pertain
1940 to multibyte characters, coding systems, and input methods.
1942 You can disable multibyte character support as follows:
1944 (setq-default enable-multibyte-characters nil)
1946 Calling the function standard-display-european turns off multibyte
1947 characters, unless you specify a non-nil value for the second
1948 argument, AUTO. This provides compatibility for people who are
1949 already using standard-display-european to continue using unibyte
1950 characters for their work until they want to change.
1954 An input method is a kind of character conversion which is designed
1955 specifically for interactive input. In Emacs, typically each language
1956 has its own input method (though sometimes several languages which use
1957 the same characters can share one input method). Some languages
1958 support several input methods.
1960 The simplest kind of input method works by mapping ASCII letters into
1961 another alphabet. This is how the Greek and Russian input methods
1964 A more powerful technique is composition: converting sequences of
1965 characters into one letter. Many European input methods use
1966 composition to produce a single non-ASCII letter from a sequence which
1967 consists of a letter followed by diacritics. For example, a' is one
1968 sequence of two characters that might be converted into a single
1971 The input methods for syllabic scripts typically use mapping followed
1972 by conversion. The input methods for Thai and Korean work this way.
1973 First, letters are mapped into symbols for particular sounds or tone
1974 marks; then, sequences of these which make up a whole syllable are
1975 mapped into one syllable sign--most often a "composite character".
1977 None of these methods works very well for Chinese and Japanese, so
1978 they are handled specially. First you input a whole word using
1979 phonetic spelling; then, after the word is in the buffer, Emacs
1980 converts it into one or more characters using a large dictionary.
1982 Since there is more than one way to represent a phonetically spelled
1983 word using Chinese characters, Emacs can only guess which one to use;
1984 typically these input methods give you a way to say "guess again" if
1985 the first guess is wrong.
1987 *** The command C-x RET m (toggle-enable-multibyte-characters)
1988 turns multibyte character support on or off for the current buffer.
1990 If multibyte character support is turned off in a buffer, then each
1991 byte is a single character, even codes 0200 through 0377--exactly as
1992 they did in Emacs 19.34. This includes the features for support for
1993 the European characters, ISO Latin-1 and ISO Latin-2.
1995 However, there is no need to turn off multibyte character support to
1996 use ISO Latin-1 or ISO Latin-2; the Emacs multibyte character set
1997 includes all the characters in these character sets, and Emacs can
1998 translate automatically to and from either one.
2000 *** Visiting a file in unibyte mode.
2002 Turning off multibyte character support in the buffer after visiting a
2003 file with multibyte code conversion will display the multibyte
2004 sequences already in the buffer, byte by byte. This is probably not
2007 If you want to edit a file of unibyte characters (Latin-1, for
2008 example), you can do it by specifying `no-conversion' as the coding
2009 system when reading the file. This coding system also turns off
2010 multibyte characters in that buffer.
2012 If you turn off multibyte character support entirely, this turns off
2013 character conversion as well.
2015 *** Displaying international characters on X Windows.
2017 A font for X typically displays just one alphabet or script.
2018 Therefore, displaying the entire range of characters Emacs supports
2019 requires using many fonts.
2021 Therefore, Emacs now supports "fontsets". Each fontset is a
2022 collection of fonts, each assigned to a range of character codes.
2024 A fontset has a name, like a font. Individual fonts are defined by
2025 the X server; fontsets are defined within Emacs itself. But once you
2026 have defined a fontset, you can use it in a face or a frame just as
2027 you would use a font.
2029 If a fontset specifies no font for a certain character, or if it
2030 specifies a font that does not exist on your system, then it cannot
2031 display that character. It will display an empty box instead.
2033 The fontset height and width are determined by the ASCII characters
2034 (that is, by the font in the fontset which is used for ASCII
2037 *** Defining fontsets.
2039 Emacs does not use any fontset by default. Its default font is still
2040 chosen as in previous versions. You can tell Emacs to use a fontset
2041 with the `-fn' option or the `Font' X resource.
2043 Emacs creates a standard fontset automatically according to the value
2044 of standard-fontset-spec. This fontset's short name is
2045 `fontset-standard'. Bold, italic, and bold-italic variants of the
2046 standard fontset are created automatically.
2048 If you specify a default ASCII font with the `Font' resource or `-fn'
2049 argument, a fontset is generated from it. This works by replacing the
2050 FOUNDRY, FAMILY, ADD_STYLE, and AVERAGE_WIDTH fields of the font name
2051 with `*' then using this to specify a fontset. This fontset's short
2052 name is `fontset-startup'.
2054 Emacs checks resources of the form Fontset-N where N is 0, 1, 2...
2055 The resource value should have this form:
2056 FONTSET-NAME, [CHARSET-NAME:FONT-NAME]...
2057 FONTSET-NAME should have the form of a standard X font name, except:
2058 * most fields should be just the wild card "*".
2059 * the CHARSET_REGISTRY field should be "fontset"
2060 * the CHARSET_ENCODING field can be any nickname of the fontset.
2061 The construct CHARSET-NAME:FONT-NAME can be repeated any number
2062 of times; each time specifies the font for one character set.
2063 CHARSET-NAME should be the name of a character set, and FONT-NAME
2064 should specify an actual font to use for that character set.
2066 Each of these fontsets has an alias which is made from the
2067 last two font name fields, CHARSET_REGISTRY and CHARSET_ENCODING.
2068 You can refer to the fontset by that alias or by its full name.
2070 For any character sets that you don't mention, Emacs tries to choose a
2071 font by substituting into FONTSET-NAME. For instance, with the
2073 Emacs*Fontset-0: -*-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-24-*-*-*-*-*-fontset-24
2074 the font for ASCII is generated as below:
2075 -*-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-24-*-ISO8859-1
2076 Here is the substitution rule:
2077 Change CHARSET_REGISTRY and CHARSET_ENCODING to that of the charset
2078 defined in the variable x-charset-registries. For instance, ASCII has
2079 the entry (ascii . "ISO8859-1") in this variable. Then, reduce
2080 sequences of wild cards -*-...-*- with a single wildcard -*-.
2081 (This is to prevent use of auto-scaled fonts.)
2083 The function which processes the fontset resource value to create the
2084 fontset is called create-fontset-from-fontset-spec. You can also call
2085 that function explicitly to create a fontset.
2087 With the X resource Emacs.Font, you can specify a fontset name just
2088 like an actual font name. But be careful not to specify a fontset
2089 name in a wildcard resource like Emacs*Font--that tries to specify the
2090 fontset for other purposes including menus, and they cannot handle
2093 *** The command M-x set-language-environment sets certain global Emacs
2094 defaults for a particular choice of language.
2096 Selecting a language environment typically specifies a default input
2097 method and which coding systems to recognize automatically when
2098 visiting files. However, it does not try to reread files you have
2099 already visited; the text in those buffers is not affected. The
2100 language environment may also specify a default choice of coding
2101 system for new files that you create.
2103 It makes no difference which buffer is current when you use
2104 set-language-environment, because these defaults apply globally to the
2105 whole Emacs session.
2107 For example, M-x set-language-environment RET Latin-1 RET
2108 chooses the Latin-1 character set. In the .emacs file, you can do this
2109 with (set-language-environment "Latin-1").
2111 *** The command C-x RET f (set-buffer-file-coding-system)
2112 specifies the file coding system for the current buffer. This
2113 specifies what sort of character code translation to do when saving
2114 the file. As an argument, you must specify the name of one of the
2115 coding systems that Emacs supports.
2117 *** The command C-x RET c (universal-coding-system-argument)
2118 lets you specify a coding system when you read or write a file.
2119 This command uses the minibuffer to read a coding system name.
2120 After you exit the minibuffer, the specified coding system
2121 is used for *the immediately following command*.
2123 So if the immediately following command is a command to read or
2124 write a file, it uses the specified coding system for that file.
2126 If the immediately following command does not use the coding system,
2127 then C-x RET c ultimately has no effect.
2129 For example, C-x RET c iso-8859-1 RET C-x C-f temp RET
2130 visits the file `temp' treating it as ISO Latin-1.
2132 *** You can specify the coding system for a file using the -*-
2133 construct. Include `coding: CODINGSYSTEM;' inside the -*-...-*-
2134 to specify use of coding system CODINGSYSTEM. You can also
2135 specify the coding system in a local variable list at the end
2138 *** The command C-x RET t (set-terminal-coding-system) specifies
2139 the coding system for terminal output. If you specify a character
2140 code for terminal output, all characters output to the terminal are
2141 translated into that character code.
2143 This feature is useful for certain character-only terminals built in
2144 various countries to support the languages of those countries.
2146 By default, output to the terminal is not translated at all.
2148 *** The command C-x RET k (set-keyboard-coding-system) specifies
2149 the coding system for keyboard input.
2151 Character code translation of keyboard input is useful for terminals
2152 with keys that send non-ASCII graphic characters--for example,
2153 some terminals designed for ISO Latin-1 or subsets of it.
2155 By default, keyboard input is not translated at all.
2157 Character code translation of keyboard input is similar to using an
2158 input method, in that both define sequences of keyboard input that
2159 translate into single characters. However, input methods are designed
2160 to be convenient for interactive use, while the code translations are
2161 designed to work with terminals.
2163 *** The command C-x RET p (set-buffer-process-coding-system)
2164 specifies the coding system for input and output to a subprocess.
2165 This command applies to the current buffer; normally, each subprocess
2166 has its own buffer, and thus you can use this command to specify
2167 translation to and from a particular subprocess by giving the command
2168 in the corresponding buffer.
2170 By default, process input and output are not translated at all.
2172 *** The variable file-name-coding-system specifies the coding system
2173 to use for encoding file names before operating on them.
2174 It is also used for decoding file names obtained from the system.
2176 *** The command C-\ (toggle-input-method) activates or deactivates
2177 an input method. If no input method has been selected before, the
2178 command prompts for you to specify the language and input method you
2181 C-u C-\ (select-input-method) lets you switch to a different input
2182 method. C-h C-\ (or C-h I) describes the current input method.
2184 *** Some input methods remap the keyboard to emulate various keyboard
2185 layouts commonly used for particular scripts. How to do this
2186 remapping properly depends on your actual keyboard layout. To specify
2187 which layout your keyboard has, use M-x quail-set-keyboard-layout.
2189 *** The command C-h C (describe-coding-system) displays
2190 the coding systems currently selected for various purposes, plus
2191 related information.
2193 *** The command C-h h (view-hello-file) displays a file called
2194 HELLO, which has examples of text in many languages, using various
2197 *** The command C-h L (describe-language-support) displays
2198 information about the support for a particular language.
2199 You specify the language as an argument.
2201 *** The mode line now contains a letter or character that identifies
2202 the coding system used in the visited file. It normally follows the
2205 A dash indicates the default state of affairs: no code conversion
2206 (except CRLF => newline if appropriate). `=' means no conversion
2207 whatsoever. The ISO 8859 coding systems are represented by digits
2208 1 through 9. Other coding systems are represented by letters:
2210 A alternativnyj (Russian)
2212 C cn-gb-2312 (Chinese)
2213 C iso-2022-cn (Chinese)
2214 D in-is13194-devanagari (Indian languages)
2215 E euc-japan (Japanese)
2216 I iso-2022-cjk or iso-2022-ss2 (Chinese, Japanese, Korean)
2217 J junet (iso-2022-7) or old-jis (iso-2022-jp-1978-irv) (Japanese)
2218 K euc-korea (Korean)
2221 S shift_jis (Japanese)
2224 V viscii or vscii (Vietnamese)
2225 i iso-2022-lock (Chinese, Japanese, Korean)
2226 k iso-2022-kr (Korean)
2230 When you are using a character-only terminal (not a window system),
2231 two additional characters appear in between the dash and the file
2232 coding system. These two characters describe the coding system for
2233 keyboard input, and the coding system for terminal output.
2235 *** The new variable rmail-file-coding-system specifies the code
2236 conversion to use for RMAIL files. The default value is nil.
2238 When you read mail with Rmail, each message is decoded automatically
2239 into Emacs' internal format. This has nothing to do with
2240 rmail-file-coding-system. That variable controls reading and writing
2241 Rmail files themselves.
2243 *** The new variable sendmail-coding-system specifies the code
2244 conversion for outgoing mail. The default value is nil.
2246 Actually, there are three different ways of specifying the coding system
2249 - If you use C-x RET f in the mail buffer, that takes priority.
2250 - Otherwise, if you set sendmail-coding-system non-nil, that specifies it.
2251 - Otherwise, the default coding system for new files is used,
2252 if that is non-nil. That comes from your language environment.
2253 - Otherwise, Latin-1 is used.
2255 *** The command C-h t (help-with-tutorial) accepts a prefix argument
2256 to specify the language for the tutorial file. Currently, English,
2257 Japanese, Korean and Thai are supported. We welcome additional
2260 ** An easy new way to visit a file with no code or format conversion
2261 of any kind: Use M-x find-file-literally. There is also a command
2262 insert-file-literally which inserts a file into the current buffer
2263 without any conversion.
2265 ** C-q's handling of octal character codes is changed.
2266 You can now specify any number of octal digits.
2267 RET terminates the digits and is discarded;
2268 any other non-digit terminates the digits and is then used as input.
2270 ** There are new commands for looking up Info documentation for
2271 functions, variables and file names used in your programs.
2273 Type M-x info-lookup-symbol to look up a symbol in the buffer at point.
2274 Type M-x info-lookup-file to look up a file in the buffer at point.
2276 Precisely which Info files are used to look it up depends on the major
2277 mode. For example, in C mode, the GNU libc manual is used.
2279 ** M-TAB in most programming language modes now runs the command
2280 complete-symbol. This command performs completion on the symbol name
2281 in the buffer before point.
2283 With a numeric argument, it performs completion based on the set of
2284 symbols documented in the Info files for the programming language that
2287 With no argument, it does completion based on the current tags tables,
2288 just like the old binding of M-TAB (complete-tag).
2290 ** File locking works with NFS now.
2292 The lock file for FILENAME is now a symbolic link named .#FILENAME,
2293 in the same directory as FILENAME.
2295 This means that collision detection between two different machines now
2296 works reasonably well; it also means that no file server or directory
2297 can become a bottleneck.
2299 The new method does have drawbacks. It means that collision detection
2300 does not operate when you edit a file in a directory where you cannot
2301 create new files. Collision detection also doesn't operate when the
2302 file server does not support symbolic links. But these conditions are
2303 rare, and the ability to have collision detection while using NFS is
2304 so useful that the change is worth while.
2306 When Emacs or a system crashes, this may leave behind lock files which
2307 are stale. So you may occasionally get warnings about spurious
2308 collisions. When you determine that the collision is spurious, just
2309 tell Emacs to go ahead anyway.
2311 ** If you wish to use Show Paren mode to display matching parentheses,
2312 it is no longer sufficient to load paren.el. Instead you must call
2315 ** If you wish to use Delete Selection mode to replace a highlighted
2316 selection when you insert new text, it is no longer sufficient to load
2317 delsel.el. Instead you must call the function delete-selection-mode.
2319 ** If you wish to use Partial Completion mode to complete partial words
2320 within symbols or filenames, it is no longer sufficient to load
2321 complete.el. Instead you must call the function partial-completion-mode.
2323 ** If you wish to use uniquify to rename buffers for you,
2324 it is no longer sufficient to load uniquify.el. You must also
2325 set uniquify-buffer-name-style to one of the non-nil legitimate values.
2327 ** Changes in View mode.
2329 *** Several new commands are available in View mode.
2330 Do H in view mode for a list of commands.
2332 *** There are two new commands for entering View mode:
2333 view-file-other-frame and view-buffer-other-frame.
2335 *** Exiting View mode does a better job of restoring windows to their
2338 *** New customization variable view-scroll-auto-exit. If non-nil,
2339 scrolling past end of buffer makes view mode exit.
2341 *** New customization variable view-exits-all-viewing-windows. If
2342 non-nil, view-mode will at exit restore all windows viewing buffer,
2343 not just the selected window.
2345 *** New customization variable view-read-only. If non-nil, visiting a
2346 read-only file automatically enters View mode, and toggle-read-only
2347 turns View mode on or off.
2349 *** New customization variable view-remove-frame-by-deleting controls
2350 how to remove a not needed frame at view mode exit. If non-nil,
2351 delete the frame, if nil make an icon of it.
2353 ** C-x v l, the command to print a file's version control log,
2354 now positions point at the entry for the file's current branch version.
2356 ** C-x v =, the command to compare a file with the last checked-in version,
2357 has a new feature. If the file is currently not locked, so that it is
2358 presumably identical to the last checked-in version, the command now asks
2359 which version to compare with.
2361 ** When using hideshow.el, incremental search can temporarily show hidden
2362 blocks if a match is inside the block.
2364 The block is hidden again if the search is continued and the next match
2365 is outside the block. By customizing the variable
2366 isearch-hide-immediately you can choose to hide all the temporarily
2367 shown blocks only when exiting from incremental search.
2369 By customizing the variable hs-isearch-open you can choose what kind
2370 of blocks to temporarily show during isearch: comment blocks, code
2371 blocks, all of them or none.
2373 ** The new command C-x 4 0 (kill-buffer-and-window) kills the
2374 current buffer and deletes the selected window. It asks for
2377 ** C-x C-w, which saves the buffer into a specified file name,
2378 now changes the major mode according to that file name.
2379 However, the mode will not be changed if
2380 (1) a local variables list or the `-*-' line specifies a major mode, or
2381 (2) the current major mode is a "special" mode,
2382 not suitable for ordinary files, or
2383 (3) the new file name does not particularly specify any mode.
2385 This applies to M-x set-visited-file-name as well.
2387 However, if you set change-major-mode-with-file-name to nil, then
2388 these commands do not change the major mode.
2390 ** M-x occur changes.
2392 *** If the argument to M-x occur contains upper case letters,
2393 it performs a case-sensitive search.
2395 *** In the *Occur* buffer made by M-x occur,
2396 if you type g or M-x revert-buffer, this repeats the search
2397 using the same regular expression and the same buffer as before.
2399 ** In Transient Mark mode, the region in any one buffer is highlighted
2400 in just one window at a time. At first, it is highlighted in the
2401 window where you set the mark. The buffer's highlighting remains in
2402 that window unless you select to another window which shows the same
2403 buffer--then the highlighting moves to that window.
2405 ** The feature to suggest key bindings when you use M-x now operates
2406 after the command finishes. The message suggesting key bindings
2407 appears temporarily in the echo area. The previous echo area contents
2408 come back after a few seconds, in case they contain useful information.
2410 ** Each frame now independently records the order for recently
2411 selected buffers, so that the default for C-x b is now based on the
2412 buffers recently selected in the selected frame.
2414 ** Outline mode changes.
2416 *** Outline mode now uses overlays (this is the former noutline.el).
2418 *** Incremental searches skip over invisible text in Outline mode.
2420 ** When a minibuffer window is active but not the selected window, if
2421 you try to use the minibuffer, you used to get a nested minibuffer.
2422 Now, this not only gives an error, it also cancels the minibuffer that
2425 The motive for this change is so that beginning users do not
2426 unknowingly move away from minibuffers, leaving them active, and then
2429 If you want to be able to have recursive minibuffers, you must
2430 set enable-recursive-minibuffers to non-nil.
2432 ** Changes in dynamic abbrevs.
2434 *** Expanding dynamic abbrevs with M-/ is now smarter about case
2435 conversion. If the expansion has mixed case not counting the first
2436 character, and the abbreviation matches the beginning of the expansion
2437 including case, then the expansion is copied verbatim.
2439 The expansion is also copied verbatim if the abbreviation itself has
2440 mixed case. And using SPC M-/ to copy an additional word always
2441 copies it verbatim except when the previous copied word is all caps.
2443 *** The values of `dabbrev-case-replace' and `dabbrev-case-fold-search'
2444 are no longer Lisp expressions. They have simply three possible
2447 `dabbrev-case-replace' has these three values: nil (don't preserve
2448 case), t (do), or `case-replace' (do like M-x query-replace).
2449 `dabbrev-case-fold-search' has these three values: nil (don't ignore
2450 case), t (do), or `case-fold-search' (do like search).
2452 ** Minibuffer history lists are truncated automatically now to a
2453 certain length. The variable history-length specifies how long they
2454 can be. The default value is 30.
2456 ** Changes in Mail mode.
2458 *** The key C-x m no longer runs the `mail' command directly.
2459 Instead, it runs the command `compose-mail', which invokes the mail
2460 composition mechanism you have selected with the variable
2461 `mail-user-agent'. The default choice of user agent is
2462 `sendmail-user-agent', which gives behavior compatible with the old
2465 C-x 4 m now runs compose-mail-other-window, and C-x 5 m runs
2466 compose-mail-other-frame.
2468 *** While composing a reply to a mail message, from Rmail, you can use
2469 the command C-c C-r to cite just the region from the message you are
2470 replying to. This copies the text which is the selected region in the
2471 buffer that shows the original message.
2473 *** The command C-c C-i inserts a file at the end of the message,
2474 with separator lines around the contents.
2476 *** The command M-x expand-mail-aliases expands all mail aliases
2477 in suitable mail headers. Emacs automatically extracts mail alias
2478 definitions from your mail alias file (e.g., ~/.mailrc). You do not
2479 need to expand mail aliases yourself before sending mail.
2481 *** New features in the mail-complete command.
2483 **** The mail-complete command now inserts the user's full name,
2484 for local users or if that is known. The variable mail-complete-style
2485 controls the style to use, and whether to do this at all.
2486 Its values are like those of mail-from-style.
2488 **** The variable mail-passwd-command lets you specify a shell command
2489 to run to fetch a set of password-entries that add to the ones in
2492 **** The variable mail-passwd-file now specifies a list of files to read
2493 to get the list of user ids. By default, one file is used:
2496 ** You can "quote" a file name to inhibit special significance of
2497 special syntax, by adding `/:' to the beginning. Thus, if you have a
2498 directory named `/foo:', you can prevent it from being treated as a
2499 reference to a remote host named `foo' by writing it as `/:/foo:'.
2501 Emacs uses this new construct automatically when necessary, such as
2502 when you start it with a working directory whose name might otherwise
2503 be taken to be magic.
2505 ** There is a new command M-x grep-find which uses find to select
2506 files to search through, and grep to scan them. The output is
2507 available in a Compile mode buffer, as with M-x grep.
2509 M-x grep now uses the -e option if the grep program supports that.
2510 (-e prevents problems if the search pattern starts with a dash.)
2512 ** In Dired, the & command now flags for deletion the files whose names
2513 suggest they are probably not needed in the long run.
2515 In Dired, * is now a prefix key for mark-related commands.
2517 new key dired.el binding old key
2518 ------- ---------------- -------
2519 * c dired-change-marks c
2521 * * dired-mark-executables * (binding deleted)
2522 * / dired-mark-directories / (binding deleted)
2523 * @ dired-mark-symlinks @ (binding deleted)
2525 * DEL dired-unmark-backward DEL
2526 * ? dired-unmark-all-files C-M-?
2527 * ! dired-unmark-all-marks
2528 * % dired-mark-files-regexp % m
2529 * C-n dired-next-marked-file M-}
2530 * C-p dired-prev-marked-file M-{
2534 *** When Rmail cannot convert your incoming mail into Babyl format, it
2535 saves the new mail in the file RMAILOSE.n, where n is an integer
2536 chosen to make a unique name. This way, Rmail will not keep crashing
2537 each time you run it.
2539 *** In Rmail, the variable rmail-summary-line-count-flag now controls
2540 whether to include the line count in the summary. Non-nil means yes.
2542 *** In Rmail summary buffers, d and C-d (the commands to delete
2543 messages) now take repeat counts as arguments. A negative argument
2544 means to move in the opposite direction.
2546 *** In Rmail, the t command now takes an optional argument which lets
2547 you specify whether to show the message headers in full or pruned.
2549 *** In Rmail, the new command w (rmail-output-body-to-file) writes
2550 just the body of the current message into a file, without the headers.
2551 It takes the file name from the message subject, by default, but you
2552 can edit that file name in the minibuffer before it is actually used
2557 *** nntp.el has been totally rewritten in an asynchronous fashion.
2559 *** Article prefetching functionality has been moved up into
2562 *** Scoring can now be performed with logical operators like
2563 `and', `or', `not', and parent redirection.
2565 *** Article washing status can be displayed in the
2568 *** gnus.el has been split into many smaller files.
2570 *** Suppression of duplicate articles based on Message-ID.
2572 (setq gnus-suppress-duplicates t)
2574 *** New variables for specifying what score and adapt files
2575 are to be considered home score and adapt files. See
2576 `gnus-home-score-file' and `gnus-home-adapt-files'.
2578 *** Groups can inherit group parameters from parent topics.
2580 *** Article editing has been revamped and is now usable.
2582 *** Signatures can be recognized in more intelligent fashions.
2583 See `gnus-signature-separator' and `gnus-signature-limit'.
2585 *** Summary pick mode has been made to look more nn-like.
2586 Line numbers are displayed and the `.' command can be
2587 used to pick articles.
2589 *** Commands for moving the .newsrc.eld from one server to
2590 another have been added.
2592 `M-x gnus-change-server'
2594 *** A way to specify that "uninteresting" fields be suppressed when
2595 generating lines in buffers.
2597 *** Several commands in the group buffer can be undone with
2600 *** Scoring can be done on words using the new score type `w'.
2602 *** Adaptive scoring can be done on a Subject word-by-word basis:
2604 (setq gnus-use-adaptive-scoring '(word))
2606 *** Scores can be decayed.
2608 (setq gnus-decay-scores t)
2610 *** Scoring can be performed using a regexp on the Date header. The
2611 Date is normalized to compact ISO 8601 format first.
2613 *** A new command has been added to remove all data on articles from
2616 `M-x gnus-group-clear-data-on-native-groups'
2618 *** A new command for reading collections of documents
2619 (nndoc with nnvirtual on top) has been added -- `C-M-d'.
2621 *** Process mark sets can be pushed and popped.
2623 *** A new mail-to-news backend makes it possible to post
2624 even when the NNTP server doesn't allow posting.
2626 *** A new backend for reading searches from Web search engines
2627 (DejaNews, Alta Vista, InReference) has been added.
2629 Use the `G w' command in the group buffer to create such
2632 *** Groups inside topics can now be sorted using the standard
2633 sorting functions, and each topic can be sorted independently.
2635 See the commands under the `T S' submap.
2637 *** Subsets of the groups can be sorted independently.
2639 See the commands under the `G P' submap.
2641 *** Cached articles can be pulled into the groups.
2643 Use the `Y c' command.
2645 *** Score files are now applied in a more reliable order.
2647 *** Reports on where mail messages end up can be generated.
2649 `M-x nnmail-split-history'
2651 *** More hooks and functions have been added to remove junk
2652 from incoming mail before saving the mail.
2654 See `nnmail-prepare-incoming-header-hook'.
2656 *** The nnml mail backend now understands compressed article files.
2658 *** To enable Gnus to read/post multi-lingual articles, you must execute
2659 the following code, for instance, in your .emacs.
2661 (add-hook 'gnus-startup-hook 'gnus-mule-initialize)
2663 Then, when you start Gnus, it will decode non-ASCII text automatically
2664 and show appropriate characters. (Note: if you are using gnus-mime
2665 from the SEMI package, formerly known as TM, you should NOT add this
2666 hook to gnus-startup-hook; gnus-mime has its own method of handling
2669 Since it is impossible to distinguish all coding systems
2670 automatically, you may need to specify a choice of coding system for a
2671 particular news group. This can be done by:
2673 (gnus-mule-add-group NEWSGROUP 'CODING-SYSTEM)
2675 Here NEWSGROUP should be a string which names a newsgroup or a tree
2676 of newsgroups. If NEWSGROUP is "XXX.YYY", all news groups under
2677 "XXX.YYY" (including "XXX.YYY.ZZZ") will use the specified coding
2678 system. CODING-SYSTEM specifies which coding system to use (for both
2679 for reading and posting).
2681 CODING-SYSTEM can also be a cons cell of the form
2682 (READ-CODING-SYSTEM . POST-CODING-SYSTEM)
2683 Then READ-CODING-SYSTEM is used when you read messages from the
2684 newsgroups, while POST-CODING-SYSTEM is used when you post messages
2687 Emacs knows the right coding systems for certain newsgroups by
2688 default. Here are some of these default settings:
2690 (gnus-mule-add-group "fj" 'iso-2022-7)
2691 (gnus-mule-add-group "alt.chinese.text" 'hz-gb-2312)
2692 (gnus-mule-add-group "alt.hk" 'hz-gb-2312)
2693 (gnus-mule-add-group "alt.chinese.text.big5" 'cn-big5)
2694 (gnus-mule-add-group "soc.culture.vietnamese" '(nil . viqr))
2696 When you reply by mail to an article, these settings are ignored;
2697 the mail is encoded according to sendmail-coding-system, as usual.
2701 *** If you edit primarily one style of C (or C++, Objective-C, Java)
2702 code, you may want to make the CC Mode style variables have global
2703 values so that you can set them directly in your .emacs file. To do
2704 this, set c-style-variables-are-local-p to nil in your .emacs file.
2705 Note that this only takes effect if you do it *before* cc-mode.el is
2708 If you typically edit more than one style of C (or C++, Objective-C,
2709 Java) code in a single Emacs session, you may want to make the CC Mode
2710 style variables have buffer local values. By default, all buffers
2711 share the same style variable settings; to make them buffer local, set
2712 c-style-variables-are-local-p to t in your .emacs file. Note that you
2713 must do this *before* CC Mode is loaded.
2715 *** The new variable c-indentation-style holds the C style name
2716 of the current buffer.
2718 *** The variable c-block-comments-indent-p has been deleted, because
2719 it is no longer necessary. C mode now handles all the supported styles
2720 of block comments, with no need to say which one you will use.
2722 *** There is a new indentation style "python", which specifies the C
2723 style that the Python developers like.
2725 *** There is a new c-cleanup-list option: brace-elseif-brace.
2726 This says to put ...} else if (...) {... on one line,
2727 just as brace-else-brace says to put ...} else {... on one line.
2731 *** In vc-retrieve-snapshot (C-x v r), if you don't specify a snapshot
2732 name, it retrieves the *latest* versions of all files in the current
2733 directory and its subdirectories (aside from files already locked).
2735 This feature is useful if your RCS directory is a link to a common
2736 master directory, and you want to pick up changes made by other
2739 You can do the same thing for an individual file by typing C-u C-x C-q
2740 RET in a buffer visiting that file.
2742 *** VC can now handle files under CVS that are being "watched" by
2743 other developers. Such files are made read-only by CVS. To get a
2744 writable copy, type C-x C-q in a buffer visiting such a file. VC then
2745 calls "cvs edit", which notifies the other developers of it.
2747 *** vc-version-diff (C-u C-x v =) now suggests reasonable defaults for
2748 version numbers, based on the current state of the file.
2750 ** Calendar changes.
2752 *** A new function, list-holidays, allows you list holidays or
2753 subclasses of holidays for ranges of years. Related menu items allow
2754 you do this for the year of the selected date, or the
2755 following/previous years.
2757 *** There is now support for the Baha'i calendar system. Use `pb' in
2758 the *Calendar* buffer to display the current Baha'i date. The Baha'i
2759 calendar, or "Badi calendar" is a system of 19 months with 19 days
2760 each, and 4 intercalary days (5 during a Gregorian leap year). The
2761 calendar begins May 23, 1844, with each of the months named after a
2762 supposed attribute of God.
2766 There are some new user variables and subgroups for customizing the page
2769 *** Headers & Footers (subgroup)
2771 Some printer systems print a header page and force the first page to
2772 be printed on the back of the header page when using duplex. If your
2773 printer system has this behavior, set variable
2774 `ps-banner-page-when-duplexing' to t.
2776 If variable `ps-banner-page-when-duplexing' is non-nil, it prints a
2777 blank page as the very first printed page. So, it behaves as if the
2778 very first character of buffer (or region) were a form feed ^L (\014).
2780 The variable `ps-spool-config' specifies who is responsible for
2781 setting duplex mode and page size. Valid values are:
2783 lpr-switches duplex and page size are configured by `ps-lpr-switches'.
2784 Don't forget to set `ps-lpr-switches' to select duplex
2785 printing for your printer.
2787 setpagedevice duplex and page size are configured by ps-print using the
2788 setpagedevice PostScript operator.
2790 nil duplex and page size are configured by ps-print *not* using
2791 the setpagedevice PostScript operator.
2793 The variable `ps-spool-tumble' specifies how the page images on
2794 opposite sides of a sheet are oriented with respect to each other. If
2795 `ps-spool-tumble' is nil, ps-print produces output suitable for
2796 bindings on the left or right. If `ps-spool-tumble' is non-nil,
2797 ps-print produces output suitable for bindings at the top or bottom.
2798 This variable takes effect only if `ps-spool-duplex' is non-nil.
2799 The default value is nil.
2801 The variable `ps-header-frame-alist' specifies a header frame
2802 properties alist. Valid frame properties are:
2804 fore-color Specify the foreground frame color.
2805 Value should be a float number between 0.0 (black
2806 color) and 1.0 (white color), or a string which is a
2807 color name, or a list of 3 float numbers which
2808 correspond to the Red Green Blue color scale, each
2809 float number between 0.0 (dark color) and 1.0 (bright
2810 color). The default is 0 ("black").
2812 back-color Specify the background frame color (similar to fore-color).
2813 The default is 0.9 ("gray90").
2815 shadow-color Specify the shadow color (similar to fore-color).
2816 The default is 0 ("black").
2818 border-color Specify the border color (similar to fore-color).
2819 The default is 0 ("black").
2821 border-width Specify the border width.
2824 Any other property is ignored.
2826 Don't change this alist directly; instead use Custom, or the
2827 `ps-value', `ps-get', `ps-put' and `ps-del' functions (see there for
2830 Ps-print can also print footers. The footer variables are:
2831 `ps-print-footer', `ps-footer-offset', `ps-print-footer-frame',
2832 `ps-footer-font-family', `ps-footer-font-size', `ps-footer-line-pad',
2833 `ps-footer-lines', `ps-left-footer', `ps-right-footer' and
2834 `ps-footer-frame-alist'. These variables are similar to those
2835 controlling headers.
2837 *** Color management (subgroup)
2839 If `ps-print-color-p' is non-nil, the buffer's text will be printed in
2842 *** Face Management (subgroup)
2844 If you need to print without worrying about face background colors,
2845 set the variable `ps-use-face-background' which specifies if face
2846 background should be used. Valid values are:
2848 t always use face background color.
2849 nil never use face background color.
2850 (face...) list of faces whose background color will be used.
2852 *** N-up printing (subgroup)
2854 The variable `ps-n-up-printing' specifies the number of pages per
2857 The variable `ps-n-up-margin' specifies the margin in points (pt)
2858 between the sheet border and the n-up printing.
2860 If variable `ps-n-up-border-p' is non-nil, a border is drawn around
2863 The variable `ps-n-up-filling' specifies how the page matrix is filled
2864 on each sheet of paper. Following are the valid values for
2865 `ps-n-up-filling' with a filling example using a 3x4 page matrix:
2867 `left-top' 1 2 3 4 `left-bottom' 9 10 11 12
2871 `right-top' 4 3 2 1 `right-bottom' 12 11 10 9
2875 `top-left' 1 4 7 10 `bottom-left' 3 6 9 12
2879 `top-right' 10 7 4 1 `bottom-right' 12 9 6 3
2883 Any other value is treated as `left-top'.
2885 *** Zebra stripes (subgroup)
2887 The variable `ps-zebra-color' controls the zebra stripes grayscale or
2890 The variable `ps-zebra-stripe-follow' specifies how zebra stripes
2891 continue on next page. Visually, valid values are (the character `+'
2892 to the right of each column indicates that a line is printed):
2894 `nil' `follow' `full' `full-follow'
2895 Current Page -------- ----------- --------- ----------------
2896 1 XXXXX + 1 XXXXXXXX + 1 XXXXXX + 1 XXXXXXXXXXXXX +
2897 2 XXXXX + 2 XXXXXXXX + 2 XXXXXX + 2 XXXXXXXXXXXXX +
2898 3 XXXXX + 3 XXXXXXXX + 3 XXXXXX + 3 XXXXXXXXXXXXX +
2902 7 XXXXX + 7 XXXXXXXX + 7 XXXXXX + 7 XXXXXXXXXXXXX +
2903 8 XXXXX + 8 XXXXXXXX + 8 XXXXXX + 8 XXXXXXXXXXXXX +
2904 9 XXXXX + 9 XXXXXXXX + 9 XXXXXX + 9 XXXXXXXXXXXXX +
2907 -------- ----------- --------- ----------------
2908 Next Page -------- ----------- --------- ----------------
2909 12 XXXXX + 12 + 10 XXXXXX + 10 +
2910 13 XXXXX + 13 XXXXXXXX + 11 XXXXXX + 11 +
2911 14 XXXXX + 14 XXXXXXXX + 12 XXXXXX + 12 +
2912 15 + 15 XXXXXXXX + 13 + 13 XXXXXXXXXXXXX +
2913 16 + 16 + 14 + 14 XXXXXXXXXXXXX +
2914 17 + 17 + 15 + 15 XXXXXXXXXXXXX +
2915 18 XXXXX + 18 + 16 XXXXXX + 16 +
2916 19 XXXXX + 19 XXXXXXXX + 17 XXXXXX + 17 +
2917 20 XXXXX + 20 XXXXXXXX + 18 XXXXXX + 18 +
2920 -------- ----------- --------- ----------------
2922 Any other value is treated as `nil'.
2925 *** Printer management (subgroup)
2927 The variable `ps-printer-name-option' determines the option used by
2928 some utilities to indicate the printer name; it's used only when
2929 `ps-printer-name' is a non-empty string. If you're using the lpr
2930 utility to print, for example, `ps-printer-name-option' should be set
2933 The variable `ps-manual-feed' indicates if the printer requires manual
2934 paper feeding. If it's nil, automatic feeding takes place. If it's
2935 non-nil, manual feeding takes place.
2937 The variable `ps-end-with-control-d' specifies whether C-d (\x04)
2938 should be inserted at end of the generated PostScript. Non-nil means
2941 *** Page settings (subgroup)
2943 If variable `ps-warn-paper-type' is nil, it's *not* treated as an
2944 error if the PostScript printer doesn't have a paper with the size
2945 indicated by `ps-paper-type'; the default paper size will be used
2946 instead. If `ps-warn-paper-type' is non-nil, an error is signaled if
2947 the PostScript printer doesn't support a paper with the size indicated
2948 by `ps-paper-type'. This is used when `ps-spool-config' is set to
2951 The variable `ps-print-upside-down' determines the orientation for
2952 printing pages: nil means `normal' printing, non-nil means
2953 `upside-down' printing (that is, the page is rotated by 180 degrees).
2955 The variable `ps-selected-pages' specifies which pages to print. If
2956 it's nil, all pages are printed. If it's a list, list elements may be
2957 integers specifying a single page to print, or cons cells (FROM . TO)
2958 specifying to print from page FROM to TO. Invalid list elements, that
2959 is integers smaller than one, or elements whose FROM is greater than
2960 its TO, are ignored.
2962 The variable `ps-even-or-odd-pages' specifies how to print even/odd
2963 pages. Valid values are:
2965 nil print all pages.
2967 `even-page' print only even pages.
2969 `odd-page' print only odd pages.
2971 `even-sheet' print only even sheets.
2972 That is, if `ps-n-up-printing' is 1, it behaves like
2973 `even-page', but for values greater than 1, it'll
2974 print only the even sheet of paper.
2976 `odd-sheet' print only odd sheets.
2977 That is, if `ps-n-up-printing' is 1, it behaves like
2978 `odd-page'; but for values greater than 1, it'll print
2979 only the odd sheet of paper.
2981 Any other value is treated as nil.
2983 If you set `ps-selected-pages' (see there for documentation), pages
2984 are filtered by `ps-selected-pages', and then by
2985 `ps-even-or-odd-pages'. For example, if we have:
2987 (setq ps-selected-pages '(1 4 (6 . 10) (12 . 16) 20))
2989 and we combine this with `ps-even-or-odd-pages' and
2990 `ps-n-up-printing', we get:
2992 `ps-n-up-printing' = 1:
2993 `ps-even-or-odd-pages' PAGES PRINTED
2994 nil 1, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 20
2995 even-page 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 20
2996 odd-page 1, 7, 9, 13, 15
2997 even-sheet 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 20
2998 odd-sheet 1, 7, 9, 13, 15
3000 `ps-n-up-printing' = 2:
3001 `ps-even-or-odd-pages' PAGES PRINTED
3002 nil 1/4, 6/7, 8/9, 10/12, 13/14, 15/16, 20
3003 even-page 4/6, 8/10, 12/14, 16/20
3004 odd-page 1/7, 9/13, 15
3005 even-sheet 6/7, 10/12, 15/16
3006 odd-sheet 1/4, 8/9, 13/14, 20
3008 *** Miscellany (subgroup)
3010 The variable `ps-error-handler-message' specifies where error handler
3011 messages should be sent.
3013 It is also possible to add a user-defined PostScript prologue code in
3014 front of all generated prologue code by setting the variable
3015 `ps-user-defined-prologue'.
3017 The variable `ps-line-number-font' specifies the font for line numbers.
3019 The variable `ps-line-number-font-size' specifies the font size in
3020 points for line numbers.
3022 The variable `ps-line-number-color' specifies the color for line
3023 numbers. See `ps-zebra-color' for documentation.
3025 The variable `ps-line-number-step' specifies the interval in which
3026 line numbers are printed. For example, if `ps-line-number-step' is set
3027 to 2, the printing will look like:
3039 integer an integer specifying the interval in which line numbers are
3040 printed. If it's smaller than or equal to zero, 1
3043 `zebra' specifies that only the line number of the first line in a
3044 zebra stripe is to be printed.
3046 Any other value is treated as `zebra'.
3048 The variable `ps-line-number-start' specifies the starting point in
3049 the interval given by `ps-line-number-step'. For example, if
3050 `ps-line-number-step' is set to 3, and `ps-line-number-start' is set to
3051 3, the output will look like:
3065 The variable `ps-postscript-code-directory' specifies the directory
3066 where the PostScript prologue file used by ps-print is found.
3068 The variable `ps-line-spacing' determines the line spacing in points,
3069 for ordinary text, when generating PostScript (similar to
3072 The variable `ps-paragraph-spacing' determines the paragraph spacing,
3073 in points, for ordinary text, when generating PostScript (similar to
3076 The variable `ps-paragraph-regexp' specifies the paragraph delimiter.
3078 The variable `ps-begin-cut-regexp' and `ps-end-cut-regexp' specify the
3079 start and end of a region to cut out when printing.
3081 ** hideshow changes.
3083 *** now supports hiding of blocks of single line comments (like // for
3086 *** Support for java-mode added.
3088 *** When doing `hs-hide-all' it is now possible to also hide the comments
3089 in the file if `hs-hide-comments-when-hiding-all' is set.
3091 *** The new function `hs-hide-initial-comment' hides the comments at
3092 the beginning of the files. Finally those huge RCS logs don't stay in your
3093 way! This is run by default when entering the `hs-minor-mode'.
3095 *** Now uses overlays instead of `selective-display', so is more
3096 robust and a lot faster.
3098 *** A block beginning can span multiple lines.
3100 *** The new variable `hs-show-hidden-short-form' if t, directs hideshow
3101 to show only the beginning of a block when it is hidden. See the
3102 documentation for more details.
3104 ** Changes in Enriched mode.
3106 *** When you visit a file in enriched-mode, Emacs will make sure it is
3107 filled to the current fill-column. This behavior is now independent
3108 of the size of the window. When you save the file, the fill-column in
3109 use is stored as well, so that the whole buffer need not be refilled
3110 the next time unless the fill-column is different.
3112 *** use-hard-newlines is now a minor mode. When it is enabled, Emacs
3113 distinguishes between hard and soft newlines, and treats hard newlines
3114 as paragraph boundaries. Otherwise all newlines inserted are marked
3115 as soft, and paragraph boundaries are determined solely from the text.
3121 The variables font-lock-face-attributes, font-lock-display-type and
3122 font-lock-background-mode are now obsolete; the recommended way to specify
3123 the faces to use for Font Lock mode is with M-x customize-group on the new
3124 custom group font-lock-faces. If you set font-lock-face-attributes in your
3125 ~/.emacs file, Font Lock mode will respect its value. However, you should
3126 consider converting from setting that variable to using M-x customize.
3128 You can still use X resources to specify Font Lock face appearances.
3130 *** Maximum decoration
3132 Fontification now uses the maximum level of decoration supported by
3133 default. Previously, fontification used a mode-specific default level
3134 of decoration, which is typically the minimum level of decoration
3135 supported. You can set font-lock-maximum-decoration to nil
3136 to get the old behavior.
3140 Support is now provided for Java, Objective-C, AWK and SIMULA modes.
3142 Note that Font Lock mode can be turned on without knowing exactly what modes
3143 support Font Lock mode, via the command global-font-lock-mode.
3145 *** Configurable support
3147 Support for C, C++, Objective-C and Java can be more easily configured for
3148 additional types and classes via the new variables c-font-lock-extra-types,
3149 c++-font-lock-extra-types, objc-font-lock-extra-types and, you guessed it,
3150 java-font-lock-extra-types. These value of each of these variables should be a
3151 list of regexps matching the extra type names. For example, the default value
3152 of c-font-lock-extra-types is ("\\sw+_t") which means fontification follows the
3153 convention that C type names end in _t. This results in slower fontification.
3155 Of course, you can change the variables that specify fontification in whatever
3156 way you wish, typically by adding regexps. However, these new variables make
3157 it easier to make specific and common changes for the fontification of types.
3159 *** Adding highlighting patterns to existing support
3161 You can use the new function font-lock-add-keywords to add your own
3162 highlighting patterns, such as for project-local or user-specific constructs,
3165 For example, to highlight `FIXME:' words in C comments, put:
3167 (font-lock-add-keywords 'c-mode '(("\\<FIXME:" 0 font-lock-warning-face t)))
3173 Font Lock now defines two new faces, font-lock-builtin-face and
3174 font-lock-warning-face. These are intended to highlight builtin keywords,
3175 distinct from a language's normal keywords, and objects that should be brought
3176 to user attention, respectively. Various modes now use these new faces.
3178 *** Changes to fast-lock support mode
3180 The fast-lock package, one of the two Font Lock support modes, can now process
3181 cache files silently. You can use the new variable fast-lock-verbose, in the
3182 same way as font-lock-verbose, to control this feature.
3184 *** Changes to lazy-lock support mode
3186 The lazy-lock package, one of the two Font Lock support modes, can now fontify
3187 according to the true syntactic context relative to other lines. You can use
3188 the new variable lazy-lock-defer-contextually to control this feature. If
3189 non-nil, changes to the buffer will cause subsequent lines in the buffer to be
3190 refontified after lazy-lock-defer-time seconds of idle time. If nil, then only
3191 the modified lines will be refontified; this is the same as the previous Lazy
3192 Lock mode behavior and the behavior of Font Lock mode.
3194 This feature is useful in modes where strings or comments can span lines.
3195 For example, if a string or comment terminating character is deleted, then if
3196 this feature is enabled subsequent lines in the buffer will be correctly
3197 refontified to reflect their new syntactic context. Previously, only the line
3198 containing the deleted character would be refontified and you would have to use
3199 the command M-o M-o (font-lock-fontify-block) to refontify some lines.
3201 As a consequence of this new feature, two other variables have changed:
3203 Variable `lazy-lock-defer-driven' is renamed `lazy-lock-defer-on-scrolling'.
3204 Variable `lazy-lock-defer-time' can now only be a time, i.e., a number.
3205 Buffer modes for which on-the-fly deferral applies can be specified via the
3206 new variable `lazy-lock-defer-on-the-fly'.
3208 If you set these variables in your ~/.emacs, then you may have to change those
3211 ** Ada mode changes.
3213 *** There is now better support for using find-file.el with Ada mode.
3214 If you switch between spec and body, the cursor stays in the same
3215 procedure (modulo overloading). If a spec has no body file yet, but
3216 you try to switch to its body file, Ada mode now generates procedure
3219 *** There are two new commands:
3220 - `ada-make-local' : invokes gnatmake on the current buffer
3221 - `ada-check-syntax' : check syntax of current buffer.
3223 The user options `ada-compiler-make', `ada-make-options',
3224 `ada-language-version', `ada-compiler-syntax-check', and
3225 `ada-compile-options' are used within these commands.
3227 *** Ada mode can now work with Outline minor mode. The outline level
3228 is calculated from the indenting, not from syntactic constructs.
3229 Outlining does not work if your code is not correctly indented.
3231 *** The new function `ada-gnat-style' converts the buffer to the style of
3232 formatting used in GNAT. It places two blanks after a comment start,
3233 places one blank between a word end and an opening '(', and puts one
3234 space between a comma and the beginning of a word.
3236 ** Scheme mode changes.
3238 *** Scheme mode indentation now uses many of the facilities of Lisp
3239 mode; therefore, the variables to customize it are the variables used
3240 for Lisp mode which have names starting with `lisp-'. The variables
3241 with names starting with `scheme-' which used to do this no longer
3244 If you want to use different indentation for Scheme and Lisp, this is
3245 still possible, but now you must do it by adding a hook to
3246 scheme-mode-hook, which could work by setting the `lisp-' indentation
3247 variables as buffer-local variables.
3249 *** DSSSL mode is a variant of Scheme mode, for editing DSSSL scripts.
3252 ** Changes to the emacsclient program
3254 *** If a socket can't be found, and environment variables LOGNAME or
3255 USER are set, emacsclient now looks for a socket based on the UID
3256 associated with the name. That is an emacsclient running as root
3257 can connect to an Emacs server started by a non-root user.
3259 *** The emacsclient program now accepts an option --no-wait which tells
3260 it to return immediately without waiting for you to "finish" the
3263 *** The new option --alternate-editor allows to specify an editor to
3264 use if Emacs is not running. The environment variable
3265 ALTERNATE_EDITOR can be used for the same effect; the command line
3266 option takes precedence.
3268 ** M-x eldoc-mode enables a minor mode in which the echo area
3269 constantly shows the parameter list for function being called at point
3270 (in Emacs Lisp and Lisp Interaction modes only).
3272 ** C-x n d now runs the new command narrow-to-defun,
3273 which narrows the accessible parts of the buffer to just
3276 ** Emacs now handles the `--' argument in the standard way; all
3277 following arguments are treated as ordinary file names.
3279 ** On MSDOS and Windows, the bookmark file is now called _emacs.bmk,
3280 and the saved desktop file is now called _emacs.desktop (truncated if
3283 ** When you kill a buffer that visits a file,
3284 if there are any registers that save positions in the file,
3285 these register values no longer become completely useless.
3286 If you try to go to such a register with C-x j, then you are
3287 asked whether to visit the file again. If you say yes,
3288 it visits the file and then goes to the same position.
3290 ** When you visit a file that changes frequently outside Emacs--for
3291 example, a log of output from a process that continues to run--it may
3292 be useful for Emacs to revert the file without querying you whenever
3293 you visit the file afresh with C-x C-f.
3295 You can request this behavior for certain files by setting the
3296 variable revert-without-query to a list of regular expressions. If a
3297 file's name matches any of these regular expressions, find-file and
3298 revert-buffer revert the buffer without asking for permission--but
3299 only if you have not edited the buffer text yourself.
3301 ** set-default-font has been renamed to set-frame-font
3302 since it applies only to the current frame.
3304 ** In TeX mode, you can use the variable tex-main-file to specify the
3305 file for tex-file to run TeX on. (By default, tex-main-file is nil,
3306 and tex-file runs TeX on the current visited file.)
3308 This is useful when you are editing a document that consists of
3309 multiple files. In each of the included files, you can set up a local
3310 variable list which specifies the top-level file of your document for
3311 tex-main-file. Then tex-file will run TeX on the whole document
3312 instead of just the file you are editing.
3316 RefTeX mode is a new minor mode with special support for \label, \ref
3317 and \cite macros in LaTeX documents. RefTeX distinguishes labels of
3318 different environments (equation, figure, ...) and has full support for
3319 multifile documents. To use it, select a buffer with a LaTeX document and
3320 turn the mode on with M-x reftex-mode. Here are the main user commands:
3323 Creates a label semi-automatically. RefTeX is context sensitive and
3324 knows which kind of label is needed.
3326 C-c ) reftex-reference
3327 Offers in a menu all labels in the document, along with context of the
3328 label definition. The selected label is referenced as \ref{LABEL}.
3330 C-c [ reftex-citation
3331 Prompts for a regular expression and displays a list of matching BibTeX
3332 database entries. The selected entry is cited with a \cite{KEY} macro.
3334 C-c & reftex-view-crossref
3335 Views the cross reference of a \ref or \cite command near point.
3338 Shows a table of contents of the (multifile) document. From there you
3339 can quickly jump to every section.
3341 Under X, RefTeX installs a "Ref" menu in the menu bar, with additional
3342 commands. Press `?' to get help when a prompt mentions this feature.
3343 Full documentation and customization examples are in the file
3344 reftex.el. You can use the finder to view the file documentation:
3345 C-h p --> tex --> reftex.el
3347 ** Changes in BibTeX mode.
3349 *** Info documentation is now available.
3351 *** Don't allow parentheses in string constants anymore. This confused
3352 both the BibTeX program and Emacs BibTeX mode.
3354 *** Renamed variable bibtex-mode-user-optional-fields to
3355 bibtex-user-optional-fields.
3357 *** Removed variable bibtex-include-OPTannote
3358 (use bibtex-user-optional-fields instead).
3360 *** New interactive functions to copy and kill fields and complete
3361 entries to the BibTeX kill ring, from where they can be yanked back by
3362 appropriate functions.
3364 *** New interactive functions for repositioning and marking of
3365 entries. They are bound by default to C-M-l and C-M-h.
3367 *** New hook bibtex-clean-entry-hook. It is called after entry has
3370 *** New variable bibtex-field-delimiters, which replaces variables
3371 bibtex-field-{left|right}-delimiter.
3373 *** New variable bibtex-entry-delimiters to determine how entries
3376 *** Allow preinitialization of fields. See documentation of
3377 bibtex-user-optional-fields, bibtex-entry-field-alist, and
3378 bibtex-include-OPTkey for details.
3380 *** Book and InBook entries require either an author or an editor
3381 field. This is now supported by bibtex.el. Alternative fields are
3382 prefixed with `ALT'.
3384 *** New variable bibtex-entry-format, which replaces variable
3385 bibtex-clean-entry-zap-empty-opts and allows specification of many
3386 formatting options performed on cleaning an entry (see variable
3389 *** Even more control on how automatic keys are generated. See
3390 documentation of bibtex-generate-autokey for details. Transcriptions
3391 for foreign languages other than German are now handled, too.
3393 *** New boolean user option bibtex-comma-after-last-field to decide if
3394 comma should be inserted at end of last field.
3396 *** New boolean user option bibtex-align-at-equal-sign to determine if
3397 alignment should be made at left side of field contents or at equal
3398 signs. New user options to control entry layout (e.g. indentation).
3400 *** New function bibtex-fill-entry to realign entries.
3402 *** New function bibtex-reformat to reformat region or buffer.
3404 *** New function bibtex-convert-alien to convert a BibTeX database
3407 *** New function bibtex-complete-key (similar to bibtex-complete-string)
3408 to complete prefix to a key defined in buffer. Mainly useful in
3411 *** New function bibtex-count-entries to count entries in buffer or
3414 *** Added support for imenu.
3416 *** The function `bibtex-validate' now checks current region instead
3417 of buffer if mark is active. Now it shows all errors of buffer in a
3418 `compilation mode' buffer. You can use the normal commands (e.g.
3419 `next-error') for compilation modes to jump to errors.
3421 *** New variable `bibtex-string-file-path' to determine where the files
3422 from `bibtex-string-files' are searched.
3424 ** Iso Accents mode now supports Latin-3 as an alternative.
3426 ** The command next-error now opens blocks hidden by hideshow.
3428 ** The function using-unix-filesystems has been replaced by the
3429 functions add-untranslated-filesystem and remove-untranslated-filesystem.
3430 Each of these functions takes the name of a drive letter or directory
3433 When a filesystem is added as untranslated, all files on it are read
3434 and written in binary mode (no cr/lf translation is performed).
3436 ** browse-url changes
3438 *** New methods for: Grail (browse-url-generic), MMM (browse-url-mmm),
3439 Lynx in a separate xterm (browse-url-lynx-xterm) or in an Emacs window
3440 (browse-url-lynx-emacs), remote W3 (browse-url-w3-gnudoit), generic
3441 non-remote-controlled browsers (browse-url-generic) and associated
3442 customization variables.
3444 *** New commands `browse-url-of-region' and `browse-url'.
3446 *** URLs marked up with <URL:...> (RFC1738) work if broken across
3447 lines. Browsing methods can be associated with URL regexps
3448 (e.g. mailto: URLs) via `browse-url-browser-function'.
3452 *** Clicking Mouse-2 on a brief command description in Ediff control panel
3453 pops up the Info file for this command.
3455 *** There is now a variable, ediff-autostore-merges, which controls whether
3456 the result of a merge is saved in a file. By default, this is done only when
3457 merge is done from a session group (eg, when merging files in two different
3460 *** Since Emacs 19.31 (this hasn't been announced before), Ediff can compare
3461 and merge groups of files residing in different directories, or revisions of
3462 files in the same directory.
3464 *** Since Emacs 19.31, Ediff can apply multi-file patches interactively.
3465 The patches must be in the context format or GNU unified format. (The bug
3466 related to the GNU format has now been fixed.)
3470 *** The startup file is now .viper instead of .vip
3471 *** All variable/function names have been changed to start with viper-
3473 *** C-\ now simulates the meta-key in all Viper states.
3474 *** C-z in Insert state now escapes to Vi for the duration of the next
3475 Viper command. In Vi and Insert states, C-z behaves as before.
3476 *** C-c \ escapes to Vi for one command if Viper is in Insert or Emacs states.
3477 *** _ is no longer the meta-key in Vi state.
3478 *** The variable viper-insert-state-cursor-color can be used to change cursor
3479 color when Viper is in insert state.
3480 *** If search lands the cursor near the top or the bottom of the window,
3481 Viper pulls the window up or down to expose more context. The variable
3482 viper-adjust-window-after-search controls this behavior.
3486 *** In C, C++, Objective C and Java, Etags tags global variables by
3487 default. The resulting tags files are inflated by 30% on average.
3488 Use --no-globals to turn this feature off. Etags can also tag
3489 variables which are members of structure-like constructs, but it does
3490 not by default. Use --members to turn this feature on.
3492 *** C++ member functions are now recognized as tags.
3494 *** Java is tagged like C++. In addition, "extends" and "implements"
3495 constructs are tagged. Files are recognized by the extension .java.
3497 *** Etags can now handle programs written in PostScript. Files are
3498 recognized by the extensions .ps and .pdb (PostScript with C syntax).
3499 In PostScript, tags are lines that start with a slash.
3501 *** Etags now handles Objective C and Objective C++ code. The usual C and
3502 C++ tags are recognized in these languages; in addition, etags
3503 recognizes special Objective C syntax for classes, class categories,
3504 methods and protocols.
3506 *** Etags also handles Cobol. Files are recognized by the extension
3507 .cobol. The tagged lines are those containing a word that begins in
3508 column 8 and ends in a full stop, i.e. anything that could be a
3511 *** Regexps in Etags now support intervals, as in ed or grep. The syntax of
3512 an interval is \{M,N\}, and it means to match the preceding expression
3513 at least M times and as many as N times.
3515 ** The format for specifying a custom format for time-stamp to insert
3516 in files has changed slightly.
3518 With the new enhancements to the functionality of format-time-string,
3519 time-stamp-format will change to be eventually compatible with it.
3520 This conversion is being done in two steps to maintain compatibility
3521 with old time-stamp-format values.
3523 In the new scheme, alternate case is signified by the number-sign
3524 (`#') modifier, rather than changing the case of the format character.
3525 This feature is as yet incompletely implemented for compatibility
3528 In the old time-stamp-format, all numeric fields defaulted to their
3529 natural width. (With format-time-string, each format has a
3530 fixed-width default.) In this version, you can specify the colon
3531 (`:') modifier to a numeric conversion to mean "give me the historical
3532 time-stamp-format width default." Do not use colon if you are
3533 specifying an explicit width, as in "%02d".
3535 Numbers are no longer truncated to the requested width, except in the
3536 case of "%02y", which continues to give a two-digit year. Digit
3537 truncation probably wasn't being used for anything else anyway.
3539 The new formats will work with old versions of Emacs. New formats are
3540 being recommended now to allow time-stamp-format to change in the
3541 future to be compatible with format-time-string. The new forms being
3542 recommended now will continue to work then.
3544 See the documentation string for the variable time-stamp-format for
3547 ** There are some additional major modes:
3549 dcl-mode, for editing VMS DCL files.
3550 m4-mode, for editing files of m4 input.
3551 meta-mode, for editing MetaFont and MetaPost source files.
3553 ** In Shell mode, the command shell-copy-environment-variable lets you
3554 copy the value of a specified environment variable from the subshell
3557 ** New Lisp packages include:
3559 *** battery.el displays battery status for laptops.
3561 *** M-x bruce (named after Lenny Bruce) is a program that might
3562 be used for adding some indecent words to your email.
3564 *** M-x crisp-mode enables an emulation for the CRiSP editor.
3566 *** M-x dirtrack arranges for better tracking of directory changes
3569 *** The new library elint.el provides for linting of Emacs Lisp code.
3570 See the documentation for `elint-initialize', `elint-current-buffer'
3573 *** M-x expand-add-abbrevs defines a special kind of abbrev which is
3574 meant for programming constructs. These abbrevs expand like ordinary
3575 ones, when you type SPC, but only at the end of a line and not within
3576 strings or comments.
3578 These abbrevs can act as templates: you can define places within an
3579 abbrev for insertion of additional text. Once you expand the abbrev,
3580 you can then use C-x a p and C-x a n to move back and forth to these
3581 insertion points. Thus you can conveniently insert additional text
3584 *** filecache.el remembers the location of files so that you
3585 can visit them by short forms of their names.
3587 *** find-func.el lets you find the definition of the user-loaded
3588 Emacs Lisp function at point.
3590 *** M-x handwrite converts text to a "handwritten" picture.
3592 *** M-x iswitchb-buffer is a command for switching to a buffer, much like
3593 switch-buffer, but it reads the argument in a more helpful way.
3595 *** M-x landmark implements a neural network for landmark learning.
3597 *** M-x locate provides a convenient interface to the `locate' program.
3599 *** M4 mode is a new mode for editing files of m4 input.
3601 *** mantemp.el creates C++ manual template instantiations
3602 from the GCC error messages which indicate which instantiations are needed.
3604 *** mouse-copy.el provides a one-click copy and move feature.
3605 You can drag a region with M-mouse-1, and it is automatically
3606 inserted at point. M-Shift-mouse-1 deletes the text from its
3607 original place after inserting the copy.
3609 *** mouse-drag.el lets you do scrolling by dragging Mouse-2
3612 You click the mouse and move; that distance either translates into the
3613 velocity to scroll (with mouse-drag-throw) or the distance to scroll
3614 (with mouse-drag-drag). Horizontal scrolling is enabled when needed.
3616 Enable mouse-drag with:
3617 (global-set-key [down-mouse-2] 'mouse-drag-throw)
3619 (global-set-key [down-mouse-2] 'mouse-drag-drag)
3621 *** mspools.el is useful for determining which mail folders have
3622 mail waiting to be read in them. It works with procmail.
3624 *** Octave mode is a major mode for editing files of input for Octave.
3625 It comes with a facility for communicating with an Octave subprocess.
3629 The ogonek package provides functions for changing the coding of
3630 Polish diacritic characters in buffers. Codings known from various
3631 platforms are supported such as ISO8859-2, Mazovia, IBM Latin2, and
3632 TeX. For example, you can change the coding from Mazovia to
3633 ISO8859-2. Another example is a change of coding from ISO8859-2 to
3634 prefix notation (in which `/a' stands for the aogonek character, for
3635 instance) and vice versa.
3637 To use this package load it using
3638 M-x load-library [enter] ogonek
3639 Then, you may get an explanation by calling one of
3640 M-x ogonek-jak -- in Polish
3641 M-x ogonek-how -- in English
3642 The info specifies the commands and variables provided as well as the
3643 ways of customization in `.emacs'.
3645 *** Interface to ph.
3647 Emacs provides a client interface to CCSO Nameservers (ph/qi)
3649 The CCSO nameserver is used in many universities to provide directory
3650 services about people. ph.el provides a convenient Emacs interface to
3653 *** uce.el is useful for replying to unsolicited commercial email.
3655 *** vcursor.el implements a "virtual cursor" feature.
3656 You can move the virtual cursor with special commands
3657 while the real cursor does not move.
3659 *** webjump.el is a "hot list" package which you can set up
3660 for visiting your favorite web sites.
3662 *** M-x winner-mode is a minor mode which saves window configurations,
3663 so you can move back to other configurations that you have recently used.
3667 Movemail no longer needs to be installed setuid root in order for POP
3668 mail retrieval to function properly. This is because it no longer
3669 supports the RPOP (reserved-port POP) protocol; instead, it uses the
3670 user's POP password to authenticate to the mail server.
3672 This change was made earlier, but not reported in NEWS before.
3675 * Emacs 20.1 changes for MS-DOS and MS-Windows.
3677 ** Changes in handling MS-DOS/MS-Windows text files.
3679 Emacs handles three different conventions for representing
3680 end-of-line: CRLF for MSDOS, LF for Unix and GNU, and CR (used on the
3681 Macintosh). Emacs determines which convention is used in a specific
3682 file based on the contents of that file (except for certain special
3683 file names), and when it saves the file, it uses the same convention.
3685 To save the file and change the end-of-line convention, you can use
3686 C-x RET f (set-buffer-file-coding-system) to specify a different
3687 coding system for the buffer. Then, when you save the file, the newly
3688 specified coding system will take effect. For example, to save with
3689 LF, specify undecided-unix (or some other ...-unix coding system); to
3690 save with CRLF, specify undecided-dos.
3693 * Lisp Changes in Emacs 20.1
3695 ** Byte-compiled files made with Emacs 20 will, in general, work in
3696 Emacs 19 as well, as long as the source code runs in Emacs 19. And
3697 vice versa: byte-compiled files made with Emacs 19 should also run in
3698 Emacs 20, as long as the program itself works in Emacs 20.
3700 ** Windows-specific functions and variables have been renamed
3701 to start with w32- instead of win32-.
3703 In hacker language, calling something a "win" is a form of praise. We
3704 don't want to praise a non-free Microsoft system, so we don't call it
3707 ** Basic Lisp changes
3709 *** A symbol whose name starts with a colon now automatically
3710 evaluates to itself. Therefore such a symbol can be used as a constant.
3712 *** The defined purpose of `defconst' has been changed. It should now
3713 be used only for values that should not be changed whether by a program
3716 The actual behavior of defconst has not been changed.
3718 *** There are new macros `when' and `unless'
3720 (when CONDITION BODY...) is short for (if CONDITION (progn BODY...))
3721 (unless CONDITION BODY...) is short for (if CONDITION nil BODY...)
3723 *** Emacs now defines functions caar, cadr, cdar and cddr with their
3724 usual Lisp meanings. For example, caar returns the car of the car of
3727 *** equal, when comparing strings, now ignores their text properties.
3729 *** The new function `functionp' tests whether an object is a function.
3731 *** arrayp now returns t for char-tables and bool-vectors.
3733 *** Certain primitives which use characters (as integers) now get an
3734 error if the integer is not a valid character code. These primitives
3735 include insert-char, char-to-string, and the %c construct in the
3738 *** The `require' function now insists on adding a suffix, either .el
3739 or .elc, to the file name. Thus, (require 'foo) will not use a file
3740 whose name is just foo. It insists on foo.el or foo.elc.
3742 *** The `autoload' function, when the file name does not contain
3743 either a directory name or the suffix .el or .elc, insists on
3744 adding one of these suffixes.
3746 *** string-to-number now takes an optional second argument BASE
3747 which specifies the base to use when converting an integer.
3748 If BASE is omitted, base 10 is used.
3750 We have not implemented other radices for floating point numbers,
3751 because that would be much more work and does not seem useful.
3753 *** substring now handles vectors as well as strings.
3755 *** The Common Lisp function eql is no longer defined normally.
3756 You must load the `cl' library to define it.
3758 *** The new macro `with-current-buffer' lets you evaluate an expression
3759 conveniently with a different current buffer. It looks like this:
3761 (with-current-buffer BUFFER BODY-FORMS...)
3763 BUFFER is the expression that says which buffer to use.
3764 BODY-FORMS say what to do in that buffer.
3766 *** The new primitive `save-current-buffer' saves and restores the
3767 choice of current buffer, like `save-excursion', but without saving or
3768 restoring the value of point or the mark. `with-current-buffer'
3769 works using `save-current-buffer'.
3771 *** The new macro `with-temp-file' lets you do some work in a new buffer and
3772 write the output to a specified file. Like `progn', it returns the value
3775 *** The new macro `with-temp-buffer' lets you do some work in a new buffer,
3776 which is discarded after use. Like `progn', it returns the value of the
3777 last form. If you wish to return the buffer contents, use (buffer-string)
3780 *** The new function split-string takes a string, splits it at certain
3781 characters, and returns a list of the substrings in between the
3784 For example, (split-string "foo bar lose" " +") returns ("foo" "bar" "lose").
3786 *** The new macro with-output-to-string executes some Lisp expressions
3787 with standard-output set up so that all output feeds into a string.
3788 Then it returns that string.
3790 For example, if the current buffer name is `foo',
3792 (with-output-to-string
3793 (princ "The buffer is ")
3794 (princ (buffer-name)))
3796 returns "The buffer is foo".
3798 ** Non-ASCII characters are now supported, if enable-multibyte-characters
3801 These characters have character codes above 256. When inserted in the
3802 buffer or stored in a string, they are represented as multibyte
3803 characters that occupy several buffer positions each.
3805 *** When enable-multibyte-characters is non-nil, a single character in
3806 a buffer or string can be two or more bytes (as many as four).
3808 Buffers and strings are still made up of unibyte elements;
3809 character positions and string indices are always measured in bytes.
3810 Therefore, moving forward one character can increase the buffer
3811 position by 2, 3 or 4. The function forward-char moves by whole
3812 characters, and therefore is no longer equivalent to
3813 (lambda (n) (goto-char (+ (point) n))).
3815 ASCII characters (codes 0 through 127) are still single bytes, always.
3816 Sequences of byte values 128 through 255 are used to represent
3817 non-ASCII characters. These sequences are called "multibyte
3820 The first byte of a multibyte character is always in the range 128
3821 through 159 (octal 0200 through 0237). These values are called
3822 "leading codes". The second and subsequent bytes are always in the
3823 range 160 through 255 (octal 0240 through 0377). The first byte, the
3824 leading code, determines how many bytes long the sequence is.
3826 *** The function forward-char moves over characters, and therefore
3827 (forward-char 1) may increase point by more than 1 if it moves over a
3828 multibyte character. Likewise, delete-char always deletes a
3829 character, which may be more than one buffer position.
3831 This means that some Lisp programs, which assume that a character is
3832 always one buffer position, need to be changed.
3834 However, all ASCII characters are always one buffer position.
3836 *** The regexp [\200-\377] no longer matches all non-ASCII characters,
3837 because when enable-multibyte-characters is non-nil, these characters
3838 have codes that are not in the range octal 200 to octal 377. However,
3839 the regexp [^\000-\177] does match all non-ASCII characters,
3842 *** The function char-boundary-p returns non-nil if position POS is
3843 between two characters in the buffer (not in the middle of a
3846 When the value is non-nil, it says what kind of character follows POS:
3848 0 if POS is at an ASCII character or at the end of range,
3849 1 if POS is before a 2-byte length multi-byte form,
3850 2 if POS is at a head of 3-byte length multi-byte form,
3851 3 if POS is at a head of 4-byte length multi-byte form,
3852 4 if POS is at a head of multi-byte form of a composite character.
3854 *** The function char-bytes returns how many bytes the character CHAR uses.
3856 *** Strings can contain multibyte characters. The function
3857 `length' returns the string length counting bytes, which may be
3858 more than the number of characters.
3860 You can include a multibyte character in a string constant by writing
3861 it literally. You can also represent it with a hex escape,
3862 \xNNNNNNN..., using as many digits as necessary. Any character which
3863 is not a valid hex digit terminates this construct. If you want to
3864 follow it with a character that is a hex digit, write backslash and
3865 newline in between; that will terminate the hex escape.
3867 *** The function concat-chars takes arguments which are characters
3868 and returns a string containing those characters.
3870 *** The function sref access a multibyte character in a string.
3871 (sref STRING INDX) returns the character in STRING at INDEX. INDEX
3872 counts from zero. If INDEX is at a position in the middle of a
3873 character, sref signals an error.
3875 *** The function chars-in-string returns the number of characters
3876 in a string. This is less than the length of the string, if the
3877 string contains multibyte characters (the length counts bytes).
3879 *** The function chars-in-region returns the number of characters
3880 in a region from BEG to END. This is less than (- END BEG) if the
3881 region contains multibyte characters (the length counts bytes).
3883 *** The function string-to-list converts a string to a list of
3884 the characters in it. string-to-vector converts a string
3885 to a vector of the characters in it.
3887 *** The function store-substring alters part of the contents
3888 of a string. You call it as follows:
3890 (store-substring STRING IDX OBJ)
3892 This says to alter STRING, by storing OBJ starting at index IDX in
3893 STRING. OBJ may be either a character or a (smaller) string.
3894 This function really does alter the contents of STRING.
3895 Since it is impossible to change the length of an existing string,
3896 it is an error if OBJ doesn't fit within STRING's actual length.
3898 *** char-width returns the width (in columns) of the character CHAR,
3899 if it were displayed in the current buffer and the selected window.
3901 *** string-width returns the width (in columns) of the text in STRING,
3902 if it were displayed in the current buffer and the selected window.
3904 *** truncate-string-to-width shortens a string, if necessary,
3905 to fit within a certain number of columns. (Of course, it does
3906 not alter the string that you give it; it returns a new string
3907 which contains all or just part of the existing string.)
3909 (truncate-string-to-width STR END-COLUMN &optional START-COLUMN PADDING)
3911 This returns the part of STR up to column END-COLUMN.
3913 The optional argument START-COLUMN specifies the starting column.
3914 If this is non-nil, then the first START-COLUMN columns of the string
3915 are not included in the resulting value.
3917 The optional argument PADDING, if non-nil, is a padding character to be added
3918 at the beginning and end the resulting string, to extend it to exactly
3919 WIDTH columns. If PADDING is nil, that means do not pad; then, if STRING
3920 is narrower than WIDTH, the value is equal to STRING.
3922 If PADDING and START-COLUMN are both non-nil, and if there is no clean
3923 place in STRING that corresponds to START-COLUMN (because one
3924 character extends across that column), then the padding character
3925 PADDING is added one or more times at the beginning of the result
3926 string, so that its columns line up as if it really did start at
3927 column START-COLUMN.
3929 *** When the functions in the list after-change-functions are called,
3930 the third argument is the number of bytes in the pre-change text, not
3931 necessarily the number of characters. It is, in effect, the
3932 difference in buffer position between the beginning and the end of the
3933 changed text, before the change.
3935 *** The characters Emacs uses are classified in various character
3936 sets, each of which has a name which is a symbol. In general there is
3937 one character set for each script, not for each language.
3939 **** The function charsetp tests whether an object is a character set name.
3941 **** The variable charset-list holds a list of character set names.
3943 **** char-charset, given a character code, returns the name of the character
3944 set that the character belongs to. (The value is a symbol.)
3946 **** split-char, given a character code, returns a list containing the
3947 name of the character set, followed by one or two byte-values
3948 which identify the character within that character set.
3950 **** make-char, given a character set name and one or two subsequent
3951 byte-values, constructs a character code. This is roughly the
3952 opposite of split-char.
3954 **** find-charset-region returns a list of the character sets
3955 of all the characters between BEG and END.
3957 **** find-charset-string returns a list of the character sets
3958 of all the characters in a string.
3960 *** Here are the Lisp facilities for working with coding systems
3961 and specifying coding systems.
3963 **** The function coding-system-list returns a list of all coding
3964 system names (symbols). With optional argument t, it returns a list
3965 of all distinct base coding systems, not including variants.
3966 (Variant coding systems are those like latin-1-dos, latin-1-unix
3967 and latin-1-mac which specify the end-of-line conversion as well
3968 as what to do about code conversion.)
3970 **** coding-system-p tests a symbol to see if it is a coding system
3971 name. It returns t if so, nil if not.
3973 **** file-coding-system-alist specifies which coding systems to use
3974 for certain file names. It works like network-coding-system-alist,
3975 except that the PATTERN is matched against the file name.
3977 Each element has the format (PATTERN . VAL), where PATTERN determines
3978 which file names the element applies to. PATTERN should be a regexp
3979 to match against a file name.
3981 VAL is a coding system, a cons cell containing two coding systems, or
3982 a function symbol. If VAL is a coding system, it is used for both
3983 decoding what received from the network stream and encoding what sent
3984 to the network stream. If VAL is a cons cell containing two coding
3985 systems, the car specifies the coding system for decoding, and the cdr
3986 specifies the coding system for encoding.
3988 If VAL is a function symbol, the function must return a coding system
3989 or a cons cell containing two coding systems, which is used as above.
3991 **** The variable network-coding-system-alist specifies
3992 the coding system to use for network sockets.
3994 Each element has the format (PATTERN . VAL), where PATTERN determines
3995 which network sockets the element applies to. PATTERN should be
3996 either a port number or a regular expression matching some network
3999 VAL is a coding system, a cons cell containing two coding systems, or
4000 a function symbol. If VAL is a coding system, it is used for both
4001 decoding what received from the network stream and encoding what sent
4002 to the network stream. If VAL is a cons cell containing two coding
4003 systems, the car specifies the coding system for decoding, and the cdr
4004 specifies the coding system for encoding.
4006 If VAL is a function symbol, the function must return a coding system
4007 or a cons cell containing two coding systems, which is used as above.
4009 **** process-coding-system-alist specifies which coding systems to use
4010 for certain subprocess. It works like network-coding-system-alist,
4011 except that the PATTERN is matched against the program name used to
4012 start the subprocess.
4014 **** The variable default-process-coding-system specifies the coding
4015 systems to use for subprocess (and net connection) input and output,
4016 when nothing else specifies what to do. The value is a cons cell
4017 (OUTPUT-CODING . INPUT-CODING). OUTPUT-CODING applies to output
4018 to the subprocess, and INPUT-CODING applies to input from it.
4020 **** The variable coding-system-for-write, if non-nil, specifies the
4021 coding system to use for writing a file, or for output to a synchronous
4024 It also applies to any asynchronous subprocess or network connection,
4025 but in a different way: the value of coding-system-for-write when you
4026 start the subprocess or connection affects that subprocess or
4027 connection permanently or until overridden.
4029 The variable coding-system-for-write takes precedence over
4030 file-coding-system-alist, process-coding-system-alist and
4031 network-coding-system-alist, and all other methods of specifying a
4032 coding system for output. But most of the time this variable is nil.
4033 It exists so that Lisp programs can bind it to a specific coding
4034 system for one operation at a time.
4036 **** coding-system-for-read applies similarly to input from
4037 files, subprocesses or network connections.
4039 **** The function process-coding-system tells you what
4040 coding systems(s) an existing subprocess is using.
4041 The value is a cons cell,
4042 (DECODING-CODING-SYSTEM . ENCODING-CODING-SYSTEM)
4043 where DECODING-CODING-SYSTEM is used for decoding output from
4044 the subprocess, and ENCODING-CODING-SYSTEM is used for encoding
4045 input to the subprocess.
4047 **** The function set-process-coding-system can be used to
4048 change the coding systems in use for an existing subprocess.
4050 ** Emacs has a new facility to help users manage the many
4051 customization options. To make a Lisp program work with this facility,
4052 you need to use the new macros defgroup and defcustom.
4054 You use defcustom instead of defvar, for defining a user option
4055 variable. The difference is that you specify two additional pieces of
4056 information (usually): the "type" which says what values are
4057 legitimate, and the "group" which specifies the hierarchy for
4060 Thus, instead of writing
4062 (defvar foo-blurgoze nil
4063 "*Non-nil means that foo will act very blurgozely.")
4065 you would now write this:
4067 (defcustom foo-blurgoze nil
4068 "*Non-nil means that foo will act very blurgozely."
4072 The type `boolean' means that this variable has only
4073 two meaningful states: nil and non-nil. Other type values
4074 describe other possibilities; see the manual for Custom
4075 for a description of them.
4077 The "group" argument is used to specify a group which the option
4078 should belong to. You define a new group like this:
4080 (defgroup ispell nil
4081 "Spell checking using Ispell."
4084 The "group" argument in defgroup specifies the parent group. The root
4085 group is called `emacs'; it should not contain any variables itself,
4086 but only other groups. The immediate subgroups of `emacs' correspond
4087 to the keywords used by C-h p. Under these subgroups come
4088 second-level subgroups that belong to individual packages.
4090 Each Emacs package should have its own set of groups. A simple
4091 package should have just one group; a more complex package should
4092 have a hierarchy of its own groups. The sole or root group of a
4093 package should be a subgroup of one or more of the "keyword"
4094 first-level subgroups.
4096 ** New `widget' library for inserting UI components in buffers.
4098 This library, used by the new custom library, is documented in a
4099 separate manual that accompanies Emacs.
4103 The easy-mmode package provides macros and functions that make
4104 developing minor modes easier. Roughly, the programmer has to code
4105 only the functionality of the minor mode. All the rest--toggles,
4106 predicate, and documentation--can be done in one call to the macro
4107 `easy-mmode-define-minor-mode' (see the documentation). See also
4108 `easy-mmode-define-keymap'.
4110 ** Text property changes
4112 *** The `intangible' property now works on overlays as well as on a
4115 *** The new functions next-char-property-change and
4116 previous-char-property-change scan through the buffer looking for a
4117 place where either a text property or an overlay might change. The
4118 functions take two arguments, POSITION and LIMIT. POSITION is the
4119 starting position for the scan. LIMIT says where to stop the scan.
4121 If no property change is found before LIMIT, the value is LIMIT. If
4122 LIMIT is nil, scan goes to the beginning or end of the accessible part
4123 of the buffer. If no property change is found, the value is the
4124 position of the beginning or end of the buffer.
4126 *** In the `local-map' text property or overlay property, the property
4127 value can now be a symbol whose function definition is a keymap. This
4128 is an alternative to using the keymap itself.
4130 ** Changes in invisibility features
4132 *** Isearch can now temporarily show parts of the buffer which are
4133 hidden by an overlay with a invisible property, when the search match
4134 is inside that portion of the buffer. To enable this the overlay
4135 should have a isearch-open-invisible property which is a function that
4136 would be called having the overlay as an argument, the function should
4137 make the overlay visible.
4139 During incremental search the overlays are shown by modifying the
4140 invisible and intangible properties, if beside this more actions are
4141 needed the overlay should have a isearch-open-invisible-temporary
4142 which is a function. The function is called with 2 arguments: one is
4143 the overlay and the second is nil when it should show the overlay and
4144 t when it should hide it.
4146 *** add-to-invisibility-spec, remove-from-invisibility-spec
4148 Modes that use overlays to hide portions of a buffer should set the
4149 invisible property of the overlay to the mode's name (or another symbol)
4150 and modify the `buffer-invisibility-spec' to include that symbol.
4151 Use `add-to-invisibility-spec' and `remove-from-invisibility-spec' to
4152 manipulate the `buffer-invisibility-spec'.
4153 Here is an example of how to do this:
4155 ;; If we want to display an ellipsis:
4156 (add-to-invisibility-spec '(my-symbol . t))
4157 ;; If you don't want ellipsis:
4158 (add-to-invisibility-spec 'my-symbol)
4161 (overlay-put (make-overlay beginning end) 'invisible 'my-symbol)
4164 ;; When done with the overlays:
4165 (remove-from-invisibility-spec '(my-symbol . t))
4167 (remove-from-invisibility-spec 'my-symbol)
4169 ** Changes in syntax parsing.
4171 *** The syntax-directed buffer-scan functions (such as
4172 `parse-partial-sexp', `forward-word' and similar functions) can now
4173 obey syntax information specified by text properties, if the variable
4174 `parse-sexp-lookup-properties' is non-nil.
4176 If the value of `parse-sexp-lookup-properties' is nil, the behavior
4177 is as before: the syntax-table of the current buffer is always
4178 used to determine the syntax of the character at the position.
4180 When `parse-sexp-lookup-properties' is non-nil, the syntax of a
4181 character in the buffer is calculated thus:
4183 a) if the `syntax-table' text-property of that character
4184 is a cons, this cons becomes the syntax-type;
4186 Valid values of `syntax-table' text-property are: nil, a valid
4187 syntax-table, and a valid syntax-table element, i.e.,
4188 a cons cell of the form (SYNTAX-CODE . MATCHING-CHAR).
4190 b) if the character's `syntax-table' text-property
4191 is a syntax table, this syntax table is used
4192 (instead of the syntax-table of the current buffer) to
4193 determine the syntax type of the character.
4195 c) otherwise the syntax-type is determined by the syntax-table
4196 of the current buffer.
4198 *** The meaning of \s in regular expressions is also affected by the
4199 value of `parse-sexp-lookup-properties'. The details are the same as
4200 for the syntax-directed buffer-scan functions.
4202 *** There are two new syntax-codes, `!' and `|' (numeric values 14
4203 and 15). A character with a code `!' starts a comment which is ended
4204 only by another character with the same code (unless quoted). A
4205 character with a code `|' starts a string which is ended only by
4206 another character with the same code (unless quoted).
4208 These codes are mainly meant for use as values of the `syntax-table'
4211 *** The function `parse-partial-sexp' has new semantics for the sixth
4212 arg COMMENTSTOP. If it is `syntax-table', parse stops after the start
4213 of a comment or a string, or after end of a comment or a string.
4215 *** The state-list which the return value from `parse-partial-sexp'
4216 (and can also be used as an argument) now has an optional ninth
4217 element: the character address of the start of last comment or string;
4218 nil if none. The fourth and eighth elements have special values if the
4219 string/comment is started by a "!" or "|" syntax-code.
4221 *** Since new features of `parse-partial-sexp' allow a complete
4222 syntactic parsing, `font-lock' no longer supports
4223 `font-lock-comment-start-regexp'.
4225 ** Changes in face features
4227 *** The face functions are now unconditionally defined in Emacs, even
4228 if it does not support displaying on a device that supports faces.
4230 *** The function face-documentation returns the documentation string
4231 of a face (or nil if it doesn't have one).
4233 *** The function face-bold-p returns t if a face should be bold.
4234 set-face-bold-p sets that flag.
4236 *** The function face-italic-p returns t if a face should be italic.
4237 set-face-italic-p sets that flag.
4239 *** You can now specify foreground and background colors for text
4240 by adding elements of the form (foreground-color . COLOR-NAME)
4241 and (background-color . COLOR-NAME) to the list of faces in
4242 the `face' property (either the character's text property or an
4245 This means that you no longer need to create named faces to use
4246 arbitrary colors in a Lisp package.
4248 ** Changes in file-handling functions
4250 *** File-access primitive functions no longer discard an extra redundant
4251 directory name from the beginning of the file name. In other words,
4252 they no longer do anything special with // or /~. That conversion
4253 is now done only in substitute-in-file-name.
4255 This makes it possible for a Lisp program to open a file whose name
4258 *** If copy-file is unable to set the date of the output file,
4259 it now signals an error with the condition file-date-error.
4261 *** The inode number returned by file-attributes may be an integer (if
4262 the number fits in a Lisp integer) or a list of integers.
4264 *** insert-file-contents can now read from a special file,
4265 as long as the arguments VISIT and REPLACE are nil.
4267 *** The RAWFILE arg to find-file-noselect, if non-nil, now suppresses
4268 character code conversion as well as other things.
4270 Meanwhile, this feature does work with remote file names
4271 (formerly it did not).
4273 *** Lisp packages which create temporary files should use the TMPDIR
4274 environment variable to decide which directory to put them in.
4276 *** interpreter-mode-alist elements now specify regexps
4277 instead of constant strings.
4279 *** expand-file-name no longer treats `//' or `/~' specially. It used
4280 to delete all the text of a file name up through the first slash of
4281 any `//' or `/~' sequence. Now it passes them straight through.
4283 substitute-in-file-name continues to treat those sequences specially,
4284 in the same way as before.
4286 *** The variable `format-alist' is more general now.
4287 The FROM-FN and TO-FN in a format definition can now be strings
4288 which specify shell commands to use as filters to perform conversion.
4290 *** The new function access-file tries to open a file, and signals an
4291 error if that fails. If the open succeeds, access-file does nothing
4292 else, and returns nil.
4294 *** The function insert-directory now signals an error if the specified
4295 directory cannot be listed.
4297 ** Changes in minibuffer input
4299 *** The functions read-buffer, read-variable, read-command, read-string
4300 read-file-name, read-from-minibuffer and completing-read now take an
4301 additional argument which specifies the default value. If this
4302 argument is non-nil, it should be a string; that string is used in two
4305 It is returned if the user enters empty input.
4306 It is available through the history command M-n.
4308 *** The functions read-string, read-from-minibuffer,
4309 read-no-blanks-input and completing-read now take an additional
4310 argument INHERIT-INPUT-METHOD. If this is non-nil, then the
4311 minibuffer inherits the current input method and the setting of
4312 enable-multibyte-characters from the previously current buffer.
4314 In an interactive spec, you can use M instead of s to read an
4315 argument in this way.
4317 *** All minibuffer input functions discard text properties
4318 from the text you enter in the minibuffer, unless the variable
4319 minibuffer-allow-text-properties is non-nil.
4321 ** Echo area features
4323 *** Clearing the echo area now runs the normal hook
4324 echo-area-clear-hook. Note that the echo area can be used while the
4325 minibuffer is active; in that case, the minibuffer is still active
4326 after the echo area is cleared.
4328 *** The function current-message returns the message currently displayed
4329 in the echo area, or nil if there is none.
4331 ** Keyboard input features
4333 *** tty-erase-char is a new variable that reports which character was
4334 set up as the terminal's erase character when time Emacs was started.
4336 *** num-nonmacro-input-events is the total number of input events
4337 received so far from the terminal. It does not count those generated
4340 ** Frame-related changes
4342 *** make-frame runs the normal hook before-make-frame-hook just before
4343 creating a frame, and just after creating a frame it runs the abnormal
4344 hook after-make-frame-functions with the new frame as arg.
4346 *** The new hook window-configuration-change-hook is now run every time
4347 the window configuration has changed. The frame whose configuration
4348 has changed is the selected frame when the hook is run.
4350 *** Each frame now independently records the order for recently
4351 selected buffers, in its buffer-list frame parameter, so that the
4352 value of other-buffer is now based on the buffers recently displayed
4353 in the selected frame.
4355 *** The value of the frame parameter vertical-scroll-bars
4356 is now `left', `right' or nil. A non-nil value specifies
4357 which side of the window to put the scroll bars on.
4359 ** X Windows features
4361 *** You can examine X resources for other applications by binding
4362 x-resource-class around a call to x-get-resource. The usual value of
4363 x-resource-class is "Emacs", which is the correct value for Emacs.
4365 *** In menus, checkboxes and radio buttons now actually work.
4366 The menu displays the current status of the box or button.
4368 *** The function x-list-fonts now takes an optional fourth argument
4369 MAXIMUM which sets a limit on how many matching fonts to return.
4370 A smaller value of MAXIMUM makes the function faster.
4372 If the only question is whether *any* font matches the pattern,
4373 it is good to supply 1 for this argument.
4375 ** Subprocess features
4377 *** A reminder: it is no longer necessary for subprocess filter
4378 functions and sentinels to do save-match-data, because Emacs does this
4381 *** The new function shell-command-to-string executes a shell command
4382 and returns the output from the command as a string.
4384 *** The new function process-contact returns t for a child process,
4385 and (HOSTNAME SERVICE) for a net connection.
4387 ** An error in running pre-command-hook or post-command-hook
4388 does clear the variable to nil. The documentation was wrong before.
4390 ** In define-key-after, if AFTER is t, the new binding now always goes
4391 at the end of the keymap. If the keymap is a menu, this means it
4392 goes after the other menu items.
4394 ** If you have a program that makes several changes in the same area
4395 of the buffer, you can use the macro combine-after-change-calls
4396 around that Lisp code to make it faster when after-change hooks
4399 The macro arranges to call the after-change functions just once for a
4400 series of several changes--if that seems safe.
4402 Don't alter the variables after-change-functions and
4403 after-change-function within the body of a combine-after-change-calls
4406 ** If you define an abbrev (with define-abbrev) whose EXPANSION
4407 is not a string, then the abbrev does not expand in the usual sense,
4408 but its hook is still run.
4410 ** Normally, the Lisp debugger is not used (even if you have enabled it)
4411 for errors that are handled by condition-case.
4413 If you set debug-on-signal to a non-nil value, then the debugger is called
4414 regardless of whether there is a handler for the condition. This is
4415 useful for debugging problems that happen inside of a condition-case.
4417 This mode of operation seems to be unreliable in other ways. Errors that
4418 are normal and ought to be handled, perhaps in timers or process
4419 filters, will instead invoke the debugger. So don't say you weren't
4422 ** The new variable ring-bell-function lets you specify your own
4423 way for Emacs to "ring the bell".
4425 ** If run-at-time's TIME argument is t, the action is repeated at
4426 integral multiples of REPEAT from the epoch; this is useful for
4427 functions like display-time.
4429 ** You can use the function locate-library to find the precise file
4430 name of a Lisp library. This isn't new, but wasn't documented before.
4432 ** Commands for entering view mode have new optional arguments that
4433 can be used from Lisp. Low-level entrance to and exit from view mode
4434 is done by functions view-mode-enter and view-mode-exit.
4436 ** batch-byte-compile-file now makes Emacs return a nonzero status code
4437 if there is an error in compilation.
4439 ** pop-to-buffer, switch-to-buffer-other-window and
4440 switch-to-buffer-other-frame now accept an additional optional
4441 argument NORECORD, much like switch-to-buffer. If it is non-nil,
4442 they don't put the buffer at the front of the buffer list.
4444 ** If your .emacs file leaves the *scratch* buffer non-empty,
4445 Emacs does not display the startup message, so as to avoid changing
4446 the *scratch* buffer.
4448 ** The new function regexp-opt returns an efficient regexp to match a string.
4449 The arguments are STRINGS and (optionally) PAREN. This function can be used
4450 where regexp matching or searching is intensively used and speed is important,
4451 e.g., in Font Lock mode.
4453 ** The variable buffer-display-count is local to each buffer,
4454 and is incremented each time the buffer is displayed in a window.
4455 It starts at 0 when the buffer is created.
4457 ** The new function compose-mail starts composing a mail message
4458 using the user's chosen mail composition agent (specified with the
4459 variable mail-user-agent). It has variants compose-mail-other-window
4460 and compose-mail-other-frame.
4462 ** The `user-full-name' function now takes an optional parameter which
4463 can either be a number (the UID) or a string (the login name). The
4464 full name of the specified user will be returned.
4466 ** Lisp packages that load files of customizations, or any other sort
4467 of user profile, should obey the variable init-file-user in deciding
4468 where to find it. They should load the profile of the user name found
4469 in that variable. If init-file-user is nil, meaning that the -q
4470 option was used, then Lisp packages should not load the customization
4473 ** format-time-string now allows you to specify the field width
4474 and type of padding. This works as in printf: you write the field
4475 width as digits in the middle of a %-construct. If you start
4476 the field width with 0, it means to pad with zeros.
4478 For example, %S normally specifies the number of seconds since the
4479 minute; %03S means to pad this with zeros to 3 positions, %_3S to pad
4480 with spaces to 3 positions. Plain %3S pads with zeros, because that
4481 is how %S normally pads to two positions.
4483 ** thing-at-point now supports a new kind of "thing": url.
4485 ** imenu.el changes.
4487 You can now specify a function to be run when selecting an
4488 item from menu created by imenu.
4490 An example of using this feature: if we define imenu items for the
4491 #include directives in a C file, we can open the included file when we
4492 select one of those items.
4495 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
4496 This file is part of GNU Emacs.
4498 GNU Emacs is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
4499 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
4500 the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
4501 (at your option) any later version.
4503 GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
4504 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
4505 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
4506 GNU General Public License for more details.
4508 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
4509 along with GNU Emacs. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
4514 paragraph-separate: "[
\f]*$"