1 GNU Emacs NEWS -- history of user-visible changes. 2002-07-09
2 Copyright (C) 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3 See the end for copying conditions.
5 Please send Emacs bug reports to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
6 For older news, see the file ONEWS
9 * Changes in Emacs 21.3
11 ** The obsolete C mode (c-mode.el) has been removed to avoid problems
14 ** UTF-16 coding systems are available, encoding the same characters
15 as mule-utf-8. Coding system `utf-16-le-dos' is useful as the value
16 of `selection-coding-system' in MS Windows, allowing you to paste
17 multilingual text from the clipboard. Set it interactively with
18 C-x RET x or in .emacs with `(set-selection-coding-system 'utf-16-le-dos)'.
20 ** There is a new language environment for UTF-8 (set up automatically
23 ** Translation tables are available between equivalent characters in
24 different Emacs charsets -- for instance `e with acute' coming from the
25 Latin-1 and Latin-2 charsets. User options `unify-8859-on-encoding-mode'
26 and `unify-8859-on-decoding-mode' respectively turn on translation
27 between ISO 8859 character sets (`unification') on encoding
28 (e.g. writing a file) and decoding (e.g. reading a file). Note that
29 `unify-8859-on-encoding-mode' is useful and safe, but
30 `unify-8859-on-decoding-mode' can cause text to change when you read
31 it and write it out again without edits, so it is not generally advisable.
32 By default `unify-8859-on-encoding-mode' is turned on.
34 ** The default value of selection-coding-system is now
35 compound-text-with-extensions.
37 If you want the old behavior, set selection-coding-system to
41 * Installation changes in Emacs 21.2
43 ** Support for BSD/OS 5.0 has been added.
45 ** Support for AIX 5.1 was added.
48 * Changes in Emacs 21.2
50 ** Emacs now supports compound-text extended segments in X selections.
52 X applications can use `extended segments' to encode characters in
53 compound text that belong to character sets which are not part of the
54 list of approved standard encodings for X, e.g. Big5. To paste
55 selections with such characters into Emacs, use the new coding system
56 compound-text-with-extensions as the value of selection-coding-system.
58 ** The default values of `tooltip-delay' and `tooltip-hide-delay'
61 ** On terminals whose erase-char is ^H (Backspace), Emacs
62 now uses normal-erase-is-backspace-mode.
64 ** When the *scratch* buffer is recreated, its mode is set from
65 initial-major-mode, which normally is lisp-interaction-mode,
66 instead of using default-major-mode.
68 ** The new option `Info-scroll-prefer-subnodes' causes Info to behave
69 like the stand-alone Info reader (from the GNU Texinfo package) as far
70 as motion between nodes and their subnodes is concerned. If it is t
71 (the default), Emacs behaves as before when you type SPC in a menu: it
72 visits the subnode pointed to by the first menu entry. If this option
73 is nil, SPC scrolls to the end of the current node, and only then goes
74 to the first menu item, like the stand-alone reader does.
76 This change was already in Emacs 21.1, but wasn't advertised in the
80 * Lisp Changes in Emacs 21.2
82 ** The meanings of scroll-up-aggressively and scroll-down-aggressively
83 have been interchanged, so that the former now controls scrolling up,
84 and the latter now controls scrolling down.
86 ** The variable `compilation-parse-errors-filename-function' can
87 be used to transform filenames found in compilation output.
90 * Installation Changes in Emacs 21.1
92 See the INSTALL file for information on installing extra libraries and
93 fonts to take advantage of the new graphical features and extra
94 charsets in this release.
96 ** Support for GNU/Linux on IA64 machines has been added.
98 ** Support for LynxOS has been added.
100 ** There are new configure options associated with the support for
101 images and toolkit scrollbars. Use the --help option in `configure'
104 ** You can build a 64-bit Emacs for SPARC/Solaris systems which
105 support 64-bit executables and also on Irix 6.5. This increases the
106 maximum buffer size. See etc/MACHINES for instructions. Changes to
107 build on other 64-bit systems should be straightforward modulo any
108 necessary changes to unexec.
110 ** There is a new configure option `--disable-largefile' to omit
111 Unix-98-style support for large files if that is available.
113 ** There is a new configure option `--without-xim' that instructs
114 Emacs to not use X Input Methods (XIM), if these are available.
116 ** `movemail' defaults to supporting POP. You can turn this off using
117 the --without-pop configure option, should that be necessary.
119 ** This version can be built for the Macintosh, but does not implement
120 all of the new display features described below. The port currently
121 lacks unexec, asynchronous processes, and networking support. See the
122 "Emacs and the Mac OS" appendix in the Emacs manual, for the
123 description of aspects specific to the Mac.
125 ** Note that the MS-Windows port does not yet implement various of the
126 new display features described below.
129 * Changes in Emacs 21.1
131 ** Emacs has a new redisplay engine.
133 The new redisplay handles characters of variable width and height.
134 Italic text can be used without redisplay problems. Fonts containing
135 oversized characters, i.e. characters larger than the logical height
136 of a font can be used. Images of various formats can be displayed in
139 ** Emacs has a new face implementation.
141 The new faces no longer fundamentally use X font names to specify the
142 font. Instead, each face has several independent attributes--family,
143 height, width, weight and slant--that it may or may not specify.
144 These attributes can be merged from various faces, and then together
147 Faces are supported on terminals that can display color or fonts.
148 These terminal capabilities are auto-detected. Details can be found
149 under Lisp changes, below.
151 ** Emacs can display faces on TTY frames.
153 Emacs automatically detects terminals that are able to display colors.
154 Faces with a weight greater than normal are displayed extra-bright, if
155 the terminal supports it. Faces with a weight less than normal and
156 italic faces are displayed dimmed, if the terminal supports it.
157 Underlined faces are displayed underlined if possible. Other face
158 attributes such as `overline', `strike-through', and `box' are ignored
161 The command-line options `-fg COLOR', `-bg COLOR', and `-rv' are now
162 supported on character terminals.
164 Emacs automatically remaps all X-style color specifications to one of
165 the colors supported by the terminal. This means you could have the
166 same color customizations that work both on a windowed display and on
167 a TTY or when Emacs is invoked with the -nw option.
169 ** New default font is Courier 12pt under X.
173 Emacs supports playing sound files on GNU/Linux and FreeBSD (Voxware
174 driver and native BSD driver, a.k.a. Luigi's driver). Currently
175 supported file formats are RIFF-WAVE (*.wav) and Sun Audio (*.au).
176 You must configure Emacs with the option `--with-sound=yes' to enable
179 ** Emacs now resizes mini-windows if appropriate.
181 If a message is longer than one line, or minibuffer contents are
182 longer than one line, Emacs can resize the minibuffer window unless it
183 is on a frame of its own. You can control resizing and the maximum
184 minibuffer window size by setting the following variables:
186 - User option: max-mini-window-height
188 Maximum height for resizing mini-windows. If a float, it specifies a
189 fraction of the mini-window frame's height. If an integer, it
190 specifies a number of lines.
194 - User option: resize-mini-windows
196 How to resize mini-windows. If nil, don't resize. If t, always
197 resize to fit the size of the text. If `grow-only', let mini-windows
198 grow only, until they become empty, at which point they are shrunk
201 Default is `grow-only'.
205 Emacs now runs with the LessTif toolkit (see
206 <http://www.lesstif.org>). You will need version 0.92.26, or later.
208 ** LessTif/Motif file selection dialog.
210 When Emacs is configured to use LessTif or Motif, reading a file name
211 from a menu will pop up a file selection dialog if `use-dialog-box' is
214 ** File selection dialog on MS-Windows is supported.
216 When a file is visited by clicking File->Open, the MS-Windows version
217 now pops up a standard file selection dialog where you can select a
218 file to visit. File->Save As also pops up that dialog.
220 ** Toolkit scroll bars.
222 Emacs now uses toolkit scroll bars if available. When configured for
223 LessTif/Motif, it will use that toolkit's scroll bar. Otherwise, when
224 configured for Lucid and Athena widgets, it will use the Xaw3d scroll
225 bar if Xaw3d is available. You can turn off the use of toolkit scroll
226 bars by specifying `--with-toolkit-scroll-bars=no' when configuring
229 When you encounter problems with the Xaw3d scroll bar, watch out how
230 Xaw3d is compiled on your system. If the Makefile generated from
231 Xaw3d's Imakefile contains a `-DNARROWPROTO' compiler option, and your
232 Emacs system configuration file `s/your-system.h' does not contain a
233 define for NARROWPROTO, you might consider adding it. Take
234 `s/freebsd.h' as an example.
236 Alternatively, if you don't have access to the Xaw3d source code, take
237 a look at your system's imake configuration file, for example in the
238 directory `/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/config' (paths are different on
239 different systems). You will find files `*.cf' there. If your
240 system's cf-file contains a line like `#define NeedWidePrototypes NO',
241 add a `#define NARROWPROTO' to your Emacs system configuration file.
243 The reason for this is that one Xaw3d function uses `double' or
244 `float' function parameters depending on the setting of NARROWPROTO.
245 This is not a problem when Imakefiles are used because each system's
246 imake configuration file contains the necessary information. Since
247 Emacs doesn't use imake, this has do be done manually.
251 Emacs supports a tool bar at the top of a frame under X. For details
252 of how to define a tool bar, see the page describing Lisp-level
253 changes. Tool-bar global minor mode controls whether or not it is
254 displayed and is on by default. The appearance of the bar is improved
255 if Emacs has been built with XPM image support. Otherwise monochrome
258 To make the tool bar more useful, we need contributions of extra icons
259 for specific modes (with copyright assignments). Contributions would
260 also be useful to touch up some of the PBM icons manually.
264 Tooltips are small X windows displaying a help string at the current
265 mouse position. The Lisp package `tooltip' implements them. You can
266 turn them off via the user option `tooltip-mode'.
268 Tooltips also provides support for GUD debugging. If activated,
269 variable values can be displayed in tooltips by pointing at them with
270 the mouse in source buffers. You can customize various aspects of the
271 tooltip display in the group `tooltip'.
273 ** Automatic Hscrolling
275 Horizontal scrolling now happens automatically if
276 `automatic-hscrolling' is set (the default). This setting can be
279 If a window is scrolled horizontally with set-window-hscroll, or
280 scroll-left/scroll-right (C-x <, C-x >), this serves as a lower bound
281 for automatic horizontal scrolling. Automatic scrolling will scroll
282 the text more to the left if necessary, but won't scroll the text more
283 to the right than the column set with set-window-hscroll etc.
285 ** When using a windowing terminal, each Emacs window now has a cursor
286 of its own. By default, when a window is selected, the cursor is
287 solid; otherwise, it is hollow. The user-option
288 `cursor-in-non-selected-windows' controls how to display the
289 cursor in non-selected windows. If nil, no cursor is shown, if
290 non-nil a hollow box cursor is shown.
292 ** Fringes to the left and right of windows are used to display
293 truncation marks, continuation marks, overlay arrows and alike. The
294 foreground, background, and stipple of these areas can be changed by
295 customizing face `fringe'.
297 ** The mode line under X is now drawn with shadows by default.
298 You can change its appearance by modifying the face `mode-line'.
299 In particular, setting the `:box' attribute to nil turns off the 3D
300 appearance of the mode line. (The 3D appearance makes the mode line
301 occupy more space, and thus might cause the first or the last line of
302 the window to be partially obscured.)
304 The variable `mode-line-inverse-video', which was used in older
305 versions of emacs to make the mode-line stand out, is now deprecated.
306 However, setting it to nil will cause the `mode-line' face to be
307 ignored, and mode-lines to be drawn using the default text face.
309 ** Mouse-sensitive mode line.
311 Different parts of the mode line have been made mouse-sensitive on all
312 systems which support the mouse. Moving the mouse to a
313 mouse-sensitive part in the mode line changes the appearance of the
314 mouse pointer to an arrow, and help about available mouse actions is
315 displayed either in the echo area, or in the tooltip window if you
318 Currently, the following actions have been defined:
320 - Mouse-1 on the buffer name in the mode line goes to the next buffer.
322 - Mouse-3 on the buffer-name goes to the previous buffer.
324 - Mouse-2 on the read-only or modified status in the mode line (`%' or
325 `*') toggles the status.
327 - Mouse-3 on the mode name displays a minor-mode menu.
331 Emacs can optionally display an hourglass pointer under X. You can
332 turn the display on or off by customizing group `cursor'.
336 M-x blink-cursor-mode toggles a blinking cursor under X and on
337 terminals having terminal capabilities `vi', `vs', and `ve'. Blinking
338 and related parameters like frequency and delay can be customized in
341 ** New font-lock support mode `jit-lock-mode'.
343 This support mode is roughly equivalent to `lazy-lock' but is
344 generally faster. It supports stealth and deferred fontification.
345 See the documentation of the function `jit-lock-mode' for more
348 Font-lock uses jit-lock-mode as default support mode, so you don't
349 have to do anything to activate it.
351 ** The default binding of the Delete key has changed.
353 The new user-option `normal-erase-is-backspace' can be set to
354 determine the effect of the Delete and Backspace function keys.
356 On window systems, the default value of this option is chosen
357 according to the keyboard used. If the keyboard has both a Backspace
358 key and a Delete key, and both are mapped to their usual meanings, the
359 option's default value is set to t, so that Backspace can be used to
360 delete backward, and Delete can be used to delete forward. On
361 keyboards which either have only one key (usually labeled DEL), or two
362 keys DEL and BS which produce the same effect, the option's value is
363 set to nil, and these keys delete backward.
365 If not running under a window system, setting this option accomplishes
366 a similar effect by mapping C-h, which is usually generated by the
367 Backspace key, to DEL, and by mapping DEL to C-d via
368 `keyboard-translate'. The former functionality of C-h is available on
369 the F1 key. You should probably not use this setting on a text-only
370 terminal if you don't have both Backspace, Delete and F1 keys.
372 Programmatically, you can call function normal-erase-is-backspace-mode
373 to toggle the behavior of the Delete and Backspace keys.
375 ** The default for user-option `next-line-add-newlines' has been
376 changed to nil, i.e. C-n will no longer add newlines at the end of a
379 ** The <home> and <end> keys now move to the beginning or end of the
380 current line, respectively. C-<home> and C-<end> move to the
381 beginning and end of the buffer.
383 ** Emacs now checks for recursive loads of Lisp files. If the
384 recursion depth exceeds `recursive-load-depth-limit', an error is
387 ** When an error is signaled during the loading of the user's init
388 file, Emacs now pops up the *Messages* buffer.
390 ** Emacs now refuses to load compiled Lisp files which weren't
391 compiled with Emacs. Set `load-dangerous-libraries' to t to change
394 The reason for this change is an incompatible change in XEmacs's byte
395 compiler. Files compiled with XEmacs can contain byte codes that let
398 ** Toggle buttons and radio buttons in menus.
400 When compiled with LessTif (or Motif) support, Emacs uses toolkit
401 widgets for radio and toggle buttons in menus. When configured for
402 Lucid, Emacs draws radio buttons and toggle buttons similar to Motif.
404 ** The menu bar configuration has changed. The new configuration is
405 more CUA-compliant. The most significant change is that Options is
406 now a separate menu-bar item, with Mule and Customize as its submenus.
408 ** Item Save Options on the Options menu allows saving options set
411 ** Highlighting of trailing whitespace.
413 When `show-trailing-whitespace' is non-nil, Emacs displays trailing
414 whitespace in the face `trailing-whitespace'. Trailing whitespace is
415 defined as spaces or tabs at the end of a line. To avoid busy
416 highlighting when entering new text, trailing whitespace is not
417 displayed if point is at the end of the line containing the
420 ** C-x 5 1 runs the new command delete-other-frames which deletes
421 all frames except the selected one.
423 ** The new user-option `confirm-kill-emacs' can be customized to
424 let Emacs ask for confirmation before exiting.
426 ** The header line in an Info buffer is now displayed as an emacs
427 header-line (which is like a mode-line, but at the top of the window),
428 so that it remains visible even when the buffer has been scrolled.
429 This behavior may be disabled by customizing the option
430 `Info-use-header-line'.
432 ** Polish, Czech, German, and French translations of Emacs' reference card
433 have been added. They are named `pl-refcard.tex', `cs-refcard.tex',
434 `de-refcard.tex' and `fr-refcard.tex'. Postscript files are included.
436 ** An `Emacs Survival Guide', etc/survival.tex, is available.
438 ** A reference card for Dired has been added. Its name is
439 `dired-ref.tex'. A French translation is available in
442 ** C-down-mouse-3 is bound differently. Now if the menu bar is not
443 displayed it pops up a menu containing the items which would be on the
444 menu bar. If the menu bar is displayed, it pops up the major mode
445 menu or the Edit menu if there is no major mode menu.
447 ** Variable `load-path' is no longer customizable through Customize.
449 You can no longer use `M-x customize-variable' to customize `load-path'
450 because it now contains a version-dependent component. You can still
451 use `add-to-list' and `setq' to customize this variable in your
452 `~/.emacs' init file or to modify it from any Lisp program in general.
454 ** C-u C-x = provides detailed information about the character at
455 point in a pop-up window.
457 ** Emacs can now support 'wheeled' mice (such as the MS IntelliMouse)
458 under XFree86. To enable this, use the `mouse-wheel-mode' command, or
459 customize the variable `mouse-wheel-mode'.
461 The variables `mouse-wheel-follow-mouse' and `mouse-wheel-scroll-amount'
462 determine where and by how much buffers are scrolled.
464 ** Emacs' auto-save list files are now by default stored in a
465 sub-directory `.emacs.d/auto-save-list/' of the user's home directory.
466 (On MS-DOS, this subdirectory's name is `_emacs.d/auto-save.list/'.)
467 You can customize `auto-save-list-file-prefix' to change this location.
469 ** The function `getenv' is now callable interactively.
471 ** The new user-option `even-window-heights' can be set to nil
472 to prevent `display-buffer' from evening out window heights.
474 ** The new command M-x delete-trailing-whitespace RET will delete the
475 trailing whitespace within the current restriction. You can also add
476 this function to `write-file-hooks' or `local-write-file-hooks'.
478 ** When visiting a file with M-x find-file-literally, no newlines will
479 be added to the end of the buffer even if `require-final-newline' is
482 ** The new user-option `find-file-suppress-same-file-warnings' can be
483 set to suppress warnings ``X and Y are the same file'' when visiting a
484 file that is already visited under a different name.
486 ** The new user-option `electric-help-shrink-window' can be set to
487 nil to prevent adjusting the help window size to the buffer size.
489 ** New command M-x describe-character-set reads a character set name
490 and displays information about that.
492 ** The new variable `auto-mode-interpreter-regexp' contains a regular
493 expression matching interpreters, for file mode determination.
495 This regular expression is matched against the first line of a file to
496 determine the file's mode in `set-auto-mode' when Emacs can't deduce a
497 mode from the file's name. If it matches, the file is assumed to be
498 interpreted by the interpreter matched by the second group of the
499 regular expression. The mode is then determined as the mode
500 associated with that interpreter in `interpreter-mode-alist'.
502 ** New function executable-make-buffer-file-executable-if-script-p is
503 suitable as an after-save-hook as an alternative to `executable-chmod'.
505 ** The most preferred coding-system is now used to save a buffer if
506 buffer-file-coding-system is `undecided' and it is safe for the buffer
507 contents. (The most preferred is set by set-language-environment or
508 by M-x prefer-coding-system.) Thus if you visit an ASCII file and
509 insert a non-ASCII character from your current language environment,
510 the file will be saved silently with the appropriate coding.
511 Previously you would be prompted for a safe coding system.
513 ** The many obsolete language `setup-...-environment' commands have
514 been removed -- use `set-language-environment'.
516 ** The new Custom option `keyboard-coding-system' specifies a coding
517 system for keyboard input.
519 ** New variable `inhibit-iso-escape-detection' determines if Emacs'
520 coding system detection algorithm should pay attention to ISO2022's
521 escape sequences. If this variable is non-nil, the algorithm ignores
522 such escape sequences. The default value is nil, and it is
523 recommended not to change it except for the special case that you
524 always want to read any escape code verbatim. If you just want to
525 read a specific file without decoding escape codes, use C-x RET c
526 (`universal-coding-system-argument'). For instance, C-x RET c latin-1
527 RET C-x C-f filename RET.
529 ** Variable `default-korean-keyboard' is initialized properly from the
530 environment variable `HANGUL_KEYBOARD_TYPE'.
532 ** New command M-x list-charset-chars reads a character set name and
533 displays all characters in that character set.
535 ** M-x set-terminal-coding-system (C-x RET t) now allows CCL-based
536 coding systems such as cpXXX and cyrillic-koi8.
538 ** Emacs now attempts to determine the initial language environment
539 and preferred and locale coding systems systematically from the
540 LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, and LANG environment variables during startup.
542 ** New language environments `Polish', `Latin-8' and `Latin-9'.
543 Latin-8 and Latin-9 correspond respectively to the ISO character sets
544 8859-14 (Celtic) and 8859-15 (updated Latin-1, with the Euro sign).
545 GNU Intlfonts doesn't support these yet but recent X releases have
546 8859-15. See etc/INSTALL for information on obtaining extra fonts.
547 There are new Leim input methods for Latin-8 and Latin-9 prefix (only)
550 ** New language environments `Dutch' and `Spanish'.
551 These new environments mainly select appropriate translations
554 ** In Ethiopic language environment, special key bindings for
555 function keys are changed as follows. This is to conform to "Emacs
556 Lisp Coding Convention".
558 new command old-binding
559 --- ------- -----------
560 f3 ethio-fidel-to-sera-buffer f5
561 S-f3 ethio-fidel-to-sera-region f5
562 C-f3 ethio-fidel-to-sera-mail-or-marker f5
564 f4 ethio-sera-to-fidel-buffer unchanged
565 S-f4 ethio-sera-to-fidel-region unchanged
566 C-f4 ethio-sera-to-fidel-mail-or-marker unchanged
568 S-f5 ethio-toggle-punctuation f3
569 S-f6 ethio-modify-vowel f6
570 S-f7 ethio-replace-space f7
571 S-f8 ethio-input-special-character f8
572 S-f9 ethio-replace-space unchanged
573 C-f9 ethio-toggle-space f2
575 ** There are new Leim input methods.
576 New input methods "turkish-postfix", "turkish-alt-postfix",
577 "greek-mizuochi", "TeX", and "greek-babel" are now part of the Leim
580 ** The rule of input method "slovak" is slightly changed. Now the
581 rules for translating "q" and "Q" to "`" (backquote) are deleted, thus
582 typing them inserts "q" and "Q" respectively. Rules for translating
583 "=q", "+q", "=Q", and "+Q" to "`" are also deleted. Now, to input
584 "`", you must type "=q".
586 ** If your terminal can't display characters from some of the ISO
587 8859 character sets but can display Latin-1, you can display
588 more-or-less mnemonic sequences of ASCII/Latin-1 characters instead of
589 empty boxes (under a window system) or question marks (not under a
590 window system). Customize the option `latin1-display' to turn this
593 ** M-; now calls comment-dwim which tries to do something clever based
594 on the context. M-x kill-comment is now an alias to comment-kill,
595 defined in newcomment.el. You can choose different styles of region
596 commenting with the variable `comment-style'.
598 ** New user options `display-time-mail-face' and
599 `display-time-use-mail-icon' control the appearance of mode-line mail
600 indicator used by the display-time package. On a suitable display the
601 indicator can be an icon and is mouse-sensitive.
603 ** On window-systems, additional space can be put between text lines
604 on the display using several methods
606 - By setting frame parameter `line-spacing' to PIXELS. PIXELS must be
607 a positive integer, and specifies that PIXELS number of pixels should
608 be put below text lines on the affected frame or frames.
610 - By setting X resource `lineSpacing', class `LineSpacing'. This is
611 equivalent to specifying the frame parameter.
613 - By specifying `--line-spacing=N' or `-lsp N' on the command line.
615 - By setting buffer-local variable `line-spacing'. The meaning is
616 the same, but applies to the a particular buffer only.
618 ** The new command `clone-indirect-buffer' can be used to create
619 an indirect buffer that is a twin copy of the current buffer. The
620 command `clone-indirect-buffer-other-window', bound to C-x 4 c,
621 does the same but displays the indirect buffer in another window.
623 ** New user options `backup-directory-alist' and
624 `make-backup-file-name-function' control the placement of backups,
625 typically in a single directory or in an invisible sub-directory.
627 ** New commands iso-iso2sgml and iso-sgml2iso convert between Latin-1
628 characters and the corresponding SGML (HTML) entities.
630 ** New X resources recognized
632 *** The X resource `synchronous', class `Synchronous', specifies
633 whether Emacs should run in synchronous mode. Synchronous mode
634 is useful for debugging X problems.
638 emacs.synchronous: true
640 *** The X resource `visualClass, class `VisualClass', specifies the
641 visual Emacs should use. The resource's value should be a string of
642 the form `CLASS-DEPTH', where CLASS is the name of the visual class,
643 and DEPTH is the requested color depth as a decimal number. Valid
644 visual class names are
653 Visual class names specified as X resource are case-insensitive, i.e.
654 `pseudocolor', `Pseudocolor' and `PseudoColor' all have the same
657 The program `xdpyinfo' can be used to list the visual classes
658 supported on your display, and which depths they have. If
659 `visualClass' is not specified, Emacs uses the display's default
664 emacs.visualClass: TrueColor-8
666 *** The X resource `privateColormap', class `PrivateColormap',
667 specifies that Emacs should use a private colormap if it is using the
668 default visual, and that visual is of class PseudoColor. Recognized
669 resource values are `true' or `on'.
673 emacs.privateColormap: true
675 ** Faces and frame parameters.
677 There are four new faces `scroll-bar', `border', `cursor' and `mouse'.
678 Setting the frame parameters `scroll-bar-foreground' and
679 `scroll-bar-background' sets foreground and background color of face
680 `scroll-bar' and vice versa. Setting frame parameter `border-color'
681 sets the background color of face `border' and vice versa. Likewise
682 for frame parameters `cursor-color' and face `cursor', and frame
683 parameter `mouse-color' and face `mouse'.
685 Changing frame parameter `font' sets font-related attributes of the
686 `default' face and vice versa. Setting frame parameters
687 `foreground-color' or `background-color' sets the colors of the
688 `default' face and vice versa.
692 The face `menu' can be used to change colors and font of Emacs' menus.
694 ** New frame parameter `screen-gamma' for gamma correction.
696 The new frame parameter `screen-gamma' specifies gamma-correction for
697 colors. Its value may be nil, the default, in which case no gamma
698 correction occurs, or a number > 0, usually a float, that specifies
699 the screen gamma of a frame's display.
701 PC monitors usually have a screen gamma of 2.2. smaller values result
702 in darker colors. You might want to try a screen gamma of 1.5 for LCD
703 color displays. The viewing gamma Emacs uses is 0.4545. (1/2.2).
705 The X resource name of this parameter is `screenGamma', class
708 ** Tabs and variable-width text.
710 Tabs are now displayed with stretch properties; the width of a tab is
711 defined as a multiple of the normal character width of a frame, and is
712 independent of the fonts used in the text where the tab appears.
713 Thus, tabs can be used to line up text in different fonts.
715 ** Enhancements of the Lucid menu bar
717 *** The Lucid menu bar now supports the resource "margin".
719 emacs.pane.menubar.margin: 5
721 The default margin is 4 which makes the menu bar appear like the
724 *** Arrows that indicate sub-menus are now drawn with shadows, as in
727 ** A block cursor can be drawn as wide as the glyph under it under X.
729 As an example: if a block cursor is over a tab character, it will be
730 drawn as wide as that tab on the display. To do this, set
731 `x-stretch-cursor' to a non-nil value.
733 ** Empty display lines at the end of a buffer may be marked with a
734 bitmap (this is similar to the tilde displayed by vi and Less).
736 This behavior is activated by setting the buffer-local variable
737 `indicate-empty-lines' to a non-nil value. The default value of this
738 variable is found in `default-indicate-empty-lines'.
740 ** There is a new "aggressive" scrolling method.
742 When scrolling up because point is above the window start, if the
743 value of the buffer-local variable `scroll-up-aggressively' is a
744 number, Emacs chooses a new window start so that point ends up that
745 fraction of the window's height from the top of the window.
747 When scrolling down because point is below the window end, if the
748 value of the buffer-local variable `scroll-down-aggressively' is a
749 number, Emacs chooses a new window start so that point ends up that
750 fraction of the window's height from the bottom of the window.
752 ** You can now easily create new *Info* buffers using either
753 M-x clone-buffer, C-u m <entry> RET or C-u g <entry> RET.
754 M-x clone-buffer can also be used on *Help* and several other special
757 ** The command `Info-search' now uses a search history.
759 ** Listing buffers with M-x list-buffers (C-x C-b) now shows
760 abbreviated file names. Abbreviations can be customized by changing
761 `directory-abbrev-alist'.
763 ** A new variable, backup-by-copying-when-privileged-mismatch, gives
764 the highest file uid for which backup-by-copying-when-mismatch will be
765 forced on. The assumption is that uids less than or equal to this
766 value are special uids (root, bin, daemon, etc.--not real system
767 users) and that files owned by these users should not change ownership,
768 even if your system policy allows users other than root to edit them.
770 The default is 200; set the variable to nil to disable the feature.
772 ** The rectangle commands now avoid inserting undesirable spaces,
773 notably at the end of lines.
775 All these functions have been rewritten to avoid inserting unwanted
776 spaces, and an optional prefix now allows them to behave the old way.
778 ** The function `replace-rectangle' is an alias for `string-rectangle'.
780 ** The new command M-x string-insert-rectangle is like `string-rectangle',
781 but inserts text instead of replacing it.
783 ** The new command M-x query-replace-regexp-eval acts like
784 query-replace-regexp, but takes a Lisp expression which is evaluated
785 after each match to get the replacement text.
787 ** M-x query-replace recognizes a new command `e' (or `E') that lets
788 you edit the replacement string.
790 ** The new command mail-abbrev-complete-alias, bound to `M-TAB'
791 (if you load the library `mailabbrev'), lets you complete mail aliases
792 in the text, analogous to lisp-complete-symbol.
794 ** The variable `echo-keystrokes' may now have a floating point value.
796 ** If your init file is compiled (.emacs.elc), `user-init-file' is set
797 to the source name (.emacs.el), if that exists, after loading it.
799 ** The help string specified for a menu-item whose definition contains
800 the property `:help HELP' is now displayed under X, on MS-Windows, and
801 MS-DOS, either in the echo area or with tooltips. Many standard menus
802 displayed by Emacs now have help strings.
805 ** New user option `read-mail-command' specifies a command to use to
806 read mail from the menu etc.
808 ** The environment variable `EMACSLOCKDIR' is no longer used on MS-Windows.
809 This environment variable was used when creating lock files. Emacs on
810 MS-Windows does not use this variable anymore. This change was made
811 before Emacs 21.1, but wasn't documented until now.
813 ** Highlighting of mouse-sensitive regions is now supported in the
814 MS-DOS version of Emacs.
816 ** The new command `msdos-set-mouse-buttons' forces the MS-DOS version
817 of Emacs to behave as if the mouse had a specified number of buttons.
818 This comes handy with mice that don't report their number of buttons
819 correctly. One example is the wheeled mice, which report 3 buttons,
820 but clicks on the middle button are not passed to the MS-DOS version
825 *** Customize now supports comments about customized items. Use the
826 `State' menu to add comments, or give a prefix argument to
827 M-x customize-set-variable or M-x customize-set-value. Note that
828 customization comments will cause the customizations to fail in
829 earlier versions of Emacs.
831 *** The new option `custom-buffer-done-function' says whether to kill
832 Custom buffers when you've done with them or just bury them (the
835 *** If Emacs was invoked with the `-q' or `--no-init-file' options, it
836 does not allow you to save customizations in your `~/.emacs' init
837 file. This is because saving customizations from such a session would
838 wipe out all the other customizationss you might have on your init
841 ** If Emacs was invoked with the `-q' or `--no-init-file' options, it
842 does not save disabled and enabled commands for future sessions, to
843 avoid overwriting existing customizations of this kind that are
844 already in your init file.
846 ** New features in evaluation commands
848 *** The commands to evaluate Lisp expressions, such as C-M-x in Lisp
849 modes, C-j in Lisp Interaction mode, and M-:, now bind the variables
850 print-level, print-length, and debug-on-error based on the new
851 customizable variables eval-expression-print-level,
852 eval-expression-print-length, and eval-expression-debug-on-error.
854 The default values for the first two of these variables are 12 and 4
855 respectively, which means that `eval-expression' now prints at most
856 the first 12 members of a list and at most 4 nesting levels deep (if
857 the list is longer or deeper than that, an ellipsis `...' is
860 <RET> or <mouse-2> on the printed text toggles between an abbreviated
861 printed representation and an unabbreviated one.
863 The default value of eval-expression-debug-on-error is t, so any error
864 during evaluation produces a backtrace.
866 *** The function `eval-defun' (C-M-x) now loads Edebug and instruments
867 code when called with a prefix argument.
871 Note: This release contains changes that might not be compatible with
872 current user setups (although it's believed that these
873 incompatibilities will only show in very uncommon circumstances).
874 However, since the impact is uncertain, these changes may be rolled
875 back depending on user feedback. Therefore there's no forward
876 compatibility guarantee wrt the new features introduced in this
879 *** The hardcoded switch to "java" style in Java mode is gone.
880 CC Mode used to automatically set the style to "java" when Java mode
881 is entered. This has now been removed since it caused too much
884 However, to keep backward compatibility to a certain extent, the
885 default value for c-default-style now specifies the "java" style for
886 java-mode, but "gnu" for all other modes (as before). So you won't
887 notice the change if you haven't touched that variable.
889 *** New cleanups, space-before-funcall and compact-empty-funcall.
890 Two new cleanups have been added to c-cleanup-list:
892 space-before-funcall causes a space to be inserted before the opening
893 parenthesis of a function call, which gives the style "foo (bar)".
895 compact-empty-funcall causes any space before a function call opening
896 parenthesis to be removed if there are no arguments to the function.
897 It's typically useful together with space-before-funcall to get the
898 style "foo (bar)" and "foo()".
900 *** Some keywords now automatically trigger reindentation.
901 Keywords like "else", "while", "catch" and "finally" have been made
902 "electric" to make them reindent automatically when they continue an
903 earlier statement. An example:
905 for (i = 0; i < 17; i++)
910 Here, the "else" should be indented like the preceding "if", since it
911 continues that statement. CC Mode will automatically reindent it after
912 the "else" has been typed in full, since it's not until then it's
913 possible to decide whether it's a new statement or a continuation of
916 CC Mode uses Abbrev mode to achieve this, which is therefore turned on
919 *** M-a and M-e now moves by sentence in multiline strings.
920 Previously these two keys only moved by sentence in comments, which
921 meant that sentence movement didn't work in strings containing
922 documentation or other natural language text.
924 The reason it's only activated in multiline strings (i.e. strings that
925 contain a newline, even when escaped by a '\') is to avoid stopping in
926 the short strings that often reside inside statements. Multiline
927 strings almost always contain text in a natural language, as opposed
928 to other strings that typically contain format specifications,
929 commands, etc. Also, it's not that bothersome that M-a and M-e misses
930 sentences in single line strings, since they're short anyway.
932 *** Support for autodoc comments in Pike mode.
933 Autodoc comments for Pike are used to extract documentation from the
934 source, like Javadoc in Java. Pike mode now recognize this markup in
935 comment prefixes and paragraph starts.
937 *** The comment prefix regexps on c-comment-prefix may be mode specific.
938 When c-comment-prefix is an association list, it specifies the comment
939 line prefix on a per-mode basis, like c-default-style does. This
940 change came about to support the special autodoc comment prefix in
943 *** Better handling of syntactic errors.
944 The recovery after unbalanced parens earlier in the buffer has been
945 improved; CC Mode now reports them by dinging and giving a message
946 stating the offending line, but still recovers and indent the
947 following lines in a sane way (most of the time). An "else" with no
948 matching "if" is handled similarly. If an error is discovered while
949 indenting a region, the whole region is still indented and the error
950 is reported afterwards.
952 *** Lineup functions may now return absolute columns.
953 A lineup function can give an absolute column to indent the line to by
954 returning a vector with the desired column as the first element.
956 *** More robust and warning-free byte compilation.
957 Although this is strictly not a user visible change (well, depending
958 on the view of a user), it's still worth mentioning that CC Mode now
959 can be compiled in the standard ways without causing trouble. Some
960 code have also been moved between the subpackages to enhance the
961 modularity somewhat. Thanks to Martin Buchholz for doing the
964 *** c-style-variables-are-local-p now defaults to t.
965 This is an incompatible change that has been made to make the behavior
966 of the style system wrt global variable settings less confusing for
967 non-advanced users. If you know what this variable does you might
968 want to set it to nil in your .emacs, otherwise you probably don't
971 Defaulting c-style-variables-are-local-p to t avoids the confusing
972 situation that occurs when a user sets some style variables globally
973 and edits both a Java and a non-Java file in the same Emacs session.
974 If the style variables aren't buffer local in this case, loading of
975 the second file will cause the default style (either "gnu" or "java"
976 by default) to override the global settings made by the user.
978 *** New initialization procedure for the style system.
979 When the initial style for a buffer is determined by CC Mode (from the
980 variable c-default-style), the global values of style variables now
981 take precedence over the values specified by the chosen style. This
982 is different than the old behavior: previously, the style-specific
983 settings would override the global settings. This change makes it
984 possible to do simple configuration in the intuitive way with
985 Customize or with setq lines in one's .emacs file.
987 By default, the global value of every style variable is the new
988 special symbol set-from-style, which causes the value to be taken from
989 the style system. This means that in effect, only an explicit setting
990 of a style variable will cause the "overriding" behavior described
993 Also note that global settings override style-specific settings *only*
994 when the initial style of a buffer is chosen by a CC Mode major mode
995 function. When a style is chosen in other ways --- for example, by a
996 call like (c-set-style "gnu") in a hook, or via M-x c-set-style ---
997 then the style-specific values take precedence over any global style
998 values. In Lisp terms, global values override style-specific values
999 only when the new second argument to c-set-style is non-nil; see the
1000 function documentation for more info.
1002 The purpose of these changes is to make it easier for users,
1003 especially novice users, to do simple customizations with Customize or
1004 with setq in their .emacs files. On the other hand, the new system is
1005 intended to be compatible with advanced users' customizations as well,
1006 such as those that choose styles in hooks or whatnot. This new system
1007 is believed to be almost entirely compatible with current
1008 configurations, in spite of the changed precedence between style and
1009 global variable settings when a buffer's default style is set.
1011 (Thanks to Eric Eide for clarifying this explanation a bit.)
1013 **** c-offsets-alist is now a customizable variable.
1014 This became possible as a result of the new initialization behavior.
1016 This variable is treated slightly differently from the other style
1017 variables; instead of using the symbol set-from-style, it will be
1018 completed with the syntactic symbols it doesn't already contain when
1019 the style is first initialized. This means it now defaults to the
1020 empty list to make all syntactic elements get their values from the
1023 **** Compatibility variable to restore the old behavior.
1024 In case your configuration doesn't work with this change, you can set
1025 c-old-style-variable-behavior to non-nil to get the old behavior back
1028 *** Improvements to line breaking and text filling.
1029 CC Mode now handles this more intelligently and seamlessly wrt the
1030 surrounding code, especially inside comments. For details see the new
1031 chapter about this in the manual.
1033 **** New variable to recognize comment line prefix decorations.
1034 The variable c-comment-prefix-regexp has been added to properly
1035 recognize the line prefix in both block and line comments. It's
1036 primarily used to initialize the various paragraph recognition and
1037 adaptive filling variables that the text handling functions uses.
1039 **** New variable c-block-comment-prefix.
1040 This is a generalization of the now obsolete variable
1041 c-comment-continuation-stars to handle arbitrary strings.
1043 **** CC Mode now uses adaptive fill mode.
1044 This to make it adapt better to the paragraph style inside comments.
1046 It's also possible to use other adaptive filling packages inside CC
1047 Mode, notably Kyle E. Jones' Filladapt mode (http://wonderworks.com/).
1048 A new convenience function c-setup-filladapt sets up Filladapt for use
1051 Note though that the 2.12 version of Filladapt lacks a feature that
1052 causes it to work suboptimally when c-comment-prefix-regexp can match
1053 the empty string (which it commonly does). A patch for that is
1054 available from the CC Mode web site (http://www.python.org/emacs/
1057 **** The variables `c-hanging-comment-starter-p' and
1058 `c-hanging-comment-ender-p', which controlled how comment starters and
1059 enders were filled, are not used anymore. The new version of the
1060 function `c-fill-paragraph' keeps the comment starters and enders as
1061 they were before the filling.
1063 **** It's now possible to selectively turn off auto filling.
1064 The variable c-ignore-auto-fill is used to ignore auto fill mode in
1065 specific contexts, e.g. in preprocessor directives and in string
1068 **** New context sensitive line break function c-context-line-break.
1069 It works like newline-and-indent in normal code, and adapts the line
1070 prefix according to the comment style when used inside comments. If
1071 you're normally using newline-and-indent, you might want to switch to
1074 *** Fixes to IDL mode.
1075 It now does a better job in recognizing only the constructs relevant
1076 to IDL. E.g. it no longer matches "class" as the beginning of a
1077 struct block, but it does match the CORBA 2.3 "valuetype" keyword.
1078 Thanks to Eric Eide.
1080 *** Improvements to the Whitesmith style.
1081 It now keeps the style consistently on all levels and both when
1082 opening braces hangs and when they don't.
1084 **** New lineup function c-lineup-whitesmith-in-block.
1086 *** New lineup functions c-lineup-template-args and c-indent-multi-line-block.
1087 See their docstrings for details. c-lineup-template-args does a
1088 better job of tracking the brackets used as parens in C++ templates,
1089 and is used by default to line up continued template arguments.
1091 *** c-lineup-comment now preserves alignment with a comment on the
1092 previous line. It used to instead preserve comments that started in
1093 the column specified by comment-column.
1095 *** c-lineup-C-comments handles "free form" text comments.
1096 In comments with a long delimiter line at the start, the indentation
1097 is kept unchanged for lines that start with an empty comment line
1098 prefix. This is intended for the type of large block comments that
1099 contain documentation with its own formatting. In these you normally
1100 don't want CC Mode to change the indentation.
1102 *** The `c' syntactic symbol is now relative to the comment start
1103 instead of the previous line, to make integers usable as lineup
1106 *** All lineup functions have gotten docstrings.
1108 *** More preprocessor directive movement functions.
1109 c-down-conditional does the reverse of c-up-conditional.
1110 c-up-conditional-with-else and c-down-conditional-with-else are
1111 variants of these that also stops at "#else" lines (suggested by Don
1114 *** Minor improvements to many movement functions in tricky situations.
1118 *** New variable `dired-recursive-deletes' determines if the delete
1119 command will delete non-empty directories recursively. The default
1120 is, delete only empty directories.
1122 *** New variable `dired-recursive-copies' determines if the copy
1123 command will copy directories recursively. The default is, do not
1124 copy directories recursively.
1126 *** In command `dired-do-shell-command' (usually bound to `!') a `?'
1127 in the shell command has a special meaning similar to `*', but with
1128 the difference that the command will be run on each file individually.
1130 *** The new command `dired-find-alternate-file' (usually bound to `a')
1131 replaces the Dired buffer with the buffer for an alternate file or
1134 *** The new command `dired-show-file-type' (usually bound to `y') shows
1135 a message in the echo area describing what type of file the point is on.
1136 This command invokes the external program `file' do its work, and so
1137 will only work on systems with that program, and will be only as
1138 accurate or inaccurate as it is.
1140 *** Dired now properly handles undo changes of adding/removing `-R'
1143 *** Dired commands that prompt for a destination file now allow the use
1144 of the `M-n' command in the minibuffer to insert the source filename,
1145 which the user can then edit. This only works if there is a single
1146 source file, not when operating on multiple marked files.
1150 The Gnus NEWS entries are short, but they reflect sweeping changes in
1151 four areas: Article display treatment, MIME treatment,
1152 internationalization and mail-fetching.
1154 *** The mail-fetching functions have changed. See the manual for the
1155 many details. In particular, all procmail fetching variables are gone.
1157 If you used procmail like in
1159 (setq nnmail-use-procmail t)
1160 (setq nnmail-spool-file 'procmail)
1161 (setq nnmail-procmail-directory "~/mail/incoming/")
1162 (setq nnmail-procmail-suffix "\\.in")
1164 this now has changed to
1167 '((directory :path "~/mail/incoming/"
1170 More information is available in the info doc at Select Methods ->
1171 Getting Mail -> Mail Sources
1173 *** Gnus is now a MIME-capable reader. This affects many parts of
1174 Gnus, and adds a slew of new commands. See the manual for details.
1175 Separate MIME packages like RMIME, mime-compose etc., will probably no
1176 longer work; remove them and use the native facilities.
1178 The FLIM/SEMI package still works with Emacs 21, but if you want to
1179 use the native facilities, you must remove any mailcap.el[c] that was
1180 installed by FLIM/SEMI version 1.13 or earlier.
1182 *** Gnus has also been multilingualized. This also affects too many
1183 parts of Gnus to summarize here, and adds many new variables. There
1184 are built-in facilities equivalent to those of gnus-mule.el, which is
1185 now just a compatibility layer.
1187 *** gnus-mule.el is now just a compatibility layer over the built-in
1190 *** gnus-auto-select-first can now be a function to be
1191 called to position point.
1193 *** The user can now decide which extra headers should be included in
1194 summary buffers and NOV files.
1196 *** `gnus-article-display-hook' has been removed. Instead, a number
1197 of variables starting with `gnus-treat-' have been added.
1199 *** The Gnus posting styles have been redone again and now work in a
1200 subtly different manner.
1202 *** New web-based backends have been added: nnslashdot, nnwarchive
1203 and nnultimate. nnweb has been revamped, again, to keep up with
1204 ever-changing layouts.
1206 *** Gnus can now read IMAP mail via nnimap.
1208 *** There is image support of various kinds and some sound support.
1210 ** Changes in Texinfo mode.
1212 *** A couple of new key bindings have been added for inserting Texinfo
1216 -------------------------
1220 C-c C-c q @quotation
1222 C-c C-o @<block> ... @end <block>
1225 *** The " key now inserts either " or `` or '' depending on context.
1227 ** Changes in Outline mode.
1229 There is now support for Imenu to index headings. A new command
1230 `outline-headers-as-kill' copies the visible headings in the region to
1231 the kill ring, e.g. to produce a table of contents.
1233 ** Changes to Emacs Server
1235 *** The new option `server-kill-new-buffers' specifies what to do
1236 with buffers when done with them. If non-nil, the default, buffers
1237 are killed, unless they were already present before visiting them with
1238 Emacs Server. If nil, `server-temp-file-regexp' specifies which
1239 buffers to kill, as before.
1241 Please note that only buffers are killed that still have a client,
1242 i.e. buffers visited with `emacsclient --no-wait' are never killed in
1245 ** Both emacsclient and Emacs itself now accept command line options
1246 of the form +LINE:COLUMN in addition to +LINE.
1248 ** Changes to Show Paren mode.
1250 *** Overlays used by Show Paren mode now use a priority property.
1251 The new user option show-paren-priority specifies the priority to
1252 use. Default is 1000.
1254 ** New command M-x check-parens can be used to find unbalanced paren
1255 groups and strings in buffers in Lisp mode (or other modes).
1257 ** Changes to hideshow.el
1259 *** Generalized block selection and traversal
1261 A block is now recognized by its start and end regexps (both strings),
1262 and an integer specifying which sub-expression in the start regexp
1263 serves as the place where a `forward-sexp'-like function can operate.
1264 See the documentation of variable `hs-special-modes-alist'.
1266 *** During incremental search, if Hideshow minor mode is active,
1267 hidden blocks are temporarily shown. The variable `hs-headline' can
1268 be used in the mode line format to show the line at the beginning of
1271 *** User option `hs-hide-all-non-comment-function' specifies a
1272 function to be called at each top-level block beginning, instead of
1273 the normal block-hiding function.
1275 *** The command `hs-show-region' has been removed.
1277 *** The key bindings have changed to fit the Emacs conventions,
1278 roughly imitating those of Outline minor mode. Notably, the prefix
1279 for all bindings is now `C-c @'. For details, see the documentation
1280 for `hs-minor-mode'.
1282 *** The variable `hs-show-hidden-short-form' has been removed, and
1283 hideshow.el now always behaves as if this variable were set to t.
1285 ** Changes to Change Log mode and Add-Log functions
1287 *** If you invoke `add-change-log-entry' from a backup file, it makes
1288 an entry appropriate for the file's parent. This is useful for making
1289 log entries by comparing a version with deleted functions.
1291 **** New command M-x change-log-merge merges another log into the
1294 *** New command M-x change-log-redate fixes any old-style date entries
1297 *** Change Log mode now adds a file's version number to change log
1298 entries if user-option `change-log-version-info-enabled' is non-nil.
1299 Unless the file is under version control the search for a file's
1300 version number is performed based on regular expressions from
1301 `change-log-version-number-regexp-list' which can be customized.
1302 Version numbers are only found in the first 10 percent of a file.
1304 *** Change Log mode now defines its own faces for font-lock highlighting.
1306 ** Changes to cmuscheme
1308 *** The user-option `scheme-program-name' has been renamed
1309 `cmuscheme-program-name' due to conflicts with xscheme.el.
1311 ** Changes in Font Lock
1313 *** The new function `font-lock-remove-keywords' can be used to remove
1314 font-lock keywords from the current buffer or from a specific major mode.
1316 *** Multi-line patterns are now supported. Modes using this, should
1317 set font-lock-multiline to t in their font-lock-defaults.
1319 *** `font-lock-syntactic-face-function' allows major-modes to choose
1320 the face used for each string/comment.
1322 *** A new standard face `font-lock-doc-face'.
1323 Meant for Lisp docstrings, Javadoc comments and other "documentation in code".
1325 ** Changes to Shell mode
1327 *** The `shell' command now accepts an optional argument to specify the buffer
1328 to use, which defaults to "*shell*". When used interactively, a
1329 non-default buffer may be specified by giving the `shell' command a
1330 prefix argument (causing it to prompt for the buffer name).
1332 ** Comint (subshell) changes
1334 These changes generally affect all modes derived from comint mode, which
1335 include shell-mode, gdb-mode, scheme-interaction-mode, etc.
1337 *** Comint now by default interprets some carriage-control characters.
1338 Comint now removes CRs from CR LF sequences, and treats single CRs and
1339 BSs in the output in a way similar to a terminal (by deleting to the
1340 beginning of the line, or deleting the previous character,
1341 respectively). This is achieved by adding `comint-carriage-motion' to
1342 the `comint-output-filter-functions' hook by default.
1344 *** By default, comint no longer uses the variable `comint-prompt-regexp'
1345 to distinguish prompts from user-input. Instead, it notices which
1346 parts of the text were output by the process, and which entered by the
1347 user, and attaches `field' properties to allow emacs commands to use
1348 this information. Common movement commands, notably beginning-of-line,
1349 respect field boundaries in a fairly natural manner. To disable this
1350 feature, and use the old behavior, customize the user option
1351 `comint-use-prompt-regexp-instead-of-fields'.
1353 *** Comint now includes new features to send commands to running processes
1354 and redirect the output to a designated buffer or buffers.
1356 *** The command M-x comint-redirect-send-command reads a command and
1357 buffer name from the mini-buffer. The command is sent to the current
1358 buffer's process, and its output is inserted into the specified buffer.
1360 The command M-x comint-redirect-send-command-to-process acts like
1361 M-x comint-redirect-send-command but additionally reads the name of
1362 the buffer whose process should be used from the mini-buffer.
1364 *** Packages based on comint now highlight user input and program prompts,
1365 and support choosing previous input with mouse-2. To control these features,
1366 see the user-options `comint-highlight-input' and `comint-highlight-prompt'.
1368 *** The new command `comint-write-output' (usually bound to `C-c C-s')
1369 saves the output from the most recent command to a file. With a prefix
1370 argument, it appends to the file.
1372 *** The command `comint-kill-output' has been renamed `comint-delete-output'
1373 (usually bound to `C-c C-o'); the old name is aliased to it for
1376 *** The new function `comint-add-to-input-history' adds commands to the input
1379 *** The new variable `comint-input-history-ignore' is a regexp for
1380 identifying history lines that should be ignored, like tcsh time-stamp
1381 strings, starting with a `#'. The default value of this variable is "^#".
1383 ** Changes to Rmail mode
1385 *** The new user-option rmail-user-mail-address-regexp can be
1386 set to fine tune the identification of the correspondent when
1387 receiving new mail. If it matches the address of the sender, the
1388 recipient is taken as correspondent of a mail. If nil, the default,
1389 `user-login-name' and `user-mail-address' are used to exclude yourself
1392 Usually you don't have to set this variable, except if you collect
1393 mails sent by you under different user names. Then it should be a
1394 regexp matching your mail addresses.
1396 *** The new user-option rmail-confirm-expunge controls whether and how
1397 to ask for confirmation before expunging deleted messages from an
1398 Rmail file. You can choose between no confirmation, confirmation
1399 with y-or-n-p, or confirmation with yes-or-no-p. Default is to ask
1400 for confirmation with yes-or-no-p.
1402 *** RET is now bound in the Rmail summary to rmail-summary-goto-msg,
1405 *** There is a new user option `rmail-digest-end-regexps' that
1406 specifies the regular expressions to detect the line that ends a
1409 *** The new user option `rmail-automatic-folder-directives' specifies
1410 in which folder to put messages automatically.
1412 *** The new function `rmail-redecode-body' allows to fix a message
1413 with non-ASCII characters if Emacs happens to decode it incorrectly
1414 due to missing or malformed "charset=" header.
1416 ** The new user-option `mail-envelope-from' can be used to specify
1417 an envelope-from address different from user-mail-address.
1419 ** The variable mail-specify-envelope-from controls whether to
1420 use the -f option when sending mail.
1422 ** The Rmail command `o' (`rmail-output-to-rmail-file') now writes the
1423 current message in the internal `emacs-mule' encoding, rather than in
1424 the encoding taken from the variable `buffer-file-coding-system'.
1425 This allows to save messages whose characters cannot be safely encoded
1426 by the buffer's coding system, and makes sure the message will be
1427 displayed correctly when you later visit the target Rmail file.
1429 If you want your Rmail files be encoded in a specific coding system
1430 other than `emacs-mule', you can customize the variable
1431 `rmail-file-coding-system' to set its value to that coding system.
1433 ** Changes to TeX mode
1435 *** The default mode has been changed from `plain-tex-mode' to
1438 *** latex-mode now has a simple indentation algorithm.
1440 *** M-f and M-p jump around \begin...\end pairs.
1442 *** Added support for outline-minor-mode.
1444 ** Changes to RefTeX mode
1446 *** RefTeX has new support for index generation. Index entries can be
1447 created with `C-c <', with completion available on index keys.
1448 Pressing `C-c /' indexes the word at the cursor with a default
1449 macro. `C-c >' compiles all index entries into an alphabetically
1450 sorted *Index* buffer which looks like the final index. Entries
1451 can be edited from that buffer.
1453 *** Label and citation key selection now allow to select several
1454 items and reference them together (use `m' to mark items, `a' or
1455 `A' to use all marked entries).
1457 *** reftex.el has been split into a number of smaller files to reduce
1458 memory use when only a part of RefTeX is being used.
1460 *** a new command `reftex-view-crossref-from-bibtex' (bound to `C-c &'
1461 in BibTeX-mode) can be called in a BibTeX database buffer in order
1462 to show locations in LaTeX documents where a particular entry has
1465 ** Emacs Lisp mode now allows multiple levels of outline headings.
1466 The level of a heading is determined from the number of leading
1467 semicolons in a heading line. Toplevel forms starting with a `('
1468 in column 1 are always made leaves.
1470 ** The M-x time-stamp command (most commonly used on write-file-hooks)
1471 has the following new features:
1473 *** The patterns for finding the time stamp and for updating a pattern
1474 may match text spanning multiple lines. For example, some people like
1475 to have the filename and date on separate lines. The new variable
1476 time-stamp-inserts-lines controls the matching for multi-line patterns.
1478 *** More than one time stamp can be updated in the same file. This
1479 feature is useful if you need separate time stamps in a program source
1480 file to both include in formatted documentation and insert in the
1481 compiled binary. The same time-stamp will be written at each matching
1482 pattern. The variable time-stamp-count enables this new feature; it
1485 ** Partial Completion mode now completes environment variables in
1490 *** The command `ispell' now spell-checks a region if
1491 transient-mark-mode is on, and the mark is active. Otherwise it
1492 spell-checks the current buffer.
1494 *** Support for synchronous subprocesses - DOS/Windoze - has been
1497 *** An "alignment error" bug was fixed when a manual spelling
1498 correction is made and re-checked.
1500 *** An Italian, Portuguese, and Slovak dictionary definition has been added.
1502 *** Region skipping performance has been vastly improved in some
1505 *** Spell checking HTML buffers has been improved and isn't so strict
1508 *** The buffer-local words are now always placed on a new line at the
1511 *** Spell checking now works in the MS-DOS version of Emacs.
1513 ** Makefile mode changes
1515 *** The mode now uses the abbrev table `makefile-mode-abbrev-table'.
1517 *** Conditionals and include statements are now highlighted when
1518 Fontlock mode is active.
1522 *** Isearch now puts a call to `isearch-resume' in the command history,
1523 so that searches can be resumed.
1525 *** In Isearch mode, C-M-s and C-M-r are now bound like C-s and C-r,
1526 respectively, i.e. you can repeat a regexp isearch with the same keys
1527 that started the search.
1529 *** In Isearch mode, mouse-2 in the echo area now yanks the current
1530 selection into the search string rather than giving an error.
1532 *** There is a new lazy highlighting feature in incremental search.
1534 Lazy highlighting is switched on/off by customizing variable
1535 `isearch-lazy-highlight'. When active, all matches for the current
1536 search string are highlighted. The current match is highlighted as
1537 before using face `isearch' or `region'. All other matches are
1538 highlighted using face `isearch-lazy-highlight-face' which defaults to
1539 `secondary-selection'.
1541 The extra highlighting makes it easier to anticipate where the cursor
1542 will end up each time you press C-s or C-r to repeat a pending search.
1543 Highlighting of these additional matches happens in a deferred fashion
1544 using "idle timers," so the cycles needed do not rob isearch of its
1545 usual snappy response.
1547 If `isearch-lazy-highlight-cleanup' is set to t, highlights for
1548 matches are automatically cleared when you end the search. If it is
1549 set to nil, you can remove the highlights manually with `M-x
1550 isearch-lazy-highlight-cleanup'.
1554 VC has been overhauled internally. It is now modular, making it
1555 easier to plug-in arbitrary version control backends. (See Lisp
1556 Changes for details on the new structure.) As a result, the mechanism
1557 to enable and disable support for particular version systems has
1558 changed: everything is now controlled by the new variable
1559 `vc-handled-backends'. Its value is a list of symbols that identify
1560 version systems; the default is '(RCS CVS SCCS). When finding a file,
1561 each of the backends in that list is tried in order to see whether the
1562 file is registered in that backend.
1564 When registering a new file, VC first tries each of the listed
1565 backends to see if any of them considers itself "responsible" for the
1566 directory of the file (e.g. because a corresponding subdirectory for
1567 master files exists). If none of the backends is responsible, then
1568 the first backend in the list that could register the file is chosen.
1569 As a consequence, the variable `vc-default-back-end' is now obsolete.
1571 The old variable `vc-master-templates' is also obsolete, although VC
1572 still supports it for backward compatibility. To define templates for
1573 RCS or SCCS, you should rather use the new variables
1574 vc-{rcs,sccs}-master-templates. (There is no such feature under CVS
1575 where it doesn't make sense.)
1577 The variables `vc-ignore-vc-files' and `vc-handle-cvs' are also
1578 obsolete now, you must set `vc-handled-backends' to nil or exclude
1579 `CVS' from the list, respectively, to achieve their effect now.
1583 The variable `vc-checkout-carefully' is obsolete: the corresponding
1584 checks are always done now.
1586 VC Dired buffers are now kept up-to-date during all version control
1589 `vc-diff' output is now displayed in `diff-mode'.
1590 `vc-print-log' uses `log-view-mode'.
1591 `vc-log-mode' (used for *VC-Log*) has been replaced by `log-edit-mode'.
1593 The command C-x v m (vc-merge) now accepts an empty argument as the
1594 first revision number. This means that any recent changes on the
1595 current branch should be picked up from the repository and merged into
1596 the working file (``merge news'').
1598 The commands C-x v s (vc-create-snapshot) and C-x v r
1599 (vc-retrieve-snapshot) now ask for a directory name from which to work
1602 *** Multiple Backends
1604 VC now lets you register files in more than one backend. This is
1605 useful, for example, if you are working with a slow remote CVS
1606 repository. You can then use RCS for local editing, and occasionally
1607 commit your changes back to CVS, or pick up changes from CVS into your
1610 To make this work, the ``more local'' backend (RCS in our example)
1611 should come first in `vc-handled-backends', and the ``more remote''
1612 backend (CVS) should come later. (The default value of
1613 `vc-handled-backends' already has it that way.)
1615 You can then commit changes to another backend (say, RCS), by typing
1616 C-u C-x v v RCS RET (i.e. vc-next-action now accepts a backend name as
1617 a revision number). VC registers the file in the more local backend
1618 if that hasn't already happened, and commits to a branch based on the
1619 current revision number from the more remote backend.
1621 If a file is registered in multiple backends, you can switch to
1622 another one using C-x v b (vc-switch-backend). This does not change
1623 any files, it only changes VC's perspective on the file. Use this to
1624 pick up changes from CVS while working under RCS locally.
1626 After you are done with your local RCS editing, you can commit your
1627 changes back to CVS using C-u C-x v v CVS RET. In this case, the
1628 local RCS archive is removed after the commit, and the log entry
1629 buffer is initialized to contain the entire RCS change log of the file.
1633 There is a new user option, `vc-cvs-stay-local'. If it is `t' (the
1634 default), then VC avoids network queries for files registered in
1635 remote repositories. The state of such files is then only determined
1636 by heuristics and past information. `vc-cvs-stay-local' can also be a
1637 regexp to match against repository hostnames; only files from hosts
1638 that match it are treated locally. If the variable is nil, then VC
1639 queries the repository just as often as it does for local files.
1641 If `vc-cvs-stay-local' is on, then VC also makes local backups of
1642 repository versions. This means that ordinary diffs (C-x v =) and
1643 revert operations (C-x v u) can be done completely locally, without
1644 any repository interactions at all. The name of a local version
1645 backup of FILE is FILE.~REV.~, where REV is the repository version
1646 number. This format is similar to that used by C-x v ~
1647 (vc-version-other-window), except for the trailing dot. As a matter
1648 of fact, the two features can each use the files created by the other,
1649 the only difference being that files with a trailing `.' are deleted
1650 automatically after commit. (This feature doesn't work on MS-DOS,
1651 since DOS disallows more than a single dot in the trunk of a file
1654 If `vc-cvs-stay-local' is on, and there have been changes in the
1655 repository, VC notifies you about it when you actually try to commit.
1656 If you want to check for updates from the repository without trying to
1657 commit, you can either use C-x v m RET to perform an update on the
1658 current file, or you can use C-x v r RET to get an update for an
1659 entire directory tree.
1661 The new user option `vc-cvs-use-edit' indicates whether VC should call
1662 "cvs edit" to make files writeable; it defaults to `t'. (This option
1663 is only meaningful if the CVSREAD variable is set, or if files are
1664 "watched" by other developers.)
1666 The commands C-x v s (vc-create-snapshot) and C-x v r
1667 (vc-retrieve-snapshot) are now also implemented for CVS. If you give
1668 an empty snapshot name to the latter, that performs a `cvs update',
1669 starting at the given directory.
1671 *** Lisp Changes in VC
1673 VC has been restructured internally to make it modular. You can now
1674 add support for arbitrary version control backends by writing a
1675 library that provides a certain set of backend-specific functions, and
1676 then telling VC to use that library. For example, to add support for
1677 a version system named SYS, you write a library named vc-sys.el, which
1678 provides a number of functions vc-sys-... (see commentary at the top
1679 of vc.el for a detailed list of them). To make VC use that library,
1680 you need to put it somewhere into Emacs' load path and add the symbol
1681 `SYS' to the list `vc-handled-backends'.
1683 ** The customizable EDT emulation package now supports the EDT
1684 SUBS command and EDT scroll margins. It also works with more
1685 terminal/keyboard configurations and it now works under XEmacs.
1686 See etc/edt-user.doc for more information.
1688 ** New modes and packages
1690 *** The new global minor mode `minibuffer-electric-default-mode'
1691 automatically hides the `(default ...)' part of minibuffer prompts when
1692 the default is not applicable.
1694 *** Artist is an Emacs lisp package that allows you to draw lines,
1695 rectangles and ellipses by using your mouse and/or keyboard. The
1696 shapes are made up with the ascii characters |, -, / and \.
1700 - Intersecting: When a `|' intersects with a `-', a `+' is
1701 drawn, like this: | \ /
1705 - Rubber-banding: When drawing lines you can interactively see the
1706 result while holding the mouse button down and moving the mouse. If
1707 your machine is not fast enough (a 386 is a bit too slow, but a
1708 pentium is well enough), you can turn this feature off. You will
1709 then see 1's and 2's which mark the 1st and 2nd endpoint of the line
1712 - Arrows: After having drawn a (straight) line or a (straight)
1713 poly-line, you can set arrows on the line-ends by typing < or >.
1715 - Flood-filling: You can fill any area with a certain character by
1718 - Cut copy and paste: You can cut, copy and paste rectangular
1719 regions. Artist also interfaces with the rect package (this can be
1720 turned off if it causes you any trouble) so anything you cut in
1721 artist can be yanked with C-x r y and vice versa.
1723 - Drawing with keys: Everything you can do with the mouse, you can
1724 also do without the mouse.
1726 - Aspect-ratio: You can set the variable artist-aspect-ratio to
1727 reflect the height-width ratio for the font you are using. Squares
1728 and circles are then drawn square/round. Note, that once your
1729 ascii-file is shown with font with a different height-width ratio,
1730 the squares won't be square and the circles won't be round.
1732 - Drawing operations: The following drawing operations are implemented:
1734 lines straight-lines
1736 poly-lines straight poly-lines
1738 text (see-thru) text (overwrite)
1739 spray-can setting size for spraying
1740 vaporize line vaporize lines
1741 erase characters erase rectangles
1743 Straight lines are lines that go horizontally, vertically or
1744 diagonally. Plain lines go in any direction. The operations in
1745 the right column are accessed by holding down the shift key while
1748 It is possible to vaporize (erase) entire lines and connected lines
1749 (rectangles for example) as long as the lines being vaporized are
1750 straight and connected at their endpoints. Vaporizing is inspired
1751 by the drawrect package by Jari Aalto <jari.aalto@poboxes.com>.
1753 - Picture mode compatibility: Artist is picture mode compatible (this
1756 *** The new package Eshell is an operating system command shell
1757 implemented entirely in Emacs Lisp. Use `M-x eshell' to invoke it.
1758 It functions similarly to bash and zsh, and allows running of Lisp
1759 functions and external commands using the same syntax. It supports
1760 history lists, aliases, extended globbing, smart scrolling, etc. It
1761 will work on any platform Emacs has been ported to. And since most of
1762 the basic commands -- ls, rm, mv, cp, ln, du, cat, etc. -- have been
1763 rewritten in Lisp, it offers an operating-system independent shell,
1764 all within the scope of your Emacs process.
1766 *** The new package timeclock.el is a mode is for keeping track of time
1767 intervals. You can use it for whatever purpose you like, but the
1768 typical scenario is to keep track of how much time you spend working
1769 on certain projects.
1771 *** The new package hi-lock.el provides commands to highlight matches
1772 of interactively entered regexps. For example,
1774 M-x highlight-regexp RET clearly RET RET
1776 will highlight all occurrences of `clearly' using a yellow background
1777 face. New occurrences of `clearly' will be highlighted as they are
1778 typed. `M-x unhighlight-regexp RET' will remove the highlighting.
1779 Any existing face can be used for highlighting and a set of
1780 appropriate faces is provided. The regexps can be written into the
1781 current buffer in a form that will be recognized the next time the
1782 corresponding file is read. There are commands to highlight matches
1783 to phrases and to highlight entire lines containing a match.
1785 *** The new package zone.el plays games with Emacs' display when
1788 *** The new package tildify.el allows to add hard spaces or other text
1789 fragments in accordance with the current major mode.
1791 *** The new package xml.el provides a simple but generic XML
1792 parser. It doesn't parse the DTDs however.
1794 *** The comment operations are now provided by the newcomment.el
1795 package which allows different styles of comment-region and should
1796 be more robust while offering the same functionality.
1797 `comment-region' now doesn't always comment a-line-at-a-time, but only
1798 comments the region, breaking the line at point if necessary.
1800 *** The Ebrowse package implements a C++ class browser and tags
1801 facilities tailored for use with C++. It is documented in a
1802 separate Texinfo file.
1804 *** The PCL-CVS package available by either running M-x cvs-examine or
1805 by visiting a CVS administrative directory (with a prefix argument)
1806 provides an alternative interface to VC-dired for CVS. It comes with
1807 `log-view-mode' to view RCS and SCCS logs and `log-edit-mode' used to
1808 enter check-in log messages.
1810 *** The new package called `woman' allows to browse Unix man pages
1811 without invoking external programs.
1813 The command `M-x woman' formats manual pages entirely in Emacs Lisp
1814 and then displays them, like `M-x manual-entry' does. Unlike
1815 `manual-entry', `woman' does not invoke any external programs, so it
1816 is useful on systems such as MS-DOS/MS-Windows where the `man' and
1817 Groff or `troff' commands are not readily available.
1819 The command `M-x woman-find-file' asks for the file name of a man
1820 page, then formats and displays it like `M-x woman' does.
1822 *** The new command M-x re-builder offers a convenient interface for
1823 authoring regular expressions with immediate visual feedback.
1825 The buffer from which the command was called becomes the target for
1826 the regexp editor popping up in a separate window. Matching text in
1827 the target buffer is immediately color marked during the editing.
1828 Each sub-expression of the regexp will show up in a different face so
1829 even complex regexps can be edited and verified on target data in a
1832 On displays not supporting faces the matches instead blink like
1833 matching parens to make them stand out. On such a setup you will
1834 probably also want to use the sub-expression mode when the regexp
1835 contains such to get feedback about their respective limits.
1837 *** glasses-mode is a minor mode that makes
1838 unreadableIdentifiersLikeThis readable. It works as glasses, without
1839 actually modifying content of a buffer.
1841 *** The package ebnf2ps translates an EBNF to a syntactic chart in
1844 Currently accepts ad-hoc EBNF, ISO EBNF and Bison/Yacc.
1846 The ad-hoc default EBNF syntax has the following elements:
1848 ; comment (until end of line)
1852 $A default non-terminal
1853 $"C" default terminal
1854 $?C? default special
1855 A = B. production (A is the header and B the body)
1856 C D sequence (C occurs before D)
1857 C | D alternative (C or D occurs)
1858 A - B exception (A excluding B, B without any non-terminal)
1859 n * A repetition (A repeats n (integer) times)
1860 (C) group (expression C is grouped together)
1861 [C] optional (C may or not occurs)
1862 C+ one or more occurrences of C
1863 {C}+ one or more occurrences of C
1864 {C}* zero or more occurrences of C
1865 {C} zero or more occurrences of C
1866 C / D equivalent to: C {D C}*
1867 {C || D}+ equivalent to: C {D C}*
1868 {C || D}* equivalent to: [C {D C}*]
1869 {C || D} equivalent to: [C {D C}*]
1871 Please, see ebnf2ps documentation for EBNF syntax and how to use it.
1873 *** The package align.el will align columns within a region, using M-x
1874 align. Its mode-specific rules, based on regular expressions,
1875 determine where the columns should be split. In C and C++, for
1876 example, it will align variable names in declaration lists, or the
1877 equal signs of assignments.
1879 *** `paragraph-indent-minor-mode' is a new minor mode supporting
1880 paragraphs in the same style as `paragraph-indent-text-mode'.
1882 *** bs.el is a new package for buffer selection similar to
1883 list-buffers or electric-buffer-list. Use M-x bs-show to display a
1884 buffer menu with this package. See the Custom group `bs'.
1886 *** find-lisp.el is a package emulating the Unix find command in Lisp.
1888 *** calculator.el is a small calculator package that is intended to
1889 replace desktop calculators such as xcalc and calc.exe. Actually, it
1890 is not too small - it has more features than most desktop calculators,
1891 and can be customized easily to get many more functions. It should
1892 not be confused with "calc" which is a much bigger mathematical tool
1893 which answers different needs.
1895 *** The minor modes cwarn-mode and global-cwarn-mode highlights
1896 suspicious C and C++ constructions. Currently, assignments inside
1897 expressions, semicolon following `if', `for' and `while' (except, of
1898 course, after a `do .. while' statement), and C++ functions with
1899 reference parameters are recognized. The modes require font-lock mode
1902 *** smerge-mode.el provides `smerge-mode', a simple minor-mode for files
1903 containing diff3-style conflict markers, such as generated by RCS.
1905 *** 5x5.el is a simple puzzle game.
1907 *** hl-line.el provides `hl-line-mode', a minor mode to highlight the
1908 current line in the current buffer. It also provides
1909 `global-hl-line-mode' to provide the same behaviour in all buffers.
1911 *** ansi-color.el translates ANSI terminal escapes into text-properties.
1913 Please note: if `ansi-color-for-comint-mode' and
1914 `global-font-lock-mode' are non-nil, loading ansi-color.el will
1915 disable font-lock and add `ansi-color-apply' to
1916 `comint-preoutput-filter-functions' for all shell-mode buffers. This
1917 displays the output of "ls --color=yes" using the correct foreground
1918 and background colors.
1920 *** delphi.el provides a major mode for editing the Delphi (Object
1923 *** quickurl.el provides a simple method of inserting a URL based on
1926 *** sql.el provides an interface to SQL data bases.
1928 *** fortune.el uses the fortune program to create mail/news signatures.
1930 *** whitespace.el is a package for warning about and cleaning bogus
1931 whitespace in a file.
1933 *** PostScript mode (ps-mode) is a new major mode for editing PostScript
1934 files. It offers: interaction with a PostScript interpreter, including
1935 (very basic) error handling; fontification, easily customizable for
1936 interpreter messages; auto-indentation; insertion of EPSF templates and
1937 often used code snippets; viewing of BoundingBox; commenting out /
1938 uncommenting regions; conversion of 8bit characters to PostScript octal
1939 codes. All functionality is accessible through a menu.
1941 *** delim-col helps to prettify columns in a text region or rectangle.
1943 Here is an example of columns:
1946 dog pineapple car EXTRA
1947 porcupine strawberry airplane
1949 Doing the following settings:
1951 (setq delimit-columns-str-before "[ ")
1952 (setq delimit-columns-str-after " ]")
1953 (setq delimit-columns-str-separator ", ")
1954 (setq delimit-columns-separator "\t")
1957 Selecting the lines above and typing:
1959 M-x delimit-columns-region
1963 [ horse , apple , bus , ]
1964 [ dog , pineapple , car , EXTRA ]
1965 [ porcupine, strawberry, airplane, ]
1967 delim-col has the following options:
1969 delimit-columns-str-before Specify a string to be inserted
1972 delimit-columns-str-separator Specify a string to be inserted
1973 between each column.
1975 delimit-columns-str-after Specify a string to be inserted
1978 delimit-columns-separator Specify a regexp which separates
1981 delim-col has the following commands:
1983 delimit-columns-region Prettify all columns in a text region.
1984 delimit-columns-rectangle Prettify all columns in a text rectangle.
1986 *** Recentf mode maintains a menu for visiting files that were
1987 operated on recently. User option recentf-menu-filter specifies a
1988 menu filter function to change the menu appearance. For example, the
1989 recent file list can be displayed:
1991 - organized by major modes, directories or user defined rules.
1992 - sorted by file paths, file names, ascending or descending.
1993 - showing paths relative to the current default-directory
1995 The `recentf-filter-changer' menu filter function allows to
1996 dynamically change the menu appearance.
1998 *** elide-head.el provides a mechanism for eliding boilerplate header
2001 *** footnote.el provides `footnote-mode', a minor mode supporting use
2002 of footnotes. It is intended for use with Message mode, but isn't
2003 specific to Message mode.
2005 *** diff-mode.el provides `diff-mode', a major mode for
2006 viewing/editing context diffs (patches). It is selected for files
2007 with extension `.diff', `.diffs', `.patch' and `.rej'.
2009 *** EUDC, the Emacs Unified Directory Client, provides a common user
2010 interface to access directory servers using different directory
2011 protocols. It has a separate manual.
2013 *** autoconf.el provides a major mode for editing configure.in files
2014 for Autoconf, selected automatically.
2016 *** windmove.el provides moving between windows.
2018 *** crm.el provides a facility to read multiple strings from the
2019 minibuffer with completion.
2021 *** todo-mode.el provides management of TODO lists and integration
2022 with the diary features.
2024 *** autoarg.el provides a feature reported from Twenex Emacs whereby
2025 numeric keys supply prefix args rather than self inserting.
2027 *** The function `turn-off-auto-fill' unconditionally turns off Auto
2030 *** pcomplete.el is a library that provides programmable completion
2031 facilities for Emacs, similar to what zsh and tcsh offer. The main
2032 difference is that completion functions are written in Lisp, meaning
2033 they can be profiled, debugged, etc.
2035 *** antlr-mode is a new major mode for editing ANTLR grammar files.
2036 It is automatically turned on for files whose names have the extension
2039 ** Changes in sort.el
2041 The function sort-numeric-fields interprets numbers starting with `0'
2042 as octal and numbers starting with `0x' or `0X' as hexadecimal. The
2043 new user-option sort-numeric-base can be used to specify a default
2046 ** Changes to Ange-ftp
2048 *** Ange-ftp allows you to specify of a port number in remote file
2049 names cleanly. It is appended to the host name, separated by a hash
2050 sign, e.g. `/foo@bar.org#666:mumble'. (This syntax comes from EFS.)
2052 *** If the new user-option `ange-ftp-try-passive-mode' is set, passive
2053 ftp mode will be used if the ftp client supports that.
2055 *** Ange-ftp handles the output of the w32-style clients which
2056 output ^M at the end of lines.
2058 ** The recommended way of using Iswitchb is via the new global minor
2059 mode `iswitchb-mode'.
2061 ** Just loading the msb package doesn't switch on Msb mode anymore.
2062 If you have `(require 'msb)' in your .emacs, please replace it with
2065 ** Flyspell mode has various new options. See the `flyspell' Custom
2068 ** The user option `backward-delete-char-untabify-method' controls the
2069 behavior of `backward-delete-char-untabify'. The following values
2072 `untabify' -- turn a tab to many spaces, then delete one space;
2073 `hungry' -- delete all whitespace, both tabs and spaces;
2074 `all' -- delete all whitespace, including tabs, spaces and newlines;
2075 nil -- just delete one character.
2077 Default value is `untabify'.
2079 [This change was made in Emacs 20.3 but not mentioned then.]
2081 ** In Cperl mode `cperl-invalid-face' should now be a normal face
2082 symbol, not double-quoted.
2084 ** Some packages are declared obsolete, to be removed in a future
2085 version. They are: auto-show, c-mode, hilit19, hscroll, ooutline,
2086 profile, rnews, rnewspost, and sc. Their implementations have been
2087 moved to lisp/obsolete.
2089 ** auto-compression mode is no longer enabled just by loading jka-compr.el.
2090 To control it, set `auto-compression-mode' via Custom or use the
2091 `auto-compression-mode' command.
2093 ** `browse-url-gnome-moz' is a new option for
2094 `browse-url-browser-function', invoking Mozilla in GNOME, and
2095 `browse-url-kde' can be chosen for invoking the KDE browser.
2097 ** The user-option `browse-url-new-window-p' has been renamed to
2098 `browse-url-new-window-flag'.
2100 ** The functions `keep-lines', `flush-lines' and `how-many' now
2101 operate on the active region in Transient Mark mode.
2103 ** `gnus-user-agent' is a new possibility for `mail-user-agent'. It
2104 is like `message-user-agent', but with all the Gnus paraphernalia.
2106 ** The Strokes package has been updated. If your Emacs has XPM
2107 support, you can use it for pictographic editing. In Strokes mode,
2108 use C-mouse-2 to compose a complex stoke and insert it into the
2109 buffer. You can encode or decode a strokes buffer with new commands
2110 M-x strokes-encode-buffer and M-x strokes-decode-buffer. There is a
2111 new command M-x strokes-list-strokes.
2113 ** Hexl contains a new command `hexl-insert-hex-string' which inserts
2114 a string of hexadecimal numbers read from the mini-buffer.
2116 ** Hexl mode allows to insert non-ASCII characters.
2118 The non-ASCII characters are encoded using the same encoding as the
2119 file you are visiting in Hexl mode.
2121 ** Shell script mode changes.
2123 Shell script mode (sh-script) can now indent scripts for shells
2124 derived from sh and rc. The indentation style is customizable, and
2125 sh-script can attempt to "learn" the current buffer's style.
2129 *** In DOS, etags looks for file.cgz if it cannot find file.c.
2131 *** New option --ignore-case-regex is an alternative to --regex. It is now
2132 possible to bind a regexp to a language, by prepending the regexp with
2133 {lang}, where lang is one of the languages that `etags --help' prints out.
2134 This feature is useful especially for regex files, where each line contains
2135 a regular expression. The manual contains details.
2137 *** In C and derived languages, etags creates tags for function
2138 declarations when given the --declarations option.
2140 *** In C++, tags are created for "operator". The tags have the form
2141 "operator+", without spaces between the keyword and the operator.
2143 *** You shouldn't generally need any more the -C or -c++ option: etags
2144 automatically switches to C++ parsing when it meets the `class' or
2145 `template' keywords.
2147 *** Etags now is able to delve at arbitrary deeps into nested structures in
2148 C-like languages. Previously, it was limited to one or two brace levels.
2150 *** New language Ada: tags are functions, procedures, packages, tasks, and
2153 *** In Fortran, `procedure' is not tagged.
2155 *** In Java, tags are created for "interface".
2157 *** In Lisp, "(defstruct (foo", "(defun (operator" and similar constructs
2160 *** In makefiles, tags the targets.
2162 *** In Perl, the --globals option tags global variables. my and local
2163 variables are tagged.
2165 *** New language Python: def and class at the beginning of a line are tags.
2167 *** .ss files are Scheme files, .pdb is Postscript with C syntax, .psw is
2170 ** Changes in etags.el
2172 *** The new user-option tags-case-fold-search can be used to make
2173 tags operations case-sensitive or case-insensitive. The default
2174 is to use the same setting as case-fold-search.
2176 *** You can display additional output with M-x tags-apropos by setting
2177 the new variable tags-apropos-additional-actions.
2179 If non-nil, the variable's value should be a list of triples (TITLE
2180 FUNCTION TO-SEARCH). For each triple, M-x tags-apropos processes
2181 TO-SEARCH and lists tags from it. TO-SEARCH should be an alist,
2182 obarray, or symbol. If it is a symbol, the symbol's value is used.
2184 TITLE is a string to use to label the list of tags from TO-SEARCH.
2186 FUNCTION is a function to call when an entry is selected in the Tags
2187 List buffer. It is called with one argument, the selected symbol.
2189 A useful example value for this variable might be something like:
2191 '(("Emacs Lisp" Info-goto-emacs-command-node obarray)
2192 ("Common Lisp" common-lisp-hyperspec common-lisp-hyperspec-obarray)
2193 ("SCWM" scwm-documentation scwm-obarray))
2195 *** The face tags-tag-face can be used to customize the appearance
2196 of tags in the output of M-x tags-apropos.
2198 *** Setting tags-apropos-verbose to a non-nil value displays the
2199 names of tags files in the *Tags List* buffer.
2201 *** You can now search for tags that are part of the filename itself.
2202 If you have tagged the files topfile.c subdir/subfile.c
2203 /tmp/tempfile.c, you can now search for tags "topfile.c", "subfile.c",
2204 "dir/sub", "tempfile", "tempfile.c". If the tag matches the file name,
2205 point will go to the beginning of the file.
2207 *** Compressed files are now transparently supported if
2208 auto-compression-mode is active. You can tag (with Etags) and search
2209 (with find-tag) both compressed and uncompressed files.
2211 *** Tags commands like M-x tags-search no longer change point
2212 in buffers where no match is found. In buffers where a match is
2213 found, the original value of point is pushed on the marker ring.
2215 ** Fortran mode has a new command `fortran-strip-sequence-nos' to
2216 remove text past column 72. The syntax class of `\' in Fortran is now
2217 appropriate for C-style escape sequences in strings.
2219 ** SGML mode's default `sgml-validate-command' is now `nsgmls'.
2221 ** A new command `view-emacs-problems' (C-h P) displays the PROBLEMS file.
2223 ** The Dabbrev package has a new user-option `dabbrev-ignored-regexps'
2224 containing a list of regular expressions. Buffers matching a regular
2225 expression from that list, are not checked.
2227 ** Emacs can now figure out modification times of remote files.
2228 When you do C-x C-f /user@host:/path/file RET and edit the file,
2229 and someone else modifies the file, you will be prompted to revert
2230 the buffer, just like for the local files.
2232 ** The buffer menu (C-x C-b) no longer lists the *Buffer List* buffer.
2234 ** When invoked with a prefix argument, the command `list-abbrevs' now
2235 displays local abbrevs, only.
2237 ** Refill minor mode provides preliminary support for keeping
2238 paragraphs filled as you modify them.
2240 ** The variable `double-click-fuzz' specifies how much the mouse
2241 may be moved between clicks that are recognized as a pair. Its value
2242 is measured in pixels.
2244 ** The new global minor mode `auto-image-file-mode' allows image files
2245 to be visited as images.
2247 ** Two new user-options `grep-command' and `grep-find-command'
2248 were added to compile.el.
2250 ** Withdrawn packages
2252 *** mldrag.el has been removed. mouse.el provides the same
2253 functionality with aliases for the mldrag functions.
2255 *** eval-reg.el has been obsoleted by changes to edebug.el and removed.
2257 *** ph.el has been obsoleted by EUDC and removed.
2260 * Incompatible Lisp changes
2262 There are a few Lisp changes which are not backwards-compatible and
2263 may require changes to existing code. Here is a list for reference.
2264 See the sections below for details.
2266 ** Since `format' preserves text properties, the idiom
2267 `(format "%s" foo)' no longer works to copy and remove properties.
2268 Use `copy-sequence' to copy the string, then use `set-text-properties'
2269 to remove the properties of the copy.
2271 ** Since the `keymap' text property now has significance, some code
2272 which uses both `local-map' and `keymap' properties (for portability)
2273 may, for instance, give rise to duplicate menus when the keymaps from
2274 these properties are active.
2276 ** The change in the treatment of non-ASCII characters in search
2277 ranges may affect some code.
2279 ** A non-nil value for the LOCAL arg of add-hook makes the hook
2280 buffer-local even if `make-local-hook' hasn't been called, which might
2281 make a difference to some code.
2283 ** The new treatment of the minibuffer prompt might affect code which
2284 operates on the minibuffer.
2286 ** The new character sets `eight-bit-control' and `eight-bit-graphic'
2287 cause `no-conversion' and `emacs-mule-unix' coding systems to produce
2288 different results when reading files with non-ASCII characters
2289 (previously, both coding systems would produce the same results).
2290 Specifically, `no-conversion' interprets each 8-bit byte as a separate
2291 character. This makes `no-conversion' inappropriate for reading
2292 multibyte text, e.g. buffers written to disk in their internal MULE
2293 encoding (auto-saving does that, for example). If a Lisp program
2294 reads such files with `no-conversion', each byte of the multibyte
2295 sequence, including the MULE leading codes such as \201, is treated as
2296 a separate character, which prevents them from being interpreted in
2297 the buffer as multibyte characters.
2299 Therefore, Lisp programs that read files which contain the internal
2300 MULE encoding should use `emacs-mule-unix'. `no-conversion' is only
2301 appropriate for reading truly binary files.
2303 ** Code that relies on the obsolete `before-change-function' and
2304 `after-change-function' to detect buffer changes will now fail. Use
2305 `before-change-functions' and `after-change-functions' instead.
2307 ** Code that uses `concat' with integer args now gets an error, as
2310 ** The function base64-decode-string now always returns a unibyte
2313 ** Not a Lisp incompatibility as such but, with the introduction of
2314 extra private charsets, there is now only one slot free for a new
2315 dimension-2 private charset. User code which tries to add more than
2316 one extra will fail unless you rebuild Emacs with some standard
2317 charset(s) removed; that is probably inadvisable because it changes
2318 the emacs-mule encoding. Also, files stored in the emacs-mule
2319 encoding using Emacs 20 with additional private charsets defined will
2320 probably not be read correctly by Emacs 21.
2322 ** The variable `directory-sep-char' is slated for removal.
2323 Not really a change (yet), but a projected one that you should be
2324 aware of: The variable `directory-sep-char' is deprecated, and should
2325 not be used. It was always ignored on GNU/Linux and Unix systems and
2326 on MS-DOS, but the MS-Windows port tried to support it by adapting the
2327 behavior of certain primitives to the value of this variable. It
2328 turned out that such support cannot be reliable, so it was decided to
2329 remove this variable in the near future. Lisp programs are well
2330 advised not to set it to anything but '/', because any different value
2331 will not have any effect when support for this variable is removed.
2334 * Lisp changes made after edition 2.6 of the Emacs Lisp Manual,
2335 (Display-related features are described in a page of their own below.)
2337 ** Function assq-delete-all replaces function assoc-delete-all.
2339 ** The new function animate-string, from lisp/play/animate.el
2340 allows the animated display of strings.
2342 ** The new function `interactive-form' can be used to obtain the
2343 interactive form of a function.
2345 ** The keyword :set-after in defcustom allows to specify dependencies
2346 between custom options. Example:
2348 (defcustom default-input-method nil
2349 "*Default input method for multilingual text (a string).
2350 This is the input method activated automatically by the command
2351 `toggle-input-method' (\\[toggle-input-method])."
2353 :type '(choice (const nil) string)
2354 :set-after '(current-language-environment))
2356 This specifies that default-input-method should be set after
2357 current-language-environment even if default-input-method appears
2358 first in a custom-set-variables statement.
2360 ** The new hook `kbd-macro-termination-hook' is run at the end of
2361 function execute-kbd-macro. Functions on this hook are called with no
2362 args. The hook is run independent of how the macro was terminated
2363 (signal or normal termination).
2365 ** Functions `butlast' and `nbutlast' for removing trailing elements
2366 from a list are now available without requiring the CL package.
2368 ** The new user-option `even-window-heights' can be set to nil
2369 to prevent `display-buffer' from evening out window heights.
2371 ** The user-option `face-font-registry-alternatives' specifies
2372 alternative font registry names to try when looking for a font.
2374 ** Function `md5' calculates the MD5 "message digest"/"checksum".
2376 ** Function `delete-frame' runs `delete-frame-hook' before actually
2377 deleting the frame. The hook is called with one arg, the frame
2380 ** `add-hook' now makes the hook local if called with a non-nil LOCAL arg.
2382 ** The treatment of non-ASCII characters in search ranges has changed.
2383 If a range in a regular expression or the arg of
2384 skip-chars-forward/backward starts with a unibyte character C and ends
2385 with a multibyte character C2, the range is divided into two: one is
2386 C..?\377, the other is C1..C2, where C1 is the first character of C2's
2389 ** The new function `display-message-or-buffer' displays a message in
2390 the echo area or pops up a buffer, depending on the length of the
2393 ** The new macro `with-auto-compression-mode' allows evaluating an
2394 expression with auto-compression-mode enabled.
2396 ** In image specifications, `:heuristic-mask' has been replaced
2397 with the more general `:mask' property.
2399 ** Image specifications accept more `:conversion's.
2401 ** A `?' can be used in a symbol name without escaping it with a
2404 ** Reading from the mini-buffer now reads from standard input if Emacs
2405 is running in batch mode. For example,
2407 (message "%s" (read t))
2409 will read a Lisp expression from standard input and print the result
2412 ** The argument of `down-list', `backward-up-list', `up-list',
2413 `kill-sexp', `backward-kill-sexp' and `mark-sexp' is now optional.
2415 ** If `display-buffer-reuse-frames' is set, function `display-buffer'
2416 will raise frames displaying a buffer, instead of creating a new
2419 ** Two new functions for removing elements from lists/sequences
2422 - Function: remove ELT SEQ
2424 Return a copy of SEQ with all occurrences of ELT removed. SEQ must be
2425 a list, vector, or string. The comparison is done with `equal'.
2427 - Function: remq ELT LIST
2429 Return a copy of LIST with all occurrences of ELT removed. The
2430 comparison is done with `eq'.
2432 ** The function `delete' now also works with vectors and strings.
2434 ** The meaning of the `:weakness WEAK' argument of make-hash-table
2435 has been changed: WEAK can now have new values `key-or-value' and
2436 `key-and-value', in addition the `nil', `key', `value', and `t'.
2438 ** Function `aset' stores any multibyte character in any string
2439 without signaling "Attempt to change char length of a string". It may
2440 convert a unibyte string to multibyte if necessary.
2442 ** The value of the `help-echo' text property is called as a function
2443 or evaluated, if it is not a string already, to obtain a help string.
2445 ** Function `make-obsolete' now has an optional arg to say when the
2446 function was declared obsolete.
2448 ** Function `plist-member' is renamed from `widget-plist-member' (which is
2449 retained as an alias).
2451 ** Easy-menu's :filter now works as in XEmacs.
2452 It takes the unconverted (i.e. XEmacs) form of the menu and the result
2453 is automatically converted to Emacs' form.
2455 ** The new function `window-list' has been defined
2457 - Function: window-list &optional FRAME WINDOW MINIBUF
2459 Return a list of windows on FRAME, starting with WINDOW. FRAME nil or
2460 omitted means use the selected frame. WINDOW nil or omitted means use
2461 the selected window. MINIBUF t means include the minibuffer window,
2462 even if it isn't active. MINIBUF nil or omitted means include the
2463 minibuffer window only if it's active. MINIBUF neither nil nor t
2464 means never include the minibuffer window.
2466 ** There's a new function `get-window-with-predicate' defined as follows
2468 - Function: get-window-with-predicate PREDICATE &optional MINIBUF ALL-FRAMES DEFAULT
2470 Return a window satisfying PREDICATE.
2472 This function cycles through all visible windows using `walk-windows',
2473 calling PREDICATE on each one. PREDICATE is called with a window as
2474 argument. The first window for which PREDICATE returns a non-nil
2475 value is returned. If no window satisfies PREDICATE, DEFAULT is
2478 Optional second arg MINIBUF t means count the minibuffer window even
2479 if not active. MINIBUF nil or omitted means count the minibuffer iff
2480 it is active. MINIBUF neither t nor nil means not to count the
2481 minibuffer even if it is active.
2483 Several frames may share a single minibuffer; if the minibuffer
2484 counts, all windows on all frames that share that minibuffer count
2485 too. Therefore, if you are using a separate minibuffer frame
2486 and the minibuffer is active and MINIBUF says it counts,
2487 `walk-windows' includes the windows in the frame from which you
2488 entered the minibuffer, as well as the minibuffer window.
2490 ALL-FRAMES is the optional third argument.
2491 ALL-FRAMES nil or omitted means cycle within the frames as specified above.
2492 ALL-FRAMES = `visible' means include windows on all visible frames.
2493 ALL-FRAMES = 0 means include windows on all visible and iconified frames.
2494 ALL-FRAMES = t means include windows on all frames including invisible frames.
2495 If ALL-FRAMES is a frame, it means include windows on that frame.
2496 Anything else means restrict to the selected frame.
2498 ** The function `single-key-description' now encloses function key and
2499 event names in angle brackets. When called with a second optional
2500 argument non-nil, angle brackets won't be printed.
2502 ** If the variable `message-truncate-lines' is bound to t around a
2503 call to `message', the echo area will not be resized to display that
2504 message; it will be truncated instead, as it was done in 20.x.
2505 Default value is nil.
2507 ** The user option `line-number-display-limit' can now be set to nil,
2510 ** The new user option `line-number-display-limit-width' controls
2511 the maximum width of lines in a buffer for which Emacs displays line
2512 numbers in the mode line. The default is 200.
2514 ** `select-safe-coding-system' now also checks the most preferred
2515 coding-system if buffer-file-coding-system is `undecided' and
2516 DEFAULT-CODING-SYSTEM is not specified,
2518 ** The function `subr-arity' provides information about the argument
2519 list of a primitive.
2521 ** `where-is-internal' now also accepts a list of keymaps.
2523 ** The text property `keymap' specifies a key map which overrides the
2524 buffer's local map and the map specified by the `local-map' property.
2525 This is probably what most current uses of `local-map' want, rather
2526 than replacing the local map.
2528 ** The obsolete variables `before-change-function' and
2529 `after-change-function' are no longer acted upon and have been
2530 removed. Use `before-change-functions' and `after-change-functions'
2533 ** The function `apropos-mode' runs the hook `apropos-mode-hook'.
2535 ** `concat' no longer accepts individual integer arguments,
2536 as promised long ago.
2538 ** The new function `float-time' returns the current time as a float.
2540 ** The new variable auto-coding-regexp-alist specifies coding systems
2541 for reading specific files, analogous to auto-coding-alist, but
2542 patterns are checked against file contents instead of file names.
2545 * Lisp changes in Emacs 21.1 (see following page for display-related features)
2547 ** The new package rx.el provides an alternative sexp notation for
2548 regular expressions.
2550 - Function: rx-to-string SEXP
2552 Translate SEXP into a regular expression in string notation.
2556 Translate SEXP into a regular expression in string notation.
2558 The following are valid subforms of regular expressions in sexp
2562 matches string STRING literally.
2565 matches character CHAR literally.
2568 matches any character except a newline.
2571 matches any character
2574 matches any character in SET. SET may be a character or string.
2575 Ranges of characters can be specified as `A-Z' in strings.
2581 matches any character not in SET
2584 matches the empty string, but only at the beginning of a line
2585 in the text being matched
2588 is similar to `line-start' but matches only at the end of a line
2591 matches the empty string, but only at the beginning of the
2592 string being matched against.
2595 matches the empty string, but only at the end of the
2596 string being matched against.
2599 matches the empty string, but only at the beginning of the
2600 buffer being matched against.
2603 matches the empty string, but only at the end of the
2604 buffer being matched against.
2607 matches the empty string, but only at point.
2610 matches the empty string, but only at the beginning or end of a
2614 matches the empty string, but only at the end of a word.
2617 matches the empty string, but only at the beginning or end of a
2620 `(not word-boundary)'
2621 matches the empty string, but not at the beginning or end of a
2625 matches 0 through 9.
2628 matches ASCII control characters.
2631 matches 0 through 9, a through f and A through F.
2634 matches space and tab only.
2637 matches graphic characters--everything except ASCII control chars,
2641 matches printing characters--everything except ASCII control chars
2645 matches letters and digits. (But at present, for multibyte characters,
2646 it matches anything that has word syntax.)
2649 matches letters. (But at present, for multibyte characters,
2650 it matches anything that has word syntax.)
2653 matches ASCII (unibyte) characters.
2656 matches non-ASCII (multibyte) characters.
2659 matches anything lower-case.
2662 matches anything upper-case.
2665 matches punctuation. (But at present, for multibyte characters,
2666 it matches anything that has non-word syntax.)
2669 matches anything that has whitespace syntax.
2672 matches anything that has word syntax.
2675 matches a character with syntax SYNTAX. SYNTAX must be one
2676 of the following symbols.
2678 `whitespace' (\\s- in string notation)
2679 `punctuation' (\\s.)
2682 `open-parenthesis' (\\s()
2683 `close-parenthesis' (\\s))
2684 `expression-prefix' (\\s')
2685 `string-quote' (\\s\")
2686 `paired-delimiter' (\\s$)
2688 `character-quote' (\\s/)
2689 `comment-start' (\\s<)
2690 `comment-end' (\\s>)
2692 `(not (syntax SYNTAX))'
2693 matches a character that has not syntax SYNTAX.
2695 `(category CATEGORY)'
2696 matches a character with category CATEGORY. CATEGORY must be
2697 either a character to use for C, or one of the following symbols.
2699 `consonant' (\\c0 in string notation)
2701 `upper-diacritical-mark' (\\c2)
2702 `lower-diacritical-mark' (\\c3)
2706 `vowel-modifying-diacritical-mark' (\\c7)
2708 `semivowel-lower' (\\c9)
2709 `not-at-end-of-line' (\\c<)
2710 `not-at-beginning-of-line' (\\c>)
2711 `alpha-numeric-two-byte' (\\cA)
2712 `chinse-two-byte' (\\cC)
2713 `greek-two-byte' (\\cG)
2714 `japanese-hiragana-two-byte' (\\cH)
2715 `indian-tow-byte' (\\cI)
2716 `japanese-katakana-two-byte' (\\cK)
2717 `korean-hangul-two-byte' (\\cN)
2718 `cyrillic-two-byte' (\\cY)
2727 `japanese-katakana' (\\ck)
2731 `japanese-roman' (\\cr)
2738 `(not (category CATEGORY))'
2739 matches a character that has not category CATEGORY.
2741 `(and SEXP1 SEXP2 ...)'
2742 matches what SEXP1 matches, followed by what SEXP2 matches, etc.
2744 `(submatch SEXP1 SEXP2 ...)'
2745 like `and', but makes the match accessible with `match-end',
2746 `match-beginning', and `match-string'.
2748 `(group SEXP1 SEXP2 ...)'
2749 another name for `submatch'.
2751 `(or SEXP1 SEXP2 ...)'
2752 matches anything that matches SEXP1 or SEXP2, etc. If all
2753 args are strings, use `regexp-opt' to optimize the resulting
2756 `(minimal-match SEXP)'
2757 produce a non-greedy regexp for SEXP. Normally, regexps matching
2758 zero or more occurrences of something are \"greedy\" in that they
2759 match as much as they can, as long as the overall regexp can
2760 still match. A non-greedy regexp matches as little as possible.
2762 `(maximal-match SEXP)'
2763 produce a greedy regexp for SEXP. This is the default.
2765 `(zero-or-more SEXP)'
2766 matches zero or more occurrences of what SEXP matches.
2769 like `zero-or-more'.
2772 like `zero-or-more', but always produces a greedy regexp.
2775 like `zero-or-more', but always produces a non-greedy regexp.
2777 `(one-or-more SEXP)'
2778 matches one or more occurrences of A.
2784 like `one-or-more', but always produces a greedy regexp.
2787 like `one-or-more', but always produces a non-greedy regexp.
2789 `(zero-or-one SEXP)'
2790 matches zero or one occurrences of A.
2796 like `zero-or-one', but always produces a greedy regexp.
2799 like `zero-or-one', but always produces a non-greedy regexp.
2802 matches N occurrences of what SEXP matches.
2805 matches N to M occurrences of what SEXP matches.
2808 evaluate FORM and insert result. If result is a string,
2812 include REGEXP in string notation in the result.
2814 *** The features `md5' and `overlay' are now provided by default.
2816 *** The special form `save-restriction' now works correctly even if the
2817 buffer is widened inside the save-restriction and changes made outside
2818 the original restriction. Previously, doing this would cause the saved
2819 restriction to be restored incorrectly.
2821 *** The functions `find-charset-region' and `find-charset-string' include
2822 `eight-bit-control' and/or `eight-bit-graphic' in the returned list
2823 when they find 8-bit characters. Previously, they included `ascii' in a
2824 multibyte buffer and `unknown' in a unibyte buffer.
2826 *** The functions `set-buffer-multibyte', `string-as-multibyte' and
2827 `string-as-unibyte' change the byte sequence of a buffer or a string
2828 if it contains a character from the `eight-bit-control' character set.
2830 *** The handling of multibyte sequences in a multibyte buffer is
2831 changed. Previously, a byte sequence matching the pattern
2832 [\200-\237][\240-\377]+ was interpreted as a single character
2833 regardless of the length of the trailing bytes [\240-\377]+. Thus, if
2834 the sequence was longer than what the leading byte indicated, the
2835 extra trailing bytes were ignored by Lisp functions. Now such extra
2836 bytes are independent 8-bit characters belonging to the charset
2839 ** Fontsets are now implemented using char-tables.
2841 A fontset can now be specified for each independent character, for
2842 a group of characters or for a character set rather than just for a
2843 character set as previously.
2845 *** The arguments of the function `set-fontset-font' are changed.
2846 They are NAME, CHARACTER, FONTNAME, and optional FRAME. The function
2847 modifies fontset NAME to use FONTNAME for CHARACTER.
2849 CHARACTER may be a cons (FROM . TO), where FROM and TO are non-generic
2850 characters. In that case FONTNAME is used for all characters in the
2851 range FROM and TO (inclusive). CHARACTER may be a charset. In that
2852 case FONTNAME is used for all character in the charset.
2854 FONTNAME may be a cons (FAMILY . REGISTRY), where FAMILY is the family
2855 name of a font and REGISTRY is a registry name of a font.
2857 *** Variable x-charset-registry has been deleted. The default charset
2858 registries of character sets are set in the default fontset
2861 *** The function `create-fontset-from-fontset-spec' ignores the second
2862 argument STYLE-VARIANT. It never creates style-variant fontsets.
2864 ** The method of composing characters is changed. Now character
2865 composition is done by a special text property `composition' in
2866 buffers and strings.
2868 *** Charset composition is deleted. Emacs never creates a `composite
2869 character' which is an independent character with a unique character
2870 code. Thus the following functions handling `composite characters'
2871 have been deleted: composite-char-component,
2872 composite-char-component-count, composite-char-composition-rule,
2873 composite-char-composition-rule and decompose-composite-char delete.
2874 The variables leading-code-composition and min-composite-char have
2877 *** Three more glyph reference points are added. They can be used to
2878 specify a composition rule. See the documentation of the variable
2879 `reference-point-alist' for more detail.
2881 *** The function `compose-region' takes new arguments COMPONENTS and
2882 MODIFICATION-FUNC. With COMPONENTS, you can specify not only a
2883 composition rule but also characters to be composed. Such characters
2884 may differ between buffer and string text.
2886 *** The function `compose-string' takes new arguments START, END,
2887 COMPONENTS, and MODIFICATION-FUNC.
2889 *** The function `compose-string' puts text property `composition'
2890 directly on the argument STRING instead of returning a new string.
2891 Likewise, the function `decompose-string' just removes text property
2892 `composition' from STRING.
2894 *** The new function `find-composition' returns information about
2895 a composition at a specified position in a buffer or a string.
2897 *** The function `decompose-composite-char' is now labeled as
2900 ** The new coding system `mac-roman' is primarily intended for use on
2901 the Macintosh but may be used generally for Macintosh-encoded text.
2903 ** The new character sets `mule-unicode-0100-24ff',
2904 `mule-unicode-2500-33ff', and `mule-unicode-e000-ffff' have been
2905 introduced for Unicode characters in the range U+0100..U+24FF,
2906 U+2500..U+33FF, U+E000..U+FFFF respectively.
2908 Note that the character sets are not yet unified in Emacs, so
2909 characters which belong to charsets such as Latin-2, Greek, Hebrew,
2910 etc. and the same characters in the `mule-unicode-*' charsets are
2911 different characters, as far as Emacs is concerned. For example, text
2912 which includes Unicode characters from the Latin-2 locale cannot be
2913 encoded by Emacs with ISO 8859-2 coding system.
2915 ** The new coding system `mule-utf-8' has been added.
2916 It provides limited support for decoding/encoding UTF-8 text. For
2917 details, please see the documentation string of this coding system.
2919 ** The new character sets `japanese-jisx0213-1' and
2920 `japanese-jisx0213-2' have been introduced for the new Japanese
2921 standard JIS X 0213 Plane 1 and Plane 2.
2923 ** The new character sets `latin-iso8859-14' and `latin-iso8859-15'
2924 have been introduced.
2926 ** The new character sets `eight-bit-control' and `eight-bit-graphic'
2927 have been introduced for 8-bit characters in the ranges 0x80..0x9F and
2928 0xA0..0xFF respectively. Note that the multibyte representation of
2929 eight-bit-control is never exposed; this leads to an exception in the
2930 emacs-mule coding system, which encodes everything else to the
2931 buffer/string internal representation. Note that to search for
2932 eight-bit-graphic characters in a multibyte buffer, the search string
2933 must be multibyte, otherwise such characters will be converted to
2934 their multibyte equivalent.
2936 ** If the APPEND argument of `write-region' is an integer, it seeks to
2937 that offset in the file before writing.
2939 ** The function `add-minor-mode' has been added for convenience and
2940 compatibility with XEmacs (and is used internally by define-minor-mode).
2942 ** The function `shell-command' now sets the default directory of the
2943 `*Shell Command Output*' buffer to the default directory of the buffer
2944 from which the command was issued.
2946 ** The functions `query-replace', `query-replace-regexp',
2947 `query-replace-regexp-eval' `map-query-replace-regexp',
2948 `replace-string', `replace-regexp', and `perform-replace' take two
2949 additional optional arguments START and END that specify the region to
2952 ** The new function `count-screen-lines' is a more flexible alternative
2953 to `window-buffer-height'.
2955 - Function: count-screen-lines &optional BEG END COUNT-FINAL-NEWLINE WINDOW
2957 Return the number of screen lines in the region between BEG and END.
2958 The number of screen lines may be different from the number of actual
2959 lines, due to line breaking, display table, etc.
2961 Optional arguments BEG and END default to `point-min' and `point-max'
2964 If region ends with a newline, ignore it unless optional third argument
2965 COUNT-FINAL-NEWLINE is non-nil.
2967 The optional fourth argument WINDOW specifies the window used for
2968 obtaining parameters such as width, horizontal scrolling, and so
2969 on. The default is to use the selected window's parameters.
2971 Like `vertical-motion', `count-screen-lines' always uses the current
2972 buffer, regardless of which buffer is displayed in WINDOW. This makes
2973 possible to use `count-screen-lines' in any buffer, whether or not it
2974 is currently displayed in some window.
2976 ** The new function `mapc' is like `mapcar' but doesn't collect the
2977 argument function's results.
2979 ** The functions base64-decode-region and base64-decode-string now
2980 signal an error instead of returning nil if decoding fails. Also,
2981 `base64-decode-string' now always returns a unibyte string (in Emacs
2982 20, it returned a multibyte string when the result was a valid multibyte
2985 ** The function sendmail-user-agent-compose now recognizes a `body'
2986 header in the list of headers passed to it.
2988 ** The new function member-ignore-case works like `member', but
2989 ignores differences in case and text representation.
2991 ** The buffer-local variable cursor-type can be used to specify the
2992 cursor to use in windows displaying a buffer. Values are interpreted
2995 t use the cursor specified for the frame (default)
2996 nil don't display a cursor
2997 `bar' display a bar cursor with default width
2998 (bar . WIDTH) display a bar cursor with width WIDTH
2999 others display a box cursor.
3001 ** The variable open-paren-in-column-0-is-defun-start controls whether
3002 an open parenthesis in column 0 is considered to be the start of a
3003 defun. If set, the default, it is considered a defun start. If not
3004 set, an open parenthesis in column 0 has no special meaning.
3006 ** The new function `string-to-syntax' can be used to translate syntax
3007 specifications in string form as accepted by `modify-syntax-entry' to
3008 the cons-cell form that is used for the values of the `syntax-table'
3009 text property, and in `font-lock-syntactic-keywords'.
3013 (string-to-syntax "()")
3016 ** Emacs' reader supports CL read syntax for integers in bases
3019 *** `#BINTEGER' or `#bINTEGER' reads INTEGER in binary (radix 2).
3020 INTEGER optionally contains a sign.
3027 *** `#OINTEGER' or `#oINTEGER' reads INTEGER in octal (radix 8).
3032 *** `#XINTEGER' or `#xINTEGER' reads INTEGER in hexadecimal (radix 16).
3037 *** `#RADIXrINTEGER' reads INTEGER in radix RADIX, 2 <= RADIX <= 36.
3044 ** The function `documentation-property' now evaluates the value of
3045 the given property to obtain a string if it doesn't refer to etc/DOC
3048 ** If called for a symbol, the function `documentation' now looks for
3049 a `function-documentation' property of that symbol. If it has a non-nil
3050 value, the documentation is taken from that value. If the value is
3051 not a string, it is evaluated to obtain a string.
3053 ** The last argument of `define-key-after' defaults to t for convenience.
3055 ** The new function `replace-regexp-in-string' replaces all matches
3056 for a regexp in a string.
3058 ** `mouse-position' now runs the abnormal hook
3059 `mouse-position-function'.
3061 ** The function string-to-number now returns a float for numbers
3062 that don't fit into a Lisp integer.
3064 ** The variable keyword-symbols-constants-flag has been removed.
3065 Keywords are now always considered constants.
3067 ** The new function `delete-and-extract-region' deletes text and
3070 ** The function `clear-this-command-keys' now also clears the vector
3071 returned by function `recent-keys'.
3073 ** Variables `beginning-of-defun-function' and `end-of-defun-function'
3074 can be used to define handlers for the functions that find defuns.
3075 Major modes can define these locally instead of rebinding C-M-a
3076 etc. if the normal conventions for defuns are not appropriate for the
3079 ** easy-mmode-define-minor-mode now takes an additional BODY argument
3080 and is renamed `define-minor-mode'.
3082 ** If an abbrev has a hook function which is a symbol, and that symbol
3083 has a non-nil `no-self-insert' property, the return value of the hook
3084 function specifies whether an expansion has been done or not. If it
3085 returns nil, abbrev-expand also returns nil, meaning "no expansion has
3088 When abbrev expansion is done by typing a self-inserting character,
3089 and the abbrev has a hook with the `no-self-insert' property, and the
3090 hook function returns non-nil meaning expansion has been done,
3091 then the self-inserting character is not inserted.
3093 ** The function `intern-soft' now accepts a symbol as first argument.
3094 In this case, that exact symbol is looked up in the specified obarray,
3095 and the function's value is nil if it is not found.
3097 ** The new macro `with-syntax-table' can be used to evaluate forms
3098 with the syntax table of the current buffer temporarily set to a
3101 (with-syntax-table TABLE &rest BODY)
3103 Evaluate BODY with syntax table of current buffer set to a copy of
3104 TABLE. The current syntax table is saved, BODY is evaluated, and the
3105 saved table is restored, even in case of an abnormal exit. Value is
3108 ** Regular expressions now support intervals \{n,m\} as well as
3109 Perl's shy-groups \(?:...\) and non-greedy *? +? and ?? operators.
3110 Also back-references like \2 are now considered as an error if the
3111 corresponding subgroup does not exist (or is not closed yet).
3112 Previously it would have been silently turned into `2' (ignoring the `\').
3114 ** The optional argument BUFFER of function file-local-copy has been
3115 removed since it wasn't used by anything.
3117 ** The file name argument of function `file-locked-p' is now required
3118 instead of being optional.
3120 ** The new built-in error `text-read-only' is signaled when trying to
3121 modify read-only text.
3123 ** New functions and variables for locales.
3125 The new variable `locale-coding-system' specifies how to encode and
3126 decode strings passed to low-level message functions like strerror and
3127 time functions like strftime. The new variables
3128 `system-messages-locale' and `system-time-locale' give the system
3129 locales to be used when invoking these two types of functions.
3131 The new function `set-locale-environment' sets the language
3132 environment, preferred coding system, and locale coding system from
3133 the system locale as specified by the LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, and LANG
3134 environment variables. Normally, it is invoked during startup and need
3135 not be invoked thereafter. It uses the new variables
3136 `locale-language-names', `locale-charset-language-names', and
3137 `locale-preferred-coding-systems' to make its decisions.
3139 ** syntax tables now understand nested comments.
3140 To declare a comment syntax as allowing nesting, just add an `n'
3141 modifier to either of the characters of the comment end and the comment
3144 ** The function `pixmap-spec-p' has been renamed `bitmap-spec-p'
3145 because `bitmap' is more in line with the usual X terminology.
3147 ** New function `propertize'
3149 The new function `propertize' can be used to conveniently construct
3150 strings with text properties.
3152 - Function: propertize STRING &rest PROPERTIES
3154 Value is a copy of STRING with text properties assigned as specified
3155 by PROPERTIES. PROPERTIES is a sequence of pairs PROPERTY VALUE, with
3156 PROPERTY being the name of a text property and VALUE being the
3157 specified value of that property. Example:
3159 (propertize "foo" 'face 'bold 'read-only t)
3161 ** push and pop macros.
3163 Simple versions of the push and pop macros of Common Lisp
3164 are now defined in Emacs Lisp. These macros allow only symbols
3165 as the place that holds the list to be changed.
3167 (push NEWELT LISTNAME) add NEWELT to the front of LISTNAME's value.
3168 (pop LISTNAME) return first elt of LISTNAME, and remove it
3169 (thus altering the value of LISTNAME).
3171 ** New dolist and dotimes macros.
3173 Simple versions of the dolist and dotimes macros of Common Lisp
3174 are now defined in Emacs Lisp.
3176 (dolist (VAR LIST [RESULT]) BODY...)
3177 Execute body once for each element of LIST,
3178 using the variable VAR to hold the current element.
3179 Then return the value of RESULT, or nil if RESULT is omitted.
3181 (dotimes (VAR COUNT [RESULT]) BODY...)
3182 Execute BODY with VAR bound to successive integers running from 0,
3183 inclusive, to COUNT, exclusive.
3184 Then return the value of RESULT, or nil if RESULT is omitted.
3186 ** Regular expressions now support Posix character classes such as
3187 [:alpha:], [:space:] and so on. These must be used within a character
3188 class--for instance, [-[:digit:].+] matches digits or a period
3191 [:digit:] matches 0 through 9
3192 [:cntrl:] matches ASCII control characters
3193 [:xdigit:] matches 0 through 9, a through f and A through F.
3194 [:blank:] matches space and tab only
3195 [:graph:] matches graphic characters--everything except ASCII control chars,
3197 [:print:] matches printing characters--everything except ASCII control chars
3199 [:alnum:] matches letters and digits.
3200 (But at present, for multibyte characters,
3201 it matches anything that has word syntax.)
3202 [:alpha:] matches letters.
3203 (But at present, for multibyte characters,
3204 it matches anything that has word syntax.)
3205 [:ascii:] matches ASCII (unibyte) characters.
3206 [:nonascii:] matches non-ASCII (multibyte) characters.
3207 [:lower:] matches anything lower-case.
3208 [:punct:] matches punctuation.
3209 (But at present, for multibyte characters,
3210 it matches anything that has non-word syntax.)
3211 [:space:] matches anything that has whitespace syntax.
3212 [:upper:] matches anything upper-case.
3213 [:word:] matches anything that has word syntax.
3215 ** Emacs now has built-in hash tables.
3217 The following functions are defined for hash tables:
3219 - Function: make-hash-table ARGS
3221 The argument list ARGS consists of keyword/argument pairs. All arguments
3222 are optional. The following arguments are defined:
3226 TEST must be a symbol specifying how to compare keys. Default is `eql'.
3227 Predefined are `eq', `eql' and `equal'. If TEST is not predefined,
3228 it must have been defined with `define-hash-table-test'.
3232 SIZE must be an integer > 0 giving a hint to the implementation how
3233 many elements will be put in the hash table. Default size is 65.
3235 :rehash-size REHASH-SIZE
3237 REHASH-SIZE specifies by how much to grow a hash table once it becomes
3238 full. If REHASH-SIZE is an integer, add that to the hash table's old
3239 size to get the new size. Otherwise, REHASH-SIZE must be a float >
3240 1.0, and the new size is computed by multiplying REHASH-SIZE with the
3241 old size. Default rehash size is 1.5.
3243 :rehash-threshold THRESHOLD
3245 THRESHOLD must be a float > 0 and <= 1.0 specifying when to resize the
3246 hash table. It is resized when the ratio of (number of entries) /
3247 (size of hash table) is >= THRESHOLD. Default threshold is 0.8.
3251 WEAK must be either nil, one of the symbols `key, `value',
3252 `key-or-value', `key-and-value', or t, meaning the same as
3253 `key-and-value'. Entries are removed from weak tables during garbage
3254 collection if their key and/or value are not referenced elsewhere
3255 outside of the hash table. Default are non-weak hash tables.
3257 - Function: makehash &optional TEST
3259 Similar to make-hash-table, but only TEST can be specified.
3261 - Function: hash-table-p TABLE
3263 Returns non-nil if TABLE is a hash table object.
3265 - Function: copy-hash-table TABLE
3267 Returns a copy of TABLE. Only the table itself is copied, keys and
3270 - Function: hash-table-count TABLE
3272 Returns the number of entries in TABLE.
3274 - Function: hash-table-rehash-size TABLE
3276 Returns the rehash size of TABLE.
3278 - Function: hash-table-rehash-threshold TABLE
3280 Returns the rehash threshold of TABLE.
3282 - Function: hash-table-rehash-size TABLE
3284 Returns the size of TABLE.
3286 - Function: hash-table-test TABLE
3288 Returns the test TABLE uses to compare keys.
3290 - Function: hash-table-weakness TABLE
3292 Returns the weakness specified for TABLE.
3294 - Function: clrhash TABLE
3298 - Function: gethash KEY TABLE &optional DEFAULT
3300 Look up KEY in TABLE and return its associated VALUE or DEFAULT if
3303 - Function: puthash KEY VALUE TABLE
3305 Associate KEY with VALUE in TABLE. If KEY is already associated with
3306 another value, replace the old value with VALUE.
3308 - Function: remhash KEY TABLE
3310 Remove KEY from TABLE if it is there.
3312 - Function: maphash FUNCTION TABLE
3314 Call FUNCTION for all elements in TABLE. FUNCTION must take two
3315 arguments KEY and VALUE.
3317 - Function: sxhash OBJ
3319 Return a hash code for Lisp object OBJ.
3321 - Function: define-hash-table-test NAME TEST-FN HASH-FN
3323 Define a new hash table test named NAME. If NAME is specified as
3324 a test in `make-hash-table', the table created will use TEST-FN for
3325 comparing keys, and HASH-FN to compute hash codes for keys. Test
3326 and hash function are stored as symbol property `hash-table-test'
3327 of NAME with a value of (TEST-FN HASH-FN).
3329 TEST-FN must take two arguments and return non-nil if they are the same.
3331 HASH-FN must take one argument and return an integer that is the hash
3332 code of the argument. The function should use the whole range of
3333 integer values for hash code computation, including negative integers.
3335 Example: The following creates a hash table whose keys are supposed to
3336 be strings that are compared case-insensitively.
3338 (defun case-fold-string= (a b)
3339 (compare-strings a nil nil b nil nil t))
3341 (defun case-fold-string-hash (a)
3342 (sxhash (upcase a)))
3344 (define-hash-table-test 'case-fold 'case-fold-string=
3345 'case-fold-string-hash))
3347 (make-hash-table :test 'case-fold)
3349 ** The Lisp reader handles circular structure.
3351 It now works to use the #N= and #N# constructs to represent
3352 circular structures. For example, #1=(a . #1#) represents
3353 a cons cell which is its own cdr.
3355 ** The Lisp printer handles circular structure.
3357 If you bind print-circle to a non-nil value, the Lisp printer outputs
3358 #N= and #N# constructs to represent circular and shared structure.
3360 ** If the second argument to `move-to-column' is anything but nil or
3361 t, that means replace a tab with spaces if necessary to reach the
3362 specified column, but do not add spaces at the end of the line if it
3363 is too short to reach that column.
3365 ** perform-replace has a new feature: the REPLACEMENTS argument may
3366 now be a cons cell (FUNCTION . DATA). This means to call FUNCTION
3367 after each match to get the replacement text. FUNCTION is called with
3368 two arguments: DATA, and the number of replacements already made.
3370 If the FROM-STRING contains any upper-case letters,
3371 perform-replace also turns off `case-fold-search' temporarily
3372 and inserts the replacement text without altering case in it.
3374 ** The function buffer-size now accepts an optional argument
3375 to specify which buffer to return the size of.
3377 ** The calendar motion commands now run the normal hook
3378 calendar-move-hook after moving point.
3380 ** The new variable small-temporary-file-directory specifies a
3381 directory to use for creating temporary files that are likely to be
3382 small. (Certain Emacs features use this directory.) If
3383 small-temporary-file-directory is nil, they use
3384 temporary-file-directory instead.
3386 ** The variable `inhibit-modification-hooks', if non-nil, inhibits all
3387 the hooks that track changes in the buffer. This affects
3388 `before-change-functions' and `after-change-functions', as well as
3389 hooks attached to text properties and overlay properties.
3391 ** assq-delete-all is a new function that deletes all the
3392 elements of an alist which have a car `eq' to a particular value.
3394 ** make-temp-file provides a more reliable way to create a temporary file.
3396 make-temp-file is used like make-temp-name, except that it actually
3397 creates the file before it returns. This prevents a timing error,
3398 ensuring that no other job can use the same name for a temporary file.
3400 ** New exclusive-open feature in `write-region'
3402 The optional seventh arg is now called MUSTBENEW. If non-nil, it insists
3403 on a check for an existing file with the same name. If MUSTBENEW
3404 is `excl', that means to get an error if the file already exists;
3405 never overwrite. If MUSTBENEW is neither nil nor `excl', that means
3406 ask for confirmation before overwriting, but do go ahead and
3407 overwrite the file if the user gives confirmation.
3409 If the MUSTBENEW argument in `write-region' is `excl',
3410 that means to use a special feature in the `open' system call
3411 to get an error if the file exists at that time.
3412 The error reported is `file-already-exists'.
3414 ** Function `format' now handles text properties.
3416 Text properties of the format string are applied to the result string.
3417 If the result string is longer than the format string, text properties
3418 ending at the end of the format string are extended to the end of the
3421 Text properties from string arguments are applied to the result
3422 string where arguments appear in the result string.
3426 (let ((s1 "hello, %s")
3428 (put-text-property 0 (length s1) 'face 'bold s1)
3429 (put-text-property 0 (length s2) 'face 'italic s2)
3432 results in a bold-face string with an italic `world' at the end.
3434 ** Messages can now be displayed with text properties.
3436 Text properties are handled as described above for function `format'.
3437 The following example displays a bold-face message with an italic
3440 (let ((msg "hello, %s!")
3442 (put-text-property 0 (length msg) 'face 'bold msg)
3443 (put-text-property 0 (length arg) 'face 'italic arg)
3448 Emacs supports playing sound files on GNU/Linux and the free BSDs
3449 (Voxware driver and native BSD driver, aka as Luigi's driver).
3451 Currently supported file formats are RIFF-WAVE (*.wav) and Sun Audio
3452 (*.au). You must configure Emacs with the option `--with-sound=yes'
3453 to enable sound support.
3455 Sound files can be played by calling (play-sound SOUND). SOUND is a
3456 list of the form `(sound PROPERTY...)'. The function is only defined
3457 when sound support is present for the system on which Emacs runs. The
3458 functions runs `play-sound-functions' with one argument which is the
3459 sound to play, before playing the sound.
3461 The following sound properties are supported:
3465 FILE is a file name. If FILE isn't an absolute name, it will be
3466 searched relative to `data-directory'.
3470 DATA is a string containing sound data. Either :file or :data
3471 may be present, but not both.
3475 VOLUME must be an integer in the range 0..100 or a float in the range
3476 0..1. This property is optional.
3480 DEVICE is a string specifying the system device on which to play the
3481 sound. The default device is system-dependent.
3483 Other properties are ignored.
3485 An alternative interface is called as
3486 (play-sound-file FILE &optional VOLUME DEVICE).
3488 ** `multimedia' is a new Finder keyword and Custom group.
3490 ** keywordp is a new predicate to test efficiently for an object being
3493 ** Changes to garbage collection
3495 *** The function garbage-collect now additionally returns the number
3496 of live and free strings.
3498 *** There is a new variable `strings-consed' holding the number of
3499 strings that have been consed so far.
3502 * Lisp-level Display features added after release 2.6 of the Emacs
3505 ** The user-option `resize-mini-windows' controls how Emacs resizes
3508 ** The function `pos-visible-in-window-p' now has a third optional
3509 argument, PARTIALLY. If a character is only partially visible, nil is
3510 returned, unless PARTIALLY is non-nil.
3512 ** On window systems, `glyph-table' is no longer used.
3514 ** Help strings in menu items are now used to provide `help-echo' text.
3516 ** The function `image-size' can be used to determine the size of an
3519 - Function: image-size SPEC &optional PIXELS FRAME
3521 Return the size of an image as a pair (WIDTH . HEIGHT).
3523 SPEC is an image specification. PIXELS non-nil means return sizes
3524 measured in pixels, otherwise return sizes measured in canonical
3525 character units (fractions of the width/height of the frame's default
3526 font). FRAME is the frame on which the image will be displayed.
3527 FRAME nil or omitted means use the selected frame.
3529 ** The function `image-mask-p' can be used to determine if an image
3532 - Function: image-mask-p SPEC &optional FRAME
3534 Return t if image SPEC has a mask bitmap.
3535 FRAME is the frame on which the image will be displayed. FRAME nil
3536 or omitted means use the selected frame.
3538 ** The function `find-image' can be used to find a usable image
3539 satisfying one of a list of specifications.
3541 ** The STRING argument of `put-image' and `insert-image' is now
3544 ** Image specifications may contain the property `:ascent center' (see
3548 * New Lisp-level Display features in Emacs 21.1
3550 ** The function tty-suppress-bold-inverse-default-colors can be used
3551 to make Emacs avoid displaying text with bold black foreground on TTYs.
3553 Some terminals, notably PC consoles, emulate bold text by displaying
3554 text in brighter colors. On such a console, a bold black foreground
3555 is displayed in a gray color. If this turns out to be hard to read on
3556 your monitor---the problem occurred with the mode line on
3557 laptops---you can instruct Emacs to ignore the text's boldness, and to
3558 just display it black instead.
3560 This situation can't be detected automatically. You will have to put
3563 (tty-suppress-bold-inverse-default-colors t)
3567 ** New face implementation.
3569 Emacs faces have been reimplemented from scratch. They don't use XLFD
3570 font names anymore and face merging now works as expected.
3574 Each face can specify the following display attributes:
3576 1. Font family or fontset alias name.
3578 2. Relative proportionate width, aka character set width or set
3579 width (swidth), e.g. `semi-compressed'.
3581 3. Font height in 1/10pt
3583 4. Font weight, e.g. `bold'.
3585 5. Font slant, e.g. `italic'.
3587 6. Foreground color.
3589 7. Background color.
3591 8. Whether or not characters should be underlined, and in what color.
3593 9. Whether or not characters should be displayed in inverse video.
3595 10. A background stipple, a bitmap.
3597 11. Whether or not characters should be overlined, and in what color.
3599 12. Whether or not characters should be strike-through, and in what
3602 13. Whether or not a box should be drawn around characters, its
3603 color, the width of the box lines, and 3D appearance.
3605 Faces are frame-local by nature because Emacs allows to define the
3606 same named face (face names are symbols) differently for different
3607 frames. Each frame has an alist of face definitions for all named
3608 faces. The value of a named face in such an alist is a Lisp vector
3609 with the symbol `face' in slot 0, and a slot for each of the face
3610 attributes mentioned above.
3612 There is also a global face alist `face-new-frame-defaults'. Face
3613 definitions from this list are used to initialize faces of newly
3616 A face doesn't have to specify all attributes. Those not specified
3617 have a nil value. Faces specifying all attributes are called
3622 The display style of a given character in the text is determined by
3623 combining several faces. This process is called `face merging'. Any
3624 aspect of the display style that isn't specified by overlays or text
3625 properties is taken from the `default' face. Since it is made sure
3626 that the default face is always fully-specified, face merging always
3627 results in a fully-specified face.
3629 *** Face realization.
3631 After all face attributes for a character have been determined by
3632 merging faces of that character, that face is `realized'. The
3633 realization process maps face attributes to what is physically
3634 available on the system where Emacs runs. The result is a `realized
3635 face' in form of an internal structure which is stored in the face
3636 cache of the frame on which it was realized.
3638 Face realization is done in the context of the charset of the
3639 character to display because different fonts and encodings are used
3640 for different charsets. In other words, for characters of different
3641 charsets, different realized faces are needed to display them.
3643 Except for composite characters, faces are always realized for a
3644 specific character set and contain a specific font, even if the face
3645 being realized specifies a fontset. The reason is that the result of
3646 the new font selection stage is better than what can be done with
3647 statically defined font name patterns in fontsets.
3649 In unibyte text, Emacs' charsets aren't applicable; function
3650 `char-charset' reports ASCII for all characters, including those >
3651 0x7f. The X registry and encoding of fonts to use is determined from
3652 the variable `face-default-registry' in this case. The variable is
3653 initialized at Emacs startup time from the font the user specified for
3656 Currently all unibyte text, i.e. all buffers with
3657 `enable-multibyte-characters' nil are displayed with fonts of the same
3658 registry and encoding `face-default-registry'. This is consistent
3659 with the fact that languages can also be set globally, only.
3661 **** Clearing face caches.
3663 The Lisp function `clear-face-cache' can be called to clear face caches
3664 on all frames. If called with a non-nil argument, it will also unload
3669 Font selection tries to find the best available matching font for a
3670 given (charset, face) combination. This is done slightly differently
3671 for faces specifying a fontset, or a font family name.
3673 If the face specifies a fontset name, that fontset determines a
3674 pattern for fonts of the given charset. If the face specifies a font
3675 family, a font pattern is constructed. Charset symbols have a
3676 property `x-charset-registry' for that purpose that maps a charset to
3677 an XLFD registry and encoding in the font pattern constructed.
3679 Available fonts on the system on which Emacs runs are then matched
3680 against the font pattern. The result of font selection is the best
3681 match for the given face attributes in this font list.
3683 Font selection can be influenced by the user.
3685 The user can specify the relative importance he gives the face
3686 attributes width, height, weight, and slant by setting
3687 face-font-selection-order (faces.el) to a list of face attribute
3688 names. The default is (:width :height :weight :slant), and means
3689 that font selection first tries to find a good match for the font
3690 width specified by a face, then---within fonts with that width---tries
3691 to find a best match for the specified font height, etc.
3693 Setting `face-font-family-alternatives' allows the user to specify
3694 alternative font families to try if a family specified by a face
3697 Setting `face-font-registry-alternatives' allows the user to specify
3698 all alternative font registry names to try for a face specifying a
3701 Please note that the interpretations of the above two variables are
3704 Setting face-ignored-fonts allows the user to ignore specific fonts.
3709 Emacs can make use of scalable fonts but doesn't do so by default,
3710 since the use of too many or too big scalable fonts may crash XFree86
3713 To enable scalable font use, set the variable
3714 `scalable-fonts-allowed'. A value of nil, the default, means never use
3715 scalable fonts. A value of t means any scalable font may be used.
3716 Otherwise, the value must be a list of regular expressions. A
3717 scalable font may then be used if it matches a regular expression from
3720 (setq scalable-fonts-allowed '("muleindian-2$"))
3722 allows the use of scalable fonts with registry `muleindian-2'.
3724 *** Functions and variables related to font selection.
3726 - Function: x-family-fonts &optional FAMILY FRAME
3728 Return a list of available fonts of family FAMILY on FRAME. If FAMILY
3729 is omitted or nil, list all families. Otherwise, FAMILY must be a
3730 string, possibly containing wildcards `?' and `*'.
3732 If FRAME is omitted or nil, use the selected frame. Each element of
3733 the result is a vector [FAMILY WIDTH POINT-SIZE WEIGHT SLANT FIXED-P
3734 FULL REGISTRY-AND-ENCODING]. FAMILY is the font family name.
3735 POINT-SIZE is the size of the font in 1/10 pt. WIDTH, WEIGHT, and
3736 SLANT are symbols describing the width, weight and slant of the font.
3737 These symbols are the same as for face attributes. FIXED-P is non-nil
3738 if the font is fixed-pitch. FULL is the full name of the font, and
3739 REGISTRY-AND-ENCODING is a string giving the registry and encoding of
3740 the font. The result list is sorted according to the current setting
3741 of the face font sort order.
3743 - Function: x-font-family-list
3745 Return a list of available font families on FRAME. If FRAME is
3746 omitted or nil, use the selected frame. Value is a list of conses
3747 (FAMILY . FIXED-P) where FAMILY is a font family, and FIXED-P is
3748 non-nil if fonts of that family are fixed-pitch.
3750 - Variable: font-list-limit
3752 Limit for font matching. If an integer > 0, font matching functions
3753 won't load more than that number of fonts when searching for a
3754 matching font. The default is currently 100.
3756 *** Setting face attributes.
3758 For the most part, the new face implementation is interface-compatible
3759 with the old one. Old face attribute related functions are now
3760 implemented in terms of the new functions `set-face-attribute' and
3763 Face attributes are identified by their names which are keyword
3764 symbols. All attributes can be set to `unspecified'.
3766 The following attributes are recognized:
3770 VALUE must be a string specifying the font family, e.g. ``courier'',
3771 or a fontset alias name. If a font family is specified, wild-cards `*'
3772 and `?' are allowed.
3776 VALUE specifies the relative proportionate width of the font to use.
3777 It must be one of the symbols `ultra-condensed', `extra-condensed',
3778 `condensed', `semi-condensed', `normal', `semi-expanded', `expanded',
3779 `extra-expanded', or `ultra-expanded'.
3783 VALUE must be either an integer specifying the height of the font to use
3784 in 1/10 pt, a floating point number specifying the amount by which to
3785 scale any underlying face, or a function, which is called with the old
3786 height (from the underlying face), and should return the new height.
3790 VALUE specifies the weight of the font to use. It must be one of the
3791 symbols `ultra-bold', `extra-bold', `bold', `semi-bold', `normal',
3792 `semi-light', `light', `extra-light', `ultra-light'.
3796 VALUE specifies the slant of the font to use. It must be one of the
3797 symbols `italic', `oblique', `normal', `reverse-italic', or
3800 `:foreground', `:background'
3802 VALUE must be a color name, a string.
3806 VALUE specifies whether characters in FACE should be underlined. If
3807 VALUE is t, underline with foreground color of the face. If VALUE is
3808 a string, underline with that color. If VALUE is nil, explicitly
3813 VALUE specifies whether characters in FACE should be overlined. If
3814 VALUE is t, overline with foreground color of the face. If VALUE is a
3815 string, overline with that color. If VALUE is nil, explicitly don't
3820 VALUE specifies whether characters in FACE should be drawn with a line
3821 striking through them. If VALUE is t, use the foreground color of the
3822 face. If VALUE is a string, strike-through with that color. If VALUE
3823 is nil, explicitly don't strike through.
3827 VALUE specifies whether characters in FACE should have a box drawn
3828 around them. If VALUE is nil, explicitly don't draw boxes. If
3829 VALUE is t, draw a box with lines of width 1 in the foreground color
3830 of the face. If VALUE is a string, the string must be a color name,
3831 and the box is drawn in that color with a line width of 1. Otherwise,
3832 VALUE must be a property list of the form `(:line-width WIDTH
3833 :color COLOR :style STYLE)'. If a keyword/value pair is missing from
3834 the property list, a default value will be used for the value, as
3835 specified below. WIDTH specifies the width of the lines to draw; it
3836 defaults to 1. COLOR is the name of the color to draw in, default is
3837 the foreground color of the face for simple boxes, and the background
3838 color of the face for 3D boxes. STYLE specifies whether a 3D box
3839 should be draw. If STYLE is `released-button', draw a box looking
3840 like a released 3D button. If STYLE is `pressed-button' draw a box
3841 that appears like a pressed button. If STYLE is nil, the default if
3842 the property list doesn't contain a style specification, draw a 2D
3847 VALUE specifies whether characters in FACE should be displayed in
3848 inverse video. VALUE must be one of t or nil.
3852 If VALUE is a string, it must be the name of a file of pixmap data.
3853 The directories listed in the `x-bitmap-file-path' variable are
3854 searched. Alternatively, VALUE may be a list of the form (WIDTH
3855 HEIGHT DATA) where WIDTH and HEIGHT are the size in pixels, and DATA
3856 is a string containing the raw bits of the bitmap. VALUE nil means
3857 explicitly don't use a stipple pattern.
3859 For convenience, attributes `:family', `:width', `:height', `:weight',
3860 and `:slant' may also be set in one step from an X font name:
3864 Set font-related face attributes from VALUE. VALUE must be a valid
3865 XLFD font name. If it is a font name pattern, the first matching font
3866 is used--this is for compatibility with the behavior of previous
3869 For compatibility with Emacs 20, keywords `:bold' and `:italic' can
3870 be used to specify that a bold or italic font should be used. VALUE
3871 must be t or nil in that case. A value of `unspecified' is not allowed."
3873 Please see also the documentation of `set-face-attribute' and
3878 VALUE is the name of a face from which to inherit attributes, or a list
3879 of face names. Attributes from inherited faces are merged into the face
3880 like an underlying face would be, with higher priority than underlying faces.
3882 *** Face attributes and X resources
3884 The following X resource names can be used to set face attributes
3887 Face attribute X resource class
3888 -----------------------------------------------------------------------
3889 :family attributeFamily . Face.AttributeFamily
3890 :width attributeWidth Face.AttributeWidth
3891 :height attributeHeight Face.AttributeHeight
3892 :weight attributeWeight Face.AttributeWeight
3893 :slant attributeSlant Face.AttributeSlant
3894 foreground attributeForeground Face.AttributeForeground
3895 :background attributeBackground . Face.AttributeBackground
3896 :overline attributeOverline Face.AttributeOverline
3897 :strike-through attributeStrikeThrough Face.AttributeStrikeThrough
3898 :box attributeBox Face.AttributeBox
3899 :underline attributeUnderline Face.AttributeUnderline
3900 :inverse-video attributeInverse Face.AttributeInverse
3901 :stipple attributeStipple Face.AttributeStipple
3902 or attributeBackgroundPixmap
3903 Face.AttributeBackgroundPixmap
3904 :font attributeFont Face.AttributeFont
3905 :bold attributeBold Face.AttributeBold
3906 :italic attributeItalic . Face.AttributeItalic
3907 :font attributeFont Face.AttributeFont
3909 *** Text property `face'.
3911 The value of the `face' text property can now be a single face
3912 specification or a list of such specifications. Each face
3913 specification can be
3915 1. A symbol or string naming a Lisp face.
3917 2. A property list of the form (KEYWORD VALUE ...) where each
3918 KEYWORD is a face attribute name, and VALUE is an appropriate value
3919 for that attribute. Please see the doc string of `set-face-attribute'
3920 for face attribute names.
3922 3. Conses of the form (FOREGROUND-COLOR . COLOR) or
3923 (BACKGROUND-COLOR . COLOR) where COLOR is a color name. This is
3924 for compatibility with previous Emacs versions.
3926 ** Support functions for colors on text-only terminals.
3928 The function `tty-color-define' can be used to define colors for use
3929 on TTY and MSDOS frames. It maps a color name to a color number on
3930 the terminal. Emacs defines a couple of common color mappings by
3931 default. You can get defined colors with a call to
3932 `defined-colors'. The function `tty-color-clear' can be
3933 used to clear the mapping table.
3935 ** Unified support for colors independent of frame type.
3937 The new functions `defined-colors', `color-defined-p', `color-values',
3938 and `display-color-p' work for any type of frame. On frames whose
3939 type is neither x nor w32, these functions transparently map X-style
3940 color specifications to the closest colors supported by the frame
3941 display. Lisp programs should use these new functions instead of the
3942 old `x-defined-colors', `x-color-defined-p', `x-color-values', and
3943 `x-display-color-p'. (The old function names are still available for
3944 compatibility; they are now aliases of the new names.) Lisp programs
3945 should no more look at the value of the variable window-system to
3946 modify their color-related behavior.
3948 The primitives `color-gray-p' and `color-supported-p' also work for
3951 ** Platform-independent functions to describe display capabilities.
3953 The new functions `display-mouse-p', `display-popup-menus-p',
3954 `display-graphic-p', `display-selections-p', `display-screens',
3955 `display-pixel-width', `display-pixel-height', `display-mm-width',
3956 `display-mm-height', `display-backing-store', `display-save-under',
3957 `display-planes', `display-color-cells', `display-visual-class', and
3958 `display-grayscale-p' describe the basic capabilities of a particular
3959 display. Lisp programs should call these functions instead of testing
3960 the value of the variables `window-system' or `system-type', or calling
3961 platform-specific functions such as `x-display-pixel-width'.
3963 The new function `display-images-p' returns non-nil if a particular
3964 display can display image files.
3966 ** The minibuffer prompt is now actually inserted in the minibuffer.
3968 This makes it possible to scroll through the prompt, if you want to.
3969 To disallow this completely (like previous versions of emacs), customize
3970 the variable `minibuffer-prompt-properties', and turn on the
3971 `Inviolable' option.
3973 The function minibuffer-prompt-end returns the current position of the
3974 end of the minibuffer prompt, if the minibuffer is current.
3975 Otherwise, it returns zero.
3977 ** New `field' abstraction in buffers.
3979 There is now code to support an abstraction called `fields' in emacs
3980 buffers. A field is a contiguous region of text with the same `field'
3981 property (which can be a text property or an overlay).
3983 Many emacs functions, such as forward-word, forward-sentence,
3984 forward-paragraph, beginning-of-line, etc., stop moving when they come
3985 to the boundary between fields; beginning-of-line and end-of-line will
3986 not let the point move past the field boundary, but other movement
3987 commands continue into the next field if repeated. Stopping at field
3988 boundaries can be suppressed programmatically by binding
3989 `inhibit-field-text-motion' to a non-nil value around calls to these
3992 Now that the minibuffer prompt is inserted into the minibuffer, it is in
3993 a separate field from the user-input part of the buffer, so that common
3994 editing commands treat the user's text separately from the prompt.
3996 The following functions are defined for operating on fields:
3998 - Function: constrain-to-field NEW-POS OLD-POS &optional ESCAPE-FROM-EDGE ONLY-IN-LINE INHIBIT-CAPTURE-PROPERTY
4000 Return the position closest to NEW-POS that is in the same field as OLD-POS.
4002 A field is a region of text with the same `field' property.
4003 If NEW-POS is nil, then the current point is used instead, and set to the
4004 constrained position if that is different.
4006 If OLD-POS is at the boundary of two fields, then the allowable
4007 positions for NEW-POS depends on the value of the optional argument
4008 ESCAPE-FROM-EDGE: If ESCAPE-FROM-EDGE is nil, then NEW-POS is
4009 constrained to the field that has the same `field' char-property
4010 as any new characters inserted at OLD-POS, whereas if ESCAPE-FROM-EDGE
4011 is non-nil, NEW-POS is constrained to the union of the two adjacent
4012 fields. Additionally, if two fields are separated by another field with
4013 the special value `boundary', then any point within this special field is
4014 also considered to be `on the boundary'.
4016 If the optional argument ONLY-IN-LINE is non-nil and constraining
4017 NEW-POS would move it to a different line, NEW-POS is returned
4018 unconstrained. This useful for commands that move by line, like
4019 C-n or C-a, which should generally respect field boundaries
4020 only in the case where they can still move to the right line.
4022 If the optional argument INHIBIT-CAPTURE-PROPERTY is non-nil, and OLD-POS has
4023 a non-nil property of that name, then any field boundaries are ignored.
4025 Field boundaries are not noticed if `inhibit-field-text-motion' is non-nil.
4027 - Function: delete-field &optional POS
4029 Delete the field surrounding POS.
4030 A field is a region of text with the same `field' property.
4031 If POS is nil, the value of point is used for POS.
4033 - Function: field-beginning &optional POS ESCAPE-FROM-EDGE
4035 Return the beginning of the field surrounding POS.
4036 A field is a region of text with the same `field' property.
4037 If POS is nil, the value of point is used for POS.
4038 If ESCAPE-FROM-EDGE is non-nil and POS is at the beginning of its
4039 field, then the beginning of the *previous* field is returned.
4041 - Function: field-end &optional POS ESCAPE-FROM-EDGE
4043 Return the end of the field surrounding POS.
4044 A field is a region of text with the same `field' property.
4045 If POS is nil, the value of point is used for POS.
4046 If ESCAPE-FROM-EDGE is non-nil and POS is at the end of its field,
4047 then the end of the *following* field is returned.
4049 - Function: field-string &optional POS
4051 Return the contents of the field surrounding POS as a string.
4052 A field is a region of text with the same `field' property.
4053 If POS is nil, the value of point is used for POS.
4055 - Function: field-string-no-properties &optional POS
4057 Return the contents of the field around POS, without text-properties.
4058 A field is a region of text with the same `field' property.
4059 If POS is nil, the value of point is used for POS.
4063 Emacs can now display images. Images are inserted into text by giving
4064 strings or buffer text a `display' text property containing one of
4065 (AREA IMAGE) or IMAGE. The display of the `display' property value
4066 replaces the display of the characters having that property.
4068 If the property value has the form (AREA IMAGE), AREA must be one of
4069 `(margin left-margin)', `(margin right-margin)' or `(margin nil)'. If
4070 AREA is `(margin nil)', IMAGE will be displayed in the text area of a
4071 window, otherwise it will be displayed in the left or right marginal
4074 IMAGE is an image specification.
4076 *** Image specifications
4078 Image specifications are lists of the form `(image PROPS)' where PROPS
4079 is a property list whose keys are keyword symbols. Each
4080 specifications must contain a property `:type TYPE' with TYPE being a
4081 symbol specifying the image type, e.g. `xbm'. Properties not
4082 described below are ignored.
4084 The following is a list of properties all image types share.
4088 ASCENT must be a number in the range 0..100, or the symbol `center'.
4089 If it is a number, it specifies the percentage of the image's height
4090 to use for its ascent.
4092 If not specified, ASCENT defaults to the value 50 which means that the
4093 image will be centered with the base line of the row it appears in.
4095 If ASCENT is `center' the image is vertically centered around a
4096 centerline which is the vertical center of text drawn at the position
4097 of the image, in the manner specified by the text properties and
4098 overlays that apply to the image.
4102 MARGIN must be either a number >= 0 specifying how many pixels to put
4103 as margin around the image, or a pair (X . Y) with X specifying the
4104 horizontal margin and Y specifying the vertical margin. Default is 0.
4108 RELIEF is analogous to the `:relief' attribute of faces. Puts a relief
4113 Apply an image algorithm to the image before displaying it.
4115 ALGO `laplace' or `emboss' means apply a Laplace or ``emboss''
4116 edge-detection algorithm to the image.
4118 ALGO `(edge-detection :matrix MATRIX :color-adjust ADJUST)' means
4119 apply a general edge-detection algorithm. MATRIX must be either a
4120 nine-element list or a nine-element vector of numbers. A pixel at
4121 position x/y in the transformed image is computed from original pixels
4122 around that position. MATRIX specifies, for each pixel in the
4123 neighborhood of x/y, a factor with which that pixel will influence the
4124 transformed pixel; element 0 specifies the factor for the pixel at
4125 x-1/y-1, element 1 the factor for the pixel at x/y-1 etc. as shown
4128 (x-1/y-1 x/y-1 x+1/y-1
4130 x-1/y+1 x/y+1 x+1/y+1)
4132 The resulting pixel is computed from the color intensity of the color
4133 resulting from summing up the RGB values of surrounding pixels,
4134 multiplied by the specified factors, and dividing that sum by the sum
4135 of the factors' absolute values.
4137 Laplace edge-detection currently uses a matrix of
4143 Emboss edge-detection uses a matrix of
4149 ALGO `disabled' means transform the image so that it looks
4154 If MASK is `heuristic' or `(heuristic BG)', build a clipping mask for
4155 the image, so that the background of a frame is visible behind the
4156 image. If BG is not specified, or if BG is t, determine the
4157 background color of the image by looking at the 4 corners of the
4158 image, assuming the most frequently occurring color from the corners is
4159 the background color of the image. Otherwise, BG must be a list `(RED
4160 GREEN BLUE)' specifying the color to assume for the background of the
4163 If MASK is nil, remove a mask from the image, if it has one. Images
4164 in some formats include a mask which can be removed by specifying
4169 Load image from FILE. If FILE is not absolute after expanding it,
4170 search for the image in `data-directory'. Some image types support
4171 building images from data. When this is done, no `:file' property
4172 may be present in the image specification.
4176 Get image data from DATA. (As of this writing, this is not yet
4177 supported for image type `postscript'). Either :file or :data may be
4178 present in an image specification, but not both. All image types
4179 support strings as DATA, some types allow additional types of DATA.
4181 *** Supported image types
4183 **** XBM, image type `xbm'.
4185 XBM images don't require an external library. Additional image
4186 properties supported are
4190 FG must be a string specifying the image foreground color, or nil
4191 meaning to use the default. Default is the frame's foreground.
4195 BG must be a string specifying the image foreground color, or nil
4196 meaning to use the default. Default is the frame's background color.
4198 XBM images can be constructed from data instead of file. In this
4199 case, the image specification must contain the following properties
4200 instead of a `:file' property.
4204 WIDTH specifies the width of the image in pixels.
4208 HEIGHT specifies the height of the image in pixels.
4214 1. a string large enough to hold the bitmap data, i.e. it must
4215 have a size >= (WIDTH + 7) / 8 * HEIGHT
4217 2. a bool-vector of size >= WIDTH * HEIGHT
4219 3. a vector of strings or bool-vectors, one for each line of the
4222 4. a string that's an in-memory XBM file. Neither width nor
4223 height may be specified in this case because these are defined
4226 **** XPM, image type `xpm'
4228 XPM images require the external library `libXpm', package
4229 `xpm-3.4k.tar.gz', version 3.4k or later. Make sure the library is
4230 found when Emacs is configured by supplying appropriate paths via
4231 `--x-includes' and `--x-libraries'.
4233 Additional image properties supported are:
4235 `:color-symbols SYMBOLS'
4237 SYMBOLS must be a list of pairs (NAME . COLOR), with NAME being the
4238 name of color as it appears in an XPM file, and COLOR being an X color
4241 XPM images can be built from memory instead of files. In that case,
4242 add a `:data' property instead of a `:file' property.
4244 The XPM library uses libz in its implementation so that it is able
4245 to display compressed images.
4247 **** PBM, image type `pbm'
4249 PBM images don't require an external library. Color, gray-scale and
4250 mono images are supported. Additional image properties supported for
4255 FG must be a string specifying the image foreground color, or nil
4256 meaning to use the default. Default is the frame's foreground.
4260 BG must be a string specifying the image foreground color, or nil
4261 meaning to use the default. Default is the frame's background color.
4263 **** JPEG, image type `jpeg'
4265 Support for JPEG images requires the external library `libjpeg',
4266 package `jpegsrc.v6a.tar.gz', or later. Additional image properties
4269 **** TIFF, image type `tiff'
4271 Support for TIFF images requires the external library `libtiff',
4272 package `tiff-v3.4-tar.gz', or later. There are no additional image
4275 **** GIF, image type `gif'
4277 Support for GIF images requires the external library `libungif', package
4278 `libungif-4.1.0', or later.
4280 Additional image properties supported are:
4284 INDEX must be an integer >= 0. Load image number INDEX from a
4285 multi-image GIF file. An error is signaled if INDEX is too large.
4287 This could be used to implement limited support for animated GIFs.
4288 For example, the following function displays a multi-image GIF file
4289 at point-min in the current buffer, switching between sub-images
4292 (defun show-anim (file max)
4293 "Display multi-image GIF file FILE which contains MAX subimages."
4294 (display-anim (current-buffer) file 0 max t))
4296 (defun display-anim (buffer file idx max first-time)
4299 (let ((img (create-image file nil nil :index idx)))
4302 (goto-char (point-min))
4303 (unless first-time (delete-char 1))
4304 (insert-image img "x"))
4305 (run-with-timer 0.1 nil 'display-anim buffer file (1+ idx) max nil)))
4307 **** PNG, image type `png'
4309 Support for PNG images requires the external library `libpng',
4310 package `libpng-1.0.2.tar.gz', or later. There are no additional image
4313 **** Ghostscript, image type `postscript'.
4315 Additional image properties supported are:
4319 WIDTH is width of the image in pt (1/72 inch). WIDTH must be an
4320 integer. This is a required property.
4324 HEIGHT specifies the height of the image in pt (1/72 inch). HEIGHT
4325 must be a integer. This is an required property.
4329 BOX must be a list or vector of 4 integers giving the bounding box of
4330 the PS image, analogous to the `BoundingBox' comment found in PS
4331 files. This is an required property.
4333 Part of the Ghostscript interface is implemented in Lisp. See
4338 The variable `image-types' contains a list of those image types
4339 which are supported in the current configuration.
4341 Images are stored in an image cache and removed from the cache when
4342 they haven't been displayed for `image-cache-eviction-delay seconds.
4343 The function `clear-image-cache' can be used to clear the image cache
4344 manually. Images in the cache are compared with `equal', i.e. all
4345 images with `equal' specifications share the same image.
4347 *** Simplified image API, image.el
4349 The new Lisp package image.el contains functions that simplify image
4350 creation and putting images into text. The function `create-image'
4351 can be used to create images. The macro `defimage' can be used to
4352 define an image based on available image types. The functions
4353 `put-image' and `insert-image' can be used to insert an image into a
4358 Windows can now have margins which are used for special text
4361 To give a window margins, either set the buffer-local variables
4362 `left-margin-width' and `right-margin-width', or call
4363 `set-window-margins'. The function `window-margins' can be used to
4364 obtain the current settings. To make `left-margin-width' and
4365 `right-margin-width' take effect, you must set them before displaying
4366 the buffer in a window, or use `set-window-buffer' to force an update
4367 of the display margins.
4369 You can put text in margins by giving it a `display' text property
4370 containing a pair of the form `(LOCATION . VALUE)', where LOCATION is
4371 one of `left-margin' or `right-margin' or nil. VALUE can be either a
4372 string, an image specification or a stretch specification (see later
4377 Emacs displays short help messages in the echo area, when the mouse
4378 moves over a tool-bar item or a piece of text that has a text property
4379 `help-echo'. This feature also applies to strings in the mode line
4380 that have a `help-echo' property.
4382 If the value of the `help-echo' property is a function, that function
4383 is called with three arguments WINDOW, OBJECT and POSITION. WINDOW is
4384 the window in which the help was found.
4386 If OBJECT is a buffer, POS is the position in the buffer where the
4387 `help-echo' text property was found.
4389 If OBJECT is an overlay, that overlay has a `help-echo' property, and
4390 POS is the position in the overlay's buffer under the mouse.
4392 If OBJECT is a string (an overlay string or a string displayed with
4393 the `display' property), POS is the position in that string under the
4396 If the value of the `help-echo' property is neither a function nor a
4397 string, it is evaluated to obtain a help string.
4399 For tool-bar and menu-bar items, their key definition is used to
4400 determine the help to display. If their definition contains a
4401 property `:help FORM', FORM is evaluated to determine the help string.
4402 For tool-bar items without a help form, the caption of the item is
4403 used as help string.
4405 The hook `show-help-function' can be set to a function that displays
4406 the help string differently. For example, enabling a tooltip window
4407 causes the help display to appear there instead of in the echo area.
4409 ** Vertical fractional scrolling.
4411 The display of text in windows can be scrolled smoothly in pixels.
4412 This is useful, for example, for making parts of large images visible.
4414 The function `window-vscroll' returns the current value of vertical
4415 scrolling, a non-negative fraction of the canonical character height.
4416 The function `set-window-vscroll' can be used to set the vertical
4417 scrolling value. Here is an example of how these function might be
4420 (global-set-key [A-down]
4423 (set-window-vscroll (selected-window)
4424 (+ 0.5 (window-vscroll)))))
4425 (global-set-key [A-up]
4428 (set-window-vscroll (selected-window)
4429 (- (window-vscroll) 0.5)))))
4431 ** New hook `fontification-functions'.
4433 Functions from `fontification-functions' are called from redisplay
4434 when it encounters a region of text that is not yet fontified. This
4435 variable automatically becomes buffer-local when set. Each function
4436 is called with one argument, POS.
4438 At least one of the hook functions should fontify one or more
4439 characters starting at POS in the current buffer. It should mark them
4440 as fontified by giving them a non-nil value of the `fontified' text
4441 property. It may be reasonable for these functions to check for the
4442 `fontified' property and not put it back on, but they do not have to.
4444 ** Tool bar support.
4446 Emacs supports a tool bar at the top of a frame under X. The frame
4447 parameter `tool-bar-lines' (X resource "toolBar", class "ToolBar")
4448 controls how may lines to reserve for the tool bar. A zero value
4449 suppresses the tool bar. If the value is non-zero and
4450 `auto-resize-tool-bars' is non-nil the tool bar's size will be changed
4451 automatically so that all tool bar items are visible.
4453 *** Tool bar item definitions
4455 Tool bar items are defined using `define-key' with a prefix-key
4456 `tool-bar'. For example `(define-key global-map [tool-bar item1] ITEM)'
4457 where ITEM is a list `(menu-item CAPTION BINDING PROPS...)'.
4459 CAPTION is the caption of the item, If it's not a string, it is
4460 evaluated to get a string. The caption is currently not displayed in
4461 the tool bar, but it is displayed if the item doesn't have a `:help'
4462 property (see below).
4464 BINDING is the tool bar item's binding. Tool bar items with keymaps as
4465 binding are currently ignored.
4467 The following properties are recognized:
4471 FORM is evaluated and specifies whether the tool bar item is enabled
4476 FORM is evaluated and specifies whether the tool bar item is displayed.
4480 FUNCTION is called with one parameter, the same list BINDING in which
4481 FUNCTION is specified as the filter. The value FUNCTION returns is
4482 used instead of BINDING to display this item.
4484 `:button (TYPE SELECTED)'
4486 TYPE must be one of `:radio' or `:toggle'. SELECTED is evaluated
4487 and specifies whether the button is selected (pressed) or not.
4491 IMAGES is either a single image specification or a vector of four
4492 image specifications. If it is a vector, this table lists the
4493 meaning of each of the four elements:
4495 Index Use when item is
4496 ----------------------------------------
4497 0 enabled and selected
4498 1 enabled and deselected
4499 2 disabled and selected
4500 3 disabled and deselected
4502 If IMAGE is a single image specification, a Laplace edge-detection
4503 algorithm is used on that image to draw the image in disabled state.
4505 `:help HELP-STRING'.
4507 Gives a help string to display for the tool bar item. This help
4508 is displayed when the mouse is moved over the item.
4510 The function `toolbar-add-item' is a convenience function for adding
4511 toolbar items generally, and `tool-bar-add-item-from-menu' can be used
4512 to define a toolbar item with a binding copied from an item on the
4515 The default bindings use a menu-item :filter to derive the tool-bar
4516 dynamically from variable `tool-bar-map' which may be set
4517 buffer-locally to override the global map.
4519 *** Tool-bar-related variables.
4521 If `auto-resize-tool-bar' is non-nil, the tool bar will automatically
4522 resize to show all defined tool bar items. It will never grow larger
4523 than 1/4 of the frame's size.
4525 If `auto-raise-tool-bar-buttons' is non-nil, tool bar buttons will be
4526 raised when the mouse moves over them.
4528 You can add extra space between tool bar items by setting
4529 `tool-bar-button-margin' to a positive integer specifying a number of
4530 pixels, or a pair of integers (X . Y) specifying horizontal and
4531 vertical margins . Default is 1.
4533 You can change the shadow thickness of tool bar buttons by setting
4534 `tool-bar-button-relief' to an integer. Default is 3.
4536 *** Tool-bar clicks with modifiers.
4538 You can bind commands to clicks with control, shift, meta etc. on
4541 (define-key global-map [tool-bar shell]
4542 '(menu-item "Shell" shell
4543 :image (image :type xpm :file "shell.xpm")))
4545 is the original tool bar item definition, then
4547 (define-key global-map [tool-bar S-shell] 'some-command)
4549 makes a binding to run `some-command' for a shifted click on the same
4552 ** Mode line changes.
4554 *** Mouse-sensitive mode line.
4556 The mode line can be made mouse-sensitive by displaying strings there
4557 that have a `local-map' text property. There are three ways to display
4558 a string with a `local-map' property in the mode line.
4560 1. The mode line spec contains a variable whose string value has
4561 a `local-map' text property.
4563 2. The mode line spec contains a format specifier (e.g. `%12b'), and
4564 that format specifier has a `local-map' property.
4566 3. The mode line spec contains a list containing `:eval FORM'. FORM
4567 is evaluated. If the result is a string, and that string has a
4568 `local-map' property.
4570 The same mechanism is used to determine the `face' and `help-echo'
4571 properties of strings in the mode line. See `bindings.el' for an
4574 *** If a mode line element has the form `(:eval FORM)', FORM is
4575 evaluated and the result is used as mode line element.
4577 *** You can suppress mode-line display by setting the buffer-local
4578 variable mode-line-format to nil.
4580 *** A headerline can now be displayed at the top of a window.
4582 This mode line's contents are controlled by the new variable
4583 `header-line-format' and `default-header-line-format' which are
4584 completely analogous to `mode-line-format' and
4585 `default-mode-line-format'. A value of nil means don't display a top
4588 The appearance of top mode lines is controlled by the face
4591 The function `coordinates-in-window-p' returns `header-line' for a
4592 position in the header-line.
4594 ** Text property `display'
4596 The `display' text property is used to insert images into text,
4597 replace text with other text, display text in marginal area, and it is
4598 also used to control other aspects of how text displays. The value of
4599 the `display' property should be a display specification, as described
4600 below, or a list or vector containing display specifications.
4602 *** Replacing text, displaying text in marginal areas
4604 To replace the text having the `display' property with some other
4605 text, use a display specification of the form `(LOCATION STRING)'.
4607 If LOCATION is `(margin left-margin)', STRING is displayed in the left
4608 marginal area, if it is `(margin right-margin)', it is displayed in
4609 the right marginal area, and if LOCATION is `(margin nil)' STRING
4610 is displayed in the text. In the latter case you can also use the
4611 simpler form STRING as property value.
4613 *** Variable width and height spaces
4615 To display a space of fractional width or height, use a display
4616 specification of the form `(LOCATION STRECH)'. If LOCATION is
4617 `(margin left-margin)', the space is displayed in the left marginal
4618 area, if it is `(margin right-margin)', it is displayed in the right
4619 marginal area, and if LOCATION is `(margin nil)' the space is
4620 displayed in the text. In the latter case you can also use the
4621 simpler form STRETCH as property value.
4623 The stretch specification STRETCH itself is a list of the form `(space
4624 PROPS)', where PROPS is a property list which can contain the
4625 properties described below.
4627 The display of the fractional space replaces the display of the
4628 characters having the `display' property.
4632 Specifies that the space width should be WIDTH times the normal
4633 character width. WIDTH can be an integer or floating point number.
4635 - :relative-width FACTOR
4637 Specifies that the width of the stretch should be computed from the
4638 first character in a group of consecutive characters that have the
4639 same `display' property. The computation is done by multiplying the
4640 width of that character by FACTOR.
4644 Specifies that the space should be wide enough to reach HPOS. The
4645 value HPOS is measured in units of the normal character width.
4647 Exactly one of the above properties should be used.
4651 Specifies the height of the space, as HEIGHT, measured in terms of the
4654 - :relative-height FACTOR
4656 The height of the space is computed as the product of the height
4657 of the text having the `display' property and FACTOR.
4661 Specifies that ASCENT percent of the height of the stretch should be
4662 used for the ascent of the stretch, i.e. for the part above the
4663 baseline. The value of ASCENT must be a non-negative number less or
4666 You should not use both `:height' and `:relative-height' together.
4670 A display specification for an image has the form `(LOCATION
4671 . IMAGE)', where IMAGE is an image specification. The image replaces,
4672 in the display, the characters having this display specification in
4673 their `display' text property. If LOCATION is `(margin left-margin)',
4674 the image will be displayed in the left marginal area, if it is
4675 `(margin right-margin)' it will be displayed in the right marginal
4676 area, and if LOCATION is `(margin nil)' the image will be displayed in
4677 the text. In the latter case you can also use the simpler form IMAGE
4678 as display specification.
4680 *** Other display properties
4682 - (space-width FACTOR)
4684 Specifies that space characters in the text having that property
4685 should be displayed FACTOR times as wide as normal; FACTOR must be an
4690 Display text having this property in a font that is smaller or larger.
4692 If HEIGHT is a list of the form `(+ N)', where N is an integer, that
4693 means to use a font that is N steps larger. If HEIGHT is a list of
4694 the form `(- N)', that means to use a font that is N steps smaller. A
4695 ``step'' is defined by the set of available fonts; each size for which
4696 a font is available counts as a step.
4698 If HEIGHT is a number, that means to use a font that is HEIGHT times
4699 as tall as the frame's default font.
4701 If HEIGHT is a symbol, it is called as a function with the current
4702 height as argument. The function should return the new height to use.
4704 Otherwise, HEIGHT is evaluated to get the new height, with the symbol
4705 `height' bound to the current specified font height.
4709 FACTOR must be a number, specifying a multiple of the current
4710 font's height. If it is positive, that means to display the characters
4711 raised. If it is negative, that means to display them lower down. The
4712 amount of raising or lowering is computed without taking account of the
4713 `height' subproperty.
4715 *** Conditional display properties
4717 All display specifications can be conditionalized. If a specification
4718 has the form `(when CONDITION . SPEC)', the specification SPEC applies
4719 only when CONDITION yields a non-nil value when evaluated. During the
4720 evaluation, `object' is bound to the string or buffer having the
4721 conditional display property; `position' and `buffer-position' are
4722 bound to the position within `object' and the buffer position where
4723 the display property was found, respectively. Both positions can be
4724 different when object is a string.
4726 The normal specification consisting of SPEC only is equivalent to
4729 ** New menu separator types.
4731 Emacs now supports more than one menu separator type. Menu items with
4732 item names consisting of dashes only (including zero dashes) are
4733 treated like before. In addition, the following item names are used
4734 to specify other menu separator types.
4736 - `--no-line' or `--space', or `--:space', or `--:noLine'
4738 No separator lines are drawn, but a small space is inserted where the
4741 - `--single-line' or `--:singleLine'
4743 A single line in the menu's foreground color.
4745 - `--double-line' or `--:doubleLine'
4747 A double line in the menu's foreground color.
4749 - `--single-dashed-line' or `--:singleDashedLine'
4751 A single dashed line in the menu's foreground color.
4753 - `--double-dashed-line' or `--:doubleDashedLine'
4755 A double dashed line in the menu's foreground color.
4757 - `--shadow-etched-in' or `--:shadowEtchedIn'
4759 A single line with 3D sunken appearance. This is the form
4760 displayed for item names consisting of dashes only.
4762 - `--shadow-etched-out' or `--:shadowEtchedOut'
4764 A single line with 3D raised appearance.
4766 - `--shadow-etched-in-dash' or `--:shadowEtchedInDash'
4768 A single dashed line with 3D sunken appearance.
4770 - `--shadow-etched-out-dash' or `--:shadowEtchedOutDash'
4772 A single dashed line with 3D raise appearance.
4774 - `--shadow-double-etched-in' or `--:shadowDoubleEtchedIn'
4776 Two lines with 3D sunken appearance.
4778 - `--shadow-double-etched-out' or `--:shadowDoubleEtchedOut'
4780 Two lines with 3D raised appearance.
4782 - `--shadow-double-etched-in-dash' or `--:shadowDoubleEtchedInDash'
4784 Two dashed lines with 3D sunken appearance.
4786 - `--shadow-double-etched-out-dash' or `--:shadowDoubleEtchedOutDash'
4788 Two dashed lines with 3D raised appearance.
4790 Under LessTif/Motif, the last four separator types are displayed like
4791 the corresponding single-line separators.
4793 ** New frame parameters for scroll bar colors.
4795 The new frame parameters `scroll-bar-foreground' and
4796 `scroll-bar-background' can be used to change scroll bar colors.
4797 Their value must be either a color name, a string, or nil to specify
4798 that scroll bars should use a default color. For toolkit scroll bars,
4799 default colors are toolkit specific. For non-toolkit scroll bars, the
4800 default background is the background color of the frame, and the
4801 default foreground is black.
4803 The X resource name of these parameters are `scrollBarForeground'
4804 (class ScrollBarForeground) and `scrollBarBackground' (class
4805 `ScrollBarBackground').
4807 Setting these parameters overrides toolkit specific X resource
4808 settings for scroll bar colors.
4810 ** You can set `redisplay-dont-pause' to a non-nil value to prevent
4811 display updates from being interrupted when input is pending.
4813 ** Changing a window's width may now change its window start if it
4814 starts on a continuation line. The new window start is computed based
4815 on the window's new width, starting from the start of the continued
4816 line as the start of the screen line with the minimum distance from
4817 the original window start.
4819 ** The variable `hscroll-step' and the functions
4820 `hscroll-point-visible' and `hscroll-window-column' have been removed
4821 now that proper horizontal scrolling is implemented.
4823 ** Windows can now be made fixed-width and/or fixed-height.
4825 A window is fixed-size if its buffer has a buffer-local variable
4826 `window-size-fixed' whose value is not nil. A value of `height' makes
4827 windows fixed-height, a value of `width' makes them fixed-width, any
4828 other non-nil value makes them both fixed-width and fixed-height.
4830 The following code makes all windows displaying the current buffer
4831 fixed-width and fixed-height.
4833 (set (make-local-variable 'window-size-fixed) t)
4835 A call to enlarge-window on a window gives an error if that window is
4836 fixed-width and it is tried to change the window's width, or if the
4837 window is fixed-height, and it is tried to change its height. To
4838 change the size of a fixed-size window, bind `window-size-fixed'
4839 temporarily to nil, for example
4841 (let ((window-size-fixed nil))
4842 (enlarge-window 10))
4844 Likewise, an attempt to split a fixed-height window vertically,
4845 or a fixed-width window horizontally results in a error.
4847 ** The cursor-type frame parameter is now supported on MS-DOS
4848 terminals. When Emacs starts, it by default changes the cursor shape
4849 to a solid box, as it does on Unix. The `cursor-type' frame parameter
4850 overrides this as it does on Unix, except that the bar cursor is
4851 horizontal rather than vertical (since the MS-DOS display doesn't
4852 support a vertical-bar cursor).
4856 * Emacs 20.7 is a bug-fix release with few user-visible changes
4858 ** It is now possible to use CCL-based coding systems for keyboard
4861 ** ange-ftp now handles FTP security extensions, like Kerberos.
4863 ** Rmail has been extended to recognize more forms of digest messages.
4865 ** Now, most coding systems set in keyboard coding system work not
4866 only for character input, but also in incremental search. The
4867 exceptions are such coding systems that handle 2-byte character sets
4868 (e.g euc-kr, euc-jp) and that use ISO's escape sequence
4869 (e.g. iso-2022-jp). They are ignored in incremental search.
4871 ** Support for Macintosh PowerPC-based machines running GNU/Linux has
4875 * Emacs 20.6 is a bug-fix release with one user-visible change
4877 ** Support for ARM-based non-RISCiX machines has been added.
4881 * Emacs 20.5 is a bug-fix release with no user-visible changes.
4883 ** Not new, but not mentioned before:
4884 M-w when Transient Mark mode is enabled disables the mark.
4886 * Changes in Emacs 20.4
4888 ** Init file may be called .emacs.el.
4890 You can now call the Emacs init file `.emacs.el'.
4891 Formerly the name had to be `.emacs'. If you use the name
4892 `.emacs.el', you can byte-compile the file in the usual way.
4894 If both `.emacs' and `.emacs.el' exist, the latter file
4895 is the one that is used.
4897 ** shell-command, and shell-command-on-region, now return
4898 the exit code of the command (unless it is asynchronous).
4899 Also, you can specify a place to put the error output,
4900 separate from the command's regular output.
4901 Interactively, the variable shell-command-default-error-buffer
4902 says where to put error output; set it to a buffer name.
4903 In calls from Lisp, an optional argument ERROR-BUFFER specifies
4906 When you specify a non-nil error buffer (or buffer name), any error
4907 output is inserted before point in that buffer, with \f\n to separate
4908 it from the previous batch of error output. The error buffer is not
4909 cleared, so error output from successive commands accumulates there.
4911 ** Setting the default value of enable-multibyte-characters to nil in
4912 the .emacs file, either explicitly using setq-default, or via Custom,
4913 is now essentially equivalent to using --unibyte: all buffers
4914 created during startup will be made unibyte after loading .emacs.
4916 ** C-x C-f now handles the wildcards * and ? in file names. For
4917 example, typing C-x C-f c*.c RET visits all the files whose names
4918 match c*.c. To visit a file whose name contains * or ?, add the
4919 quoting sequence /: to the beginning of the file name.
4921 ** The M-x commands keep-lines, flush-lines and count-matches
4922 now have the same feature as occur and query-replace:
4923 if the pattern contains any upper case letters, then
4924 they never ignore case.
4926 ** The end-of-line format conversion feature previously mentioned
4927 under `* Emacs 20.1 changes for MS-DOS and MS-Windows' actually
4928 applies to all operating systems. Emacs recognizes from the contents
4929 of a file what convention it uses to separate lines--newline, CRLF, or
4930 just CR--and automatically converts the contents to the normal Emacs
4931 convention (using newline to separate lines) for editing. This is a
4932 part of the general feature of coding system conversion.
4934 If you subsequently save the buffer, Emacs converts the text back to
4935 the same format that was used in the file before.
4937 You can turn off end-of-line conversion by setting the variable
4938 `inhibit-eol-conversion' to non-nil, e.g. with Custom in the MULE group.
4940 ** The character set property `prefered-coding-system' has been
4941 renamed to `preferred-coding-system', for the sake of correct spelling.
4942 This is a fairly internal feature, so few programs should be affected.
4944 ** Mode-line display of end-of-line format is changed.
4945 The indication of the end-of-line format of the file visited by a
4946 buffer is now more explicit when that format is not the usual one for
4947 your operating system. For example, the DOS-style end-of-line format
4948 is displayed as "(DOS)" on Unix and GNU/Linux systems. The usual
4949 end-of-line format is still displayed as a single character (colon for
4950 Unix, backslash for DOS and Windows, and forward slash for the Mac).
4952 The values of the variables eol-mnemonic-unix, eol-mnemonic-dos,
4953 eol-mnemonic-mac, and eol-mnemonic-undecided, which are strings,
4954 control what is displayed in the mode line for each end-of-line
4955 format. You can now customize these variables.
4957 ** In the previous version of Emacs, tar-mode didn't work well if a
4958 filename contained non-ASCII characters. Now this is fixed. Such a
4959 filename is decoded by file-name-coding-system if the default value of
4960 enable-multibyte-characters is non-nil.
4962 ** The command temp-buffer-resize-mode toggles a minor mode
4963 in which temporary buffers (such as help buffers) are given
4964 windows just big enough to hold the whole contents.
4966 ** If you use completion.el, you must now run the function
4967 dynamic-completion-mode to enable it. Just loading the file
4968 doesn't have any effect.
4970 ** In Flyspell mode, the default is now to make just one Ispell process,
4973 ** If you use iswitchb but do not call (iswitchb-default-keybindings) to
4974 use the default keybindings, you will need to add the following line:
4975 (add-hook 'minibuffer-setup-hook 'iswitchb-minibuffer-setup)
4977 ** Auto-show mode is no longer enabled just by loading auto-show.el.
4978 To control it, set `auto-show-mode' via Custom or use the
4979 `auto-show-mode' command.
4981 ** Handling of X fonts' ascent/descent parameters has been changed to
4982 avoid redisplay problems. As a consequence, compared with previous
4983 versions the line spacing and frame size now differ with some font
4984 choices, typically increasing by a pixel per line. This change
4985 occurred in version 20.3 but was not documented then.
4987 ** If you select the bar cursor style, it uses the frame's
4988 cursor-color, rather than the cursor foreground pixel.
4990 ** In multibyte mode, Rmail decodes incoming MIME messages using the
4991 character set specified in the message. If you want to disable this
4992 feature, set the variable rmail-decode-mime-charset to nil.
4994 ** Not new, but not mentioned previously in NEWS: when you use #! at
4995 the beginning of a file to make it executable and specify an
4996 interpreter program, Emacs looks on the second line for the -*- mode
4997 and variable specification, as well as on the first line.
4999 ** Support for IBM codepage encoding of non-ASCII characters.
5001 The new command M-x codepage-setup creates a special coding system
5002 that can be used to convert text between a specific IBM codepage and
5003 one of the character sets built into Emacs which matches that
5004 codepage. For example, codepage 850 corresponds to Latin-1 character
5005 set, codepage 855 corresponds to Cyrillic-ISO character set, etc.
5007 Windows codepages 1250, 1251 and some others, where Windows deviates
5008 from the corresponding ISO character set, are also supported.
5010 IBM box-drawing characters and other glyphs which don't have
5011 equivalents in the corresponding ISO character set, are converted to
5012 a character defined by dos-unsupported-char-glyph on MS-DOS, and to
5013 `?' on other systems.
5015 IBM codepages are widely used on MS-DOS and MS-Windows, so this
5016 feature is most useful on those platforms, but it can also be used on
5019 Emacs compiled for MS-DOS automatically loads the support for the
5020 current codepage when it starts.
5024 *** When mail is sent using compose-mail (C-x m), and if
5025 `mail-send-nonascii' is set to the new default value `mime',
5026 appropriate MIME headers are added. The headers are added only if
5027 non-ASCII characters are present in the body of the mail, and no other
5028 MIME headers are already present. For example, the following three
5029 headers are added if the coding system used in the *mail* buffer is
5033 Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
5034 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
5036 *** The new variable default-sendmail-coding-system specifies the
5037 default way to encode outgoing mail. This has higher priority than
5038 default-buffer-file-coding-system but has lower priority than
5039 sendmail-coding-system and the local value of
5040 buffer-file-coding-system.
5042 You should not set this variable manually. Instead, set
5043 sendmail-coding-system to specify a fixed encoding for all outgoing
5046 *** When you try to send a message that contains non-ASCII characters,
5047 if the coding system specified by those variables doesn't handle them,
5048 Emacs will ask you to select a suitable coding system while showing a
5049 list of possible coding systems.
5053 *** c-default-style can now take an association list that maps major
5054 modes to style names. When this variable is an alist, Java mode no
5055 longer hardcodes a setting to "java" style. See the variable's
5056 docstring for details.
5058 *** It's now possible to put a list as the offset on a syntactic
5059 symbol. The list is evaluated recursively until a non-nil offset is
5060 found. This is useful to combine several lineup functions to act in a
5061 prioritized order on a single line. However, none of the supplied
5062 lineup functions use this feature currently.
5064 *** New syntactic symbol catch-clause, which is used on the "catch" and
5065 "finally" lines in try-catch constructs in C++ and Java.
5067 *** New cleanup brace-catch-brace on c-cleanup-list, which does for
5068 "catch" lines what brace-elseif-brace does for "else if" lines.
5070 *** The braces of Java anonymous inner classes are treated separately
5071 from the braces of other classes in auto-newline mode. Two new
5072 symbols inexpr-class-open and inexpr-class-close may be used on
5073 c-hanging-braces-alist to control the automatic newlines used for
5076 *** Support for the Pike language added, along with new Pike specific
5077 syntactic symbols: inlambda, lambda-intro-cont
5079 *** Support for Java anonymous classes via new syntactic symbol
5080 inexpr-class. New syntactic symbol inexpr-statement for Pike
5081 support and gcc-style statements inside expressions. New lineup
5082 function c-lineup-inexpr-block.
5084 *** New syntactic symbol brace-entry-open which is used in brace lists
5085 (i.e. static initializers) when a list entry starts with an open
5086 brace. These used to be recognized as brace-list-entry's.
5087 c-electric-brace also recognizes brace-entry-open braces
5088 (brace-list-entry's can no longer be electrified).
5090 *** New command c-indent-line-or-region, not bound by default.
5092 *** `#' is only electric when typed in the indentation of a line.
5094 *** Parentheses are now electric (via the new command c-electric-paren)
5095 for auto-reindenting lines when parens are typed.
5097 *** In "gnu" style, inline-open offset is now set to zero.
5099 *** Uniform handling of the inclass syntactic symbol. The indentation
5100 associated with it is now always relative to the class opening brace.
5101 This means that the indentation behavior has changed in some
5102 circumstances, but only if you've put anything besides 0 on the
5103 class-open syntactic symbol (none of the default styles do that).
5107 *** New functionality for using Gnus as an offline newsreader has been
5108 added. A plethora of new commands and modes have been added. See the
5109 Gnus manual for the full story.
5111 *** The nndraft backend has returned, but works differently than
5112 before. All Message buffers are now also articles in the nndraft
5113 group, which is created automatically.
5115 *** `gnus-alter-header-function' can now be used to alter header
5118 *** `gnus-summary-goto-article' now accept Message-ID's.
5120 *** A new Message command for deleting text in the body of a message
5121 outside the region: `C-c C-v'.
5123 *** You can now post to component group in nnvirtual groups with
5126 *** `nntp-rlogin-program' -- new variable to ease customization.
5128 *** `C-u C-c C-c' in `gnus-article-edit-mode' will now inhibit
5129 re-highlighting of the article buffer.
5131 *** New element in `gnus-boring-article-headers' -- `long-to'.
5133 *** `M-i' symbolic prefix command. See the section "Symbolic
5134 Prefixes" in the Gnus manual for details.
5136 *** `L' and `I' in the summary buffer now take the symbolic prefix
5137 `a' to add the score rule to the "all.SCORE" file.
5139 *** `gnus-simplify-subject-functions' variable to allow greater
5140 control over simplification.
5142 *** `A T' -- new command for fetching the current thread.
5144 *** `/ T' -- new command for including the current thread in the
5147 *** `M-RET' is a new Message command for breaking cited text.
5149 *** \\1-expressions are now valid in `nnmail-split-methods'.
5151 *** The `custom-face-lookup' function has been removed.
5152 If you used this function in your initialization files, you must
5153 rewrite them to use `face-spec-set' instead.
5155 *** Canceling now uses the current select method. Symbolic prefix
5156 `a' forces normal posting method.
5158 *** New command to translate M******** sm*rtq**t*s into proper text
5161 *** For easier debugging of nntp, you can set `nntp-record-commands'
5164 *** nntp now uses ~/.authinfo, a .netrc-like file, for controlling
5165 where and how to send AUTHINFO to NNTP servers.
5167 *** A command for editing group parameters from the summary buffer
5170 *** A history of where mails have been split is available.
5172 *** A new article date command has been added -- `article-date-iso8601'.
5174 *** Subjects can be simplified when threading by setting
5175 `gnus-score-thread-simplify'.
5177 *** A new function for citing in Message has been added --
5178 `message-cite-original-without-signature'.
5180 *** `article-strip-all-blank-lines' -- new article command.
5182 *** A new Message command to kill to the end of the article has
5185 *** A minimum adaptive score can be specified by using the
5186 `gnus-adaptive-word-minimum' variable.
5188 *** The "lapsed date" article header can be kept continually
5189 updated by the `gnus-start-date-timer' command.
5191 *** Web listserv archives can be read with the nnlistserv backend.
5193 *** Old dejanews archives can now be read by nnweb.
5195 *** `gnus-posting-styles' has been re-activated.
5197 ** Changes to TeX and LaTeX mode
5199 *** The new variable `tex-start-options-string' can be used to give
5200 options for the TeX run. The default value causes TeX to run in
5201 nonstopmode. For an interactive TeX run set it to nil or "".
5203 *** The command `tex-feed-input' sends input to the Tex Shell. In a
5204 TeX buffer it is bound to the keys C-RET, C-c RET, and C-c C-m (some
5205 of these keys may not work on all systems). For instance, if you run
5206 TeX interactively and if the TeX run stops because of an error, you
5207 can continue it without leaving the TeX buffer by typing C-RET.
5209 *** The Tex Shell Buffer is now in `compilation-shell-minor-mode'.
5210 All error-parsing commands of the Compilation major mode are available
5211 but bound to keys that don't collide with the shell. Thus you can use
5212 the Tex Shell for command line executions like a usual shell.
5214 *** The commands `tex-validate-region' and `tex-validate-buffer' check
5215 the matching of braces and $'s. The errors are listed in a *Occur*
5216 buffer and you can use C-c C-c or mouse-2 to go to a particular
5219 ** Changes to RefTeX mode
5221 *** The table of contents buffer can now also display labels and
5222 file boundaries in addition to sections. Use `l', `i', and `c' keys.
5224 *** Labels derived from context (the section heading) are now
5225 lowercase by default. To make the label legal in LaTeX, latin-1
5226 characters will lose their accent. All Mule characters will be
5227 removed from the label.
5229 *** The automatic display of cross reference information can also use
5230 a window instead of the echo area. See variable `reftex-auto-view-crossref'.
5232 *** kpsewhich can be used by RefTeX to find TeX and BibTeX files. See the
5233 customization group `reftex-finding-files'.
5235 *** The option `reftex-bibfile-ignore-list' has been renamed to
5236 `reftex-bibfile-ignore-regexps' and indeed can be fed with regular
5239 *** Multiple Selection buffers are now hidden buffers.
5241 ** New/deleted modes and packages
5243 *** The package snmp-mode.el provides major modes for editing SNMP and
5244 SNMPv2 MIBs. It has entries on `auto-mode-alist'.
5246 *** The package sql.el provides a major mode, M-x sql-mode, for
5247 editing SQL files, and M-x sql-interactive-mode for interacting with
5248 SQL interpreters. It has an entry on `auto-mode-alist'.
5250 *** M-x highlight-changes-mode provides a minor mode displaying buffer
5251 changes with a special face.
5253 *** ispell4.el has been deleted. It got in the way of ispell.el and
5254 this was hard to fix reliably. It has long been obsolete -- use
5255 Ispell 3.1 and ispell.el.
5257 * MS-DOS changes in Emacs 20.4
5259 ** Emacs compiled for MS-DOS now supports MULE features better.
5260 This includes support for display of all ISO 8859-N character sets,
5261 conversion to and from IBM codepage encoding of non-ASCII characters,
5262 and automatic setup of the MULE environment at startup. For details,
5263 check out the section `MS-DOS and MULE' in the manual.
5265 The MS-DOS installation procedure automatically configures and builds
5266 Emacs with input method support if it finds an unpacked Leim
5267 distribution when the config.bat script is run.
5269 ** Formerly, the value of lpr-command did not affect printing on
5270 MS-DOS unless print-region-function was set to nil, but now it
5271 controls whether an external program is invoked or output is written
5272 directly to a printer port. Similarly, in the previous version of
5273 Emacs, the value of ps-lpr-command did not affect PostScript printing
5274 on MS-DOS unless ps-printer-name was set to something other than a
5275 string (eg. t or `pipe'), but now it controls whether an external
5276 program is used. (These changes were made so that configuration of
5277 printing variables would be almost identical across all platforms.)
5279 ** In the previous version of Emacs, PostScript and non-PostScript
5280 output was piped to external programs, but because most print programs
5281 available for MS-DOS and MS-Windows cannot read data from their standard
5282 input, on those systems the data to be output is now written to a
5283 temporary file whose name is passed as the last argument to the external
5286 An exception is made for `print', a standard program on Windows NT,
5287 and `nprint', a standard program on Novell Netware. For both of these
5288 programs, the command line is constructed in the appropriate syntax
5289 automatically, using only the value of printer-name or ps-printer-name
5290 as appropriate--the value of the relevant `-switches' variable is
5291 ignored, as both programs have no useful switches.
5293 ** The value of the variable dos-printer (cf. dos-ps-printer), if it has
5294 a value, overrides the value of printer-name (cf. ps-printer-name), on
5295 MS-DOS and MS-Windows only. This has been true since version 20.3, but
5296 was not documented clearly before.
5298 ** All the Emacs games now work on MS-DOS terminals.
5299 This includes Tetris and Snake.
5301 * Lisp changes in Emacs 20.4
5303 ** New functions line-beginning-position and line-end-position
5304 return the position of the beginning or end of the current line.
5305 They both accept an optional argument, which has the same
5306 meaning as the argument to beginning-of-line or end-of-line.
5308 ** find-file and allied functions now have an optional argument
5309 WILDCARD. If this is non-nil, they do wildcard processing,
5310 and visit all files that match the wildcard pattern.
5312 ** Changes in the file-attributes function.
5314 *** The file size returned by file-attributes may be an integer or a float.
5315 It is an integer if the size fits in a Lisp integer, float otherwise.
5317 *** The inode number returned by file-attributes may be an integer (if
5318 the number fits in a Lisp integer) or a cons cell containing two
5321 ** The new function directory-files-and-attributes returns a list of
5322 files in a directory and their attributes. It accepts the same
5323 arguments as directory-files and has similar semantics, except that
5324 file names and attributes are returned.
5326 ** The new function file-attributes-lessp is a helper function for
5327 sorting the list generated by directory-files-and-attributes. It
5328 accepts two arguments, each a list of a file name and its attributes.
5329 It compares the file names of each according to string-lessp and
5332 ** The new function file-expand-wildcards expands a wildcard-pattern
5333 to produce a list of existing files that match the pattern.
5335 ** New functions for base64 conversion:
5337 The function base64-encode-region converts a part of the buffer
5338 into the base64 code used in MIME. base64-decode-region
5339 performs the opposite conversion. Line-breaking is supported
5342 Functions base64-encode-string and base64-decode-string do a similar
5343 job on the text in a string. They return the value as a new string.
5346 The new function process-running-child-p
5347 will tell you if a subprocess has given control of its
5348 terminal to its own child process.
5350 ** interrupt-process and such functions have a new feature:
5351 when the second argument is `lambda', they send a signal
5352 to the running child of the subshell, if any, but if the shell
5353 itself owns its terminal, no signal is sent.
5355 ** There are new widget types `plist' and `alist' which can
5356 be used for customizing variables whose values are plists or alists.
5358 ** easymenu.el Now understands `:key-sequence' and `:style button'.
5359 :included is an alias for :visible.
5361 easy-menu-add-item now understands the values returned by
5362 easy-menu-remove-item and easy-menu-item-present-p. This can be used
5363 to move or copy menu entries.
5365 ** Multibyte editing changes
5367 *** The definitions of sref and char-bytes are changed. Now, sref is
5368 an alias of aref and char-bytes always returns 1. This change is to
5369 make some Emacs Lisp code which works on 20.2 and earlier also
5370 work on the latest Emacs. Such code uses a combination of sref and
5371 char-bytes in a loop typically as below:
5372 (setq char (sref str idx)
5373 idx (+ idx (char-bytes idx)))
5374 The byte-compiler now warns that this is obsolete.
5376 If you want to know how many bytes a specific multibyte character
5377 (say, CH) occupies in a multibyte buffer, use this code:
5378 (charset-bytes (char-charset ch))
5380 *** In multibyte mode, when you narrow a buffer to some region, and the
5381 region is preceded or followed by non-ASCII codes, inserting or
5382 deleting at the head or the end of the region may signal this error:
5384 Byte combining across boundary of accessible buffer text inhibited
5386 This is to avoid some bytes being combined together into a character
5387 across the boundary.
5389 *** The functions find-charset-region and find-charset-string include
5390 `unknown' in the returned list in the following cases:
5391 o The current buffer or the target string is unibyte and
5392 contains 8-bit characters.
5393 o The current buffer or the target string is multibyte and
5394 contains invalid characters.
5396 *** The functions decode-coding-region and encode-coding-region remove
5397 text properties of the target region. Ideally, they should correctly
5398 preserve text properties, but for the moment, it's hard. Removing
5399 text properties is better than preserving them in a less-than-correct
5402 *** prefer-coding-system sets EOL conversion of default coding systems.
5403 If the argument to prefer-coding-system specifies a certain type of
5404 end of line conversion, the default coding systems set by
5405 prefer-coding-system will specify that conversion type for end of line.
5407 *** The new function thai-compose-string can be used to properly
5408 compose Thai characters in a string.
5410 ** The primitive `define-prefix-command' now takes an optional third
5411 argument NAME, which should be a string. It supplies the menu name
5412 for the created keymap. Keymaps created in order to be displayed as
5413 menus should always use the third argument.
5415 ** The meanings of optional second arguments for read-char,
5416 read-event, and read-char-exclusive are flipped. Now the second
5417 arguments are INHERIT-INPUT-METHOD. These functions use the current
5418 input method (if any) if and only if INHERIT-INPUT-METHOD is non-nil.
5420 ** The new function clear-this-command-keys empties out the contents
5421 of the vector that (this-command-keys) returns. This is useful in
5422 programs that read passwords, to prevent the passwords from echoing
5423 inadvertently as part of the next command in certain cases.
5425 ** The new macro `with-temp-message' displays a temporary message in
5426 the echo area, while executing some Lisp code. Like `progn', it
5427 returns the value of the last form, but it also restores the previous
5430 (with-temp-message MESSAGE &rest BODY)
5432 ** The function `require' now takes an optional third argument
5433 NOERROR. If it is non-nil, then there is no error if the
5434 requested feature cannot be loaded.
5436 ** In the function modify-face, an argument of (nil) for the
5437 foreground color, background color or stipple pattern
5438 means to clear out that attribute.
5440 ** The `outer-window-id' frame property of an X frame
5441 gives the window number of the outermost X window for the frame.
5443 ** Temporary buffers made with with-output-to-temp-buffer are now
5444 read-only by default, and normally use the major mode Help mode
5445 unless you put them in some other non-Fundamental mode before the
5446 end of with-output-to-temp-buffer.
5448 ** The new functions gap-position and gap-size return information on
5449 the gap of the current buffer.
5451 ** The new functions position-bytes and byte-to-position provide a way
5452 to convert between character positions and byte positions in the
5455 ** vc.el defines two new macros, `edit-vc-file' and `with-vc-file', to
5456 facilitate working with version-controlled files from Lisp programs.
5457 These macros check out a given file automatically if needed, and check
5458 it back in after any modifications have been made.
5460 * Installation Changes in Emacs 20.3
5462 ** The default value of load-path now includes most subdirectories of
5463 the site-specific directories /usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp and
5464 /usr/local/share/emacs/VERSION/site-lisp, in addition to those
5465 directories themselves. Both immediate subdirectories and
5466 subdirectories multiple levels down are added to load-path.
5468 Not all subdirectories are included, though. Subdirectories whose
5469 names do not start with a letter or digit are excluded.
5470 Subdirectories named RCS or CVS are excluded. Also, a subdirectory
5471 which contains a file named `.nosearch' is excluded. You can use
5472 these methods to prevent certain subdirectories from being searched.
5474 Emacs finds these subdirectories and adds them to load-path when it
5475 starts up. While it would be cleaner to find the subdirectories each
5476 time Emacs loads a file, that would be much slower.
5478 This feature is an incompatible change. If you have stored some Emacs
5479 Lisp files in a subdirectory of the site-lisp directory specifically
5480 to prevent them from being used, you will need to rename the
5481 subdirectory to start with a non-alphanumeric character, or create a
5482 `.nosearch' file in it, in order to continue to achieve the desired
5485 ** Emacs no longer includes an old version of the C preprocessor from
5486 GCC. This was formerly used to help compile Emacs with C compilers
5487 that had limits on the significant length of an identifier, but in
5488 fact we stopped supporting such compilers some time ago.
5490 * Changes in Emacs 20.3
5492 ** The new command C-x z (repeat) repeats the previous command
5493 including its argument. If you repeat the z afterward,
5494 it repeats the command additional times; thus, you can
5495 perform many repetitions with one keystroke per repetition.
5497 ** Emacs now supports "selective undo" which undoes only within a
5498 specified region. To do this, set point and mark around the desired
5499 region and type C-u C-x u (or C-u C-_). You can then continue undoing
5500 further, within the same region, by repeating the ordinary undo
5501 command C-x u or C-_. This will keep undoing changes that were made
5502 within the region you originally specified, until either all of them
5503 are undone, or it encounters a change which crosses the edge of that
5506 In Transient Mark mode, undoing when a region is active requests
5509 ** If you specify --unibyte when starting Emacs, then all buffers are
5510 unibyte, except when a Lisp program specifically creates a multibyte
5511 buffer. Setting the environment variable EMACS_UNIBYTE has the same
5512 effect. The --no-unibyte option overrides EMACS_UNIBYTE and directs
5513 Emacs to run normally in multibyte mode.
5515 The option --unibyte does not affect the reading of Emacs Lisp files,
5516 though. If you want a Lisp file to be read in unibyte mode, use
5517 -*-unibyte: t;-*- on its first line. That will force Emacs to
5518 load that file in unibyte mode, regardless of how Emacs was started.
5520 ** toggle-enable-multibyte-characters no longer has a key binding and
5521 no longer appears in the menu bar. We've realized that changing the
5522 enable-multibyte-characters variable in an existing buffer is
5523 something that most users not do.
5525 ** You can specify a coding system to use for the next cut or paste
5526 operations through the window system with the command C-x RET X.
5527 The coding system can make a difference for communication with other
5530 C-x RET x specifies a coding system for all subsequent cutting and
5533 ** You can specify the printer to use for commands that do printing by
5534 setting the variable `printer-name'. Just what a printer name looks
5535 like depends on your operating system. You can specify a different
5536 printer for the Postscript printing commands by setting
5539 ** Emacs now supports on-the-fly spell checking by the means of a
5540 minor mode. It is called M-x flyspell-mode. You don't have to remember
5541 any other special commands to use it, and you will hardly notice it
5542 except when you make a spelling error. Flyspell works by highlighting
5543 incorrect words as soon as they are completed or as soon as the cursor
5546 Flyspell mode works with whichever dictionary you have selected for
5547 Ispell in Emacs. In TeX mode, it understands TeX syntax so as not
5548 to be confused by TeX commands.
5550 You can correct a misspelled word by editing it into something
5551 correct. You can also correct it, or accept it as correct, by
5552 clicking on the word with Mouse-2; that gives you a pop-up menu
5553 of various alternative replacements and actions.
5555 Flyspell mode also proposes "automatic" corrections. M-TAB replaces
5556 the current misspelled word with a possible correction. If several
5557 corrections are made possible, M-TAB cycles through them in
5558 alphabetical order, or in order of decreasing likelihood if
5559 flyspell-sort-corrections is nil.
5561 Flyspell mode also flags an error when a word is repeated, if
5562 flyspell-mark-duplications-flag is non-nil.
5564 ** Changes in input method usage.
5566 Now you can use arrow keys (right, left, down, up) for selecting among
5567 the alternatives just the same way as you do by C-f, C-b, C-n, and C-p
5570 You can use the ENTER key to accept the current conversion.
5572 If you type TAB to display a list of alternatives, you can select one
5573 of the alternatives with Mouse-2.
5575 The meaning of the variable `input-method-verbose-flag' is changed so
5576 that you can set it to t, nil, `default', or `complex-only'.
5578 If the value is nil, extra guidance is never given.
5580 If the value is t, extra guidance is always given.
5582 If the value is `complex-only', extra guidance is always given only
5583 when you are using complex input methods such as chinese-py.
5585 If the value is `default' (this is the default), extra guidance is
5586 given in the following case:
5587 o When you are using a complex input method.
5588 o When you are using a simple input method but not in the minibuffer.
5590 If you are using Emacs through a very slow line, setting
5591 input-method-verbose-flag to nil or to complex-only is a good choice,
5592 and if you are using an input method you are not familiar with,
5593 setting it to t is helpful.
5595 The old command select-input-method is now called set-input-method.
5597 In the language environment "Korean", you can use the following
5599 Shift-SPC toggle-korean-input-method
5600 C-F9 quail-hangul-switch-symbol-ksc
5601 F9 quail-hangul-switch-hanja
5602 These key bindings are canceled when you switch to another language
5605 ** The minibuffer history of file names now records the specified file
5606 names, not the entire minibuffer input. For example, if the
5607 minibuffer starts out with /usr/foo/, you might type in /etc/passwd to
5610 /usr/foo//etc/passwd
5612 which stands for the file /etc/passwd.
5614 Formerly, this used to put /usr/foo//etc/passwd in the history list.
5615 Now this puts just /etc/passwd in the history list.
5617 ** If you are root, Emacs sets backup-by-copying-when-mismatch to t
5618 at startup, so that saving a file will be sure to preserve
5619 its owner and group.
5621 ** find-func.el can now also find the place of definition of Emacs
5622 Lisp variables in user-loaded libraries.
5624 ** C-x r t (string-rectangle) now deletes the existing rectangle
5625 contents before inserting the specified string on each line.
5627 ** There is a new command delete-whitespace-rectangle
5628 which deletes whitespace starting from a particular column
5629 in all the lines on a rectangle. The column is specified
5630 by the left edge of the rectangle.
5632 ** You can now store a number into a register with C-u NUMBER C-x r n REG,
5633 increment it by INC with C-u INC C-x r + REG (to increment by one, omit
5634 C-u INC), and insert it in the buffer with C-x r g REG. This is useful
5635 for writing keyboard macros.
5637 ** The new command M-x speedbar displays a frame in which directories,
5638 files, and tags can be displayed, manipulated, and jumped to. The
5639 frame defaults to 20 characters in width, and is the same height as
5640 the frame that it was started from. Some major modes define
5641 additional commands for the speedbar, including Rmail, GUD/GDB, and
5644 ** query-replace-regexp is now bound to C-M-%.
5646 ** In Transient Mark mode, when the region is active, M-x
5647 query-replace and the other replace commands now operate on the region
5650 ** M-x write-region, when used interactively, now asks for
5651 confirmation before overwriting an existing file. When you call
5652 the function from a Lisp program, a new optional argument CONFIRM
5653 says whether to ask for confirmation in this case.
5655 ** If you use find-file-literally and the file is already visited
5656 non-literally, the command asks you whether to revisit the file
5657 literally. If you say no, it signals an error.
5659 ** Major modes defined with the "derived mode" feature
5660 now use the proper name for the mode hook: WHATEVER-mode-hook.
5661 Formerly they used the name WHATEVER-mode-hooks, but that is
5662 inconsistent with Emacs conventions.
5664 ** shell-command-on-region (and shell-command) reports success or
5665 failure if the command produces no output.
5667 ** Set focus-follows-mouse to nil if your window system or window
5668 manager does not transfer focus to another window when you just move
5671 ** mouse-menu-buffer-maxlen has been renamed to
5672 mouse-buffer-menu-maxlen to be consistent with the other related
5673 function and variable names.
5675 ** The new variable auto-coding-alist specifies coding systems for
5676 reading specific files. This has higher priority than
5677 file-coding-system-alist.
5679 ** If you set the variable unibyte-display-via-language-environment to
5680 t, then Emacs displays non-ASCII characters are displayed by
5681 converting them to the equivalent multibyte characters according to
5682 the current language environment. As a result, they are displayed
5683 according to the current fontset.
5685 ** C-q's handling of codes in the range 0200 through 0377 is changed.
5687 The codes in the range 0200 through 0237 are inserted as one byte of
5688 that code regardless of the values of nonascii-translation-table and
5689 nonascii-insert-offset.
5691 For the codes in the range 0240 through 0377, if
5692 enable-multibyte-characters is non-nil and nonascii-translation-table
5693 nor nonascii-insert-offset can't convert them to valid multibyte
5694 characters, they are converted to Latin-1 characters.
5696 ** If you try to find a file that is not read-accessible, you now get
5697 an error, rather than an empty buffer and a warning.
5699 ** In the minibuffer history commands M-r and M-s, an upper case
5700 letter in the regular expression forces case-sensitive search.
5702 ** In the *Help* buffer, cross-references to commands and variables
5703 are inferred and hyperlinked. Use C-h m in Help mode for the relevant
5706 ** M-x apropos-command, with a prefix argument, no longer looks for
5707 user option variables--instead it looks for noninteractive functions.
5709 Meanwhile, the command apropos-variable normally searches for
5710 user option variables; with a prefix argument, it looks at
5711 all variables that have documentation.
5713 ** When you type a long line in the minibuffer, and the minibuffer
5714 shows just one line, automatically scrolling works in a special way
5715 that shows you overlap with the previous line of text. The variable
5716 minibuffer-scroll-overlap controls how many characters of overlap
5717 it should show; the default is 20.
5719 Meanwhile, Resize Minibuffer mode is still available; in that mode,
5720 the minibuffer grows taller (up to a point) as needed to show the whole
5723 ** The new command M-x customize-changed-options lets you customize
5724 all the options whose meanings or default values have changed in
5725 recent Emacs versions. You specify a previous Emacs version number as
5726 argument, and the command creates a customization buffer showing all
5727 the customizable options which were changed since that version.
5728 Newly added options are included as well.
5730 If you don't specify a particular version number argument,
5731 then the customization buffer shows all the customizable options
5732 for which Emacs versions of changes are recorded.
5734 This function is also bound to the Changed Options entry in the
5737 ** When you run M-x grep with a prefix argument, it figures out
5738 the tag around point and puts that into the default grep command.
5740 ** The new command M-* (pop-tag-mark) pops back through a history of
5741 buffer positions from which M-. or other tag-finding commands were
5744 ** The new variable comment-padding specifies the number of spaces
5745 that `comment-region' will insert before the actual text of the comment.
5748 ** In Fortran mode the characters `.', `_' and `$' now have symbol
5749 syntax, not word syntax. Fortran mode now supports `imenu' and has
5750 new commands fortran-join-line (M-^) and fortran-narrow-to-subprogram
5751 (C-x n d). M-q can be used to fill a statement or comment block
5754 ** GUD now supports jdb, the Java debugger, and pdb, the Python debugger.
5756 ** If you set the variable add-log-keep-changes-together to a non-nil
5757 value, the command `C-x 4 a' will automatically notice when you make
5758 two entries in one day for one file, and combine them.
5760 ** You can use the command M-x diary-mail-entries to mail yourself a
5761 reminder about upcoming diary entries. See the documentation string
5762 for a sample shell script for calling this function automatically
5767 *** All you need to do to enable use of the Desktop package, is to set
5768 the variable desktop-enable to t with Custom.
5770 *** Minor modes are now restored. Which minor modes are restored
5771 and how modes are restored is controlled by `desktop-minor-mode-table'.
5773 ** There is no need to do anything special, now, to enable Gnus to
5774 read and post multi-lingual articles.
5776 ** Outline mode has now support for showing hidden outlines when
5777 doing an isearch. In order for this to happen search-invisible should
5778 be set to open (the default). If an isearch match is inside a hidden
5779 outline the outline is made visible. If you continue pressing C-s and
5780 the match moves outside the formerly invisible outline, the outline is
5781 made invisible again.
5783 ** Mail reading and sending changes
5785 *** The Rmail e command now switches to displaying the whole header of
5786 the message before it lets you edit the message. This is so that any
5787 changes you make in the header will not be lost if you subsequently
5790 *** The w command in Rmail, which writes the message body into a file,
5791 now works in the summary buffer as well. (The command to delete the
5792 summary buffer is now Q.) The default file name for the w command, if
5793 the message has no subject, is stored in the variable
5794 rmail-default-body-file.
5796 *** Most of the commands and modes that operate on mail and netnews no
5797 longer depend on the value of mail-header-separator. Instead, they
5798 handle whatever separator the buffer happens to use.
5800 *** If you set mail-signature to a value which is not t, nil, or a string,
5801 it should be an expression. When you send a message, this expression
5802 is evaluated to insert the signature.
5804 *** The new Lisp library feedmail.el (version 8) enhances processing of
5805 outbound email messages. It works in coordination with other email
5806 handling packages (e.g., rmail, VM, gnus) and is responsible for
5807 putting final touches on messages and actually submitting them for
5808 transmission. Users of the emacs program "fakemail" might be
5809 especially interested in trying feedmail.
5811 feedmail is not enabled by default. See comments at the top of
5812 feedmail.el for set-up instructions. Among the bigger features
5813 provided by feedmail are:
5815 **** you can park outgoing messages into a disk-based queue and
5816 stimulate sending some or all of them later (handy for laptop users);
5817 there is also a queue for draft messages
5819 **** you can get one last look at the prepped outbound message and
5820 be prompted for confirmation
5822 **** does smart filling of address headers
5824 **** can generate a MESSAGE-ID: line and a DATE: line; the date can be
5825 the time the message was written or the time it is being sent; this
5826 can make FCC copies more closely resemble copies that recipients get
5828 **** you can specify an arbitrary function for actually transmitting
5829 the message; included in feedmail are interfaces for /bin/[r]mail,
5830 /usr/lib/sendmail, and elisp smtpmail; it's easy to write a new
5831 function for something else (10-20 lines of elisp)
5835 *** The Dired function dired-do-toggle, which toggles marked and unmarked
5836 files, is now bound to "t" instead of "T".
5838 *** dired-at-point has been added to ffap.el. It allows one to easily
5839 run Dired on the directory name at point.
5841 *** Dired has a new command: %g. It searches the contents of
5842 files in the directory and marks each file that contains a match
5843 for a specified regexp.
5847 *** New option vc-ignore-vc-files lets you turn off version control
5850 *** VC Dired has been completely rewritten. It is now much
5851 faster, especially for CVS, and works very similar to ordinary
5854 VC Dired is invoked by typing C-x v d and entering the name of the
5855 directory to display. By default, VC Dired gives you a recursive
5856 listing of all files at or below the given directory which are
5857 currently locked (for CVS, all files not up-to-date are shown).
5859 You can change the listing format by setting vc-dired-recurse to nil,
5860 then it shows only the given directory, and you may also set
5861 vc-dired-terse-display to nil, then it shows all files under version
5862 control plus the names of any subdirectories, so that you can type `i'
5863 on such lines to insert them manually, as in ordinary Dired.
5865 All Dired commands operate normally in VC Dired, except for `v', which
5866 is redefined as the version control prefix. That means you may type
5867 `v l', `v =' etc. to invoke `vc-print-log', `vc-diff' and the like on
5868 the file named in the current Dired buffer line. `v v' invokes
5869 `vc-next-action' on this file, or on all files currently marked.
5871 The new command `v t' (vc-dired-toggle-terse-mode) allows you to
5872 toggle between terse display (only locked files) and full display (all
5873 VC files plus subdirectories). There is also a special command,
5874 `* l', to mark all files currently locked.
5876 Giving a prefix argument to C-x v d now does the same thing as in
5877 ordinary Dired: it allows you to supply additional options for the ls
5878 command in the minibuffer, to fine-tune VC Dired's output.
5880 *** Under CVS, if you merge changes from the repository into a working
5881 file, and CVS detects conflicts, VC now offers to start an ediff
5882 session to resolve them.
5884 Alternatively, you can use the new command `vc-resolve-conflicts' to
5885 resolve conflicts in a file at any time. It works in any buffer that
5886 contains conflict markers as generated by rcsmerge (which is what CVS
5889 *** You can now transfer changes between branches, using the new
5890 command vc-merge (C-x v m). It is implemented for RCS and CVS. When
5891 you invoke it in a buffer under version-control, you can specify
5892 either an entire branch or a pair of versions, and the changes on that
5893 branch or between the two versions are merged into the working file.
5894 If this results in any conflicts, they may be resolved interactively,
5897 ** Changes in Font Lock
5899 *** The face and variable previously known as font-lock-reference-face
5900 are now called font-lock-constant-face to better reflect their typical
5901 use for highlighting constants and labels. (Its face properties are
5902 unchanged.) The variable font-lock-reference-face remains for now for
5903 compatibility reasons, but its value is font-lock-constant-face.
5905 ** Frame name display changes
5907 *** The command set-frame-name lets you set the name of the current
5908 frame. You can use the new command select-frame-by-name to select and
5909 raise a frame; this is mostly useful on character-only terminals, or
5910 when many frames are invisible or iconified.
5912 *** On character-only terminal (not a window system), changing the
5913 frame name is now reflected on the mode line and in the Buffers/Frames
5916 ** Comint (subshell) changes
5918 *** In Comint modes, the commands to kill, stop or interrupt a
5919 subjob now also kill pending input. This is for compatibility
5920 with ordinary shells, where the signal characters do this.
5922 *** There are new commands in Comint mode.
5924 C-c C-x fetches the "next" line from the input history;
5925 that is, the line after the last line you got.
5926 You can use this command to fetch successive lines, one by one.
5928 C-c SPC accumulates lines of input. More precisely, it arranges to
5929 send the current line together with the following line, when you send
5932 C-c C-a if repeated twice consecutively now moves to the process mark,
5933 which separates the pending input from the subprocess output and the
5934 previously sent input.
5936 C-c M-r now runs comint-previous-matching-input-from-input;
5937 it searches for a previous command, using the current pending input
5938 as the search string.
5940 *** New option compilation-scroll-output can be set to scroll
5941 automatically in compilation-mode windows.
5945 *** Multiline macros are now handled, both as they affect indentation,
5946 and as recognized syntax. New syntactic symbol cpp-macro-cont is
5947 assigned to second and subsequent lines of a multiline macro
5950 *** A new style "user" which captures all non-hook-ified
5951 (i.e. top-level) .emacs file variable settings and customizations.
5952 Style "cc-mode" is an alias for "user" and is deprecated. "gnu"
5953 style is still the default however.
5955 *** "java" style now conforms to Sun's JDK coding style.
5957 *** There are new commands c-beginning-of-defun, c-end-of-defun which
5958 are alternatives which you could bind to C-M-a and C-M-e if you prefer
5959 them. They do not have key bindings by default.
5961 *** New and improved implementations of M-a (c-beginning-of-statement)
5962 and M-e (c-end-of-statement).
5964 *** C++ namespace blocks are supported, with new syntactic symbols
5965 namespace-open, namespace-close, and innamespace.
5967 *** File local variable settings of c-file-style and c-file-offsets
5968 makes the style variables local to that buffer only.
5970 *** New indentation functions c-lineup-close-paren,
5971 c-indent-one-line-block, c-lineup-dont-change.
5973 *** Improvements (hopefully!) to the way CC Mode is loaded. You
5974 should now be able to do a (require 'cc-mode) to get the entire
5975 package loaded properly for customization in your .emacs file. A new
5976 variable c-initialize-on-load controls this and is t by default.
5978 ** Changes to hippie-expand.
5980 *** New customization variable `hippie-expand-dabbrev-skip-space'. If
5981 non-nil, trailing spaces may be included in the abbreviation to search for,
5982 which then gives the same behavior as the original `dabbrev-expand'.
5984 *** New customization variable `hippie-expand-dabbrev-as-symbol'. If
5985 non-nil, characters of syntax '_' is considered part of the word when
5986 expanding dynamically.
5988 *** New customization variable `hippie-expand-no-restriction'. If
5989 non-nil, narrowed buffers are widened before they are searched.
5991 *** New customization variable `hippie-expand-only-buffers'. If
5992 non-empty, buffers searched are restricted to the types specified in
5993 this list. Useful for example when constructing new special-purpose
5994 expansion functions with `make-hippie-expand-function'.
5996 *** Text properties of the expansion are no longer copied.
5998 ** Changes in BibTeX mode.
6000 *** Any titleword matching a regexp in the new variable
6001 bibtex-autokey-titleword-ignore (case sensitive) is ignored during
6002 automatic key generation. This replaces variable
6003 bibtex-autokey-titleword-first-ignore, which only checked for matches
6004 against the first word in the title.
6006 *** Autokey generation now uses all words from the title, not just
6007 capitalized words. To avoid conflicts with existing customizations,
6008 bibtex-autokey-titleword-ignore is set up such that words starting with
6009 lowerkey characters will still be ignored. Thus, if you want to use
6010 lowercase words from the title, you will have to overwrite the
6011 bibtex-autokey-titleword-ignore standard setting.
6013 *** Case conversion of names and title words for automatic key
6014 generation is more flexible. Variable bibtex-autokey-preserve-case is
6015 replaced by bibtex-autokey-titleword-case-convert and
6016 bibtex-autokey-name-case-convert.
6018 ** Changes in vcursor.el.
6020 *** Support for character terminals is available: there is a new keymap
6021 and the vcursor will appear as an arrow between buffer text. A
6022 variable `vcursor-interpret-input' allows input from the vcursor to be
6023 entered exactly as if typed. Numerous functions, including
6024 `vcursor-compare-windows', have been rewritten to improve consistency
6025 in the selection of windows and corresponding keymaps.
6027 *** vcursor options can now be altered with M-x customize under the
6028 Editing group once the package is loaded.
6030 *** Loading vcursor now does not define keys by default, as this is
6031 generally a bad side effect. Use M-x customize to set
6032 vcursor-key-bindings to t to restore the old behavior.
6034 *** vcursor-auto-disable can be `copy', which turns off copying from the
6035 vcursor, but doesn't disable it, after any non-vcursor command.
6039 *** You can now spell check comments and strings in the current
6040 buffer with M-x ispell-comments-and-strings. Comments and strings
6041 are identified by syntax tables in effect.
6043 *** Generic region skipping implemented.
6044 A single buffer can be broken into a number of regions where text will
6045 and will not be checked. The definitions of the regions can be user
6046 defined. New applications and improvements made available by this
6049 o URLs are automatically skipped
6050 o EMail message checking is vastly improved.
6052 *** Ispell can highlight the erroneous word even on non-window terminals.
6054 ** Changes to RefTeX mode
6056 RefTeX has been updated in order to make it more usable with very
6057 large projects (like a several volume math book). The parser has been
6058 re-written from scratch. To get maximum speed from RefTeX, check the
6059 section `Optimizations' in the manual.
6061 *** New recursive parser.
6063 The old version of RefTeX created a single large buffer containing the
6064 entire multifile document in order to parse the document. The new
6065 recursive parser scans the individual files.
6067 *** Parsing only part of a document.
6069 Reparsing of changed document parts can now be made faster by enabling
6070 partial scans. To use this feature, read the documentation string of
6071 the variable `reftex-enable-partial-scans' and set the variable to t.
6073 (setq reftex-enable-partial-scans t)
6075 *** Storing parsing information in a file.
6077 This can improve startup times considerably. To turn it on, use
6079 (setq reftex-save-parse-info t)
6081 *** Using multiple selection buffers
6083 If the creation of label selection buffers is too slow (this happens
6084 for large documents), you can reuse these buffers by setting
6086 (setq reftex-use-multiple-selection-buffers t)
6088 *** References to external documents.
6090 The LaTeX package `xr' allows to cross-reference labels in external
6091 documents. RefTeX can provide information about the external
6092 documents as well. To use this feature, set up the \externaldocument
6093 macros required by the `xr' package and rescan the document with
6094 RefTeX. The external labels can then be accessed with the `x' key in
6095 the selection buffer provided by `reftex-reference' (bound to `C-c )').
6096 The `x' key also works in the table of contents buffer.
6098 *** Many more labeled LaTeX environments are recognized by default.
6100 The built-in command list now covers all the standard LaTeX commands,
6101 and all of the major packages included in the LaTeX distribution.
6103 Also, RefTeX now understands the \appendix macro and changes
6104 the enumeration of sections in the *toc* buffer accordingly.
6106 *** Mouse support for selection and *toc* buffers
6108 The mouse can now be used to select items in the selection and *toc*
6109 buffers. See also the new option `reftex-highlight-selection'.
6111 *** New keymaps for selection and table of contents modes.
6113 The selection processes for labels and citation keys, and the table of
6114 contents buffer now have their own keymaps: `reftex-select-label-map',
6115 `reftex-select-bib-map', `reftex-toc-map'. The selection processes
6116 have a number of new keys predefined. In particular, TAB lets you
6117 enter a label with completion. Check the on-the-fly help (press `?'
6118 at the selection prompt) or read the Info documentation to find out
6121 *** Support for the varioref package
6123 The `v' key in the label selection buffer toggles \ref versus \vref.
6127 Three new hooks can be used to redefine the way labels, references,
6128 and citations are created. These hooks are
6129 `reftex-format-label-function', `reftex-format-ref-function',
6130 `reftex-format-cite-function'.
6132 *** Citations outside LaTeX
6134 The command `reftex-citation' may also be used outside LaTeX (e.g. in
6135 a mail buffer). See the Info documentation for details.
6137 *** Short context is no longer fontified.
6139 The short context in the label menu no longer copies the
6140 fontification from the text in the buffer. If you prefer it to be
6143 (setq reftex-refontify-context t)
6145 ** file-cache-minibuffer-complete now accepts a prefix argument.
6146 With a prefix argument, it does not try to do completion of
6147 the file name within its directory; it only checks for other
6148 directories that contain the same file name.
6150 Thus, given the file name Makefile, and assuming that a file
6151 Makefile.in exists in the same directory, ordinary
6152 file-cache-minibuffer-complete will try to complete Makefile to
6153 Makefile.in and will therefore never look for other directories that
6154 have Makefile. A prefix argument tells it not to look for longer
6155 names such as Makefile.in, so that instead it will look for other
6156 directories--just as if the name were already complete in its present
6159 ** New modes and packages
6161 *** There is a new alternative major mode for Perl, Cperl mode.
6162 It has many more features than Perl mode, and some people prefer
6163 it, but some do not.
6165 *** There is a new major mode, M-x vhdl-mode, for editing files of VHDL
6168 *** M-x which-function-mode enables a minor mode that displays the
6169 current function name continuously in the mode line, as you move
6172 Which Function mode is effective in major modes which support Imenu.
6174 *** Gametree is a major mode for editing game analysis trees. The author
6175 uses it for keeping notes about his postal Chess games, but it should
6176 be helpful for other two-player games as well, as long as they have an
6177 established system of notation similar to Chess.
6179 *** The new minor mode checkdoc-minor-mode provides Emacs Lisp
6180 documentation string checking for style and spelling. The style
6181 guidelines are found in the Emacs Lisp programming manual.
6183 *** The net-utils package makes some common networking features
6184 available in Emacs. Some of these functions are wrappers around
6185 system utilities (ping, nslookup, etc); others are implementations of
6186 simple protocols (finger, whois) in Emacs Lisp. There are also
6187 functions to make simple connections to TCP/IP ports for debugging and
6190 *** highlight-changes-mode is a minor mode that uses colors to
6191 identify recently changed parts of the buffer text.
6193 *** The new package `midnight' lets you specify things to be done
6194 within Emacs at midnight--by default, kill buffers that you have not
6195 used in a considerable time. To use this feature, customize
6196 the user option `midnight-mode' to t.
6198 *** The file generic-x.el defines a number of simple major modes.
6200 apache-generic-mode: For Apache and NCSA httpd configuration files
6201 samba-generic-mode: Samba configuration files
6202 fvwm-generic-mode: For fvwm initialization files
6203 x-resource-generic-mode: For X resource files
6204 hosts-generic-mode: For hosts files (.rhosts, /etc/hosts, etc)
6205 mailagent-rules-generic-mode: For mailagent .rules files
6206 javascript-generic-mode: For JavaScript files
6207 vrml-generic-mode: For VRML files
6208 java-manifest-generic-mode: For Java MANIFEST files
6209 java-properties-generic-mode: For Java property files
6210 mailrc-generic-mode: For .mailrc files
6212 Platform-specific modes:
6214 prototype-generic-mode: For Solaris/Sys V prototype files
6215 pkginfo-generic-mode: For Solaris/Sys V pkginfo files
6216 alias-generic-mode: For C shell alias files
6217 inf-generic-mode: For MS-Windows INF files
6218 ini-generic-mode: For MS-Windows INI files
6219 reg-generic-mode: For MS-Windows Registry files
6220 bat-generic-mode: For MS-Windows BAT scripts
6221 rc-generic-mode: For MS-Windows Resource files
6222 rul-generic-mode: For InstallShield scripts
6224 * Lisp changes in Emacs 20.3 since the Emacs Lisp Manual was published
6226 ** If you want a Lisp file to be read in unibyte mode,
6227 use -*-unibyte: t;-*- on its first line.
6228 That will force Emacs to read that file in unibyte mode.
6229 Otherwise, the file will be loaded and byte-compiled in multibyte mode.
6231 Thus, each lisp file is read in a consistent way regardless of whether
6232 you started Emacs with --unibyte, so that a Lisp program gives
6233 consistent results regardless of how Emacs was started.
6235 ** The new function assoc-default is useful for searching an alist,
6236 and using a default value if the key is not found there. You can
6237 specify a comparison predicate, so this function is useful for
6238 searching comparing a string against an alist of regular expressions.
6240 ** The functions unibyte-char-to-multibyte and
6241 multibyte-char-to-unibyte convert between unibyte and multibyte
6242 character codes, in a way that is appropriate for the current language
6245 ** The functions read-event, read-char and read-char-exclusive now
6246 take two optional arguments. PROMPT, if non-nil, specifies a prompt
6247 string. SUPPRESS-INPUT-METHOD, if non-nil, says to disable the
6248 current input method for reading this one event.
6250 ** Two new variables print-escape-nonascii and print-escape-multibyte
6251 now control whether to output certain characters as
6252 backslash-sequences. print-escape-nonascii applies to single-byte
6253 non-ASCII characters; print-escape-multibyte applies to multibyte
6254 characters. Both of these variables are used only when printing
6255 in readable fashion (prin1 uses them, princ does not).
6257 * Lisp changes in Emacs 20.3 before the Emacs Lisp Manual was published
6259 ** Compiled Emacs Lisp files made with the modified "MBSK" version
6260 of Emacs 20.2 do not work in Emacs 20.3.
6262 ** Buffer positions are now measured in characters, as they were
6263 in Emacs 19 and before. This means that (forward-char 1)
6264 always increases point by 1.
6266 The function chars-in-region now just subtracts its arguments. It is
6267 considered obsolete. The function char-boundary-p has been deleted.
6269 See below for additional changes relating to multibyte characters.
6271 ** defcustom, defface and defgroup now accept the keyword `:version'.
6272 Use this to specify in which version of Emacs a certain variable's
6273 default value changed. For example,
6275 (defcustom foo-max 34 "*Maximum number of foo's allowed."
6280 (defgroup foo-group nil "The foo group."
6283 If an entire new group is added or the variables in it have the
6284 default values changed, then just add a `:version' to that group. It
6285 is recommended that new packages added to the distribution contain a
6286 `:version' in the top level group.
6288 This information is used to control the customize-changed-options command.
6290 ** It is now an error to change the value of a symbol whose name
6291 starts with a colon--if it is interned in the standard obarray.
6293 However, setting such a symbol to its proper value, which is that
6294 symbol itself, is not an error. This is for the sake of programs that
6295 support previous Emacs versions by explicitly setting these variables
6298 If you set the variable keyword-symbols-constant-flag to nil,
6299 this error is suppressed, and you can set these symbols to any
6302 ** There is a new debugger command, R.
6303 It evaluates an expression like e, but saves the result
6304 in the buffer *Debugger-record*.
6306 ** Frame-local variables.
6308 You can now make a variable local to various frames. To do this, call
6309 the function make-variable-frame-local; this enables frames to have
6310 local bindings for that variable.
6312 These frame-local bindings are actually frame parameters: you create a
6313 frame-local binding in a specific frame by calling
6314 modify-frame-parameters and specifying the variable name as the
6317 Buffer-local bindings take precedence over frame-local bindings.
6318 Thus, if the current buffer has a buffer-local binding, that binding is
6319 active; otherwise, if the selected frame has a frame-local binding,
6320 that binding is active; otherwise, the default binding is active.
6322 It would not be hard to implement window-local bindings, but it is not
6323 clear that this would be very useful; windows tend to come and go in a
6324 very transitory fashion, so that trying to produce any specific effect
6325 through a window-local binding would not be very robust.
6327 ** `sregexq' and `sregex' are two new functions for constructing
6328 "symbolic regular expressions." These are Lisp expressions that, when
6329 evaluated, yield conventional string-based regexps. The symbolic form
6330 makes it easier to construct, read, and maintain complex patterns.
6331 See the documentation in sregex.el.
6333 ** parse-partial-sexp's return value has an additional element which
6334 is used to pass information along if you pass it to another call to
6335 parse-partial-sexp, starting its scan where the first call ended.
6336 The contents of this field are not yet finalized.
6338 ** eval-region now accepts a fourth optional argument READ-FUNCTION.
6339 If it is non-nil, that function is used instead of `read'.
6341 ** unload-feature by default removes the feature's functions from
6342 known hooks to avoid trouble, but a package providing FEATURE can
6343 define a hook FEATURE-unload-hook to be run by unload-feature instead.
6345 ** read-from-minibuffer no longer returns the argument DEFAULT-VALUE
6346 when the user enters empty input. It now returns the null string, as
6347 it did in Emacs 19. The default value is made available in the
6348 history via M-n, but it is not applied here as a default.
6350 The other, more specialized minibuffer-reading functions continue to
6351 return the default value (not the null string) when the user enters
6354 ** The new variable read-buffer-function controls which routine to use
6355 for selecting buffers. For example, if you set this variable to
6356 `iswitchb-read-buffer', iswitchb will be used to read buffer names.
6357 Other functions can also be used if they accept the same arguments as
6358 `read-buffer' and return the selected buffer name as a string.
6360 ** The new function read-passwd reads a password from the terminal,
6361 echoing a period for each character typed. It takes three arguments:
6362 a prompt string, a flag which says "read it twice to make sure", and a
6363 default password to use if the user enters nothing.
6365 ** The variable fill-nobreak-predicate gives major modes a way to
6366 specify not to break a line at certain places. Its value is a
6367 function which is called with no arguments, with point located at the
6368 place where a break is being considered. If the function returns
6369 non-nil, then the line won't be broken there.
6371 ** window-end now takes an optional second argument, UPDATE.
6372 If this is non-nil, then the function always returns an accurate
6373 up-to-date value for the buffer position corresponding to the
6374 end of the window, even if this requires computation.
6376 ** other-buffer now takes an optional argument FRAME
6377 which specifies which frame's buffer list to use.
6378 If it is nil, that means use the selected frame's buffer list.
6380 ** The new variable buffer-display-time, always local in every buffer,
6381 holds the value of (current-time) as of the last time that a window
6382 was directed to display this buffer.
6384 ** It is now meaningful to compare two window-configuration objects
6385 with `equal'. Two window-configuration objects are equal if they
6386 describe equivalent arrangements of windows, in the same frame--in
6387 other words, if they would give the same results if passed to
6388 set-window-configuration.
6390 ** compare-window-configurations is a new function that compares two
6391 window configurations loosely. It ignores differences in saved buffer
6392 positions and scrolling, and considers only the structure and sizes of
6393 windows and the choice of buffers to display.
6395 ** The variable minor-mode-overriding-map-alist allows major modes to
6396 override the key bindings of a minor mode. The elements of this alist
6397 look like the elements of minor-mode-map-alist: (VARIABLE . KEYMAP).
6399 If the VARIABLE in an element of minor-mode-overriding-map-alist has a
6400 non-nil value, the paired KEYMAP is active, and totally overrides the
6401 map (if any) specified for the same variable in minor-mode-map-alist.
6403 minor-mode-overriding-map-alist is automatically local in all buffers,
6404 and it is meant to be set by major modes.
6406 ** The function match-string-no-properties is like match-string
6407 except that it discards all text properties from the result.
6409 ** The function load-average now accepts an optional argument
6410 USE-FLOATS. If it is non-nil, the load average values are returned as
6411 floating point numbers, rather than as integers to be divided by 100.
6413 ** The new variable temporary-file-directory specifies the directory
6414 to use for creating temporary files. The default value is determined
6415 in a reasonable way for your operating system; on GNU and Unix systems
6416 it is based on the TMP and TMPDIR environment variables.
6420 *** easymenu.el now uses the new menu item format and supports the
6421 keywords :visible and :filter. The existing keyword :keys is now
6424 The variable `easy-menu-precalculate-equivalent-keybindings' controls
6425 a new feature which calculates keyboard equivalents for the menu when
6426 you define the menu. The default is t. If you rarely use menus, you
6427 can set the variable to nil to disable this precalculation feature;
6428 then the calculation is done only if you use the menu bar.
6430 *** A new format for menu items is supported.
6432 In a keymap, a key binding that has the format
6433 (STRING . REAL-BINDING) or (STRING HELP-STRING . REAL-BINDING)
6434 defines a menu item. Now a menu item definition may also be a list that
6435 starts with the symbol `menu-item'.
6438 (menu-item ITEM-NAME) or
6439 (menu-item ITEM-NAME REAL-BINDING . ITEM-PROPERTY-LIST)
6440 where ITEM-NAME is an expression which evaluates to the menu item
6441 string, and ITEM-PROPERTY-LIST has the form of a property list.
6442 The supported properties include
6444 :enable FORM Evaluate FORM to determine whether the
6446 :visible FORM Evaluate FORM to determine whether the
6447 item should appear in the menu.
6449 FILTER-FN is a function of one argument,
6450 which will be REAL-BINDING.
6451 It should return a binding to use instead.
6453 DESCRIPTION is a string that describes an equivalent keyboard
6454 binding for REAL-BINDING. DESCRIPTION is expanded with
6455 `substitute-command-keys' before it is used.
6456 :key-sequence KEY-SEQUENCE
6457 KEY-SEQUENCE is a key-sequence for an equivalent
6460 This means that the command normally has no
6461 keyboard equivalent.
6462 :help HELP HELP is the extra help string (not currently used).
6463 :button (TYPE . SELECTED)
6464 TYPE is :toggle or :radio.
6465 SELECTED is a form, to be evaluated, and its
6466 value says whether this button is currently selected.
6468 Buttons are at the moment only simulated by prefixes in the menu.
6469 Eventually ordinary X-buttons may be supported.
6471 (menu-item ITEM-NAME) defines unselectable item.
6475 *** The new event type `mouse-wheel' is generated by a wheel on a
6476 mouse (such as the MS Intellimouse). The event contains a delta that
6477 corresponds to the amount and direction that the wheel is rotated,
6478 which is typically used to implement a scroll or zoom. The format is:
6480 (mouse-wheel POSITION DELTA)
6482 where POSITION is a list describing the position of the event in the
6483 same format as a mouse-click event, and DELTA is a signed number
6484 indicating the number of increments by which the wheel was rotated. A
6485 negative DELTA indicates that the wheel was rotated backwards, towards
6486 the user, and a positive DELTA indicates that the wheel was rotated
6487 forward, away from the user.
6489 As of now, this event type is generated only on MS Windows.
6491 *** The new event type `drag-n-drop' is generated when a group of
6492 files is selected in an application outside of Emacs, and then dragged
6493 and dropped onto an Emacs frame. The event contains a list of
6494 filenames that were dragged and dropped, which are then typically
6495 loaded into Emacs. The format is:
6497 (drag-n-drop POSITION FILES)
6499 where POSITION is a list describing the position of the event in the
6500 same format as a mouse-click event, and FILES is the list of filenames
6501 that were dragged and dropped.
6503 As of now, this event type is generated only on MS Windows.
6505 ** Changes relating to multibyte characters.
6507 *** The variable enable-multibyte-characters is now read-only;
6508 any attempt to set it directly signals an error. The only way
6509 to change this value in an existing buffer is with set-buffer-multibyte.
6511 *** In a string constant, `\ ' now stands for "nothing at all". You
6512 can use it to terminate a hex escape which is followed by a character
6513 that could otherwise be read as part of the hex escape.
6515 *** String indices are now measured in characters, as they were
6516 in Emacs 19 and before.
6518 The function chars-in-string has been deleted.
6519 The function concat-chars has been renamed to `string'.
6521 *** The function set-buffer-multibyte sets the flag in the current
6522 buffer that says whether the buffer uses multibyte representation or
6523 unibyte representation. If the argument is nil, it selects unibyte
6524 representation. Otherwise it selects multibyte representation.
6526 This function does not change the contents of the buffer, viewed
6527 as a sequence of bytes. However, it does change the contents
6528 viewed as characters; a sequence of two bytes which is treated as
6529 one character when the buffer uses multibyte representation
6530 will count as two characters using unibyte representation.
6532 This function sets enable-multibyte-characters to record which
6533 representation is in use. It also adjusts various data in the buffer
6534 (including its markers, overlays and text properties) so that they are
6535 consistent with the new representation.
6537 *** string-make-multibyte takes a string and converts it to multibyte
6538 representation. Most of the time, you don't need to care
6539 about the representation, because Emacs converts when necessary;
6540 however, it makes a difference when you compare strings.
6542 The conversion of non-ASCII characters works by adding the value of
6543 nonascii-insert-offset to each character, or by translating them
6544 using the table nonascii-translation-table.
6546 *** string-make-unibyte takes a string and converts it to unibyte
6547 representation. Most of the time, you don't need to care about the
6548 representation, but it makes a difference when you compare strings.
6550 The conversion from multibyte to unibyte representation
6551 loses information; the only time Emacs performs it automatically
6552 is when inserting a multibyte string into a unibyte buffer.
6554 *** string-as-multibyte takes a string, and returns another string
6555 which contains the same bytes, but treats them as multibyte.
6557 *** string-as-unibyte takes a string, and returns another string
6558 which contains the same bytes, but treats them as unibyte.
6560 *** The new function compare-strings lets you compare
6561 portions of two strings. Unibyte strings are converted to multibyte,
6562 so that a unibyte string can match a multibyte string.
6563 You can specify whether to ignore case or not.
6565 *** assoc-ignore-case now uses compare-strings so that
6566 it can treat unibyte and multibyte strings as equal.
6568 *** Regular expression operations and buffer string searches now
6569 convert the search pattern to multibyte or unibyte to accord with the
6570 buffer or string being searched.
6572 One consequence is that you cannot always use \200-\377 inside of
6573 [...] to match all non-ASCII characters. This does still work when
6574 searching or matching a unibyte buffer or string, but not when
6575 searching or matching a multibyte string. Unfortunately, there is no
6576 obvious choice of syntax to use within [...] for that job. But, what
6577 you want is just to match all non-ASCII characters, the regular
6578 expression [^\0-\177] works for it.
6580 *** Structure of coding system changed.
6582 All coding systems (including aliases and subsidiaries) are named
6583 by symbols; the symbol's `coding-system' property is a vector
6584 which defines the coding system. Aliases share the same vector
6585 as the principal name, so that altering the contents of this
6586 vector affects the principal name and its aliases. You can define
6587 your own alias name of a coding system by the function
6588 define-coding-system-alias.
6590 The coding system definition includes a property list of its own. Use
6591 the new functions `coding-system-get' and `coding-system-put' to
6592 access such coding system properties as post-read-conversion,
6593 pre-write-conversion, character-translation-table-for-decode,
6594 character-translation-table-for-encode, mime-charset, and
6595 safe-charsets. For instance, (coding-system-get 'iso-latin-1
6596 'mime-charset) gives the corresponding MIME-charset parameter
6599 Among the coding system properties listed above, safe-charsets is new.
6600 The value of this property is a list of character sets which this
6601 coding system can correctly encode and decode. For instance:
6602 (coding-system-get 'iso-latin-1 'safe-charsets) => (ascii latin-iso8859-1)
6604 Here, "correctly encode" means that the encoded character sets can
6605 also be handled safely by systems other than Emacs as far as they
6606 are capable of that coding system. Though, Emacs itself can encode
6607 the other character sets and read it back correctly.
6609 *** The new function select-safe-coding-system can be used to find a
6610 proper coding system for encoding the specified region or string.
6611 This function requires a user interaction.
6613 *** The new functions find-coding-systems-region and
6614 find-coding-systems-string are helper functions used by
6615 select-safe-coding-system. They return a list of all proper coding
6616 systems to encode a text in some region or string. If you don't want
6617 a user interaction, use one of these functions instead of
6618 select-safe-coding-system.
6620 *** The explicit encoding and decoding functions, such as
6621 decode-coding-region and encode-coding-string, now set
6622 last-coding-system-used to reflect the actual way encoding or decoding
6625 *** The new function detect-coding-with-language-environment can be
6626 used to detect a coding system of text according to priorities of
6627 coding systems used by some specific language environment.
6629 *** The functions detect-coding-region and detect-coding-string always
6630 return a list if the arg HIGHEST is nil. Thus, if only ASCII
6631 characters are found, they now return a list of single element
6632 `undecided' or its subsidiaries.
6634 *** The new functions coding-system-change-eol-conversion and
6635 coding-system-change-text-conversion can be used to get a different
6636 coding system than what specified only in how end-of-line or text is
6639 *** The new function set-selection-coding-system can be used to set a
6640 coding system for communicating with other X clients.
6642 *** The function `map-char-table' now passes as argument only valid
6643 character codes, plus generic characters that stand for entire
6644 character sets or entire subrows of a character set. In other words,
6645 each time `map-char-table' calls its FUNCTION argument, the key value
6646 either will be a valid individual character code, or will stand for a
6647 range of characters.
6649 *** The new function `char-valid-p' can be used for checking whether a
6650 Lisp object is a valid character code or not.
6652 *** The new function `charset-after' returns a charset of a character
6653 in the current buffer at position POS.
6655 *** Input methods are now implemented using the variable
6656 input-method-function. If this is non-nil, its value should be a
6657 function; then, whenever Emacs reads an input event that is a printing
6658 character with no modifier bits, it calls that function, passing the
6659 event as an argument. Often this function will read more input, first
6660 binding input-method-function to nil.
6662 The return value should be a list of the events resulting from input
6663 method processing. These events will be processed sequentially as
6664 input, before resorting to unread-command-events. Events returned by
6665 the input method function are not passed to the input method function,
6666 not even if they are printing characters with no modifier bits.
6668 The input method function is not called when reading the second and
6669 subsequent events of a key sequence.
6671 *** You can customize any language environment by using
6672 set-language-environment-hook and exit-language-environment-hook.
6674 The hook `exit-language-environment-hook' should be used to undo
6675 customizations that you made with set-language-environment-hook. For
6676 instance, if you set up a special key binding for a specific language
6677 environment by set-language-environment-hook, you should set up
6678 exit-language-environment-hook to restore the normal key binding.
6680 * Changes in Emacs 20.1
6682 ** Emacs has a new facility for customization of its many user
6683 options. It is called M-x customize. With this facility you can look
6684 at the many user options in an organized way; they are grouped into a
6687 M-x customize also knows what sorts of values are legitimate for each
6688 user option and ensures that you don't use invalid values.
6690 With M-x customize, you can set options either for the present Emacs
6691 session or permanently. (Permanent settings are stored automatically
6692 in your .emacs file.)
6694 ** Scroll bars are now on the left side of the window.
6695 You can change this with M-x customize-option scroll-bar-mode.
6697 ** The mode line no longer includes the string `Emacs'.
6698 This makes more space in the mode line for other information.
6700 ** When you select a region with the mouse, it is highlighted
6701 immediately afterward. At that time, if you type the DELETE key, it
6704 The BACKSPACE key, and the ASCII character DEL, do not do this; they
6705 delete the character before point, as usual.
6707 ** In an incremental search the whole current match is highlighted
6708 on terminals which support this. (You can disable this feature
6709 by setting search-highlight to nil.)
6711 ** In the minibuffer, in some cases, you can now use M-n to
6712 insert the default value into the minibuffer as text. In effect,
6713 the default value (if the minibuffer routines know it) is tacked
6714 onto the history "in the future". (The more normal use of the
6715 history list is to use M-p to insert minibuffer input used in the
6718 ** In Text mode, now only blank lines separate paragraphs.
6719 This makes it possible to get the full benefit of Adaptive Fill mode
6720 in Text mode, and other modes derived from it (such as Mail mode).
6721 TAB in Text mode now runs the command indent-relative; this
6722 makes a practical difference only when you use indented paragraphs.
6724 As a result, the old Indented Text mode is now identical to Text mode,
6725 and is an alias for it.
6727 If you want spaces at the beginning of a line to start a paragraph,
6728 use the new mode, Paragraph Indent Text mode.
6730 ** Scrolling changes
6732 *** Scroll commands to scroll a whole screen now preserve the screen
6733 position of the cursor, if scroll-preserve-screen-position is non-nil.
6735 In this mode, if you scroll several screens back and forth, finishing
6736 on the same screen where you started, the cursor goes back to the line
6739 *** If you set scroll-conservatively to a small number, then when you
6740 move point a short distance off the screen, Emacs will scroll the
6741 screen just far enough to bring point back on screen, provided that
6742 does not exceed `scroll-conservatively' lines.
6744 *** The new variable scroll-margin says how close point can come to the
6745 top or bottom of a window. It is a number of screen lines; if point
6746 comes within that many lines of the top or bottom of the window, Emacs
6747 recenters the window.
6749 ** International character set support (MULE)
6751 Emacs now supports a wide variety of international character sets,
6752 including European variants of the Latin alphabet, as well as Chinese,
6753 Devanagari (Hindi and Marathi), Ethiopian, Greek, IPA, Japanese,
6754 Korean, Lao, Russian, Thai, Tibetan, and Vietnamese scripts. These
6755 features have been merged from the modified version of Emacs known as
6756 MULE (for "MULti-lingual Enhancement to GNU Emacs")
6758 Users of these scripts have established many more-or-less standard
6759 coding systems for storing files. Emacs uses a single multibyte
6760 character encoding within Emacs buffers; it can translate from a wide
6761 variety of coding systems when reading a file and can translate back
6762 into any of these coding systems when saving a file.
6764 Keyboards, even in the countries where these character sets are used,
6765 generally don't have keys for all the characters in them. So Emacs
6766 supports various "input methods", typically one for each script or
6767 language, to make it possible to type them.
6769 The Emacs internal multibyte encoding represents a non-ASCII
6770 character as a sequence of bytes in the range 0200 through 0377.
6772 The new prefix key C-x RET is used for commands that pertain
6773 to multibyte characters, coding systems, and input methods.
6775 You can disable multibyte character support as follows:
6777 (setq-default enable-multibyte-characters nil)
6779 Calling the function standard-display-european turns off multibyte
6780 characters, unless you specify a non-nil value for the second
6781 argument, AUTO. This provides compatibility for people who are
6782 already using standard-display-european to continue using unibyte
6783 characters for their work until they want to change.
6787 An input method is a kind of character conversion which is designed
6788 specifically for interactive input. In Emacs, typically each language
6789 has its own input method (though sometimes several languages which use
6790 the same characters can share one input method). Some languages
6791 support several input methods.
6793 The simplest kind of input method works by mapping ASCII letters into
6794 another alphabet. This is how the Greek and Russian input methods
6797 A more powerful technique is composition: converting sequences of
6798 characters into one letter. Many European input methods use
6799 composition to produce a single non-ASCII letter from a sequence which
6800 consists of a letter followed by diacritics. For example, a' is one
6801 sequence of two characters that might be converted into a single
6804 The input methods for syllabic scripts typically use mapping followed
6805 by conversion. The input methods for Thai and Korean work this way.
6806 First, letters are mapped into symbols for particular sounds or tone
6807 marks; then, sequences of these which make up a whole syllable are
6808 mapped into one syllable sign--most often a "composite character".
6810 None of these methods works very well for Chinese and Japanese, so
6811 they are handled specially. First you input a whole word using
6812 phonetic spelling; then, after the word is in the buffer, Emacs
6813 converts it into one or more characters using a large dictionary.
6815 Since there is more than one way to represent a phonetically spelled
6816 word using Chinese characters, Emacs can only guess which one to use;
6817 typically these input methods give you a way to say "guess again" if
6818 the first guess is wrong.
6820 *** The command C-x RET m (toggle-enable-multibyte-characters)
6821 turns multibyte character support on or off for the current buffer.
6823 If multibyte character support is turned off in a buffer, then each
6824 byte is a single character, even codes 0200 through 0377--exactly as
6825 they did in Emacs 19.34. This includes the features for support for
6826 the European characters, ISO Latin-1 and ISO Latin-2.
6828 However, there is no need to turn off multibyte character support to
6829 use ISO Latin-1 or ISO Latin-2; the Emacs multibyte character set
6830 includes all the characters in these character sets, and Emacs can
6831 translate automatically to and from either one.
6833 *** Visiting a file in unibyte mode.
6835 Turning off multibyte character support in the buffer after visiting a
6836 file with multibyte code conversion will display the multibyte
6837 sequences already in the buffer, byte by byte. This is probably not
6840 If you want to edit a file of unibyte characters (Latin-1, for
6841 example), you can do it by specifying `no-conversion' as the coding
6842 system when reading the file. This coding system also turns off
6843 multibyte characters in that buffer.
6845 If you turn off multibyte character support entirely, this turns off
6846 character conversion as well.
6848 *** Displaying international characters on X Windows.
6850 A font for X typically displays just one alphabet or script.
6851 Therefore, displaying the entire range of characters Emacs supports
6852 requires using many fonts.
6854 Therefore, Emacs now supports "fontsets". Each fontset is a
6855 collection of fonts, each assigned to a range of character codes.
6857 A fontset has a name, like a font. Individual fonts are defined by
6858 the X server; fontsets are defined within Emacs itself. But once you
6859 have defined a fontset, you can use it in a face or a frame just as
6860 you would use a font.
6862 If a fontset specifies no font for a certain character, or if it
6863 specifies a font that does not exist on your system, then it cannot
6864 display that character. It will display an empty box instead.
6866 The fontset height and width are determined by the ASCII characters
6867 (that is, by the font in the fontset which is used for ASCII
6868 characters). If another font in the fontset has a different height,
6869 or the wrong width, then characters assigned to that font are clipped,
6870 and displayed within a box if highlight-wrong-size-font is non-nil.
6872 *** Defining fontsets.
6874 Emacs does not use any fontset by default. Its default font is still
6875 chosen as in previous versions. You can tell Emacs to use a fontset
6876 with the `-fn' option or the `Font' X resource.
6878 Emacs creates a standard fontset automatically according to the value
6879 of standard-fontset-spec. This fontset's short name is
6880 `fontset-standard'. Bold, italic, and bold-italic variants of the
6881 standard fontset are created automatically.
6883 If you specify a default ASCII font with the `Font' resource or `-fn'
6884 argument, a fontset is generated from it. This works by replacing the
6885 FOUNDARY, FAMILY, ADD_STYLE, and AVERAGE_WIDTH fields of the font name
6886 with `*' then using this to specify a fontset. This fontset's short
6887 name is `fontset-startup'.
6889 Emacs checks resources of the form Fontset-N where N is 0, 1, 2...
6890 The resource value should have this form:
6891 FONTSET-NAME, [CHARSET-NAME:FONT-NAME]...
6892 FONTSET-NAME should have the form of a standard X font name, except:
6893 * most fields should be just the wild card "*".
6894 * the CHARSET_REGISTRY field should be "fontset"
6895 * the CHARSET_ENCODING field can be any nickname of the fontset.
6896 The construct CHARSET-NAME:FONT-NAME can be repeated any number
6897 of times; each time specifies the font for one character set.
6898 CHARSET-NAME should be the name of a character set, and FONT-NAME
6899 should specify an actual font to use for that character set.
6901 Each of these fontsets has an alias which is made from the
6902 last two font name fields, CHARSET_REGISTRY and CHARSET_ENCODING.
6903 You can refer to the fontset by that alias or by its full name.
6905 For any character sets that you don't mention, Emacs tries to choose a
6906 font by substituting into FONTSET-NAME. For instance, with the
6908 Emacs*Fontset-0: -*-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-24-*-*-*-*-*-fontset-24
6909 the font for ASCII is generated as below:
6910 -*-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-24-*-ISO8859-1
6911 Here is the substitution rule:
6912 Change CHARSET_REGISTRY and CHARSET_ENCODING to that of the charset
6913 defined in the variable x-charset-registries. For instance, ASCII has
6914 the entry (ascii . "ISO8859-1") in this variable. Then, reduce
6915 sequences of wild cards -*-...-*- with a single wildcard -*-.
6916 (This is to prevent use of auto-scaled fonts.)
6918 The function which processes the fontset resource value to create the
6919 fontset is called create-fontset-from-fontset-spec. You can also call
6920 that function explicitly to create a fontset.
6922 With the X resource Emacs.Font, you can specify a fontset name just
6923 like an actual font name. But be careful not to specify a fontset
6924 name in a wildcard resource like Emacs*Font--that tries to specify the
6925 fontset for other purposes including menus, and they cannot handle
6928 *** The command M-x set-language-environment sets certain global Emacs
6929 defaults for a particular choice of language.
6931 Selecting a language environment typically specifies a default input
6932 method and which coding systems to recognize automatically when
6933 visiting files. However, it does not try to reread files you have
6934 already visited; the text in those buffers is not affected. The
6935 language environment may also specify a default choice of coding
6936 system for new files that you create.
6938 It makes no difference which buffer is current when you use
6939 set-language-environment, because these defaults apply globally to the
6940 whole Emacs session.
6942 For example, M-x set-language-environment RET Latin-1 RET
6943 chooses the Latin-1 character set. In the .emacs file, you can do this
6944 with (set-language-environment "Latin-1").
6946 *** The command C-x RET f (set-buffer-file-coding-system)
6947 specifies the file coding system for the current buffer. This
6948 specifies what sort of character code translation to do when saving
6949 the file. As an argument, you must specify the name of one of the
6950 coding systems that Emacs supports.
6952 *** The command C-x RET c (universal-coding-system-argument)
6953 lets you specify a coding system when you read or write a file.
6954 This command uses the minibuffer to read a coding system name.
6955 After you exit the minibuffer, the specified coding system
6956 is used for *the immediately following command*.
6958 So if the immediately following command is a command to read or
6959 write a file, it uses the specified coding system for that file.
6961 If the immediately following command does not use the coding system,
6962 then C-x RET c ultimately has no effect.
6964 For example, C-x RET c iso-8859-1 RET C-x C-f temp RET
6965 visits the file `temp' treating it as ISO Latin-1.
6967 *** You can specify the coding system for a file using the -*-
6968 construct. Include `coding: CODINGSYSTEM;' inside the -*-...-*-
6969 to specify use of coding system CODINGSYSTEM. You can also
6970 specify the coding system in a local variable list at the end
6973 *** The command C-x RET t (set-terminal-coding-system) specifies
6974 the coding system for terminal output. If you specify a character
6975 code for terminal output, all characters output to the terminal are
6976 translated into that character code.
6978 This feature is useful for certain character-only terminals built in
6979 various countries to support the languages of those countries.
6981 By default, output to the terminal is not translated at all.
6983 *** The command C-x RET k (set-keyboard-coding-system) specifies
6984 the coding system for keyboard input.
6986 Character code translation of keyboard input is useful for terminals
6987 with keys that send non-ASCII graphic characters--for example,
6988 some terminals designed for ISO Latin-1 or subsets of it.
6990 By default, keyboard input is not translated at all.
6992 Character code translation of keyboard input is similar to using an
6993 input method, in that both define sequences of keyboard input that
6994 translate into single characters. However, input methods are designed
6995 to be convenient for interactive use, while the code translations are
6996 designed to work with terminals.
6998 *** The command C-x RET p (set-buffer-process-coding-system)
6999 specifies the coding system for input and output to a subprocess.
7000 This command applies to the current buffer; normally, each subprocess
7001 has its own buffer, and thus you can use this command to specify
7002 translation to and from a particular subprocess by giving the command
7003 in the corresponding buffer.
7005 By default, process input and output are not translated at all.
7007 *** The variable file-name-coding-system specifies the coding system
7008 to use for encoding file names before operating on them.
7009 It is also used for decoding file names obtained from the system.
7011 *** The command C-\ (toggle-input-method) activates or deactivates
7012 an input method. If no input method has been selected before, the
7013 command prompts for you to specify the language and input method you
7016 C-u C-\ (select-input-method) lets you switch to a different input
7017 method. C-h C-\ (or C-h I) describes the current input method.
7019 *** Some input methods remap the keyboard to emulate various keyboard
7020 layouts commonly used for particular scripts. How to do this
7021 remapping properly depends on your actual keyboard layout. To specify
7022 which layout your keyboard has, use M-x quail-set-keyboard-layout.
7024 *** The command C-h C (describe-coding-system) displays
7025 the coding systems currently selected for various purposes, plus
7026 related information.
7028 *** The command C-h h (view-hello-file) displays a file called
7029 HELLO, which has examples of text in many languages, using various
7032 *** The command C-h L (describe-language-support) displays
7033 information about the support for a particular language.
7034 You specify the language as an argument.
7036 *** The mode line now contains a letter or character that identifies
7037 the coding system used in the visited file. It normally follows the
7040 A dash indicates the default state of affairs: no code conversion
7041 (except CRLF => newline if appropriate). `=' means no conversion
7042 whatsoever. The ISO 8859 coding systems are represented by digits
7043 1 through 9. Other coding systems are represented by letters:
7045 A alternativnyj (Russian)
7047 C cn-gb-2312 (Chinese)
7048 C iso-2022-cn (Chinese)
7049 D in-is13194-devanagari (Indian languages)
7050 E euc-japan (Japanese)
7051 I iso-2022-cjk or iso-2022-ss2 (Chinese, Japanese, Korean)
7052 J junet (iso-2022-7) or old-jis (iso-2022-jp-1978-irv) (Japanese)
7053 K euc-korea (Korean)
7056 S shift_jis (Japanese)
7059 V viscii or vscii (Vietnamese)
7060 i iso-2022-lock (Chinese, Japanese, Korean)
7061 k iso-2022-kr (Korean)
7065 When you are using a character-only terminal (not a window system),
7066 two additional characters appear in between the dash and the file
7067 coding system. These two characters describe the coding system for
7068 keyboard input, and the coding system for terminal output.
7070 *** The new variable rmail-file-coding-system specifies the code
7071 conversion to use for RMAIL files. The default value is nil.
7073 When you read mail with Rmail, each message is decoded automatically
7074 into Emacs' internal format. This has nothing to do with
7075 rmail-file-coding-system. That variable controls reading and writing
7076 Rmail files themselves.
7078 *** The new variable sendmail-coding-system specifies the code
7079 conversion for outgoing mail. The default value is nil.
7081 Actually, there are three different ways of specifying the coding system
7084 - If you use C-x RET f in the mail buffer, that takes priority.
7085 - Otherwise, if you set sendmail-coding-system non-nil, that specifies it.
7086 - Otherwise, the default coding system for new files is used,
7087 if that is non-nil. That comes from your language environment.
7088 - Otherwise, Latin-1 is used.
7090 *** The command C-h t (help-with-tutorial) accepts a prefix argument
7091 to specify the language for the tutorial file. Currently, English,
7092 Japanese, Korean and Thai are supported. We welcome additional
7095 ** An easy new way to visit a file with no code or format conversion
7096 of any kind: Use M-x find-file-literally. There is also a command
7097 insert-file-literally which inserts a file into the current buffer
7098 without any conversion.
7100 ** C-q's handling of octal character codes is changed.
7101 You can now specify any number of octal digits.
7102 RET terminates the digits and is discarded;
7103 any other non-digit terminates the digits and is then used as input.
7105 ** There are new commands for looking up Info documentation for
7106 functions, variables and file names used in your programs.
7108 Type M-x info-lookup-symbol to look up a symbol in the buffer at point.
7109 Type M-x info-lookup-file to look up a file in the buffer at point.
7111 Precisely which Info files are used to look it up depends on the major
7112 mode. For example, in C mode, the GNU libc manual is used.
7114 ** M-TAB in most programming language modes now runs the command
7115 complete-symbol. This command performs completion on the symbol name
7116 in the buffer before point.
7118 With a numeric argument, it performs completion based on the set of
7119 symbols documented in the Info files for the programming language that
7122 With no argument, it does completion based on the current tags tables,
7123 just like the old binding of M-TAB (complete-tag).
7125 ** File locking works with NFS now.
7127 The lock file for FILENAME is now a symbolic link named .#FILENAME,
7128 in the same directory as FILENAME.
7130 This means that collision detection between two different machines now
7131 works reasonably well; it also means that no file server or directory
7132 can become a bottleneck.
7134 The new method does have drawbacks. It means that collision detection
7135 does not operate when you edit a file in a directory where you cannot
7136 create new files. Collision detection also doesn't operate when the
7137 file server does not support symbolic links. But these conditions are
7138 rare, and the ability to have collision detection while using NFS is
7139 so useful that the change is worth while.
7141 When Emacs or a system crashes, this may leave behind lock files which
7142 are stale. So you may occasionally get warnings about spurious
7143 collisions. When you determine that the collision is spurious, just
7144 tell Emacs to go ahead anyway.
7146 ** If you wish to use Show Paren mode to display matching parentheses,
7147 it is no longer sufficient to load paren.el. Instead you must call
7150 ** If you wish to use Delete Selection mode to replace a highlighted
7151 selection when you insert new text, it is no longer sufficient to load
7152 delsel.el. Instead you must call the function delete-selection-mode.
7154 ** If you wish to use Partial Completion mode to complete partial words
7155 within symbols or filenames, it is no longer sufficient to load
7156 complete.el. Instead you must call the function partial-completion-mode.
7158 ** If you wish to use uniquify to rename buffers for you,
7159 it is no longer sufficient to load uniquify.el. You must also
7160 set uniquify-buffer-name-style to one of the non-nil legitimate values.
7162 ** Changes in View mode.
7164 *** Several new commands are available in View mode.
7165 Do H in view mode for a list of commands.
7167 *** There are two new commands for entering View mode:
7168 view-file-other-frame and view-buffer-other-frame.
7170 *** Exiting View mode does a better job of restoring windows to their
7173 *** New customization variable view-scroll-auto-exit. If non-nil,
7174 scrolling past end of buffer makes view mode exit.
7176 *** New customization variable view-exits-all-viewing-windows. If
7177 non-nil, view-mode will at exit restore all windows viewing buffer,
7178 not just the selected window.
7180 *** New customization variable view-read-only. If non-nil, visiting a
7181 read-only file automatically enters View mode, and toggle-read-only
7182 turns View mode on or off.
7184 *** New customization variable view-remove-frame-by-deleting controls
7185 how to remove a not needed frame at view mode exit. If non-nil,
7186 delete the frame, if nil make an icon of it.
7188 ** C-x v l, the command to print a file's version control log,
7189 now positions point at the entry for the file's current branch version.
7191 ** C-x v =, the command to compare a file with the last checked-in version,
7192 has a new feature. If the file is currently not locked, so that it is
7193 presumably identical to the last checked-in version, the command now asks
7194 which version to compare with.
7196 ** When using hideshow.el, incremental search can temporarily show hidden
7197 blocks if a match is inside the block.
7199 The block is hidden again if the search is continued and the next match
7200 is outside the block. By customizing the variable
7201 isearch-hide-immediately you can choose to hide all the temporarily
7202 shown blocks only when exiting from incremental search.
7204 By customizing the variable hs-isearch-open you can choose what kind
7205 of blocks to temporarily show during isearch: comment blocks, code
7206 blocks, all of them or none.
7208 ** The new command C-x 4 0 (kill-buffer-and-window) kills the
7209 current buffer and deletes the selected window. It asks for
7212 ** C-x C-w, which saves the buffer into a specified file name,
7213 now changes the major mode according to that file name.
7214 However, the mode will not be changed if
7215 (1) a local variables list or the `-*-' line specifies a major mode, or
7216 (2) the current major mode is a "special" mode,
7217 not suitable for ordinary files, or
7218 (3) the new file name does not particularly specify any mode.
7220 This applies to M-x set-visited-file-name as well.
7222 However, if you set change-major-mode-with-file-name to nil, then
7223 these commands do not change the major mode.
7225 ** M-x occur changes.
7227 *** If the argument to M-x occur contains upper case letters,
7228 it performs a case-sensitive search.
7230 *** In the *Occur* buffer made by M-x occur,
7231 if you type g or M-x revert-buffer, this repeats the search
7232 using the same regular expression and the same buffer as before.
7234 ** In Transient Mark mode, the region in any one buffer is highlighted
7235 in just one window at a time. At first, it is highlighted in the
7236 window where you set the mark. The buffer's highlighting remains in
7237 that window unless you select to another window which shows the same
7238 buffer--then the highlighting moves to that window.
7240 ** The feature to suggest key bindings when you use M-x now operates
7241 after the command finishes. The message suggesting key bindings
7242 appears temporarily in the echo area. The previous echo area contents
7243 come back after a few seconds, in case they contain useful information.
7245 ** Each frame now independently records the order for recently
7246 selected buffers, so that the default for C-x b is now based on the
7247 buffers recently selected in the selected frame.
7249 ** Outline mode changes.
7251 *** Outline mode now uses overlays (this is the former noutline.el).
7253 *** Incremental searches skip over invisible text in Outline mode.
7255 ** When a minibuffer window is active but not the selected window, if
7256 you try to use the minibuffer, you used to get a nested minibuffer.
7257 Now, this not only gives an error, it also cancels the minibuffer that
7260 The motive for this change is so that beginning users do not
7261 unknowingly move away from minibuffers, leaving them active, and then
7264 If you want to be able to have recursive minibuffers, you must
7265 set enable-recursive-minibuffers to non-nil.
7267 ** Changes in dynamic abbrevs.
7269 *** Expanding dynamic abbrevs with M-/ is now smarter about case
7270 conversion. If the expansion has mixed case not counting the first
7271 character, and the abbreviation matches the beginning of the expansion
7272 including case, then the expansion is copied verbatim.
7274 The expansion is also copied verbatim if the abbreviation itself has
7275 mixed case. And using SPC M-/ to copy an additional word always
7276 copies it verbatim except when the previous copied word is all caps.
7278 *** The values of `dabbrev-case-replace' and `dabbrev-case-fold-search'
7279 are no longer Lisp expressions. They have simply three possible
7282 `dabbrev-case-replace' has these three values: nil (don't preserve
7283 case), t (do), or `case-replace' (do like M-x query-replace).
7284 `dabbrev-case-fold-search' has these three values: nil (don't ignore
7285 case), t (do), or `case-fold-search' (do like search).
7287 ** Minibuffer history lists are truncated automatically now to a
7288 certain length. The variable history-length specifies how long they
7289 can be. The default value is 30.
7291 ** Changes in Mail mode.
7293 *** The key C-x m no longer runs the `mail' command directly.
7294 Instead, it runs the command `compose-mail', which invokes the mail
7295 composition mechanism you have selected with the variable
7296 `mail-user-agent'. The default choice of user agent is
7297 `sendmail-user-agent', which gives behavior compatible with the old
7300 C-x 4 m now runs compose-mail-other-window, and C-x 5 m runs
7301 compose-mail-other-frame.
7303 *** While composing a reply to a mail message, from Rmail, you can use
7304 the command C-c C-r to cite just the region from the message you are
7305 replying to. This copies the text which is the selected region in the
7306 buffer that shows the original message.
7308 *** The command C-c C-i inserts a file at the end of the message,
7309 with separator lines around the contents.
7311 *** The command M-x expand-mail-aliases expands all mail aliases
7312 in suitable mail headers. Emacs automatically extracts mail alias
7313 definitions from your mail alias file (e.g., ~/.mailrc). You do not
7314 need to expand mail aliases yourself before sending mail.
7316 *** New features in the mail-complete command.
7318 **** The mail-complete command now inserts the user's full name,
7319 for local users or if that is known. The variable mail-complete-style
7320 controls the style to use, and whether to do this at all.
7321 Its values are like those of mail-from-style.
7323 **** The variable mail-passwd-command lets you specify a shell command
7324 to run to fetch a set of password-entries that add to the ones in
7327 **** The variable mail-passwd-file now specifies a list of files to read
7328 to get the list of user ids. By default, one file is used:
7331 ** You can "quote" a file name to inhibit special significance of
7332 special syntax, by adding `/:' to the beginning. Thus, if you have a
7333 directory named `/foo:', you can prevent it from being treated as a
7334 reference to a remote host named `foo' by writing it as `/:/foo:'.
7336 Emacs uses this new construct automatically when necessary, such as
7337 when you start it with a working directory whose name might otherwise
7338 be taken to be magic.
7340 ** There is a new command M-x grep-find which uses find to select
7341 files to search through, and grep to scan them. The output is
7342 available in a Compile mode buffer, as with M-x grep.
7344 M-x grep now uses the -e option if the grep program supports that.
7345 (-e prevents problems if the search pattern starts with a dash.)
7347 ** In Dired, the & command now flags for deletion the files whose names
7348 suggest they are probably not needed in the long run.
7350 In Dired, * is now a prefix key for mark-related commands.
7352 new key dired.el binding old key
7353 ------- ---------------- -------
7354 * c dired-change-marks c
7356 * * dired-mark-executables * (binding deleted)
7357 * / dired-mark-directories / (binding deleted)
7358 * @ dired-mark-symlinks @ (binding deleted)
7360 * DEL dired-unmark-backward DEL
7361 * ? dired-unmark-all-files C-M-?
7362 * ! dired-unmark-all-marks
7363 * % dired-mark-files-regexp % m
7364 * C-n dired-next-marked-file M-}
7365 * C-p dired-prev-marked-file M-{
7369 *** When Rmail cannot convert your incoming mail into Babyl format, it
7370 saves the new mail in the file RMAILOSE.n, where n is an integer
7371 chosen to make a unique name. This way, Rmail will not keep crashing
7372 each time you run it.
7374 *** In Rmail, the variable rmail-summary-line-count-flag now controls
7375 whether to include the line count in the summary. Non-nil means yes.
7377 *** In Rmail summary buffers, d and C-d (the commands to delete
7378 messages) now take repeat counts as arguments. A negative argument
7379 means to move in the opposite direction.
7381 *** In Rmail, the t command now takes an optional argument which lets
7382 you specify whether to show the message headers in full or pruned.
7384 *** In Rmail, the new command w (rmail-output-body-to-file) writes
7385 just the body of the current message into a file, without the headers.
7386 It takes the file name from the message subject, by default, but you
7387 can edit that file name in the minibuffer before it is actually used
7392 *** nntp.el has been totally rewritten in an asynchronous fashion.
7394 *** Article prefetching functionality has been moved up into
7397 *** Scoring can now be performed with logical operators like
7398 `and', `or', `not', and parent redirection.
7400 *** Article washing status can be displayed in the
7403 *** gnus.el has been split into many smaller files.
7405 *** Suppression of duplicate articles based on Message-ID.
7407 (setq gnus-suppress-duplicates t)
7409 *** New variables for specifying what score and adapt files
7410 are to be considered home score and adapt files. See
7411 `gnus-home-score-file' and `gnus-home-adapt-files'.
7413 *** Groups can inherit group parameters from parent topics.
7415 *** Article editing has been revamped and is now usable.
7417 *** Signatures can be recognized in more intelligent fashions.
7418 See `gnus-signature-separator' and `gnus-signature-limit'.
7420 *** Summary pick mode has been made to look more nn-like.
7421 Line numbers are displayed and the `.' command can be
7422 used to pick articles.
7424 *** Commands for moving the .newsrc.eld from one server to
7425 another have been added.
7427 `M-x gnus-change-server'
7429 *** A way to specify that "uninteresting" fields be suppressed when
7430 generating lines in buffers.
7432 *** Several commands in the group buffer can be undone with
7435 *** Scoring can be done on words using the new score type `w'.
7437 *** Adaptive scoring can be done on a Subject word-by-word basis:
7439 (setq gnus-use-adaptive-scoring '(word))
7441 *** Scores can be decayed.
7443 (setq gnus-decay-scores t)
7445 *** Scoring can be performed using a regexp on the Date header. The
7446 Date is normalized to compact ISO 8601 format first.
7448 *** A new command has been added to remove all data on articles from
7451 `M-x gnus-group-clear-data-on-native-groups'
7453 *** A new command for reading collections of documents
7454 (nndoc with nnvirtual on top) has been added -- `C-M-d'.
7456 *** Process mark sets can be pushed and popped.
7458 *** A new mail-to-news backend makes it possible to post
7459 even when the NNTP server doesn't allow posting.
7461 *** A new backend for reading searches from Web search engines
7462 (DejaNews, Alta Vista, InReference) has been added.
7464 Use the `G w' command in the group buffer to create such
7467 *** Groups inside topics can now be sorted using the standard
7468 sorting functions, and each topic can be sorted independently.
7470 See the commands under the `T S' submap.
7472 *** Subsets of the groups can be sorted independently.
7474 See the commands under the `G P' submap.
7476 *** Cached articles can be pulled into the groups.
7478 Use the `Y c' command.
7480 *** Score files are now applied in a more reliable order.
7482 *** Reports on where mail messages end up can be generated.
7484 `M-x nnmail-split-history'
7486 *** More hooks and functions have been added to remove junk
7487 from incoming mail before saving the mail.
7489 See `nnmail-prepare-incoming-header-hook'.
7491 *** The nnml mail backend now understands compressed article files.
7493 *** To enable Gnus to read/post multi-lingual articles, you must execute
7494 the following code, for instance, in your .emacs.
7496 (add-hook 'gnus-startup-hook 'gnus-mule-initialize)
7498 Then, when you start Gnus, it will decode non-ASCII text automatically
7499 and show appropriate characters. (Note: if you are using gnus-mime
7500 from the SEMI package, formerly known as TM, you should NOT add this
7501 hook to gnus-startup-hook; gnus-mime has its own method of handling
7504 Since it is impossible to distinguish all coding systems
7505 automatically, you may need to specify a choice of coding system for a
7506 particular news group. This can be done by:
7508 (gnus-mule-add-group NEWSGROUP 'CODING-SYSTEM)
7510 Here NEWSGROUP should be a string which names a newsgroup or a tree
7511 of newsgroups. If NEWSGROUP is "XXX.YYY", all news groups under
7512 "XXX.YYY" (including "XXX.YYY.ZZZ") will use the specified coding
7513 system. CODING-SYSTEM specifies which coding system to use (for both
7514 for reading and posting).
7516 CODING-SYSTEM can also be a cons cell of the form
7517 (READ-CODING-SYSTEM . POST-CODING-SYSTEM)
7518 Then READ-CODING-SYSTEM is used when you read messages from the
7519 newsgroups, while POST-CODING-SYSTEM is used when you post messages
7522 Emacs knows the right coding systems for certain newsgroups by
7523 default. Here are some of these default settings:
7525 (gnus-mule-add-group "fj" 'iso-2022-7)
7526 (gnus-mule-add-group "alt.chinese.text" 'hz-gb-2312)
7527 (gnus-mule-add-group "alt.hk" 'hz-gb-2312)
7528 (gnus-mule-add-group "alt.chinese.text.big5" 'cn-big5)
7529 (gnus-mule-add-group "soc.culture.vietnamese" '(nil . viqr))
7531 When you reply by mail to an article, these settings are ignored;
7532 the mail is encoded according to sendmail-coding-system, as usual.
7536 *** If you edit primarily one style of C (or C++, Objective-C, Java)
7537 code, you may want to make the CC Mode style variables have global
7538 values so that you can set them directly in your .emacs file. To do
7539 this, set c-style-variables-are-local-p to nil in your .emacs file.
7540 Note that this only takes effect if you do it *before* cc-mode.el is
7543 If you typically edit more than one style of C (or C++, Objective-C,
7544 Java) code in a single Emacs session, you may want to make the CC Mode
7545 style variables have buffer local values. By default, all buffers
7546 share the same style variable settings; to make them buffer local, set
7547 c-style-variables-are-local-p to t in your .emacs file. Note that you
7548 must do this *before* CC Mode is loaded.
7550 *** The new variable c-indentation-style holds the C style name
7551 of the current buffer.
7553 *** The variable c-block-comments-indent-p has been deleted, because
7554 it is no longer necessary. C mode now handles all the supported styles
7555 of block comments, with no need to say which one you will use.
7557 *** There is a new indentation style "python", which specifies the C
7558 style that the Python developers like.
7560 *** There is a new c-cleanup-list option: brace-elseif-brace.
7561 This says to put ...} else if (...) {... on one line,
7562 just as brace-else-brace says to put ...} else {... on one line.
7566 *** In vc-retrieve-snapshot (C-x v r), if you don't specify a snapshot
7567 name, it retrieves the *latest* versions of all files in the current
7568 directory and its subdirectories (aside from files already locked).
7570 This feature is useful if your RCS directory is a link to a common
7571 master directory, and you want to pick up changes made by other
7574 You can do the same thing for an individual file by typing C-u C-x C-q
7575 RET in a buffer visiting that file.
7577 *** VC can now handle files under CVS that are being "watched" by
7578 other developers. Such files are made read-only by CVS. To get a
7579 writable copy, type C-x C-q in a buffer visiting such a file. VC then
7580 calls "cvs edit", which notifies the other developers of it.
7582 *** vc-version-diff (C-u C-x v =) now suggests reasonable defaults for
7583 version numbers, based on the current state of the file.
7585 ** Calendar changes.
7587 *** A new function, list-holidays, allows you list holidays or
7588 subclasses of holidays for ranges of years. Related menu items allow
7589 you do this for the year of the selected date, or the
7590 following/previous years.
7592 *** There is now support for the Baha'i calendar system. Use `pb' in
7593 the *Calendar* buffer to display the current Baha'i date. The Baha'i
7594 calendar, or "Badi calendar" is a system of 19 months with 19 days
7595 each, and 4 intercalary days (5 during a Gregorian leap year). The
7596 calendar begins May 23, 1844, with each of the months named after a
7597 supposed attribute of God.
7601 There are some new user variables and subgroups for customizing the page
7604 *** Headers & Footers (subgroup)
7606 Some printer systems print a header page and force the first page to
7607 be printed on the back of the header page when using duplex. If your
7608 printer system has this behavior, set variable
7609 `ps-banner-page-when-duplexing' to t.
7611 If variable `ps-banner-page-when-duplexing' is non-nil, it prints a
7612 blank page as the very first printed page. So, it behaves as if the
7613 very first character of buffer (or region) were a form feed ^L (\014).
7615 The variable `ps-spool-config' specifies who is responsible for
7616 setting duplex mode and page size. Valid values are:
7618 lpr-switches duplex and page size are configured by `ps-lpr-switches'.
7619 Don't forget to set `ps-lpr-switches' to select duplex
7620 printing for your printer.
7622 setpagedevice duplex and page size are configured by ps-print using the
7623 setpagedevice PostScript operator.
7625 nil duplex and page size are configured by ps-print *not* using
7626 the setpagedevice PostScript operator.
7628 The variable `ps-spool-tumble' specifies how the page images on
7629 opposite sides of a sheet are oriented with respect to each other. If
7630 `ps-spool-tumble' is nil, ps-print produces output suitable for
7631 bindings on the left or right. If `ps-spool-tumble' is non-nil,
7632 ps-print produces output suitable for bindings at the top or bottom.
7633 This variable takes effect only if `ps-spool-duplex' is non-nil.
7634 The default value is nil.
7636 The variable `ps-header-frame-alist' specifies a header frame
7637 properties alist. Valid frame properties are:
7639 fore-color Specify the foreground frame color.
7640 Value should be a float number between 0.0 (black
7641 color) and 1.0 (white color), or a string which is a
7642 color name, or a list of 3 float numbers which
7643 correspond to the Red Green Blue color scale, each
7644 float number between 0.0 (dark color) and 1.0 (bright
7645 color). The default is 0 ("black").
7647 back-color Specify the background frame color (similar to fore-color).
7648 The default is 0.9 ("gray90").
7650 shadow-color Specify the shadow color (similar to fore-color).
7651 The default is 0 ("black").
7653 border-color Specify the border color (similar to fore-color).
7654 The default is 0 ("black").
7656 border-width Specify the border width.
7659 Any other property is ignored.
7661 Don't change this alist directly; instead use Custom, or the
7662 `ps-value', `ps-get', `ps-put' and `ps-del' functions (see there for
7665 Ps-print can also print footers. The footer variables are:
7666 `ps-print-footer', `ps-footer-offset', `ps-print-footer-frame',
7667 `ps-footer-font-family', `ps-footer-font-size', `ps-footer-line-pad',
7668 `ps-footer-lines', `ps-left-footer', `ps-right-footer' and
7669 `ps-footer-frame-alist'. These variables are similar to those
7670 controlling headers.
7672 *** Color management (subgroup)
7674 If `ps-print-color-p' is non-nil, the buffer's text will be printed in
7677 *** Face Management (subgroup)
7679 If you need to print without worrying about face background colors,
7680 set the variable `ps-use-face-background' which specifies if face
7681 background should be used. Valid values are:
7683 t always use face background color.
7684 nil never use face background color.
7685 (face...) list of faces whose background color will be used.
7687 *** N-up printing (subgroup)
7689 The variable `ps-n-up-printing' specifies the number of pages per
7692 The variable `ps-n-up-margin' specifies the margin in points (pt)
7693 between the sheet border and the n-up printing.
7695 If variable `ps-n-up-border-p' is non-nil, a border is drawn around
7698 The variable `ps-n-up-filling' specifies how the page matrix is filled
7699 on each sheet of paper. Following are the valid values for
7700 `ps-n-up-filling' with a filling example using a 3x4 page matrix:
7702 `left-top' 1 2 3 4 `left-bottom' 9 10 11 12
7706 `right-top' 4 3 2 1 `right-bottom' 12 11 10 9
7710 `top-left' 1 4 7 10 `bottom-left' 3 6 9 12
7714 `top-right' 10 7 4 1 `bottom-right' 12 9 6 3
7718 Any other value is treated as `left-top'.
7720 *** Zebra stripes (subgroup)
7722 The variable `ps-zebra-color' controls the zebra stripes grayscale or
7725 The variable `ps-zebra-stripe-follow' specifies how zebra stripes
7726 continue on next page. Visually, valid values are (the character `+'
7727 to the right of each column indicates that a line is printed):
7729 `nil' `follow' `full' `full-follow'
7730 Current Page -------- ----------- --------- ----------------
7731 1 XXXXX + 1 XXXXXXXX + 1 XXXXXX + 1 XXXXXXXXXXXXX +
7732 2 XXXXX + 2 XXXXXXXX + 2 XXXXXX + 2 XXXXXXXXXXXXX +
7733 3 XXXXX + 3 XXXXXXXX + 3 XXXXXX + 3 XXXXXXXXXXXXX +
7737 7 XXXXX + 7 XXXXXXXX + 7 XXXXXX + 7 XXXXXXXXXXXXX +
7738 8 XXXXX + 8 XXXXXXXX + 8 XXXXXX + 8 XXXXXXXXXXXXX +
7739 9 XXXXX + 9 XXXXXXXX + 9 XXXXXX + 9 XXXXXXXXXXXXX +
7742 -------- ----------- --------- ----------------
7743 Next Page -------- ----------- --------- ----------------
7744 12 XXXXX + 12 + 10 XXXXXX + 10 +
7745 13 XXXXX + 13 XXXXXXXX + 11 XXXXXX + 11 +
7746 14 XXXXX + 14 XXXXXXXX + 12 XXXXXX + 12 +
7747 15 + 15 XXXXXXXX + 13 + 13 XXXXXXXXXXXXX +
7748 16 + 16 + 14 + 14 XXXXXXXXXXXXX +
7749 17 + 17 + 15 + 15 XXXXXXXXXXXXX +
7750 18 XXXXX + 18 + 16 XXXXXX + 16 +
7751 19 XXXXX + 19 XXXXXXXX + 17 XXXXXX + 17 +
7752 20 XXXXX + 20 XXXXXXXX + 18 XXXXXX + 18 +
7755 -------- ----------- --------- ----------------
7757 Any other value is treated as `nil'.
7760 *** Printer management (subgroup)
7762 The variable `ps-printer-name-option' determines the option used by
7763 some utilities to indicate the printer name; it's used only when
7764 `ps-printer-name' is a non-empty string. If you're using the lpr
7765 utility to print, for example, `ps-printer-name-option' should be set
7768 The variable `ps-manual-feed' indicates if the printer requires manual
7769 paper feeding. If it's nil, automatic feeding takes place. If it's
7770 non-nil, manual feeding takes place.
7772 The variable `ps-end-with-control-d' specifies whether C-d (\x04)
7773 should be inserted at end of the generated PostScript. Non-nil means
7776 *** Page settings (subgroup)
7778 If variable `ps-warn-paper-type' is nil, it's *not* treated as an
7779 error if the PostScript printer doesn't have a paper with the size
7780 indicated by `ps-paper-type'; the default paper size will be used
7781 instead. If `ps-warn-paper-type' is non-nil, an error is signaled if
7782 the PostScript printer doesn't support a paper with the size indicated
7783 by `ps-paper-type'. This is used when `ps-spool-config' is set to
7786 The variable `ps-print-upside-down' determines the orientation for
7787 printing pages: nil means `normal' printing, non-nil means
7788 `upside-down' printing (that is, the page is rotated by 180 degrees).
7790 The variable `ps-selected-pages' specifies which pages to print. If
7791 it's nil, all pages are printed. If it's a list, list elements may be
7792 integers specifying a single page to print, or cons cells (FROM . TO)
7793 specifying to print from page FROM to TO. Invalid list elements, that
7794 is integers smaller than one, or elements whose FROM is greater than
7795 its TO, are ignored.
7797 The variable `ps-even-or-odd-pages' specifies how to print even/odd
7798 pages. Valid values are:
7800 nil print all pages.
7802 `even-page' print only even pages.
7804 `odd-page' print only odd pages.
7806 `even-sheet' print only even sheets.
7807 That is, if `ps-n-up-printing' is 1, it behaves like
7808 `even-page', but for values greater than 1, it'll
7809 print only the even sheet of paper.
7811 `odd-sheet' print only odd sheets.
7812 That is, if `ps-n-up-printing' is 1, it behaves like
7813 `odd-page'; but for values greater than 1, it'll print
7814 only the odd sheet of paper.
7816 Any other value is treated as nil.
7818 If you set `ps-selected-pages' (see there for documentation), pages
7819 are filtered by `ps-selected-pages', and then by
7820 `ps-even-or-odd-pages'. For example, if we have:
7822 (setq ps-selected-pages '(1 4 (6 . 10) (12 . 16) 20))
7824 and we combine this with `ps-even-or-odd-pages' and
7825 `ps-n-up-printing', we get:
7827 `ps-n-up-printing' = 1:
7828 `ps-even-or-odd-pages' PAGES PRINTED
7829 nil 1, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 20
7830 even-page 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 20
7831 odd-page 1, 7, 9, 13, 15
7832 even-sheet 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 20
7833 odd-sheet 1, 7, 9, 13, 15
7835 `ps-n-up-printing' = 2:
7836 `ps-even-or-odd-pages' PAGES PRINTED
7837 nil 1/4, 6/7, 8/9, 10/12, 13/14, 15/16, 20
7838 even-page 4/6, 8/10, 12/14, 16/20
7839 odd-page 1/7, 9/13, 15
7840 even-sheet 6/7, 10/12, 15/16
7841 odd-sheet 1/4, 8/9, 13/14, 20
7843 *** Miscellany (subgroup)
7845 The variable `ps-error-handler-message' specifies where error handler
7846 messages should be sent.
7848 It is also possible to add a user-defined PostScript prologue code in
7849 front of all generated prologue code by setting the variable
7850 `ps-user-defined-prologue'.
7852 The variable `ps-line-number-font' specifies the font for line numbers.
7854 The variable `ps-line-number-font-size' specifies the font size in
7855 points for line numbers.
7857 The variable `ps-line-number-color' specifies the color for line
7858 numbers. See `ps-zebra-color' for documentation.
7860 The variable `ps-line-number-step' specifies the interval in which
7861 line numbers are printed. For example, if `ps-line-number-step' is set
7862 to 2, the printing will look like:
7874 integer an integer specifying the interval in which line numbers are
7875 printed. If it's smaller than or equal to zero, 1
7878 `zebra' specifies that only the line number of the first line in a
7879 zebra stripe is to be printed.
7881 Any other value is treated as `zebra'.
7883 The variable `ps-line-number-start' specifies the starting point in
7884 the interval given by `ps-line-number-step'. For example, if
7885 `ps-line-number-step' is set to 3, and `ps-line-number-start' is set to
7886 3, the output will look like:
7900 The variable `ps-postscript-code-directory' specifies the directory
7901 where the PostScript prologue file used by ps-print is found.
7903 The variable `ps-line-spacing' determines the line spacing in points,
7904 for ordinary text, when generating PostScript (similar to
7907 The variable `ps-paragraph-spacing' determines the paragraph spacing,
7908 in points, for ordinary text, when generating PostScript (similar to
7911 The variable `ps-paragraph-regexp' specifies the paragraph delimiter.
7913 The variable `ps-begin-cut-regexp' and `ps-end-cut-regexp' specify the
7914 start and end of a region to cut out when printing.
7916 ** hideshow changes.
7918 *** now supports hiding of blocks of single line comments (like // for
7921 *** Support for java-mode added.
7923 *** When doing `hs-hide-all' it is now possible to also hide the comments
7924 in the file if `hs-hide-comments-when-hiding-all' is set.
7926 *** The new function `hs-hide-initial-comment' hides the comments at
7927 the beginning of the files. Finally those huge RCS logs don't stay in your
7928 way! This is run by default when entering the `hs-minor-mode'.
7930 *** Now uses overlays instead of `selective-display', so is more
7931 robust and a lot faster.
7933 *** A block beginning can span multiple lines.
7935 *** The new variable `hs-show-hidden-short-form' if t, directs hideshow
7936 to show only the beginning of a block when it is hidden. See the
7937 documentation for more details.
7939 ** Changes in Enriched mode.
7941 *** When you visit a file in enriched-mode, Emacs will make sure it is
7942 filled to the current fill-column. This behavior is now independent
7943 of the size of the window. When you save the file, the fill-column in
7944 use is stored as well, so that the whole buffer need not be refilled
7945 the next time unless the fill-column is different.
7947 *** use-hard-newlines is now a minor mode. When it is enabled, Emacs
7948 distinguishes between hard and soft newlines, and treats hard newlines
7949 as paragraph boundaries. Otherwise all newlines inserted are marked
7950 as soft, and paragraph boundaries are determined solely from the text.
7956 The variables font-lock-face-attributes, font-lock-display-type and
7957 font-lock-background-mode are now obsolete; the recommended way to specify the
7958 faces to use for Font Lock mode is with M-x customize-group on the new custom
7959 group font-lock-highlighting-faces. If you set font-lock-face-attributes in
7960 your ~/.emacs file, Font Lock mode will respect its value. However, you should
7961 consider converting from setting that variable to using M-x customize.
7963 You can still use X resources to specify Font Lock face appearances.
7965 *** Maximum decoration
7967 Fontification now uses the maximum level of decoration supported by
7968 default. Previously, fontification used a mode-specific default level
7969 of decoration, which is typically the minimum level of decoration
7970 supported. You can set font-lock-maximum-decoration to nil
7971 to get the old behavior.
7975 Support is now provided for Java, Objective-C, AWK and SIMULA modes.
7977 Note that Font Lock mode can be turned on without knowing exactly what modes
7978 support Font Lock mode, via the command global-font-lock-mode.
7980 *** Configurable support
7982 Support for C, C++, Objective-C and Java can be more easily configured for
7983 additional types and classes via the new variables c-font-lock-extra-types,
7984 c++-font-lock-extra-types, objc-font-lock-extra-types and, you guessed it,
7985 java-font-lock-extra-types. These value of each of these variables should be a
7986 list of regexps matching the extra type names. For example, the default value
7987 of c-font-lock-extra-types is ("\\sw+_t") which means fontification follows the
7988 convention that C type names end in _t. This results in slower fontification.
7990 Of course, you can change the variables that specify fontification in whatever
7991 way you wish, typically by adding regexps. However, these new variables make
7992 it easier to make specific and common changes for the fontification of types.
7994 *** Adding highlighting patterns to existing support
7996 You can use the new function font-lock-add-keywords to add your own
7997 highlighting patterns, such as for project-local or user-specific constructs,
8000 For example, to highlight `FIXME:' words in C comments, put:
8002 (font-lock-add-keywords 'c-mode '(("\\<FIXME:" 0 font-lock-warning-face t)))
8008 Font Lock now defines two new faces, font-lock-builtin-face and
8009 font-lock-warning-face. These are intended to highlight builtin keywords,
8010 distinct from a language's normal keywords, and objects that should be brought
8011 to user attention, respectively. Various modes now use these new faces.
8013 *** Changes to fast-lock support mode
8015 The fast-lock package, one of the two Font Lock support modes, can now process
8016 cache files silently. You can use the new variable fast-lock-verbose, in the
8017 same way as font-lock-verbose, to control this feature.
8019 *** Changes to lazy-lock support mode
8021 The lazy-lock package, one of the two Font Lock support modes, can now fontify
8022 according to the true syntactic context relative to other lines. You can use
8023 the new variable lazy-lock-defer-contextually to control this feature. If
8024 non-nil, changes to the buffer will cause subsequent lines in the buffer to be
8025 refontified after lazy-lock-defer-time seconds of idle time. If nil, then only
8026 the modified lines will be refontified; this is the same as the previous Lazy
8027 Lock mode behaviour and the behaviour of Font Lock mode.
8029 This feature is useful in modes where strings or comments can span lines.
8030 For example, if a string or comment terminating character is deleted, then if
8031 this feature is enabled subsequent lines in the buffer will be correctly
8032 refontified to reflect their new syntactic context. Previously, only the line
8033 containing the deleted character would be refontified and you would have to use
8034 the command M-g M-g (font-lock-fontify-block) to refontify some lines.
8036 As a consequence of this new feature, two other variables have changed:
8038 Variable `lazy-lock-defer-driven' is renamed `lazy-lock-defer-on-scrolling'.
8039 Variable `lazy-lock-defer-time' can now only be a time, i.e., a number.
8040 Buffer modes for which on-the-fly deferral applies can be specified via the
8041 new variable `lazy-lock-defer-on-the-fly'.
8043 If you set these variables in your ~/.emacs, then you may have to change those
8046 ** Ada mode changes.
8048 *** There is now better support for using find-file.el with Ada mode.
8049 If you switch between spec and body, the cursor stays in the same
8050 procedure (modulo overloading). If a spec has no body file yet, but
8051 you try to switch to its body file, Ada mode now generates procedure
8054 *** There are two new commands:
8055 - `ada-make-local' : invokes gnatmake on the current buffer
8056 - `ada-check-syntax' : check syntax of current buffer.
8058 The user options `ada-compiler-make', `ada-make-options',
8059 `ada-language-version', `ada-compiler-syntax-check', and
8060 `ada-compile-options' are used within these commands.
8062 *** Ada mode can now work with Outline minor mode. The outline level
8063 is calculated from the indenting, not from syntactic constructs.
8064 Outlining does not work if your code is not correctly indented.
8066 *** The new function `ada-gnat-style' converts the buffer to the style of
8067 formatting used in GNAT. It places two blanks after a comment start,
8068 places one blank between a word end and an opening '(', and puts one
8069 space between a comma and the beginning of a word.
8071 ** Scheme mode changes.
8073 *** Scheme mode indentation now uses many of the facilities of Lisp
8074 mode; therefore, the variables to customize it are the variables used
8075 for Lisp mode which have names starting with `lisp-'. The variables
8076 with names starting with `scheme-' which used to do this no longer
8079 If you want to use different indentation for Scheme and Lisp, this is
8080 still possible, but now you must do it by adding a hook to
8081 scheme-mode-hook, which could work by setting the `lisp-' indentation
8082 variables as buffer-local variables.
8084 *** DSSSL mode is a variant of Scheme mode, for editing DSSSL scripts.
8087 ** Changes to the emacsclient program
8089 *** If a socket can't be found, and environment variables LOGNAME or
8090 USER are set, emacsclient now looks for a socket based on the UID
8091 associated with the name. That is an emacsclient running as root
8092 can connect to an Emacs server started by a non-root user.
8094 *** The emacsclient program now accepts an option --no-wait which tells
8095 it to return immediately without waiting for you to "finish" the
8098 *** The new option --alternate-editor allows to specify an editor to
8099 use if Emacs is not running. The environment variable
8100 ALTERNATE_EDITOR can be used for the same effect; the command line
8101 option takes precedence.
8103 ** M-x eldoc-mode enables a minor mode in which the echo area
8104 constantly shows the parameter list for function being called at point
8105 (in Emacs Lisp and Lisp Interaction modes only).
8107 ** C-x n d now runs the new command narrow-to-defun,
8108 which narrows the accessible parts of the buffer to just
8111 ** Emacs now handles the `--' argument in the standard way; all
8112 following arguments are treated as ordinary file names.
8114 ** On MSDOS and Windows, the bookmark file is now called _emacs.bmk,
8115 and the saved desktop file is now called _emacs.desktop (truncated if
8118 ** When you kill a buffer that visits a file,
8119 if there are any registers that save positions in the file,
8120 these register values no longer become completely useless.
8121 If you try to go to such a register with C-x j, then you are
8122 asked whether to visit the file again. If you say yes,
8123 it visits the file and then goes to the same position.
8125 ** When you visit a file that changes frequently outside Emacs--for
8126 example, a log of output from a process that continues to run--it may
8127 be useful for Emacs to revert the file without querying you whenever
8128 you visit the file afresh with C-x C-f.
8130 You can request this behavior for certain files by setting the
8131 variable revert-without-query to a list of regular expressions. If a
8132 file's name matches any of these regular expressions, find-file and
8133 revert-buffer revert the buffer without asking for permission--but
8134 only if you have not edited the buffer text yourself.
8136 ** set-default-font has been renamed to set-frame-font
8137 since it applies only to the current frame.
8139 ** In TeX mode, you can use the variable tex-main-file to specify the
8140 file for tex-file to run TeX on. (By default, tex-main-file is nil,
8141 and tex-file runs TeX on the current visited file.)
8143 This is useful when you are editing a document that consists of
8144 multiple files. In each of the included files, you can set up a local
8145 variable list which specifies the top-level file of your document for
8146 tex-main-file. Then tex-file will run TeX on the whole document
8147 instead of just the file you are editing.
8151 RefTeX mode is a new minor mode with special support for \label, \ref
8152 and \cite macros in LaTeX documents. RefTeX distinguishes labels of
8153 different environments (equation, figure, ...) and has full support for
8154 multifile documents. To use it, select a buffer with a LaTeX document and
8155 turn the mode on with M-x reftex-mode. Here are the main user commands:
8158 Creates a label semi-automatically. RefTeX is context sensitive and
8159 knows which kind of label is needed.
8161 C-c ) reftex-reference
8162 Offers in a menu all labels in the document, along with context of the
8163 label definition. The selected label is referenced as \ref{LABEL}.
8165 C-c [ reftex-citation
8166 Prompts for a regular expression and displays a list of matching BibTeX
8167 database entries. The selected entry is cited with a \cite{KEY} macro.
8169 C-c & reftex-view-crossref
8170 Views the cross reference of a \ref or \cite command near point.
8173 Shows a table of contents of the (multifile) document. From there you
8174 can quickly jump to every section.
8176 Under X, RefTeX installs a "Ref" menu in the menu bar, with additional
8177 commands. Press `?' to get help when a prompt mentions this feature.
8178 Full documentation and customization examples are in the file
8179 reftex.el. You can use the finder to view the file documentation:
8180 C-h p --> tex --> reftex.el
8182 ** Changes in BibTeX mode.
8184 *** Info documentation is now available.
8186 *** Don't allow parentheses in string constants anymore. This confused
8187 both the BibTeX program and Emacs BibTeX mode.
8189 *** Renamed variable bibtex-mode-user-optional-fields to
8190 bibtex-user-optional-fields.
8192 *** Removed variable bibtex-include-OPTannote
8193 (use bibtex-user-optional-fields instead).
8195 *** New interactive functions to copy and kill fields and complete
8196 entries to the BibTeX kill ring, from where they can be yanked back by
8197 appropriate functions.
8199 *** New interactive functions for repositioning and marking of
8200 entries. They are bound by default to C-M-l and C-M-h.
8202 *** New hook bibtex-clean-entry-hook. It is called after entry has
8205 *** New variable bibtex-field-delimiters, which replaces variables
8206 bibtex-field-{left|right}-delimiter.
8208 *** New variable bibtex-entry-delimiters to determine how entries
8211 *** Allow preinitialization of fields. See documentation of
8212 bibtex-user-optional-fields, bibtex-entry-field-alist, and
8213 bibtex-include-OPTkey for details.
8215 *** Book and InBook entries require either an author or an editor
8216 field. This is now supported by bibtex.el. Alternative fields are
8217 prefixed with `ALT'.
8219 *** New variable bibtex-entry-format, which replaces variable
8220 bibtex-clean-entry-zap-empty-opts and allows specification of many
8221 formatting options performed on cleaning an entry (see variable
8224 *** Even more control on how automatic keys are generated. See
8225 documentation of bibtex-generate-autokey for details. Transcriptions
8226 for foreign languages other than German are now handled, too.
8228 *** New boolean user option bibtex-comma-after-last-field to decide if
8229 comma should be inserted at end of last field.
8231 *** New boolean user option bibtex-align-at-equal-sign to determine if
8232 alignment should be made at left side of field contents or at equal
8233 signs. New user options to control entry layout (e.g. indentation).
8235 *** New function bibtex-fill-entry to realign entries.
8237 *** New function bibtex-reformat to reformat region or buffer.
8239 *** New function bibtex-convert-alien to convert a BibTeX database
8242 *** New function bibtex-complete-key (similar to bibtex-complete-string)
8243 to complete prefix to a key defined in buffer. Mainly useful in
8246 *** New function bibtex-count-entries to count entries in buffer or
8249 *** Added support for imenu.
8251 *** The function `bibtex-validate' now checks current region instead
8252 of buffer if mark is active. Now it shows all errors of buffer in a
8253 `compilation mode' buffer. You can use the normal commands (e.g.
8254 `next-error') for compilation modes to jump to errors.
8256 *** New variable `bibtex-string-file-path' to determine where the files
8257 from `bibtex-string-files' are searched.
8259 ** Iso Accents mode now supports Latin-3 as an alternative.
8261 ** The command next-error now opens blocks hidden by hideshow.
8263 ** The function using-unix-filesystems has been replaced by the
8264 functions add-untranslated-filesystem and remove-untranslated-filesystem.
8265 Each of these functions takes the name of a drive letter or directory
8268 When a filesystem is added as untranslated, all files on it are read
8269 and written in binary mode (no cr/lf translation is performed).
8271 ** browse-url changes
8273 *** New methods for: Grail (browse-url-generic), MMM (browse-url-mmm),
8274 Lynx in a separate xterm (browse-url-lynx-xterm) or in an Emacs window
8275 (browse-url-lynx-emacs), remote W3 (browse-url-w3-gnudoit), generic
8276 non-remote-controlled browsers (browse-url-generic) and associated
8277 customization variables.
8279 *** New commands `browse-url-of-region' and `browse-url'.
8281 *** URLs marked up with <URL:...> (RFC1738) work if broken across
8282 lines. Browsing methods can be associated with URL regexps
8283 (e.g. mailto: URLs) via `browse-url-browser-function'.
8287 *** Clicking Mouse-2 on a brief command description in Ediff control panel
8288 pops up the Info file for this command.
8290 *** There is now a variable, ediff-autostore-merges, which controls whether
8291 the result of a merge is saved in a file. By default, this is done only when
8292 merge is done from a session group (eg, when merging files in two different
8295 *** Since Emacs 19.31 (this hasn't been announced before), Ediff can compare
8296 and merge groups of files residing in different directories, or revisions of
8297 files in the same directory.
8299 *** Since Emacs 19.31, Ediff can apply multi-file patches interactively.
8300 The patches must be in the context format or GNU unified format. (The bug
8301 related to the GNU format has now been fixed.)
8305 *** The startup file is now .viper instead of .vip
8306 *** All variable/function names have been changed to start with viper-
8308 *** C-\ now simulates the meta-key in all Viper states.
8309 *** C-z in Insert state now escapes to Vi for the duration of the next
8310 Viper command. In Vi and Insert states, C-z behaves as before.
8311 *** C-c \ escapes to Vi for one command if Viper is in Insert or Emacs states.
8312 *** _ is no longer the meta-key in Vi state.
8313 *** The variable viper-insert-state-cursor-color can be used to change cursor
8314 color when Viper is in insert state.
8315 *** If search lands the cursor near the top or the bottom of the window,
8316 Viper pulls the window up or down to expose more context. The variable
8317 viper-adjust-window-after-search controls this behavior.
8321 *** In C, C++, Objective C and Java, Etags tags global variables by
8322 default. The resulting tags files are inflated by 30% on average.
8323 Use --no-globals to turn this feature off. Etags can also tag
8324 variables which are members of structure-like constructs, but it does
8325 not by default. Use --members to turn this feature on.
8327 *** C++ member functions are now recognized as tags.
8329 *** Java is tagged like C++. In addition, "extends" and "implements"
8330 constructs are tagged. Files are recognised by the extension .java.
8332 *** Etags can now handle programs written in Postscript. Files are
8333 recognised by the extensions .ps and .pdb (Postscript with C syntax).
8334 In Postscript, tags are lines that start with a slash.
8336 *** Etags now handles Objective C and Objective C++ code. The usual C and
8337 C++ tags are recognized in these languages; in addition, etags
8338 recognizes special Objective C syntax for classes, class categories,
8339 methods and protocols.
8341 *** Etags also handles Cobol. Files are recognised by the extension
8342 .cobol. The tagged lines are those containing a word that begins in
8343 column 8 and ends in a full stop, i.e. anything that could be a
8346 *** Regexps in Etags now support intervals, as in ed or grep. The syntax of
8347 an interval is \{M,N\}, and it means to match the preceding expression
8348 at least M times and as many as N times.
8350 ** The format for specifying a custom format for time-stamp to insert
8351 in files has changed slightly.
8353 With the new enhancements to the functionality of format-time-string,
8354 time-stamp-format will change to be eventually compatible with it.
8355 This conversion is being done in two steps to maintain compatibility
8356 with old time-stamp-format values.
8358 In the new scheme, alternate case is signified by the number-sign
8359 (`#') modifier, rather than changing the case of the format character.
8360 This feature is as yet incompletely implemented for compatibility
8363 In the old time-stamp-format, all numeric fields defaulted to their
8364 natural width. (With format-time-string, each format has a
8365 fixed-width default.) In this version, you can specify the colon
8366 (`:') modifier to a numeric conversion to mean "give me the historical
8367 time-stamp-format width default." Do not use colon if you are
8368 specifying an explicit width, as in "%02d".
8370 Numbers are no longer truncated to the requested width, except in the
8371 case of "%02y", which continues to give a two-digit year. Digit
8372 truncation probably wasn't being used for anything else anyway.
8374 The new formats will work with old versions of Emacs. New formats are
8375 being recommended now to allow time-stamp-format to change in the
8376 future to be compatible with format-time-string. The new forms being
8377 recommended now will continue to work then.
8379 See the documentation string for the variable time-stamp-format for
8382 ** There are some additional major modes:
8384 dcl-mode, for editing VMS DCL files.
8385 m4-mode, for editing files of m4 input.
8386 meta-mode, for editing MetaFont and MetaPost source files.
8388 ** In Shell mode, the command shell-copy-environment-variable lets you
8389 copy the value of a specified environment variable from the subshell
8392 ** New Lisp packages include:
8394 *** battery.el displays battery status for laptops.
8396 *** M-x bruce (named after Lenny Bruce) is a program that might
8397 be used for adding some indecent words to your email.
8399 *** M-x crisp-mode enables an emulation for the CRiSP editor.
8401 *** M-x dirtrack arranges for better tracking of directory changes
8404 *** The new library elint.el provides for linting of Emacs Lisp code.
8405 See the documentation for `elint-initialize', `elint-current-buffer'
8408 *** M-x expand-add-abbrevs defines a special kind of abbrev which is
8409 meant for programming constructs. These abbrevs expand like ordinary
8410 ones, when you type SPC, but only at the end of a line and not within
8411 strings or comments.
8413 These abbrevs can act as templates: you can define places within an
8414 abbrev for insertion of additional text. Once you expand the abbrev,
8415 you can then use C-x a p and C-x a n to move back and forth to these
8416 insertion points. Thus you can conveniently insert additional text
8419 *** filecache.el remembers the location of files so that you
8420 can visit them by short forms of their names.
8422 *** find-func.el lets you find the definition of the user-loaded
8423 Emacs Lisp function at point.
8425 *** M-x handwrite converts text to a "handwritten" picture.
8427 *** M-x iswitchb-buffer is a command for switching to a buffer, much like
8428 switch-buffer, but it reads the argument in a more helpful way.
8430 *** M-x landmark implements a neural network for landmark learning.
8432 *** M-x locate provides a convenient interface to the `locate' program.
8434 *** M4 mode is a new mode for editing files of m4 input.
8436 *** mantemp.el creates C++ manual template instantiations
8437 from the GCC error messages which indicate which instantiations are needed.
8439 *** mouse-copy.el provides a one-click copy and move feature.
8440 You can drag a region with M-mouse-1, and it is automatically
8441 inserted at point. M-Shift-mouse-1 deletes the text from its
8442 original place after inserting the copy.
8444 *** mouse-drag.el lets you do scrolling by dragging Mouse-2
8447 You click the mouse and move; that distance either translates into the
8448 velocity to scroll (with mouse-drag-throw) or the distance to scroll
8449 (with mouse-drag-drag). Horizontal scrolling is enabled when needed.
8451 Enable mouse-drag with:
8452 (global-set-key [down-mouse-2] 'mouse-drag-throw)
8454 (global-set-key [down-mouse-2] 'mouse-drag-drag)
8456 *** mspools.el is useful for determining which mail folders have
8457 mail waiting to be read in them. It works with procmail.
8459 *** Octave mode is a major mode for editing files of input for Octave.
8460 It comes with a facility for communicating with an Octave subprocess.
8464 The ogonek package provides functions for changing the coding of
8465 Polish diacritic characters in buffers. Codings known from various
8466 platforms are supported such as ISO8859-2, Mazovia, IBM Latin2, and
8467 TeX. For example, you can change the coding from Mazovia to
8468 ISO8859-2. Another example is a change of coding from ISO8859-2 to
8469 prefix notation (in which `/a' stands for the aogonek character, for
8470 instance) and vice versa.
8472 To use this package load it using
8473 M-x load-library [enter] ogonek
8474 Then, you may get an explanation by calling one of
8475 M-x ogonek-jak -- in Polish
8476 M-x ogonek-how -- in English
8477 The info specifies the commands and variables provided as well as the
8478 ways of customization in `.emacs'.
8480 *** Interface to ph.
8482 Emacs provides a client interface to CCSO Nameservers (ph/qi)
8484 The CCSO nameserver is used in many universities to provide directory
8485 services about people. ph.el provides a convenient Emacs interface to
8488 *** uce.el is useful for replying to unsolicited commercial email.
8490 *** vcursor.el implements a "virtual cursor" feature.
8491 You can move the virtual cursor with special commands
8492 while the real cursor does not move.
8494 *** webjump.el is a "hot list" package which you can set up
8495 for visiting your favorite web sites.
8497 *** M-x winner-mode is a minor mode which saves window configurations,
8498 so you can move back to other configurations that you have recently used.
8502 Movemail no longer needs to be installed setuid root in order for POP
8503 mail retrieval to function properly. This is because it no longer
8504 supports the RPOP (reserved-port POP) protocol; instead, it uses the
8505 user's POP password to authenticate to the mail server.
8507 This change was made earlier, but not reported in NEWS before.
8509 * Emacs 20.1 changes for MS-DOS and MS-Windows.
8511 ** Changes in handling MS-DOS/MS-Windows text files.
8513 Emacs handles three different conventions for representing
8514 end-of-line: CRLF for MSDOS, LF for Unix and GNU, and CR (used on the
8515 Macintosh). Emacs determines which convention is used in a specific
8516 file based on the contents of that file (except for certain special
8517 file names), and when it saves the file, it uses the same convention.
8519 To save the file and change the end-of-line convention, you can use
8520 C-x RET f (set-buffer-file-coding-system) to specify a different
8521 coding system for the buffer. Then, when you save the file, the newly
8522 specified coding system will take effect. For example, to save with
8523 LF, specify undecided-unix (or some other ...-unix coding system); to
8524 save with CRLF, specify undecided-dos.
8526 * Lisp Changes in Emacs 20.1
8528 ** Byte-compiled files made with Emacs 20 will, in general, work in
8529 Emacs 19 as well, as long as the source code runs in Emacs 19. And
8530 vice versa: byte-compiled files made with Emacs 19 should also run in
8531 Emacs 20, as long as the program itself works in Emacs 20.
8533 ** Windows-specific functions and variables have been renamed
8534 to start with w32- instead of win32-.
8536 In hacker language, calling something a "win" is a form of praise. We
8537 don't want to praise a non-free Microsoft system, so we don't call it
8540 ** Basic Lisp changes
8542 *** A symbol whose name starts with a colon now automatically
8543 evaluates to itself. Therefore such a symbol can be used as a constant.
8545 *** The defined purpose of `defconst' has been changed. It should now
8546 be used only for values that should not be changed whether by a program
8549 The actual behavior of defconst has not been changed.
8551 *** There are new macros `when' and `unless'
8553 (when CONDITION BODY...) is short for (if CONDITION (progn BODY...))
8554 (unless CONDITION BODY...) is short for (if CONDITION nil BODY...)
8556 *** Emacs now defines functions caar, cadr, cdar and cddr with their
8557 usual Lisp meanings. For example, caar returns the car of the car of
8560 *** equal, when comparing strings, now ignores their text properties.
8562 *** The new function `functionp' tests whether an object is a function.
8564 *** arrayp now returns t for char-tables and bool-vectors.
8566 *** Certain primitives which use characters (as integers) now get an
8567 error if the integer is not a valid character code. These primitives
8568 include insert-char, char-to-string, and the %c construct in the
8571 *** The `require' function now insists on adding a suffix, either .el
8572 or .elc, to the file name. Thus, (require 'foo) will not use a file
8573 whose name is just foo. It insists on foo.el or foo.elc.
8575 *** The `autoload' function, when the file name does not contain
8576 either a directory name or the suffix .el or .elc, insists on
8577 adding one of these suffixes.
8579 *** string-to-number now takes an optional second argument BASE
8580 which specifies the base to use when converting an integer.
8581 If BASE is omitted, base 10 is used.
8583 We have not implemented other radices for floating point numbers,
8584 because that would be much more work and does not seem useful.
8586 *** substring now handles vectors as well as strings.
8588 *** The Common Lisp function eql is no longer defined normally.
8589 You must load the `cl' library to define it.
8591 *** The new macro `with-current-buffer' lets you evaluate an expression
8592 conveniently with a different current buffer. It looks like this:
8594 (with-current-buffer BUFFER BODY-FORMS...)
8596 BUFFER is the expression that says which buffer to use.
8597 BODY-FORMS say what to do in that buffer.
8599 *** The new primitive `save-current-buffer' saves and restores the
8600 choice of current buffer, like `save-excursion', but without saving or
8601 restoring the value of point or the mark. `with-current-buffer'
8602 works using `save-current-buffer'.
8604 *** The new macro `with-temp-file' lets you do some work in a new buffer and
8605 write the output to a specified file. Like `progn', it returns the value
8608 *** The new macro `with-temp-buffer' lets you do some work in a new buffer,
8609 which is discarded after use. Like `progn', it returns the value of the
8610 last form. If you wish to return the buffer contents, use (buffer-string)
8613 *** The new function split-string takes a string, splits it at certain
8614 characters, and returns a list of the substrings in between the
8617 For example, (split-string "foo bar lose" " +") returns ("foo" "bar" "lose").
8619 *** The new macro with-output-to-string executes some Lisp expressions
8620 with standard-output set up so that all output feeds into a string.
8621 Then it returns that string.
8623 For example, if the current buffer name is `foo',
8625 (with-output-to-string
8626 (princ "The buffer is ")
8627 (princ (buffer-name)))
8629 returns "The buffer is foo".
8631 ** Non-ASCII characters are now supported, if enable-multibyte-characters
8634 These characters have character codes above 256. When inserted in the
8635 buffer or stored in a string, they are represented as multibyte
8636 characters that occupy several buffer positions each.
8638 *** When enable-multibyte-characters is non-nil, a single character in
8639 a buffer or string can be two or more bytes (as many as four).
8641 Buffers and strings are still made up of unibyte elements;
8642 character positions and string indices are always measured in bytes.
8643 Therefore, moving forward one character can increase the buffer
8644 position by 2, 3 or 4. The function forward-char moves by whole
8645 characters, and therefore is no longer equivalent to
8646 (lambda (n) (goto-char (+ (point) n))).
8648 ASCII characters (codes 0 through 127) are still single bytes, always.
8649 Sequences of byte values 128 through 255 are used to represent
8650 non-ASCII characters. These sequences are called "multibyte
8653 The first byte of a multibyte character is always in the range 128
8654 through 159 (octal 0200 through 0237). These values are called
8655 "leading codes". The second and subsequent bytes are always in the
8656 range 160 through 255 (octal 0240 through 0377). The first byte, the
8657 leading code, determines how many bytes long the sequence is.
8659 *** The function forward-char moves over characters, and therefore
8660 (forward-char 1) may increase point by more than 1 if it moves over a
8661 multibyte character. Likewise, delete-char always deletes a
8662 character, which may be more than one buffer position.
8664 This means that some Lisp programs, which assume that a character is
8665 always one buffer position, need to be changed.
8667 However, all ASCII characters are always one buffer position.
8669 *** The regexp [\200-\377] no longer matches all non-ASCII characters,
8670 because when enable-multibyte-characters is non-nil, these characters
8671 have codes that are not in the range octal 200 to octal 377. However,
8672 the regexp [^\000-\177] does match all non-ASCII characters,
8675 *** The function char-boundary-p returns non-nil if position POS is
8676 between two characters in the buffer (not in the middle of a
8679 When the value is non-nil, it says what kind of character follows POS:
8681 0 if POS is at an ASCII character or at the end of range,
8682 1 if POS is before a 2-byte length multi-byte form,
8683 2 if POS is at a head of 3-byte length multi-byte form,
8684 3 if POS is at a head of 4-byte length multi-byte form,
8685 4 if POS is at a head of multi-byte form of a composite character.
8687 *** The function char-bytes returns how many bytes the character CHAR uses.
8689 *** Strings can contain multibyte characters. The function
8690 `length' returns the string length counting bytes, which may be
8691 more than the number of characters.
8693 You can include a multibyte character in a string constant by writing
8694 it literally. You can also represent it with a hex escape,
8695 \xNNNNNNN..., using as many digits as necessary. Any character which
8696 is not a valid hex digit terminates this construct. If you want to
8697 follow it with a character that is a hex digit, write backslash and
8698 newline in between; that will terminate the hex escape.
8700 *** The function concat-chars takes arguments which are characters
8701 and returns a string containing those characters.
8703 *** The function sref access a multibyte character in a string.
8704 (sref STRING INDX) returns the character in STRING at INDEX. INDEX
8705 counts from zero. If INDEX is at a position in the middle of a
8706 character, sref signals an error.
8708 *** The function chars-in-string returns the number of characters
8709 in a string. This is less than the length of the string, if the
8710 string contains multibyte characters (the length counts bytes).
8712 *** The function chars-in-region returns the number of characters
8713 in a region from BEG to END. This is less than (- END BEG) if the
8714 region contains multibyte characters (the length counts bytes).
8716 *** The function string-to-list converts a string to a list of
8717 the characters in it. string-to-vector converts a string
8718 to a vector of the characters in it.
8720 *** The function store-substring alters part of the contents
8721 of a string. You call it as follows:
8723 (store-substring STRING IDX OBJ)
8725 This says to alter STRING, by storing OBJ starting at index IDX in
8726 STRING. OBJ may be either a character or a (smaller) string.
8727 This function really does alter the contents of STRING.
8728 Since it is impossible to change the length of an existing string,
8729 it is an error if OBJ doesn't fit within STRING's actual length.
8731 *** char-width returns the width (in columns) of the character CHAR,
8732 if it were displayed in the current buffer and the selected window.
8734 *** string-width returns the width (in columns) of the text in STRING,
8735 if it were displayed in the current buffer and the selected window.
8737 *** truncate-string-to-width shortens a string, if necessary,
8738 to fit within a certain number of columns. (Of course, it does
8739 not alter the string that you give it; it returns a new string
8740 which contains all or just part of the existing string.)
8742 (truncate-string-to-width STR END-COLUMN &optional START-COLUMN PADDING)
8744 This returns the part of STR up to column END-COLUMN.
8746 The optional argument START-COLUMN specifies the starting column.
8747 If this is non-nil, then the first START-COLUMN columns of the string
8748 are not included in the resulting value.
8750 The optional argument PADDING, if non-nil, is a padding character to be added
8751 at the beginning and end the resulting string, to extend it to exactly
8752 WIDTH columns. If PADDING is nil, that means do not pad; then, if STRING
8753 is narrower than WIDTH, the value is equal to STRING.
8755 If PADDING and START-COLUMN are both non-nil, and if there is no clean
8756 place in STRING that corresponds to START-COLUMN (because one
8757 character extends across that column), then the padding character
8758 PADDING is added one or more times at the beginning of the result
8759 string, so that its columns line up as if it really did start at
8760 column START-COLUMN.
8762 *** When the functions in the list after-change-functions are called,
8763 the third argument is the number of bytes in the pre-change text, not
8764 necessarily the number of characters. It is, in effect, the
8765 difference in buffer position between the beginning and the end of the
8766 changed text, before the change.
8768 *** The characters Emacs uses are classified in various character
8769 sets, each of which has a name which is a symbol. In general there is
8770 one character set for each script, not for each language.
8772 **** The function charsetp tests whether an object is a character set name.
8774 **** The variable charset-list holds a list of character set names.
8776 **** char-charset, given a character code, returns the name of the character
8777 set that the character belongs to. (The value is a symbol.)
8779 **** split-char, given a character code, returns a list containing the
8780 name of the character set, followed by one or two byte-values
8781 which identify the character within that character set.
8783 **** make-char, given a character set name and one or two subsequent
8784 byte-values, constructs a character code. This is roughly the
8785 opposite of split-char.
8787 **** find-charset-region returns a list of the character sets
8788 of all the characters between BEG and END.
8790 **** find-charset-string returns a list of the character sets
8791 of all the characters in a string.
8793 *** Here are the Lisp facilities for working with coding systems
8794 and specifying coding systems.
8796 **** The function coding-system-list returns a list of all coding
8797 system names (symbols). With optional argument t, it returns a list
8798 of all distinct base coding systems, not including variants.
8799 (Variant coding systems are those like latin-1-dos, latin-1-unix
8800 and latin-1-mac which specify the end-of-line conversion as well
8801 as what to do about code conversion.)
8803 **** coding-system-p tests a symbol to see if it is a coding system
8804 name. It returns t if so, nil if not.
8806 **** file-coding-system-alist specifies which coding systems to use
8807 for certain file names. It works like network-coding-system-alist,
8808 except that the PATTERN is matched against the file name.
8810 Each element has the format (PATTERN . VAL), where PATTERN determines
8811 which file names the element applies to. PATTERN should be a regexp
8812 to match against a file name.
8814 VAL is a coding system, a cons cell containing two coding systems, or
8815 a function symbol. If VAL is a coding system, it is used for both
8816 decoding what received from the network stream and encoding what sent
8817 to the network stream. If VAL is a cons cell containing two coding
8818 systems, the car specifies the coding system for decoding, and the cdr
8819 specifies the coding system for encoding.
8821 If VAL is a function symbol, the function must return a coding system
8822 or a cons cell containing two coding systems, which is used as above.
8824 **** The variable network-coding-system-alist specifies
8825 the coding system to use for network sockets.
8827 Each element has the format (PATTERN . VAL), where PATTERN determines
8828 which network sockets the element applies to. PATTERN should be
8829 either a port number or a regular expression matching some network
8832 VAL is a coding system, a cons cell containing two coding systems, or
8833 a function symbol. If VAL is a coding system, it is used for both
8834 decoding what received from the network stream and encoding what sent
8835 to the network stream. If VAL is a cons cell containing two coding
8836 systems, the car specifies the coding system for decoding, and the cdr
8837 specifies the coding system for encoding.
8839 If VAL is a function symbol, the function must return a coding system
8840 or a cons cell containing two coding systems, which is used as above.
8842 **** process-coding-system-alist specifies which coding systems to use
8843 for certain subprocess. It works like network-coding-system-alist,
8844 except that the PATTERN is matched against the program name used to
8845 start the subprocess.
8847 **** The variable default-process-coding-system specifies the coding
8848 systems to use for subprocess (and net connection) input and output,
8849 when nothing else specifies what to do. The value is a cons cell
8850 (OUTPUT-CODING . INPUT-CODING). OUTPUT-CODING applies to output
8851 to the subprocess, and INPUT-CODING applies to input from it.
8853 **** The variable coding-system-for-write, if non-nil, specifies the
8854 coding system to use for writing a file, or for output to a synchronous
8857 It also applies to any asynchronous subprocess or network connection,
8858 but in a different way: the value of coding-system-for-write when you
8859 start the subprocess or connection affects that subprocess or
8860 connection permanently or until overridden.
8862 The variable coding-system-for-write takes precedence over
8863 file-coding-system-alist, process-coding-system-alist and
8864 network-coding-system-alist, and all other methods of specifying a
8865 coding system for output. But most of the time this variable is nil.
8866 It exists so that Lisp programs can bind it to a specific coding
8867 system for one operation at a time.
8869 **** coding-system-for-read applies similarly to input from
8870 files, subprocesses or network connections.
8872 **** The function process-coding-system tells you what
8873 coding systems(s) an existing subprocess is using.
8874 The value is a cons cell,
8875 (DECODING-CODING-SYSTEM . ENCODING-CODING-SYSTEM)
8876 where DECODING-CODING-SYSTEM is used for decoding output from
8877 the subprocess, and ENCODING-CODING-SYSTEM is used for encoding
8878 input to the subprocess.
8880 **** The function set-process-coding-system can be used to
8881 change the coding systems in use for an existing subprocess.
8883 ** Emacs has a new facility to help users manage the many
8884 customization options. To make a Lisp program work with this facility,
8885 you need to use the new macros defgroup and defcustom.
8887 You use defcustom instead of defvar, for defining a user option
8888 variable. The difference is that you specify two additional pieces of
8889 information (usually): the "type" which says what values are
8890 legitimate, and the "group" which specifies the hierarchy for
8893 Thus, instead of writing
8895 (defvar foo-blurgoze nil
8896 "*Non-nil means that foo will act very blurgozely.")
8898 you would now write this:
8900 (defcustom foo-blurgoze nil
8901 "*Non-nil means that foo will act very blurgozely."
8905 The type `boolean' means that this variable has only
8906 two meaningful states: nil and non-nil. Other type values
8907 describe other possibilities; see the manual for Custom
8908 for a description of them.
8910 The "group" argument is used to specify a group which the option
8911 should belong to. You define a new group like this:
8913 (defgroup ispell nil
8914 "Spell checking using Ispell."
8917 The "group" argument in defgroup specifies the parent group. The root
8918 group is called `emacs'; it should not contain any variables itself,
8919 but only other groups. The immediate subgroups of `emacs' correspond
8920 to the keywords used by C-h p. Under these subgroups come
8921 second-level subgroups that belong to individual packages.
8923 Each Emacs package should have its own set of groups. A simple
8924 package should have just one group; a more complex package should
8925 have a hierarchy of its own groups. The sole or root group of a
8926 package should be a subgroup of one or more of the "keyword"
8927 first-level subgroups.
8929 ** New `widget' library for inserting UI components in buffers.
8931 This library, used by the new custom library, is documented in a
8932 separate manual that accompanies Emacs.
8936 The easy-mmode package provides macros and functions that make
8937 developing minor modes easier. Roughly, the programmer has to code
8938 only the functionality of the minor mode. All the rest--toggles,
8939 predicate, and documentation--can be done in one call to the macro
8940 `easy-mmode-define-minor-mode' (see the documentation). See also
8941 `easy-mmode-define-keymap'.
8943 ** Text property changes
8945 *** The `intangible' property now works on overlays as well as on a
8948 *** The new functions next-char-property-change and
8949 previous-char-property-change scan through the buffer looking for a
8950 place where either a text property or an overlay might change. The
8951 functions take two arguments, POSITION and LIMIT. POSITION is the
8952 starting position for the scan. LIMIT says where to stop the scan.
8954 If no property change is found before LIMIT, the value is LIMIT. If
8955 LIMIT is nil, scan goes to the beginning or end of the accessible part
8956 of the buffer. If no property change is found, the value is the
8957 position of the beginning or end of the buffer.
8959 *** In the `local-map' text property or overlay property, the property
8960 value can now be a symbol whose function definition is a keymap. This
8961 is an alternative to using the keymap itself.
8963 ** Changes in invisibility features
8965 *** Isearch can now temporarily show parts of the buffer which are
8966 hidden by an overlay with a invisible property, when the search match
8967 is inside that portion of the buffer. To enable this the overlay
8968 should have a isearch-open-invisible property which is a function that
8969 would be called having the overlay as an argument, the function should
8970 make the overlay visible.
8972 During incremental search the overlays are shown by modifying the
8973 invisible and intangible properties, if beside this more actions are
8974 needed the overlay should have a isearch-open-invisible-temporary
8975 which is a function. The function is called with 2 arguments: one is
8976 the overlay and the second is nil when it should show the overlay and
8977 t when it should hide it.
8979 *** add-to-invisibility-spec, remove-from-invisibility-spec
8981 Modes that use overlays to hide portions of a buffer should set the
8982 invisible property of the overlay to the mode's name (or another symbol)
8983 and modify the `buffer-invisibility-spec' to include that symbol.
8984 Use `add-to-invisibility-spec' and `remove-from-invisibility-spec' to
8985 manipulate the `buffer-invisibility-spec'.
8986 Here is an example of how to do this:
8988 ;; If we want to display an ellipsis:
8989 (add-to-invisibility-spec '(my-symbol . t))
8990 ;; If you don't want ellipsis:
8991 (add-to-invisibility-spec 'my-symbol)
8994 (overlay-put (make-overlay beginning end) 'invisible 'my-symbol)
8997 ;; When done with the overlays:
8998 (remove-from-invisibility-spec '(my-symbol . t))
9000 (remove-from-invisibility-spec 'my-symbol)
9002 ** Changes in syntax parsing.
9004 *** The syntax-directed buffer-scan functions (such as
9005 `parse-partial-sexp', `forward-word' and similar functions) can now
9006 obey syntax information specified by text properties, if the variable
9007 `parse-sexp-lookup-properties' is non-nil.
9009 If the value of `parse-sexp-lookup-properties' is nil, the behavior
9010 is as before: the syntax-table of the current buffer is always
9011 used to determine the syntax of the character at the position.
9013 When `parse-sexp-lookup-properties' is non-nil, the syntax of a
9014 character in the buffer is calculated thus:
9016 a) if the `syntax-table' text-property of that character
9017 is a cons, this cons becomes the syntax-type;
9019 Valid values of `syntax-table' text-property are: nil, a valid
9020 syntax-table, and a valid syntax-table element, i.e.,
9021 a cons cell of the form (SYNTAX-CODE . MATCHING-CHAR).
9023 b) if the character's `syntax-table' text-property
9024 is a syntax table, this syntax table is used
9025 (instead of the syntax-table of the current buffer) to
9026 determine the syntax type of the character.
9028 c) otherwise the syntax-type is determined by the syntax-table
9029 of the current buffer.
9031 *** The meaning of \s in regular expressions is also affected by the
9032 value of `parse-sexp-lookup-properties'. The details are the same as
9033 for the syntax-directed buffer-scan functions.
9035 *** There are two new syntax-codes, `!' and `|' (numeric values 14
9036 and 15). A character with a code `!' starts a comment which is ended
9037 only by another character with the same code (unless quoted). A
9038 character with a code `|' starts a string which is ended only by
9039 another character with the same code (unless quoted).
9041 These codes are mainly meant for use as values of the `syntax-table'
9044 *** The function `parse-partial-sexp' has new semantics for the sixth
9045 arg COMMENTSTOP. If it is `syntax-table', parse stops after the start
9046 of a comment or a string, or after end of a comment or a string.
9048 *** The state-list which the return value from `parse-partial-sexp'
9049 (and can also be used as an argument) now has an optional ninth
9050 element: the character address of the start of last comment or string;
9051 nil if none. The fourth and eighth elements have special values if the
9052 string/comment is started by a "!" or "|" syntax-code.
9054 *** Since new features of `parse-partial-sexp' allow a complete
9055 syntactic parsing, `font-lock' no longer supports
9056 `font-lock-comment-start-regexp'.
9058 ** Changes in face features
9060 *** The face functions are now unconditionally defined in Emacs, even
9061 if it does not support displaying on a device that supports faces.
9063 *** The function face-documentation returns the documentation string
9064 of a face (or nil if it doesn't have one).
9066 *** The function face-bold-p returns t if a face should be bold.
9067 set-face-bold-p sets that flag.
9069 *** The function face-italic-p returns t if a face should be italic.
9070 set-face-italic-p sets that flag.
9072 *** You can now specify foreground and background colors for text
9073 by adding elements of the form (foreground-color . COLOR-NAME)
9074 and (background-color . COLOR-NAME) to the list of faces in
9075 the `face' property (either the character's text property or an
9078 This means that you no longer need to create named faces to use
9079 arbitrary colors in a Lisp package.
9081 ** Changes in file-handling functions
9083 *** File-access primitive functions no longer discard an extra redundant
9084 directory name from the beginning of the file name. In other words,
9085 they no longer do anything special with // or /~. That conversion
9086 is now done only in substitute-in-file-name.
9088 This makes it possible for a Lisp program to open a file whose name
9091 *** If copy-file is unable to set the date of the output file,
9092 it now signals an error with the condition file-date-error.
9094 *** The inode number returned by file-attributes may be an integer (if
9095 the number fits in a Lisp integer) or a list of integers.
9097 *** insert-file-contents can now read from a special file,
9098 as long as the arguments VISIT and REPLACE are nil.
9100 *** The RAWFILE arg to find-file-noselect, if non-nil, now suppresses
9101 character code conversion as well as other things.
9103 Meanwhile, this feature does work with remote file names
9104 (formerly it did not).
9106 *** Lisp packages which create temporary files should use the TMPDIR
9107 environment variable to decide which directory to put them in.
9109 *** interpreter-mode-alist elements now specify regexps
9110 instead of constant strings.
9112 *** expand-file-name no longer treats `//' or `/~' specially. It used
9113 to delete all the text of a file name up through the first slash of
9114 any `//' or `/~' sequence. Now it passes them straight through.
9116 substitute-in-file-name continues to treat those sequences specially,
9117 in the same way as before.
9119 *** The variable `format-alist' is more general now.
9120 The FROM-FN and TO-FN in a format definition can now be strings
9121 which specify shell commands to use as filters to perform conversion.
9123 *** The new function access-file tries to open a file, and signals an
9124 error if that fails. If the open succeeds, access-file does nothing
9125 else, and returns nil.
9127 *** The function insert-directory now signals an error if the specified
9128 directory cannot be listed.
9130 ** Changes in minibuffer input
9132 *** The functions read-buffer, read-variable, read-command, read-string
9133 read-file-name, read-from-minibuffer and completing-read now take an
9134 additional argument which specifies the default value. If this
9135 argument is non-nil, it should be a string; that string is used in two
9138 It is returned if the user enters empty input.
9139 It is available through the history command M-n.
9141 *** The functions read-string, read-from-minibuffer,
9142 read-no-blanks-input and completing-read now take an additional
9143 argument INHERIT-INPUT-METHOD. If this is non-nil, then the
9144 minibuffer inherits the current input method and the setting of
9145 enable-multibyte-characters from the previously current buffer.
9147 In an interactive spec, you can use M instead of s to read an
9148 argument in this way.
9150 *** All minibuffer input functions discard text properties
9151 from the text you enter in the minibuffer, unless the variable
9152 minibuffer-allow-text-properties is non-nil.
9154 ** Echo area features
9156 *** Clearing the echo area now runs the normal hook
9157 echo-area-clear-hook. Note that the echo area can be used while the
9158 minibuffer is active; in that case, the minibuffer is still active
9159 after the echo area is cleared.
9161 *** The function current-message returns the message currently displayed
9162 in the echo area, or nil if there is none.
9164 ** Keyboard input features
9166 *** tty-erase-char is a new variable that reports which character was
9167 set up as the terminal's erase character when time Emacs was started.
9169 *** num-nonmacro-input-events is the total number of input events
9170 received so far from the terminal. It does not count those generated
9173 ** Frame-related changes
9175 *** make-frame runs the normal hook before-make-frame-hook just before
9176 creating a frame, and just after creating a frame it runs the abnormal
9177 hook after-make-frame-functions with the new frame as arg.
9179 *** The new hook window-configuration-change-hook is now run every time
9180 the window configuration has changed. The frame whose configuration
9181 has changed is the selected frame when the hook is run.
9183 *** Each frame now independently records the order for recently
9184 selected buffers, in its buffer-list frame parameter, so that the
9185 value of other-buffer is now based on the buffers recently displayed
9186 in the selected frame.
9188 *** The value of the frame parameter vertical-scroll-bars
9189 is now `left', `right' or nil. A non-nil value specifies
9190 which side of the window to put the scroll bars on.
9192 ** X Windows features
9194 *** You can examine X resources for other applications by binding
9195 x-resource-class around a call to x-get-resource. The usual value of
9196 x-resource-class is "Emacs", which is the correct value for Emacs.
9198 *** In menus, checkboxes and radio buttons now actually work.
9199 The menu displays the current status of the box or button.
9201 *** The function x-list-fonts now takes an optional fourth argument
9202 MAXIMUM which sets a limit on how many matching fonts to return.
9203 A smaller value of MAXIMUM makes the function faster.
9205 If the only question is whether *any* font matches the pattern,
9206 it is good to supply 1 for this argument.
9208 ** Subprocess features
9210 *** A reminder: it is no longer necessary for subprocess filter
9211 functions and sentinels to do save-match-data, because Emacs does this
9214 *** The new function shell-command-to-string executes a shell command
9215 and returns the output from the command as a string.
9217 *** The new function process-contact returns t for a child process,
9218 and (HOSTNAME SERVICE) for a net connection.
9220 ** An error in running pre-command-hook or post-command-hook
9221 does clear the variable to nil. The documentation was wrong before.
9223 ** In define-key-after, if AFTER is t, the new binding now always goes
9224 at the end of the keymap. If the keymap is a menu, this means it
9225 goes after the other menu items.
9227 ** If you have a program that makes several changes in the same area
9228 of the buffer, you can use the macro combine-after-change-calls
9229 around that Lisp code to make it faster when after-change hooks
9232 The macro arranges to call the after-change functions just once for a
9233 series of several changes--if that seems safe.
9235 Don't alter the variables after-change-functions and
9236 after-change-function within the body of a combine-after-change-calls
9239 ** If you define an abbrev (with define-abbrev) whose EXPANSION
9240 is not a string, then the abbrev does not expand in the usual sense,
9241 but its hook is still run.
9243 ** Normally, the Lisp debugger is not used (even if you have enabled it)
9244 for errors that are handled by condition-case.
9246 If you set debug-on-signal to a non-nil value, then the debugger is called
9247 regardless of whether there is a handler for the condition. This is
9248 useful for debugging problems that happen inside of a condition-case.
9250 This mode of operation seems to be unreliable in other ways. Errors that
9251 are normal and ought to be handled, perhaps in timers or process
9252 filters, will instead invoke the debugger. So don't say you weren't
9255 ** The new variable ring-bell-function lets you specify your own
9256 way for Emacs to "ring the bell".
9258 ** If run-at-time's TIME argument is t, the action is repeated at
9259 integral multiples of REPEAT from the epoch; this is useful for
9260 functions like display-time.
9262 ** You can use the function locate-library to find the precise file
9263 name of a Lisp library. This isn't new, but wasn't documented before.
9265 ** Commands for entering view mode have new optional arguments that
9266 can be used from Lisp. Low-level entrance to and exit from view mode
9267 is done by functions view-mode-enter and view-mode-exit.
9269 ** batch-byte-compile-file now makes Emacs return a nonzero status code
9270 if there is an error in compilation.
9272 ** pop-to-buffer, switch-to-buffer-other-window and
9273 switch-to-buffer-other-frame now accept an additional optional
9274 argument NORECORD, much like switch-to-buffer. If it is non-nil,
9275 they don't put the buffer at the front of the buffer list.
9277 ** If your .emacs file leaves the *scratch* buffer non-empty,
9278 Emacs does not display the startup message, so as to avoid changing
9279 the *scratch* buffer.
9281 ** The new function regexp-opt returns an efficient regexp to match a string.
9282 The arguments are STRINGS and (optionally) PAREN. This function can be used
9283 where regexp matching or searching is intensively used and speed is important,
9284 e.g., in Font Lock mode.
9286 ** The variable buffer-display-count is local to each buffer,
9287 and is incremented each time the buffer is displayed in a window.
9288 It starts at 0 when the buffer is created.
9290 ** The new function compose-mail starts composing a mail message
9291 using the user's chosen mail composition agent (specified with the
9292 variable mail-user-agent). It has variants compose-mail-other-window
9293 and compose-mail-other-frame.
9295 ** The `user-full-name' function now takes an optional parameter which
9296 can either be a number (the UID) or a string (the login name). The
9297 full name of the specified user will be returned.
9299 ** Lisp packages that load files of customizations, or any other sort
9300 of user profile, should obey the variable init-file-user in deciding
9301 where to find it. They should load the profile of the user name found
9302 in that variable. If init-file-user is nil, meaning that the -q
9303 option was used, then Lisp packages should not load the customization
9306 ** format-time-string now allows you to specify the field width
9307 and type of padding. This works as in printf: you write the field
9308 width as digits in the middle of a %-construct. If you start
9309 the field width with 0, it means to pad with zeros.
9311 For example, %S normally specifies the number of seconds since the
9312 minute; %03S means to pad this with zeros to 3 positions, %_3S to pad
9313 with spaces to 3 positions. Plain %3S pads with zeros, because that
9314 is how %S normally pads to two positions.
9316 ** thing-at-point now supports a new kind of "thing": url.
9318 ** imenu.el changes.
9320 You can now specify a function to be run when selecting an
9321 item from menu created by imenu.
9323 An example of using this feature: if we define imenu items for the
9324 #include directives in a C file, we can open the included file when we
9325 select one of those items.
9327 * For older news, see the file ONEWS
9329 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
9330 Copyright information:
9332 Copyright (C) 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
9334 Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim copies
9335 of this document as received, in any medium, provided that the
9336 copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved,
9337 thus giving the recipient permission to redistribute in turn.
9339 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions
9340 of this document, or of portions of it,
9341 under the above conditions, provided also that they
9342 carry prominent notices stating who last changed them.
9346 paragraph-separate: "[
\f]*$"