Emacs NEWS.24

Table of Contents

GNU Emacs NEWS – history of user-visible changes.

Copyright (C) 2010-2023 Free Software Foundation, Inc. See the end of the file for license conditions.

Please send Emacs bug reports to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. If possible, use M-x report-emacs-bug.

This file is about changes in Emacs version 24.

See files NEWS.23, NEWS.22, NEWS.21, NEWS.20, NEWS.19, NEWS.18, and NEWS.1-17 for changes in older Emacs versions.

You can narrow news to a specific version by calling view-emacs-news with a prefix argument or by typing C-u C-h C-n.

1. Changes in Emacs 24.5

1.1. This is mainly a bug-fix release, but there are some other changes.

1.2. The default value of history-length has increased to 100.

1.3. The variable redisplay-dont-pause is obsolete.

2. Changes in Specialized Modes and Packages in Emacs 24.5

2.1. call-process-shell-command and process-file-shell-command no longer

take "&rest args".

2.2. The option browse-url-firefox-startup-arguments no longer has an effect.

2.3. ERC

2.3.1. New option 「erc-rename-buffers」.

2.3.2. New faces 「erc-my-nick-prefix-face」 and 「erc-nick-prefix-face」.

2.3.3. 'erc-format-@nick' displays all user modes instead of only op and voice.

2.3.4. The display of irc commands in the current buffer has been disabled.

2.3.5. 「erc-version」 now follows the Emacs version.

2.4. Obsolete packages

2.4.1. cc-compat.el

2.4.2. crisp.el (moved to elpa.gnu.org)

2.4.3. tpu-edt.el, ws-mode.el

These emulations of old editors are believed to be no longer relevant

  • contact emacs-devel@gnu.org if you disagree.

2.4.4. vi.el, vip.el (try M-x viper instead)

3. Installation Changes in Emacs 24.4

3.1. Emacs can now be compiled with ACL (access control list) support.

This happens by default if a suitable support library is found at build time, like libacl on GNU/Linux. To prevent this, use the configure option '–disable-acl'. See below for the features this provides.

3.2. Emacs can now be compiled with file notification support.

This happens by default if a suitable system library is found at build time. To prevent this, use the configure option '–without-file-notification'. See below for file-notify features. This feature is not available for the Nextstep port.

3.3. Emacs can now be compiled with zlib support.

This happens by default if zlib is present, which it normally is. To prevent this, use the configure option '–without-zlib'. This provides the function zlib-decompress-region; see below for details.

3.4. The configure option '–without-compress-info' has been generalized,

and renamed to '–without-compress-install'. It now prevents compression of any files during installation.

3.5. The configure option '–with-crt-dir' has been removed.

It is no longer needed, as the crt*.o files are no longer linked specially.

3.6. Directories passed to configure option '–enable-locallisppath' are

no longer created during installation.

3.7. Emacs for Nextstep (OS X, GNUstep) can be built with ImageMagick support.

This requires pkg-config to be available at build time.

4. Startup Changes in Emacs 24.4

4.1. When initializing load-path, an empty element in the EMACSLOADPATH

environment variable (either leading, e.g., ":/foo"; trailing, e.g., "/foo:"; or embedded, e.g., "/foo::/bar") is replaced with the default load-path (the one that would have been used if EMACSLOADPATH was unset). This makes it easier to extend the load-path via EMACSLOADPATH (previously, EMACSLOADPATH had to specify the complete load-path, including the defaults). (In older versions of Emacs, an empty element was replaced by ".", so use an explicit "." now if that is what you want.)

4.2. The -L option, which normally prepends its argument to load-path,

will instead append, if the argument begins with ':' (or ';' on MS Windows; i.e., path-separator).

4.3. If you use either site-load.el or site-init.el to customize the dumped

Emacs executable, any changes to load-path that these files make will no longer be present after dumping. To affect a permanent change to load-path, use the '–enable-locallisppath' option of 'configure'.

4.4. The user option initial-buffer-choice can now specify a function

to set up the initial buffer.

5. Changes in Emacs 24.4

5.1. Support for ACLs (access control lists).

This requires a suitable support library to be found at build time. On GNU/Linux, the POSIX ACL interface is used via libacl. On MS-Windows, the NT Security APIs are used to emulate the POSIX interface. ACLs are extended file attributes, used e.g. for finer-grained permissions.

5.1.1. Emacs preserves the ACL entries of files when backing up.

5.1.2. New functions file-acl and set-file-acl get and set file ACLs.

5.2. Support for menus on text-mode terminals.

If the terminal supports a mouse, clicking on the menu bar, or on sensitive portions of the mode line or header line, will drop down the menu defined at that position. Likewise, clicking C-mouse-1, C-mouse-2, or C-mouse-3 on the text area will pop up the menus defined for those locations.

If the text terminal does not support a mouse, you can activate the first menu-bar menu by typing F10, which invokes menu-bar-open.

If you want the previous behavior, where F10 invoked tmm-menubar, customize the option tty-menu-open-use-tmm to a non-nil value. (Typing M-` always invokes tmm-menubar, even if tty-menu-open-use-tmm is nil.)

5.3. New option load-prefer-newer affects how the 'load' function chooses

the file to load. If this is non-nil, then when both .el and .elc versions of a file exist, and the caller did not explicitly specify which one to load, then the newer file is loaded. The default, nil, means to always load the .elc file.

5.4. Multi-monitor support

5.4.1. New functions display-monitor-attributes-list and

frame-monitor-attributes can be used to obtain information about each physical monitor on multi-monitor setups.

5.4.2. The functions display-pixel-width and display-pixel-height now

behave consistently among the platforms: they return the pixel width or height for all physical monitors associated with the given display as if they were on X. To get information for each physical monitor, use the new functions above. Similar notes also apply to 'x-display-pixel-width', 'x-display-pixel-height', display-mm-width, display-mm-height, 'x-display-mm-width', and 'x-display-mm-height'.

5.5. New function zlib-decompress-region, which decompresses gzip- and

zlib-format compressed data using built-in zlib support (if available).

5.6. The Messages buffer is created in messages-buffer-mode,

a new major mode, with read-only status. Any code that might create the Messages buffer should call the function messages-buffer to do so and set up the mode.

5.7. The cursor stops blinking after 10 blinks (by default) on X and Nextstep.

You can change the default by customizing blink-cursor-blinks.

5.8. In keymaps where SPC scrolls forward, S-SPC now scrolls backward.

This affects View mode, etc.

5.9. The default value of make-backup-file-name-function is no longer nil.

Instead it defaults to a function that does what the nil value used to.

5.10. Help

5.10.1. The command apropos-variable is renamed to apropos-user-option.

apropos-user-option shows all user options, while apropos-variable shows all variables. When called with a universal prefix argument, the two commands swap their behaviors. When apropos-do-all is non-nil, they output the same results.

5.10.2. The key '?' now describes prefix bindings, like 【C-h】.

5.10.3. The command describe-function has been extended for EIEIO.

Running it on constructors will show a full description of the generated class. For generic functions, it will show all implementations together with links to the source. The old commands 「describe-class」, 「describe-constructor」 and 「describe-generic」 were removed.

5.10.4. The function 「quail-help」 is no longer an interactive command.

Use 'C-h C-\' (describe-input-method) instead.

5.11. Frame and window handling

5.11.1. New commands toggle-frame-fullscreen and toggle-frame-maximized,

bound to <f11> and M-<f10>, respectively.

5.11.2. New hooks focus-in-hook, focus-out-hook.

These are normal hooks run when an Emacs frame gains or loses input focus.

5.11.3. The function window-in-direction now takes additional arguments

for specifying a reference point, wrapping the selection around frame borders, and specifying ways to select the minibuffer window.

5.11.4. Emacs can now change frame sizes in units of pixels, rather than

text rows or columns. When maximizing a frame or making it fullscreen, remaining extra pixels are no longer given to the minibuffer, the rightmost fringe, or other unusable space, but are distributed among the text areas of the frame's windows. If the new option frame-resize-pixelwise is non-nil, all frame size changes happen pixelwise and set the corresponding size hints for the window manager.

5.11.5. Emacs can now change window sizes in units of pixels.

Mouse-dragging a mode line or window divider now changes the size of adjacent windows pixelwise. If the new option window-resize-pixelwise is non-nil, functions like balance-windows-area and fit-window-to-buffer resize windows pixelwise. Most functions for changing or accessing window sizes now have an additional argument that allows changes to apply, or values to be returned, in pixels instead of lines/columns.

5.11.6. The functions window-body-height and window-body-width now never

count partially visible lines or columns if called with a nil PIXELWISE argument.

5.11.7. Emacs can now draw dividers between adjacent windows. To put

dividers between side-by-side/vertically stacked windows customize the frame parameters 「right-divider-width」 and 「bottom-divider-width」 to some positive integer. You can drag dividers with the mouse (they show a corresponding cursor when the mouse hovers over them). You can change the appearance of dividers by customizing the faces 「window-divider」, 「window-divider-first-pixel」, and 「window-divider-last-pixel」. The last two are useful to provide a 3D effect, or to better distinguish dividers from surrounding display objects.

5.11.8. New functions to return the pixel sizes of window components, namely

window-scroll-bar-width, window-mode-line-height, window-header-line-height, window-right-divider-width, and window-bottom-divider-width.

5.11.9. The new function window-text-pixel-size returns the size of the

text of a window's buffer in pixels. This allows functions like fit-frame-to-buffer and fit-window-to-buffer to accurately fit a window to its buffer as it will be displayed.

5.11.10. fit-window-to-buffer can now resize windows in both dimensions.

This behavior is controlled by the new option fit-window-to-buffer-horizontally. The new option fit-frame-to-buffer allows you to fit the window's frame to its buffer.

5.11.11. fit-frame-to-buffer now fits frames in both dimensions. The new

options fit-frame-to-buffer-margins and fit-frame-to-buffer-sizes control the size of the frame and its position on screen.

5.11.12. Temp Buffer Resize Mode can now adjust the height and width of

windows and frames. The new option temp-buffer-max-width allows you to control the width of temporary buffer windows. Moreover, if the new option fit-frame-to-buffer is non-nil and the buffer appears in the root window of a frame, Temp Buffer Resize Mode will try to adjust the width and/or height of the frame.

5.11.13. split-window is now a non-interactive function, not a command.

As a command, it was a special case of 【C-x 2】 (split-window-below), and as such superfluous. After being reimplemented in Lisp, its interactive form was mistakenly retained.

5.11.14. The functions window-size and window-total-size now have an

optional argument to return a rounded size value.

5.11.15. window-state-put now allows you to put a window state into internal

windows too.

5.11.16. New option scroll-bar-adjust-thumb-portion.

Available only on X, this option allows you to control over-scrolling using the scroll bar (i.e., dragging the thumb down even when the end of the buffer is visible).

5.11.17. New display actions functions for display-buffer:

  1. display-buffer-at-bottom chooses or creates a window at the

    bottom of the selected frame.

  2. display-buffer-no-window to not display the buffer in a window.

5.11.18. New display action alist entry 「allow-no-window」 to indicate the

caller of display-buffer is ready to handle the case of not displaying the buffer in a window.

5.11.19. display-buffer-in-previous-window is now a member of

display-buffer-fallback-action.

5.12. Lisp evaluation

5.12.1. eval-defun on an already defined defcustom calls the :set function,

if there is one.

5.12.2. The commands eval-expression ('M-:'), eval-last-sexp ('C-x C-e'),

and eval-print-last-sexp (【C-j】 in Lisp Interaction mode) can take a zero prefix argument. This disables truncation of lists in the output, equivalent to setting '(eval-expression-)print-length' and '(eval-expression-)print-level' to nil. Additionally, it causes integers to be printed in other formats (octal, hexadecimal, and character).

5.12.3. New hook eval-expression-minibuffer-setup-hook run by

eval-expression on entering the minibuffer.

5.13. cache-long-line-scans is now non-nil, and renamed to cache-long-scans,

because it affects caching of paragraph scanning results as well. There is no reason to set this to nil except for debugging purposes.

5.14. emacs-bzr-version has been renamed to emacs-repository-version,

and works for git too, if you fetch the repository notes.

5.15. The default value of comment-use-global-state is now t,

and this variable has been marked obsolete.

5.16. write-region-inhibit-fsync now defaults to t in batch mode.

5.17. The option 「set-mark-default-inactive」 has been deleted.

This unfinished feature was introduced by accident in Emacs 23.1; simply disabling Transient Mark mode does the same thing.

6. Editing Changes in Emacs 24.4

6.1. Indentation

6.1.1. electric-indent-mode is now enabled by default.

Typing RET reindents the current line and indents the new line. 【C-j】 inserts a newline but does not indent. In some programming modes, additional characters are electric (eg '{').

6.1.2. New buffer-local electric-indent-local-mode.

6.1.3. The behavior of 【C-x TAB】 (indent-rigidly) has changed.

When invoked without a prefix argument, it now activates a transient mode in which typing <left>, <right>, <S-left>, and <S-right> adjusts the text indentation in the region. Typing any other key resumes normal editing behavior.

6.1.4. tab-stop-list is now implicitly extended to infinity by repeating

the last step. Its default value is changed to nil, which means a tab stop every tab-width columns.

6.2. Uniquify is enabled by default, with 「post-forward-angle-brackets」 style.

In other words, if you visit two files that have the same base name, then rather than creating buffers basename and basename<2>, Emacs uses basename<dirA> and basename<dirB>. To change this, customize uniquify-buffer-name-style. Set it to nil for the old behavior.

6.3. New command 【C-x SPC】 (rectangle-mark-mode) makes a rectangular region.

Most commands are still unaware of it, but kill/yank do work on the rectangle.

6.4. New option visual-order-cursor-movement.

If this is non-nil, cursor motion with arrow keys will follow the visual order of characters on the screen: <left> always moves to the left, <right> always moves to the right, disregarding the surrounding bidirectional context.

6.5. New command delete-duplicate-lines.

This searches the region for identical lines, and removes all but one copy of each repeated line. The lines need not be sorted.

6.6. New command cycle-spacing acts like a smarter just-one-space.

When called in succession, it cycles between spacing conventions: one space, no spaces, original spacing.

6.7. blink-matching-paren now only highlights the matching open-paren

by default, instead of moving the cursor. Set this variable to 'jump' to restore the old behavior.

6.8. The new function fill-single-char-nobreak-p can stop fill from breaking

a line after a one-letter word, which is an error in some typographical conventions. To use it, add it to the fill-nobreak-predicate hook.

6.9. Registers

6.9.1. All interactive commands that read a register (copy-to-register, etc.)

now display a temporary window after register-preview-delay seconds that summarizes existing registers. To disable this, set that option to nil. Interactive commands that read registers and want to make use of this should use register-read-with-preview to read register names.

6.9.2. New command frameset-to-register bound to 【C-x r f】, replacing

frame-configuration-to-register. It offers similar functionality, plus enhancements like the ability to restore deleted frames. (frame-configuration-to-register still exists, but no longer has a key binding.)

6.9.3. New command 'C-x C-k x' (「kmacro-to-register」) stores keyboard

macros in registers.

7. Changes in Specialized Modes and Packages in Emacs 24.4

7.1. Backtrace and debugger

7.1.1. New Lisp debugger command 'v' (「debugger-toggle-locals」) toggles the

display of local variables of the current stack frame.

7.1.2. The Lisp debugger's 'e' command (「debugger-eval-expression」) now includes

the lexical environment when evaluating the code in the context at point (and so allows you to access lexical variables).

7.1.3. New minor mode jit-lock-debug-mode helps you debug code run via JIT Lock.

7.2. Battery information can now be retrieved from BSD's 'apm' utility.

7.3. In the Buffer Menu, 'M-s a C-o' shows matches for a regexp in marked buffers.

7.4. Calc

7.4.1. Calc by default now uses the Gregorian calendar for all dates, and

uses January 1, 1 AD as its day number 1. Previously Calc used the Julian calendar for dates before September 14, 1752, and it used December 31, 1 BC as its day number 1; the new scheme is more consistent with Calendar's calendrical system and day numbering.

7.4.2. The new option 「calc-gregorian-switch」 lets you configure if

(and when) Calc switches from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar.

7.4.3. Support for ISO 8601 dates.

7.5. Calendar and Diary

7.5.1. New faces 「calendar-weekday-header」, 「calendar-weekend-header」,

and 「calendar-month-header」.

7.5.2. New option 「calendar-day-header-array」.

7.5.3. New variable 「diary-from-outlook-function」, used by the command

「diary-from-outlook」.

7.5.4. The variable 「calendar-font-lock-keywords」 is obsolete.

7.6. CEDET

7.6.1. EDE

  1. The cpp-root project now supports executing a compile command.

    It can be set through the new :compile-command slot or the buffer-local variable compile-command.

  2. Better selection of include directories for the 'linux' project.

    Include directories now support out-of-tree build directories and target architecture auto-detection.

7.6.2. Semantic

  1. Improved detection of used namespaces in current scope in C++.
  2. Parsing of default values for variables and function arguments in C/C++.

    They are also displayed by the summarize feature in the mode line.

  3. Improved parsing of function pointers in C/C++.

    This also includes parsing of function pointers as function arguments.

  4. Parsing of C/C++ preprocessor macros that open new scope.

    For example, this enables parsing of macros that open new namespaces.

  5. Support for 'this' pointer in inline member functions in C++.

7.7. CFEngine mode

7.7.1. Support for completion, ElDoc, and Flycheck has been added.

7.7.2. The current CFEngine syntax is parsed from "cf-promises -s json".

There is a fallback syntax available if you don't have cf-promises or if your version doesn't support that option. See option 「cfengine-cf-promises」.

7.8. cl-lib

7.8.1. New macro cl-tagbody.

This executes statements while allowing for control transfer to labels.

7.8.2. letf is now just an alias for cl-letf.

7.9. CUA mode

7.9.1. CUA mode now uses delete-selection-mode and shift-select-mode.

Hence, you can now enable it independently from those modes, and from transient-mark-mode.

7.9.2. 「cua-highlight-region-shift-only」 is now obsolete.

You can disable transient-mark-mode to get the same result.

7.9.3. CUA's rectangles can now be used without CUA by calling the command

cua-rectangle-mark-mode.

7.10. Delete Selection mode can now be used without Transient Mark mode.

7.11. Desktop

7.11.1. desktop-save-mode by default now auto-saves an existing desktop file

after desktop-auto-save-timeout. To disable this, customize that option to nil (or zero).

7.11.2. Desktop now saves and restores the frame/window configuration.

To disable this, set desktop-restore-frames to nil. See also related options 「desktop-restore-reuses-frames」, 「desktop-restore-in-current-display」, and 「desktop-restore-forces-onscreen」.

7.12. New Dired minor mode dired-hide-details-mode toggles whether details,

such as file ownership or permissions, are visible in Dired buffers. See the new options dired-hide-details-hide-symlink-targets and dired-hide-details-hide-information-lines for customizing what to hide.

7.13. You can enable ElDoc inside the eval-expression minibuffer with:

(add-hook 'eval-expression-minibuffer-setup-hook #'eldoc-mode) The results display in the mode line.

7.14. Electric Pair mode

7.14.1. New option electric-pair-preserve-balance, enabled by default.

If non-nil, pairing/skipping only kicks in when that help the balance of parentheses and quotes; i.e., the buffer should end up at least as balanced as before.

You can further control this behavior by adjusting the predicates stored in electric-pair-inhibit-predicate and electric-pair-skip-self.

7.14.2. New option electric-pair-delete-adjacent-pairs, enabled by default.

In electric-pair-mode, the commands backward-delete-char and backward-delete-char-untabify are now bound to electric variants that delete the closer when invoked between adjacent pairs.

7.14.3. New option electric-pair-open-newline-between-pairs, enabled by default.

In electric-pair-mode, inserting a newline between adjacent pairs opens an extra newline after point, which is indented if electric-indent-mode is also set.

7.14.4. New option electric-pair-skip-whitespace, enabled by default.

This controls if skipping over closing delimiters should jump over any whitespace slack. Setting it to 'chomp' makes it delete this whitespace. See also the variable electric-pair-skip-whitespace-chars.

7.14.5. New variables control the pairing in strings and comments.

You can customize electric-pair-text-pairs and electric-pair-text-syntax-table to tweak pairing behavior inside strings and comments.

7.15. New EPA option 「epa-mail-aliases」.

You can set this to a list of email address aliases that epa-mail-encrypt should use to find keys.

7.16. New ERC option 「erc-accidental-paste-threshold-seconds」.

If set to a number, this can be used to avoid accidentally pasting large amounts of data into the ERC input.

7.17. New ERT macro 「skip-unless」 allows skipping ERT tests.

7.18. Eshell

7.18.1. 'eshell' now supports visual subcommands and options.

Eshell has been able to handle "visual" commands (interactive, non-line oriented commands such as top that require display capabilities not provided by eshell) by running them in an Emacs terminal emulator. See 「eshell-visual-commands」.

This feature has been extended to subcommands and options that make a usually line-oriented command a visual command. Typical examples are "git log" and "git <command> –help", which display their output in a pager by default. See 「eshell-visual-subcommands」 and 「eshell-visual-options」.

7.18.2. New Eshell-Tramp module.

External su and sudo commands are now the default; the internal, Tramp-using variants can still be used by enabling the eshell-tramp module.

7.19. New F90 mode option 「f90-smart-end-names」.

7.20. New option 「gnutls-verify-error」, if non-nil, means that Emacs

should reject SSL/TLS certificates that GnuTLS determines as invalid. (This option defaults to nil at present, but this is expected to change in a future release.)

7.21. Hi-Lock

7.21.1. New global command 'M-s h .' (highlight-symbol-at-point) highlights

the symbol near point.

7.21.2. New option hi-lock-auto-select-face. When non-nil, hi-lock commands

will cycle through faces in hi-lock-face-defaults without prompting.

7.22. Icomplete is now more similar to Ido.

7.22.1. Icomplete by default now applies to all forms of minibuffer completion.

The variable icomplete-with-completion-tables (now a user option) controls this. To restore the old behavior, set it back to '(internal-complete-buffer).

7.22.2. You can navigate through and select completions using the keys

from icomplete-minibuffer-map.

7.22.3. The string that separates potential completions is now a customizable

option (icomplete-separator). The default is " | " rather than ",".

7.22.4. New face 「icomplete-first-match」; and new options

icomplete-hide-common-prefix and icomplete-show-matches-on-no-input.

7.22.5. The option 「icomplete-show-key-bindings」 has been removed.

7.23. Ido

7.23.1. An Ido user manual is now included.

7.23.2. The option 「ido-use-virtual-buffers」 can now take the value 'auto'.

This means to use virtual buffers if the current ido input does not match an existing buffer.

7.23.3. The variable 「ido-decorations」 can optionally have two new elements,

which are the brackets to use around the sole remaining completion.

7.24. Image mode

7.24.1. New commands 'n' (image-next-file) and 'p' (image-previous-file)

visit the next image file and the previous image file in the same directory, respectively.

7.24.2. New commands to show specific frames of multi-frame images.

'f' (image-next-frame) and 'b' (image-previous-frame) visit the next or previous frame. 'F' (image-goto-frame) shows a specific frame.

7.24.3. New commands to speed up, slow down, or reverse animation.

'a +' (image-increase-speed) and 'a -' (image-decrease-speed) to speed up and slow down the animation. 'a r' (image-reverse-speed) to reverse it and 'a 0' (image-reset-speed) to reset it.

7.24.4. The command image-mode-fit-frame deletes other windows.

When toggling, it restores the frame's previous window configuration. It also has an optional frame argument, which can be used by Lisp callers to fit the image to a frame other than the selected frame.

7.25. New Imenu option imenu-generic-skip-comments-and-strings.

7.26. Info

7.26.1. New Info face 「info-index-match」, used to highlight matches in index

entries displayed by 'Info-index-next', 'Info-virtual-index' and info-apropos.

7.26.2. The Info-edit command is obsolete. Editing Info nodes by hand

has not been relevant for some time.

7.27. JS Mode

7.27.1. New option js-switch-indent-offset.

7.27.2. Better indentation of multiple-variable declarations.

If a declaration spans several lines, variables on the following lines are lined up to the first one.

7.27.3. Recognition and better indentation of continuations in array comprehensions.

7.28. MH-E has been updated to version 8.6 - see separate MH-E-NEWS file.

7.29. Octave mode

7.29.1. Font locking for Texinfo comments and new keywords.

7.29.2. Completion in Octave file buffers.

7.29.3. ElDoc support.

7.29.4. Jump to definition.

7.29.5. Documentation lookup/search.

7.30. OPascal mode is the new name for Delphi mode

7.30.1. All delphi-* variables and functions have been renamed to opascal-*.

Obsolete aliases exist for those likely to have been used externally.

7.30.2. The option 「delphi-newline-always-indents」 has been removed.

Use electric-indent-mode instead.

7.30.3. The TAB key runs the standard indent-for-tab-command, not 「delphi-tab」.

7.31. Package

7.31.1. The package library now supports digital signing of packages.

Maintainers of package archives should consider signing their packages to enhance security.

  1. If the user option package-check-signature is non-nil,

    Emacs tries to check package signatures at install time. The value 「allow-unsigned」 allows installation of unsigned packages.

  2. The user option package-unsigned-archives lists archives where

    Emacs will not try to check signatures.

7.31.2. New option package-pinned-packages. This is useful if you have multiple

archives enabled, with more than one offering a given package that you want.

7.31.3. In the list-packages buffer, you can use 'f' (package-menu-filter)

to filter the list of packages by a keyword.

7.31.4. In the describe-package buffer, there are now buttons listing the

keywords related to the package. Click on a button to see other packages related to that keyword.

7.31.5. The format of 「archive-contents」 files, generated by package

repositories, has changed to allow a new (fifth) element in the data vectors, containing an association list with extra properties. (For example, describe-package uses the ':url' extra property to display a "Homepage" header.)

7.32. In Prolog mode, 「prolog-use-smie」 has been removed,

along with the non-SMIE indentation code.

7.33. Python mode

7.33.1. Out of the box support for CPython, iPython and readline based shells.

  1. 「python-shell-completion-module-string-code」 is no longer used.

7.33.2. Automatic shell prompt detection. New user options:

  1. 「python-shell-interpreter-interactive-arg」.
  2. 「python-shell-prompt-detect-enabled」.
  3. 「python-shell-prompt-detect-failure-warning」.
  4. 「python-shell-prompt-input-regexps」.
  5. 「python-shell-prompt-output-regexps」.

7.33.3. Python shell support for remote hosts via tramp.

7.33.4. Correct display of line numbers for code sent to the Python shell.

7.34. Remember

7.34.1. The new command remember-notes creates a buffer that is saved on exit.

You can use it as a more permanent scratch buffer.

7.34.2. Remember can now store notes in separate files.

To use this, add 「remember-store-in-files」 to the 「remember-handler-functions」 option. The files are saved in 「remember-data-directory」 using names specified by 「remember-directory-file-name-format」.

7.35. Rmail

7.35.1. Customize 「rmail-mbox-format」 to influence some minor aspects of

how Rmail displays non-MIME messages.

7.35.2. The 'unrmail' command now converts from BABYL to mboxrd format,

rather than mboxo. Customize 「unrmail-mbox-format」 to change this.

7.36. Ruby mode

7.36.1. Improved syntax highlighting and indentation.

7.36.2. New electric-indent-mode integration.

7.36.3. New option 「ruby-encoding-magic-comment-style」.

7.36.4. New option 「ruby-custom-encoding-magic-comment-template」.

7.36.5. New option 「ruby-align-to-stmt-keywords」.

7.36.6. New option 「ruby-align-chained-calls」.

7.36.7. More Ruby file types have been added to auto-mode-alist.

7.37. Search and Replace

7.37.1. New global command 'M-s .' (isearch-forward-symbol-at-point)

starts a symbol (identifier) incremental search forward with the symbol found near point added to the search string initially.

7.37.2. 【C-x 8 RET】 in Isearch mode reads a character by its Unicode name

and adds it to the search string.

7.37.3. 【M-s i】 in Isearch mode toggles whether search matches invisible text.

7.37.4. query-replace skips invisible text when search-invisible is nil,

and opens overlays with hidden text when search-invisible is 'open'.

7.37.5. A negative prefix argument of replacement commands replaces backward.

'M– M-%' replaces a string backward, 'M– C-M-%' replaces a regexp backward, 'M-s w words M– M-%' replaces a sequence of words backward.

7.37.6. By default, prefix arguments do not now terminate Isearch mode.

Set isearch-allow-prefix to nil to restore the old behavior.

7.37.7. More Isearch commands accept prefix arguments, namely

isearch-printing-char, isearch-quote-char, isearch-yank-word, isearch-yank-line.

7.37.8. Word search now matches whitespace at the beginning/end

of the search string if it contains leading/trailing whitespace. In an incremental word search or when using a non-nil LAX argument of word-search-regexp, the lax matching can also match part of the first word (in addition to the lax matching of the last word). The same rules are now applied to the symbol search, with the difference that it matches symbols, and non-symbol characters between symbols.

7.38. New SES command 「ses-rename-cell」 allows assignment of names to SES cells.

7.39. The shell.el option 「explicit-bash-args」 includes –noediting by default.

All non-ancient Bash versions support this option.

7.40. Shell Script mode

7.40.1. The SMIE indentation engine is now used by default - see 「sh-use-smie」.

7.40.2. sh-mode now has its own setting for add-log-current-defun-function.

7.41. SMIE

7.41.1. You can customize the SMIE indentation of a mode via 「smie-config」.

The command 「smie-config-guess」 can help you derive the appropriate indentation settings, if you provide it with an indented sample file. Use 「smie-config-save」 to save the result.

7.41.2. You can customize the SMIE indentation of a file by adding an entry to

the file's local variables of the form: 'eval: (smie-config-local '(RULES))'.

7.41.3. New commands 「smie-config-show-indent」 and 「smie-config-set-indent」.

7.42. SQL mode

7.42.1. Improved login monitoring and appropriate response to login failures.

New variable 「sql-login-delay」 defines maximum wait time for a connection.

7.42.2. Oracle support.

SQL*Plus script placeholders are properly highlighted and identified in 「sql-placeholders-filter」. When starting SQL*Plus, 「sql-oracle-options」 are passed before the logon parameter, as required. The default now includes '-L', to limit the number of logon attempts per invocation.

7.43. New Term mode option 「term-suppress-hard-newline」.

7.44. Todo mode has been rewritten and enhanced.

The Todo mode user manual describes all commands and most user options. To support some of these features, a new file format is used, which is incompatible with the old format; however, you can convert old todo and done item files to the new format on initializing the first new todo file, or at any later time with the provided conversion command. The previous version of todo-mode.el has been renamed to otodo-mode.el and is now obsolete. New features include:

7.44.1. Support for multiple todo files and archive files of done items.

7.44.2. Renaming, reordering, moving, merging, and deleting categories.

7.44.3. Sortable tabular summaries of categories and the item types they contain.

7.44.4. Cross-category lists of items filtered by specific criteria.

7.44.5. More fine-grained interaction with the Emacs diary, by being able to

decide for each todo item whether it appears in the Fancy Diary display.

7.44.6. Highly flexible new item insertion and item editing.

7.44.7. Moving items between categories, storing done items in their category

or in archive files, undoing or unarchiving done items.

7.44.8. Reprioritizing items by inputting a numerical priority.

7.44.9. Extensive customizability of operation and display, including many faces.

7.45. Trace

7.45.1. trace-function and trace-function-background no longer prompt for

the output buffer. Unless you use a prefix argument, they output to trace-buffer.

7.45.2. With a prefix argument, trace-function and trace-function-background

will prompt for a "context". This is a Lisp expression, whose value at the time the function is entered/exited is printed along with the function's name and arguments.

7.46. Tramp

7.46.1. New connection method "adb", which allows to access Android

devices by the Android Debug Bridge. The variable 「tramp-adb-program」 can be used to adapt the path of the "adb" program, if needed.

7.46.2. Handlers for file-acl and set-file-acl for remote machines

that support POSIX ACLs.

7.46.3. Handlers for file-notify-add-watch and file-notify-rm-watch

for remote machines that support filesystem notifications.

7.46.4. The experimental url syntax for remote file names has been removed.

7.46.5. The connection methods "plink1", "ssh1", "ssh2", "scp1", "scp2",

"scpc" and "rsyncc" are discontinued. The ssh option "ControlMaster=auto" is set automatically in all ssh-based methods, when possible. See 「tramp-use-ssh-controlmaster-options」.

7.47. New URL command url-cookie-list displays the current cookies,

and allows you to interactively remove cookies.

7.48. VC and related modes

7.48.1. In VC directory mode, 'D' displays diffs between VC-controlled

whole tree revisions.

7.48.2. In VC directory mode, 'L' lists the change log for the current VC

controlled tree in a window.

7.48.3. In VC directory mode, 'I' shows a log of changes that will be

received with a pull operation.

7.48.4. 【C-x v G】 (globally) and 'G' (in VC directory mode) ignores a file

under current version control system. When called with a prefix argument, you can remove a file from the ignored file list.

7.49. VHDL mode

7.49.1. New options: 「vhdl-actual-generic-name」, 「vhdl-beautify-options」.

7.49.2. New commands: 「vhdl-fix-statement-region」, 「vhdl-fix-statement-buffer」.

7.50. The Woman commands 「woman-default-faces」 and 「woman-monochrome-faces」

are obsolete. Customize the 'woman-*' faces instead.

7.51. More packages look for ~/.emacs.d/<foo> additionally to ~/.<foo>.

Affected files: ~/.emacs.d/timelog replaces ~/.timelog ~/.emacs.d/vip replaces ~/.vip ~/.emacs.d/viper replaces ~/.viper ~/.emacs.d/ido.last replaces ~/.ido.last ~/.emacs.d/kkcrc replaces ~/.kkcrc ~/.emacs.d/quickurls replaces ~/.quickurls ~/.emacs.d/idlwave/ replaces ~/.idlwave/ ~/.emacs.d/bdfcache.el replaces ~/.bdfcache.el ~/.emacs.d/places replaces ~/.emacs-places ~/.emacs.d/shadows replaces ~/.shadows ~/.emacs.d/shadowtodo replaces ~/.shadowtodo ~/.emacs.d/strokes replaces ~/.strokes ~/.emacs.d/notes replaces ~/.notes ~/.emacs.d/type-break replaces ~/.type-break Also the following files used by the now obsolete otodo-mode.el: ~/.emacs.d/todo-do replaces ~/.todo-do ~/.emacs.d/todo-done replaces ~/.todo-done ~/.emacs.d/todo-top replaces ~/.todo-top

7.52. Obsolete packages

7.52.1. iswitchb.el; use icomplete-mode.

7.52.2. longlines.el; use visual-line-mode.

7.52.3. meese.el.

7.52.4. sup-mouse.el.

7.52.5. terminal.el; use term.el instead.

7.52.6. the old version of todo-mode.el (renamed to otodo-mode.el).

7.52.7. xesam.el (owing to the cancellation of the XESAM project).

7.52.8. yow.el; use fortune.el or cookie1.el instead.

8. New Modes and Packages in Emacs 24.4

8.1. New package 'eww' provides a built-in web browser.

This requires Emacs to have been compiled with libxml2 support.

8.2. New package nadvice.el offers lighter-weight advice facilities.

It is layered as:

8.2.1. add-function/remove-function, which can be used to add/remove code on

any function-carrying place, such as process filters or '<foo>-function' hooks.

8.2.2. advice-add/advice-remove to add/remove a piece of advice on a named

function, much like 'defadvice' does.

8.3. New package frameset.el provides a set of operations to save a frameset

(the state of all or a subset of the existing frames and windows, somewhat similar to a frame configuration), both in-session and persistently, and restore it at some point in the future.

8.4. New package filenotify.el provides an interface for file system

notifications. It requires that Emacs be compiled with one of the low-level libraries gfilenotify.c, inotify.c or w32notify.c.

8.5. New minor modes prettify-symbols-mode and global-prettify-symbols-mode

display specified symbols as composed characters. E.g., in Emacs Lisp mode, this replaces the string "lambda" with the Greek lambda character.

8.6. New minor mode superword-mode, which overrides the default word motion

commands to treat "symbolwords" as a single word, similar to what subword-mode does.

9. Incompatible Lisp Changes in Emacs 24.4

9.1. The default file coding for Emacs Lisp files is now utf-8.

(See file-coding-system-alist.) In most cases, this change is transparent, but files that contain unusual characters without specifying an explicit coding system may fail to load with obscure errors. You should either convert them to utf-8 or add an explicit 'coding:' cookie.

9.2. Default process filters and sentinels are not nil any more.

Instead they default to a function that does what the nil value used to do.

9.3. Overlay priority does not have to be nil or a non-negative integer.

Overlay priority can be other kinds of Lisp objects. We didn't yet decide whether other types of values are stable enough, and therefore don't feel it's right to document them. For now, don't assume in your code that the values of overlay priority can only be either nil or an integer, always test them with an appropriate predicate to be one or the other. If you need to sort arbitrary overlays into priority order, overlays-at can now optionally do this. You should still only specify integer priorities on overlays you create.

9.4. The cars of the elements in interpreter-mode-alist are now

treated as regexps rather than literal strings.

9.5. overriding-terminal-local-map no longer replaces the local keymaps.

It used to disable the minor mode, major mode, and text-property keymaps, whereas now it simply has higher precedence.

9.6. kill-region has lost its 「yank-handler」 optional argument.

9.7. '(input-pending-p)' no longer runs other timers that are ready to run.

The new optional CHECK-TIMERS parameter allows for the prior behavior.

9.8. 'defvar' and 'defcustom' in a let-binding affect the "external" default.

9.9. The syntax of ?» and ?« is now punctuation instead of matched parens.

Some languages match those as »…«, and others as «…», so it is better for Emacs to stay neutral by default.

9.10. read-event does not always decode chars in ttys any more. As was the case

in Emacs 22 and before, read-event (and read-char) by default read raw bytes from the terminal. If you want to read decoded chars instead (as was always the case in Emacs-23, for example), pass a non-nil 「inherit-input-method」 argument.

9.11. In symbol-function, nil and "unbound" are indistinguishable.

symbol-function does not signal a 「void-function」 error any more. To determine if a symbol's function definition is void, use 'fboundp'.

9.12. 'defadvice' does not honor the 'freeze' flag and cannot advise

special-forms any more.

9.13. 'dolist' no longer binds VAR while evaluating the RESULT form,

when lexical binding is enabled. Previously, VAR was bound to nil, which often led to spurious unused-variable warnings.

9.14. The return value of backup-buffer has changed.

The second argument is no longer an SELinux context, instead it is an alist of extended attributes as returned by the new function file-extended-attributes. The attributes can be applied to another file using set-file-extended-attributes.

9.15. By default copy-file no longer copies file permission bits to an

existing destination; and it sets the file permission bits of a newly created destination to those of the source, masked by the default file permissions. To copy the file permission bits, pass t as the PRESERVE-PERMISSIONS argument of copy-file.

9.16. visited-file-modtime now returns -1 for nonexistent files.

Formerly it returned a list (-1 LOW USEC PSEC), but this was ambiguous in the presence of files with negative time stamps.

9.17. Frame-local variables that affect redisplay do not work any more.

More specifically, redisplay does not bother to check for a frame-local value when looking up variables.

9.18. In compiled Lisp files, the header no longer includes a timestamp.

9.19. The option 「inhibit-local-menu-bar-menus」 has been removed.

10. Lisp Changes in Emacs 24.4

10.1. Change to the Emacs Lisp coding conventions: the package descriptor

and name of global variables, constants, and functions should be separated by two hyphens if the symbol is not meant to be used by other packages.

10.2. The second argument of 'eval' can now specify a lexical environment.

10.3. New macro define-alternatives can be used to define generic commands.

Generic commands are interactive functions whose implementation can be selected among several alternatives, as a matter of user preference.

10.4. Numeric comparison functions , <, >, <, >= can now take many arguments.

10.5. New functions special-form-p and 'macrop'.

10.6. New macro with-eval-after-load.

This is like the old eval-after-load, but better behaved.

10.7. If you give a symbol a 「defalias-fset-function」 property, 'defalias'

on that symbol will use the associated value as a function to call in place of 'fset'.

10.8. New variable enable-dir-local-variables.

Directory-local variables are ignored if this is nil. This may be useful for modes that want to ignore directory-locals while still respecting file-local variables.

10.9. read-regexp now uses the new variable read-regexp-defaults-function

as a function to call to provide default values.

10.10. New functions group-gid and group-real-gid.

10.11. New function get-pos-property.

10.12. New hook pre-redisplay-function.

10.13. byte-compile-interactive-only-functions is now obsolete.

To specify that a command should only be called interactively, give it a non-nil 「interactive-only」 property.

10.14. New function string-suffix-p.

10.15. split-string now takes an optional argument TRIM.

The value, if non-nil, is a regexp that specifies what to trim from the start and end of each substring.

10.16. New function delete-consecutive-dups.

10.17. Completion

10.17.1. The separator used by completing-read-multiple is now a regexp.

The default 「crm-separator」 has been changed to allow surrounding spaces around the comma.

10.17.2. New function completion-table-with-cache is a wrapper for

completion-table-dynamic that caches the result of the last lookup.

10.17.3. New function completion-table-merge to combine several

completion tables by merging their completions.

10.17.4. The 「common-substring」 argument of display-completion-list,

which has been documented as obsolete since Emacs 23.1, is now really obsolete, and no longer advertised. Instead either call completion-hilit-commonality to add the highlighting; or use completion-all-completions, which returns highlighted strings.

10.18. Encoding and decoding of text

10.18.1. New coding-system 「prefer-utf-8」.

This is like 'undecided' but prefers UTF-8 on decoding if the text to be decoded does not contain any invalid UTF-8 sequences. On encoding, any non-ASCII characters are automatically encoded as UTF-8.

10.18.2. New attributes of coding-systems whose type is 'undecided'.

Two new attributes, ':inhibit-null-byte-detection' and ':inhibit-iso-escape-detection', determine how to detect encoding of text that includes null bytes and ISO-2022 escape sequences, respectively. Each of these attributes can be either nil, zero, or t. If t, decoding text ignores null bytes and ISO-2022 sequences, respectively. If nil, null bytes cause text to be decoded with no-conversion, and ISO-2022 sequences cause Emacs to assume the text is encoded in one of the ISO-2022 encodings, such as iso-2022-7bit. If zero, Emacs consults the variables inhibit-null-byte-detection and inhibit-iso-escape-detection. The new attribute ':prefer-utf-8', if non-nil, causes Emacs to prefer UTF-8 encoding and decoding, whenever possible.

These attributes are only meaningful for coding-systems of type 'undecided'. (The type of a coding-system is determined by its ':coding-type' attribute and can be accessed by calling the coding-system-type function.)

10.19. Error-handling

10.19.1. New function define-error.

10.19.2. with-demoted-errors takes an additional argument 'format'.

10.19.3. Errors from timer functions are no longer silently discarded,

but are reported as messages. So you may see "Error running timer" messages from code that was failing silently till now. Set debug-on-error non-nil to get a real error and a backtrace.

10.20. Faces

10.20.1. Face specs set via Custom themes now replace the 'defface' spec

rather than inheriting from it. In other words, setting a face via a theme now behaves like setting it via Customize: you only need to specify the attributes that you want, you don't need to unset those that you don't want.

10.20.2. The function face-spec-set is now like 'setq' for face specs.

Its third arg now accepts values specifying a face spec type (defface, custom, or override spec), and the relevant spec is set accordingly.

10.20.3. New face spec attribute :distant-foreground

specifies foreground to use if background color is near the foreground color that would otherwise have been used.

10.20.4. New function add-face-text-property, which can be used to

conveniently prepend/append new face properties.

10.20.5. New face characteristic (supports :underline (:style wave))

specifies whether or not the terminal can display a wavy line.

10.21. File-handling

10.21.1. Support for filesystem notifications.

Emacs now supports notifications of filesystem changes, such as creation, modification, and deletion of files. This requires the 'glib' API, or the 'inotify' API (on GNU/Linux systems only). On MS-Windows systems, this is supported for Windows XP and newer.

10.21.2. The 9th element returned by file-attributes is now unspecified.

Formerly, it was t if the file's gid would change if file were deleted and recreated. This value has been inaccurate for years on many platforms, and nobody seems to have noticed or cared.

10.21.3. The 6th argument to copy-file has been renamed to

PRESERVE-PERMISSIONS as it now handles ACL entries and the traditional Unix file permission bits as well as SELinux context.

10.21.4. The function file-ownership-preserved-p now has an optional

argument GROUP which causes it check for file group too. This can be used in place of the 9th element of file-attributes.

10.21.5. The function set-visited-file-modtime now accepts a 0 or -1 argument,

with the same interpretation as the returned value of visited-file-modtime.

10.22. Image API

10.22.1. image-animated-p is now image-multi-frame-p.

It returns non-nil for any image that contains multiple frames, whether or not it specifies a frame delay.

10.22.2. New variable image-default-frame-delay gives the frame delay for

animated images which do not specify a frame delay.

10.22.3. New functions image-current-frame and image-show-frame for getting

and setting the current frame of a multi-frame image.

10.23. ImageMagick

10.23.1. ImageMagick images now support the :max-width and :max-height keywords.

10.23.2. When using create-image with image data, you can pass a :format

attribute (via the property-list argument) in order to help ImageMagick detect the image type. The value should be a MIME content-type that is found in the new variable image-format-suffixes.

10.24. Revert and Autorevert

10.24.1. If Emacs is compiled with file notification support, it uses notifications

instead of checking file time stamps. To disable this, set the user option auto-revert-use-notify to nil. Alternatively, you can specify a regular expression matching directories to be excluded from file notifications via auto-revert-notify-exclude-dir-regexp.

10.24.2. The default values of buffer-stale-function, revert-buffer-function,

and revert-buffer-insert-file-contents-function are no longer nil. Instead they default to functions that do what the nil value used to.

10.24.3. buffer-stale-function is now used for buffers visiting files too.

10.24.4. The new user option auto-revert-remote-files enables reversion

of remote files, if non-nil.

10.25. Terminal

10.25.1. Functions to pop up menus and dialogs now work on all terminals,

including TTYs. This includes 'x-popup-menu', 'x-popup-dialog', message-box, yes-or-no-p, etc.

The function display-popup-menus-p will now return non-nil for a display or frame whenever a mouse is supported on that display or frame.

10.25.2. New hook tty-setup-hook, run at the end of initializing a text terminal.

10.25.3. The hook term-setup-hook is obsolete. It is entirely equivalent

to emacs-startup-hook. See also the new tty-setup-hook.

10.26. Minor internal changes to the details of lock files.

The lock for DIR/FILE is now always DIR/.#FILE. If DIR/.#FILE already exists and is not an Emacs lock file, Emacs makes no attempt to lock DIR/FILE. (Previously, it fell back to numbered lock files DIR/.#FILE.0…). On file systems that do not support symbolic links, the lock is now a regular file with contents being what would have been in the symlink.

10.27. New bool-vector set operation functions:

10.27.1. bool-vector-exclusive-or

10.27.2. bool-vector-union

10.27.3. bool-vector-intersection

10.27.4. bool-vector-set-difference

10.27.5. bool-vector-not

10.27.6. bool-vector-subsetp

10.27.7. bool-vector-count-consecutive

10.27.8. bool-vector-count-population

10.28. New library subr-x.el with miscellaneous small utility functions:

10.28.1. hash-table-keys

10.28.2. hash-table-values

10.28.3. string-blank-p

10.28.4. string-empty-p

10.28.5. string-join

10.28.6. string-reverse

10.28.7. string-trim-left

10.28.8. string-trim-right

10.28.9. string-trim

10.28.10. string-remove-prefix

10.28.11. string-remove-suffix

10.29. The time-to-seconds alias to float-time is no longer marked obsolete.

10.30. The spelling of the rx.el category 「chinese-two-byte」 has been

corrected (the first 'e' was missing).

10.31. EIEIO namespace cleanup, obsolete-aliasing functions to use 'eieio-' prefix:

10.31.1. object-name -> eieio-object-name

10.31.2. object-class -> eieio-object-class

10.31.3. object-class-fast -> eieio–object-class

10.31.4. object-class-name -> eieio-object-class-name

10.31.5. object-name-string -> eieio-object-name-string

10.31.6. object-num-slots -> eieio–object-num-slots

10.31.7. object-set-name-string -> eieio-object-set-name-string

10.31.8. class-of -> eieio-object-class

10.31.9. class-name -> eieio-class-name

10.31.10. class-parent -> eieio-class-parent

10.31.11. class-parents -> eieio-class-parents

10.31.12. class-parents-fast -> eieio-class-parents-fast

10.31.13. class-children -> eieio-class-children

10.31.14. class-num-slots -> eieio–class-num-slots

10.31.15. class-precedence-list -> eieio-class-precedence-list

10.31.16. class-direct-subclasses -> eieio-class-children

10.31.17. class-direct-superclasses -> eieio-class-parents

10.32. Obsoleted functions

10.32.1. 'log10'

10.32.2. dont-compile

10.32.3. lisp-complete-symbol

10.32.4. field-complete

10.32.5. minibuffer-completion-contents

10.32.6. isearch-nonincremental-exit-minibuffer

10.32.7. isearch-filter-visible

10.32.8. generic-make-keywords-list

10.32.9. get-upcase-table (use case-table-get-table instead).

10.33. with-wrapper-hook is obsoleted by add-function.

The few hooks that used with-wrapper-hook are replaced as follows:

10.33.1. abbrev-expand-function obsoletes abbrev-expand-functions.

10.33.2. completion-in-region-function obsoletes completion-in-region-functions.

10.33.3. filter-buffer-substring-function obsoletes filter-buffer-substring-functions.

11. Changes in Emacs 24.4 on Non-Free Operating Systems

11.1. New Core Text based font backend for Mac OS X 10.5 and newer.

To use the old font backend, use the following on the command line: % defaults write org.gnu.Emacs FontBackend ns GNUstep and Mac OS X 10.4 use the old font backend.

11.2. Improved fullscreen support on Mac OS X 10.7 and newer, where the

default fullscreen method is now "native" fullscreen. To use the old style fullscreen, customize 「ns-use-native-fullscreen」 to nil.

11.3. On Mac OS X 10.7 and newer, Emacs can use sRGB colorspace, and does so

by default. Customize 「ns-use-srgb-colorspace」 to go back to the old method. Note that this does not apply to images.

11.4. The procedure for building Emacs on MS-Windows has changed.

It is now built by running the same configure script as on all other platforms. This requires the MSYS environment and MinGW development tools. See the updated instructions in nt/INSTALL for details.

Using the Posix configure script and Makefiles also means a change in the directory structure of the Emacs installation on Windows. It is now the same as on GNU and Unix systems. In particular, the auxiliary programs, such as cmdproxy.exe and hexl.exe, are in libexec/emacs/VERSION/i686-pc-mingw32 (where VERSION is the Emacs version), version-independent site-lisp is in share/emacs/site-lisp, version-specific Lisp files are in share/emacs/VERSION/lisp and in share/emacs/VERSION/site-lisp, Info docs are in share/info, and data files are in share/emacs/VERSION/etc. (Emacs knows about all these directories and will find the files in there automatically; there's no need to set any variables due to this change.)

11.5. Emacs on Windows 2000 and later can now access files and directories

whose names cannot be encoded in the current system codepage.

The new variable w32-unicode-filenames controls this feature: if it is t, Emacs uses Unicode APIs to pass file names to system calls, which lifts the limitation of file names to the current locale.

11.6. Lock files now work on MS-Windows.

This helps to prevent losing your edits if the same file is being edited in another Emacs session or by another user. See the node "Interlocking" in the Emacs User Manual for the details. To disable file locking, customize create-lockfiles to nil.

11.7. The "generate a backtrace on fatal error" feature now works on MS-Windows.

The backtrace is written to the 'emacsbacktrace.txt' file in the directory where Emacs was running.

11.8. The network-interface-list and network-interface-info functions

are now available on MS-Windows.

11.9. The variable 「buffer-file-type」 is no longer supported.

Setting it has no effect, and %t in the mode-line format is ignored. Likewise, file-name-buffer-file-type-alist is now obsolete, and modifying it has no effect.

12. Installation Changes in Emacs 24.3

12.1. The default X toolkit is now Gtk+ version 3.

If you don't pass '–with-x-toolkit' to configure, or if you use '–with-x-toolkit=gtk' or '–with-x-toolkit=yes', configure will try to build with Gtk+ version 3, and if that fails, try Gtk+ version 2. You can explicitly require a specific version by passing '–with-x-toolkit=gtk2' or '–with-x-toolkit=gtk3' to configure.

12.2. New configure option '–enable-link-time-optimization', to utilize

an appropriate feature provided by GCC since version 4.5.0.

12.3. New configure option '–without-all' to disable most of the optional

features (image support, etc.) that are normally enabled by default.

12.4. New configure option '–enable-gcc-warnings' (for developing/debugging

Emacs). If building with GCC, this enables compile-time checks that warn/give errors about possibly-questionable C code. On a recent GNU system there should be no warnings; on older and on non-GNU systems the results may be useful to developers.

12.5. The configure option '–enable-use-lisp-union-type' has been

renamed to '–enable-check-lisp-object-type', as the resulting LispObject type no longer uses a union to implement the compile time check that this option enables.

12.6. The configure option '–disable-maintainer-mode' has been removed,

as it was confusingly-named and rarely useful.

12.7. The configure options '–program-prefix', '–program-suffix', and

'–program-transform-name' apply to more than just the installed binaries. Now they also affect the man pages, icons, and the etc/emacs.desktop file; but not the info pages, since this would break links between the various manuals.

12.8. You can use 'NOBINLINK=t make install' to prevent the installation

overwriting "emacs" in the installation bin/ directory with a link to "emacs-VERSION".

12.9. Emacs uses libtinfo in preference to libncurses, if available.

12.10. On FreeBSD and NetBSD, configure no longer adds /usr/local/lib and

/usr/pkg/lib to the linker search path. You must add them yourself if you want them.

12.11. The standalone scripts 「rcs-checkin」 and 'vcdiff' have been removed

(from the bin and libexec directories, respectively). The former is no longer relevant, the latter is replaced by lisp (in vc-sccs.el).

13. Startup Changes in Emacs 24.3

13.1. Emacs no longer searches for 'leim-list.el' files beneath the standard

lisp/ directory. There should not be any there anyway. If you have been adding them there, put them somewhere else; e.g., site-lisp.

13.2. The '–no-site-lisp' command line option now works for Nextstep builds.

14. Changes in Emacs 24.3

14.1. Help

14.1.1. 【C-h f】 (describe-function) can now perform autoloading.

When this command is called for an autoloaded function whose docstring contains a key substitution construct, that function's library is automatically loaded, so that the documentation can be shown correctly. To disable this, set help-enable-auto-load to nil.

14.1.2. 【C-h f】 now reports previously-autoloaded functions as "autoloaded",

even after their associated libraries have been loaded (and the autoloads have been redefined as functions).

14.2. ImageMagick

14.2.1. Images displayed via ImageMagick now support transparency and the

:background image specification property.

14.2.2. When available, ImageMagick support is automatically enabled.

It is no longer necessary to call imagemagick-register-types explicitly to install ImageMagick image types; that function is called automatically at startup, or when customizing an imagemagick- option.

14.2.3. Setting imagemagick-types-inhibit to t now disables the use of

ImageMagick to view images. (You must call imagemagick-register-types afterwards if you do not use customize to change this.)

14.2.4. The new variable imagemagick-enabled-types also affects which

ImageMagick types are treated as images. The function imagemagick-filter-types returns the list of types that will be treated as images.

14.3. Minibuffer

14.3.1. In minibuffer filename prompts, 'C-M-f' and 'C-M-b' now move to the

next and previous path separator, respectively.

14.3.2. minibuffer-electric-default-mode can shorten "(default …)" to "[…]"

in minibuffer prompts. Just set 「minibuffer-eldef-shorten-default」 non-nil before enabling the mode.

14.4. Mode line

14.4.1. New option mode-line-default-help-echo specifies the help text

(shown in a tooltip or in the echo area) for any part of the mode line that does not have its own specialized help text.

14.4.2. You can now click mouse-3 in the coding system indicator to invoke

set-buffer-file-coding-system.

14.5. Server and client

14.5.1. emacsclient now obeys string values for initial-buffer-choice,

if it is told to open a new frame without specifying any file to visit or expression to evaluate.

14.5.2. New option 「server-auth-key」 specifies a shared server key.

14.6. Emacs now generates backtraces on fatal errors.

On encountering a fatal error, Emacs now outputs a textual description of the fatal signal, and a short backtrace on platforms like glibc that support backtraces.

14.7. 'C-x C-q' is now bound to the new minor mode read-only-mode.

This minor mode replaces 「toggle-read-only」, which is now obsolete.

14.8. Most 'y-or-n' prompts now allow you to scroll the selected window.

Typing 【C-v】 or 【M-v】 at a y-or-n prompt scrolls forward or backward respectively, without exiting from the prompt.

14.9. In the Package Menu, newly-available packages are listed as "new",

and sorted above the other "available" packages by default.

14.10. If your Emacs was built from a repository checkout, the new variable

emacs-bzr-version contains information about the bzr revision used.

14.11. New option create-lockfiles specifies usage of lockfiles.

It defaults to t. Changing it to nil inhibits the creation of lock files (use this with caution).

14.12. New option enable-remote-dir-locals, if non-nil, allows directory-local

variables on remote hosts.

14.13. The entry for PCL-CVS has been removed from the Tools menu.

The PCL-CVS commands are still available via the keyboard.

14.14. Using "unibyte: t" in Lisp source files is obsolete.

Use "coding: raw-text" instead.

14.15. In the buffer made by 'M-x report-emacs-bug', the 【C-c m】 binding

has been changed to 'C-c M-i' (「report-emacs-bug-insert-to-mailer」). The previous binding, introduced in Emacs 24.1, was a mistake, because 【C-c LETTER】 bindings are reserved for user customizations.

14.16. Internationalization

14.16.1. New language environment: Persian.

14.16.2. New input method 「vietnamese-vni」.

14.17. Nextstep (GNUstep / OS X) port

14.17.1. Support for fullscreen and the frame parameter fullscreen.

14.17.2. A file dialog is used for open/save operations initiated from the

menu/toolbar.

15. Editing Changes in Emacs 24.3

15.1. Search and Replace

15.1.1. Non-regexp Isearch now performs "lax" space matching.

Each sequence of spaces in the supplied search string may match any sequence of one or more whitespace characters, as specified by the variable search-whitespace-regexp. (This variable is also used by a similar existing feature for regexp Isearch.)

15.1.2. New Isearch command 【M-s SPC】 toggles lax space matching.

This applies to both ordinary and regexp Isearch.

15.1.3. New option replace-lax-whitespace.

If non-nil, query-replace uses flexible whitespace matching too. The default is nil.

15.1.4. Global 'M-s _' starts a symbol (identifier) incremental search,

and 'M-s _' in Isearch toggles symbol search mode. 【M-s c】 in Isearch toggles search case-sensitivity.

15.2. Navigation commands

15.2.1. New binding 【M-g c】 for goto-char.

15.2.2. New binding 【M-g TAB】 for move-to-column.

15.2.3. 【M-g TAB】 (move-to-column) prompts for a column number if called

interactively with no prefix arg. Previously, it moved to column 1.

15.3. New option yank-handled-properties allows processing of text

properties on yanked text, in ways that are more general than just removing them (as is done by yank-excluded-properties).

15.4. New option delete-trailing-lines specifies whether

M-x delete-trailing-whitespace should delete trailing lines at the end of the buffer. It defaults to t.

15.5. 'C-u M-=' now counts lines/words/characters in the entire buffer.

15.6. 【C-x 8 RET】 is now bound to insert-char, which is now a command.

「ucs-insert」 is now an obsolete alias for insert-char.

15.7. The 'z' key no longer has a binding in most special modes.

It used to be bound to kill-this-buffer, but 'z' is too easy to accidentally type.

15.8. New command 'C-x r M-w' (copy-rectangle-as-kill).

It copies the region-rectangle as the last rectangle kill.

15.9. Registers

15.9.1. 'C-x r +' is now overloaded to invoke append-to-register.

15.9.2. New option register-separator specifies the register containing

the text to put between collected texts for use with M-x append-to-register and M-x prepend-to-register.

16. Changes in Specialized Modes and Packages in Emacs 24.3

16.1. Common Lisp emulation (CL)

16.1.1. CL's main entry is now (require 'cl-lib).

「cl-lib」 is like the old 'cl' except that it uses the namespace cleanly; i.e., all its definitions have the "cl-" prefix (and internal definitions use the "cl–" prefix).

If 'cl' provided a feature under the name 'foo', then 「cl-lib」 provides it under the name 「cl-foo」 instead; with the exceptions of the few 'cl' definitions that had to use 'foo*' to avoid conflicts with pre-existing Elisp entities. These have been renamed to 「cl-foo」 rather than 'cl-foo*'.

The old 'cl' is now deprecated and is mainly just a bunch of aliases that provide the old, non-prefixed names. Some exceptions are listed below:

16.1.2. cl-flet is not like 'flet' (which is deprecated).

Instead it obeys the behavior of Common-Lisp's 'flet'. In particular, in cl-flet function definitions are lexically scoped, whereas in flet the scoping is dynamic.

16.1.3. cl-labels is slightly different from 'labels'.

The difference is that it relies on the lexical-binding machinery (as opposed to the lexical-let machinery used previously) to capture definitions in closures, so such closures will only work if lexical-binding is in use.

16.1.4. cl-letf is not exactly like 'letf'.

The only difference is in details that relate to some deprecated usage of symbol-function in place forms.

16.1.5. 'progv' was rewritten to use the 'let' machinery.

A side effect is that variables without corresponding values are bound to nil rather than being made unbound.

16.1.6. The following methods of extending 'setf' are obsolete

(use features from gv.el instead): define-modify-macro (use gv-letplace) 'defsetf' (use gv-define-simple-setter or gv-define-setter) define-setf-expander (use gv-define-setter or gv-define-expander) 「get-setf-method」 no longer exists (see "Incompatible Lisp Changes")

16.2. Diff mode

16.2.1. Changes are now highlighted using the same color scheme as in

modern VCSes. Deletions are displayed in red (new faces 「diff-refine-removed」 and 「smerge-refined-removed」, and new definition of 「diff-removed」), insertions in green (new faces 「diff-refine-added」 and 「smerge-refined-added」, and new definition of 「diff-added」).

16.2.2. The variable diff-use-changed-face defines whether to use the

face 「diff-changed」, or 「diff-removed」 and 「diff-added」 to highlight changes in context diffs.

16.2.3. The new command diff-delete-trailing-whitespace removes trailing

whitespace introduced by a diff.

16.3. Ediff now uses the same color scheme as Diff mode.

16.4. Python mode

A new version of python.el, which provides several new features, including: per-buffer shells, better indentation, Python 3 support, and improved shell-interaction compatible with iPython (and virtually any other text based shell).

16.4.1. Some user options have been replaced/renamed, including (old -> new):

  1. python-indent -> python-indent-offset
  2. python-guess-indent -> python-indent-guess-indent-offset
  3. python-pdbtrack-do-tracking-p -> python-pdbtrack-activate
  4. python-use-skeletons -> python-skeleton-autoinsert

16.4.2. Some user options have been removed, including:

  1. 「python-indent-string-contents」: Strings are never indented.
  2. 「python-honour-comment-indentation」:

    Comments are always considered as indentation markers.

  3. 「python-continuation-offset」: Indentation is automatically

    calculated in a pep8 compliant way depending on the context.

  4. 「python-shell-prompt-alist」, 「python-shell-continuation-prompt-alist」:

    Have no direct mapping as the shell interaction is completely different.

  5. 「python-python-command」, 「python-jython-command」:

    Replaced by 「python-shell-interpreter」.

  6. 「inferior-python-filter-regexp」, 「python-remove-cwd-from-path」,

    「python-pdbtrack-minor-mode-string」, 「python-source-modes」: No longer relevant.

16.4.3. Some commands have been replaced (old -> new):

  1. python-insert-class -> python-skeleton-class
  2. python-insert-def -> python-skeleton-def
  3. python-insert-for -> python-skeleton-for
  4. python-insert-if -> python-skeleton-if
  5. python-insert-try/except -> python-skeleton-try
  6. python-insert-try/finally -> python-skeleton-try
  7. python-insert-while -> python-skeleton-while
  8. python-find-function -> python-nav-jump-to-defun
  9. python-next-statement -> python-nav-forward-sentence
  10. python-previous-statement -> python-nav-backward-sentence
  11. python-beginning-of-defun-function -> python-nav-beginning-of-defun
  12. python-end-of-defun-function -> python-nav-end-of-defun
  13. python-send-buffer -> python-shell-send-buffer
  14. python-send-defun -> python-shell-send-defun
  15. python-send-region -> python-shell-send-region
  16. python-send-region-and-go -> emulate with python-shell-send-region

    and python-shell-switch-to-shell

  17. python-send-string -> python-shell-send-string
  18. python-switch-to-python -> python-shell-switch-to-shell
  19. python-describe-symbol -> python-eldoc-at-point

16.5. D-Bus

16.5.1. New variables 「dbus-compiled-version」 and 「dbus-runtime-version」.

16.5.2. The D-Bus object manager interface is implemented.

16.5.3. Variables of type :(u)int32 and :(u)int64 accept floating points,

if their value does not fit into Emacs's integer range.

16.5.4. The function 「dbus-call-method」 is now non-blocking.

It can be interrupted by 【C-g】. 「dbus-call-method-non-blocking」 is obsolete.

16.5.5. Signals can also be sent as unicast messages.

16.5.6. The argument list of 「dbus-register-signal」 has been extended,

according to the new match rule types of D-Bus.

16.5.7. 「dbus-init-bus」 supports private connections.

16.5.8. There is a new function 「dbus-setenv」.

16.6. 「desktop-path」 no longer includes the "." directory.

Desktop files are now located in ~/.emacs.d by default.

16.7. Dired

16.7.1. dired-do-async-shell-command executes each file sequentially

if the command ends in ';' (when operating on multiple files). Otherwise, it executes the command on each file in parallel.

16.7.2. Typing 【M-n】 in the minibuffer of dired-do-chmod, dired-do-chgrp,

dired-do-chown, and dired-do-touch yanks the attributes of the file at point.

16.7.3. When the region is active, 'm' (dired-mark), 'u' (dired-unmark),

'DEL' (dired-unmark-backward), and 'd' (dired-flag-file-deletion) mark/unmark/flag all files in the active region.

16.7.4. The minibuffer default for '=' (dired-diff) has changed.

It is now the backup file for the file at point, if one exists. In Transient Mark mode the default is the file at the active mark.

16.7.5. 'M-=' is no longer bound to dired-backup-diff in Dired buffers.

The global binding for 'M-=', count-words-region is in effect.

16.8. ERC

16.8.1. New module "notifications", which can send a notification when you

receive a private message or your nickname is mentioned.

16.8.2. ERC will look up server/channel names via auth-source and use any

channel keys found.

16.8.3. New option 「erc-lurker-hide-list」, similar to 「erc-hide-list」, but

only applies to messages sent by lurkers.

16.9. reStructuredText mode

16.9.1. Keybindings (see 'C-c C-h'), TAB indentation, filling and auto-filling,

fontification, comment handling, and customization have all been revised and improved.

16.9.2. Support for 'imenu' and which-function-mode.

16.9.3. The reStructuredText syntax is more closely covered.

Sphinx support has been improved.

16.9.4. 「rst-insert-list」 inserts new list or continues existing lists.

16.9.5. A negative prefix argument always works for 「rst-adjust」.

16.9.6. The window configuration is reset after displaying a TOC.

16.9.7. The constant 「rst-version」 describes the rst.el package version.

16.10. Ruby mode

16.10.1. Support for percent literals and recognition of regular expressions

in method calls without parentheses with more methods, including Cucumber steps definitions.

16.10.2. Improved syntax highlighting and indentation.

16.10.3. New command 「ruby-toggle-block」, bound to 'C-c {'.

16.10.4. Some non-standard keybindings/commands have been removed:

  1. 「ruby-electric-brace」; use electric-indent-mode instead.
  2. 「ruby-mark-defun」; use mark-defun.
  3. 「ruby-beginning-of-defun」 and 「ruby-end-of-defun」 are replaced by

    appropriate settings for the variables beginning-of-defun-function and end-of-defun-function.

  4. Non-standard keybindings for backward-kill-word, comment-region,

    reindent-then-newline-and-indent and 'newline' have been removed.

16.11. Shell Script mode

16.11.1. Pairing of parens/quotes uses electric-pair-mode instead of skeleton-pair.

16.11.2. 「sh-electric-here-document-mode」 now controls auto-insertion of here-docs.

16.11.3. 「sh-use-smie」 lets you choose a new indentation and navigation code.

16.12. VHDL mode

16.12.1. The free software compiler GHDL is supported (and now the default).

16.12.2. Support for the VHDL-AMS packages has been added/updated.

16.12.3. Updated to the 2002 revision of the VHDL standard.

16.12.4. Accepts \r and \f as whitespace.

16.13. Apropos

16.13.1. The faces used by Apropos are now directly customizable.

These faces are named 「apropos-symbol」, 「apropos-keybinding」, and so on; see the 'apropos' Custom group for details.

16.13.2. The old options whose values specified faces to use have been removed

(i.e. 「apropos-symbol-face」, 「apropos-keybinding-face」, 「apropos-label-face」, apropos-match-face and 「apropos-property-face」.).

16.14. Buffer Menu

16.14.1. This package has been rewritten to use Tabulated List mode.

16.14.2. Option 'Buffer-menu-buffer+size-width' is now obsolete.

Use 'Buffer-menu-name-width' and 'Buffer-menu-size-width' instead.

16.15. Calc

16.15.1. Algebraic simplification mode is now the default.

To restrict to the limited simplifications given by the former default simplification mode, use 'm I'.

16.16. Calendar

16.16.1. You can customize the header text that appears above each calendar month.

See the variable 「calendar-month-header」.

16.16.2. New LaTeX calendar style, produced by 「cal-tex-cursor-week2-summary」.

16.16.3. The calendars produced by cal-html include holidays.

Customize 「cal-html-holidays」 to change this.

16.17. CEDET

16.17.1. The major modes from the parser generators "Bovine" and "Wisent"

are now properly integrated in Emacs. The file suffixes ".by" and ".wy" are in auto-mode-alist, and the corresponding manuals are included.

16.17.2. EDE

  1. Menu support for the "Configuration" feature. This allows users to

    choose the active configuration (such as debug or install) from the menu.

  2. New command 「ede-set」 to interactively set project-local variables.
  3. Support for compiling, debugging, and running in "generic" projects.
  4. Autoconf editing support for M4 macros with complex arguments.
  5. Compilation support for the "linux" project type.
  6. "simple" projects have been removed; use "generic" projects instead.

16.17.3. Semantic

  1. Support for parsing #include statements inside a namespace in C/C++.
  2. Improved support for 'extern "C"' declarations in C/C++.
  3. The ability to ignore more common special C/C++ preprocessor symbols,

    such as '_nonnull' and '_asm'. Add '_cplusplus' macro when parsing C++. If available, include cdefs.h as an additional source of preprocessor symbols.

  4. Improved C/C++ function pointer parsing.
  5. In Python, support for converting imports to include file names.
  6. Ability to dynamically determine the Python load path.
  7. Support for the Python 'WITH' and 'AT' keywords.
  8. Improved tooltip completion.

16.17.4. SRecode

  1. The SRecode manual is now included.
  2. Tag generation supports constructor/destructor settings and system

    include differentiation.

  3. Addition of 'Framework' support: Frameworks are specified when a

    particular kind of library (such as Android) is needed in a common language mode (like Java).

  4. Support for nested templates and let variables override based on priority.
  5. Support for merging tables from multiple related modes, such as

    default -> c++ -> arduino.

16.18. Compile has a new option 「compilation-always-kill」.

16.19. Customize

16.19.1. custom-reset-button-menu now defaults to t.

16.19.2. Non-option variables are never matched in customize-apropos and

customize-apropos-options (i.e., the prefix argument does nothing for these commands now).

16.20. Term

16.20.1. The variables 「term-default-fg-color」 and 「term-default-bg-color」

are now deprecated in favor of the customizable face 'term'.

16.20.2. You can customize how to display ANSI terminal colors and styles

by customizing the corresponding 'term-color-<COLOR>', 「term-color-underline」 and 「term-color-bold」 faces.

16.21. Tramp

16.21.1. The syntax has been extended in order to allow ad-hoc proxy definitions.

16.21.2. Remote processes are now also supported on remote MS-Windows hosts.

16.22. URL

16.22.1. Structs made by url-generic-parse-url have nil 'attributes' slot.

Previously, this slot stored semicolon-separated attribute-value pairs appended to some imap URLs, but this is not compatible with RFC 3986. So now the 'filename' slot stores the entire path and query components, and the 'attributes' slot is always nil.

16.22.2. New function url-encode-url for encoding a URI string.

The url-retrieve function now uses this to encode its URL argument, in case that is not properly encoded.

16.23. notifications.el supports now version 1.2 of the Notifications API.

The function 「notifications-get-capabilities」 returns the supported server properties.

16.24. Flymake uses fringe bitmaps to indicate errors and warnings.

See 「flymake-fringe-indicator-position」, 「flymake-error-bitmap」 and 「flymake-warning-bitmap」.

16.25. The FFAP option 「ffap-url-unwrap-remote」 can now be a list of strings,

specifying URL types that should be converted to remote file names at the FFAP prompt. The default is now '("ftp").

16.26. New Ibuffer 「derived-mode」 filter, bound to '/ M'.

The old binding for '/ M' (filter by used-mode) is now bound to '/ m'.

16.27. New option 「mouse-avoidance-banish-position」 specifies where the

'banish' mouse avoidance setting moves the mouse.

16.28. In Perl mode, new option 「perl-indent-parens-as-block」 causes non-block

closing brackets to be aligned with the line of the opening bracket.

16.29. In Proced mode, new command 「proced-renice」 renices marked processes.

16.30. New option async-shell-command-buffer specifies the buffer to use

for a new asynchronous shell-command when the default output buffer 'Async Shell Command' is already in use.

16.31. SQL mode has a new option 「sql-db2-escape-newlines」.

If non-nil, newlines sent to the command interpreter will be escaped by a backslash. The default does not escape the newlines and assumes that the sql statement will be terminated by a semicolon.

16.32. New command tabulated-list-sort, bound to 'S' in Tabulated List mode

(and modes that derive from it), sorts the column at point, or the Nth column if a numeric prefix argument is given.

16.33. 「which-func-modes」 now defaults to t, so Which Function mode, when

enabled, applies to all applicable major modes.

16.34. 「winner-mode-hook」 now runs when the mode is disabled, as well as when

it is enabled.

16.35. Follow mode no longer works by using advice.

The option 「follow-intercept-processes」 has been removed.

16.36. 「javascript-generic-mode」 is now an obsolete alias for js-mode.

16.37. Hooks renamed to avoid obsolete "-hooks" suffix:

16.37.1. 「semantic-lex-reset-hooks」 -> 「semantic-lex-reset-functions」

16.37.2. 「semantic-change-hooks」 -> 「semantic-change-functions」

16.37.3. 「semantic-edits-new-change-hooks」 -> 「semantic-edits-new-change-functions」

16.37.4. 「semantic-edits-delete-change-hooks」 -> 「semantic-edits-delete-change-functions」

16.37.5. 「semantic-edits-reparse-change-hooks」 -> 「semantic-edits-reparse-change-functions」

16.37.6. 「semanticdb-save-database-hooks」 -> 「semanticdb-save-database-functions」

16.37.7. 'c-prepare-bug-report-hooks' -> 'c-prepare-bug-report-hook'

16.37.8. 「rcirc-sentinel-hooks」 -> 「rcirc-sentinel-functions」

16.37.9. 「rcirc-receive-message-hooks」 -> 「rcirc-receive-message-functions」

16.37.10. 「rcirc-activity-hooks」 -> 「rcirc-activity-functions」

16.37.11. 「rcirc-print-hooks」 -> 「rcirc-print-functions」

16.37.12. 「dbus-event-error-hooks」 -> 「dbus-event-error-functions」

16.37.13. 「eieio-pre-method-execution-hooks」 -> 「eieio-pre-method-execution-functions」

16.37.14. 「checkdoc-style-hooks」 -> 「checkdoc-style-functions」

16.37.15. 「checkdoc-comment-style-hooks」 -> 「checkdoc-comment-style-functions」

16.37.16. 「archive-extract-hooks」 -> 「archive-extract-hook」

16.37.17. 「filesets-cache-fill-content-hooks」 -> 「filesets-cache-fill-content-hook」

16.37.18. 「hfy-post-html-hooks」 -> 「hfy-post-html-hook」

16.37.19. 「nndiary-request-create-group-hooks」 -> 「nndiary-request-create-group-functions」

16.37.20. 「nndiary-request-update-info-hooks」 -> 「nndiary-request-update-info-functions」

16.37.21. 「nndiary-request-accept-article-hooks」 -> 「nndiary-request-accept-article-functions」

16.37.22. 「gnus-subscribe-newsgroup-hooks」 -> 「gnus-subscribe-newsgroup-functions」

16.38. Obsolete packages

16.38.1. assoc.el

In most cases, assoc+member+push+delq work just as well. And in any case it's just a terrible package: ugly semantics, terrible inefficiency, and not namespace-clean.

16.38.2. bruce.el

16.38.3. cust-print.el

16.38.4. ledit.el

16.38.5. mailpost.el

16.38.6. mouse-sel.el

16.38.7. patcomp.el

17. Incompatible Lisp Changes in Emacs 24.3

17.1. Docstrings starting with '*' no longer indicate user options.

Only variables defined using 'defcustom' are considered user options. The function 「user-variable-p」 is now an obsolete alias for custom-variable-p.

17.2. The return values of 'defalias', 'defun' and 'defmacro' have changed,

and are now undefined. For backwards compatibility, 'defun' and 'defmacro' currently return the name of the newly defined function/macro, but this should not be relied upon.

17.3. 'random' by default now returns a different random sequence in

every Emacs run. Use '(random S)', where S is a string, to set the random seed to a value based on S, in order to get a repeatable sequence in later calls.

17.4. If the NEWTEXT arg to replace-match contains a substring "\?",

that substring is inserted literally even if the LITERAL arg is non-nil, instead of causing an error to be signaled.

17.5. select-window now always makes the window's buffer current.

It does so even if the window was selected before.

17.6. The function 'x-select-font' can return a font spec, instead of a

font name as a string. Whether it returns a font spec or a font name depends on the graphical library.

17.7. face-spec-set no longer sets frame-specific attributes when the

third argument is a frame (that usage was obsolete since Emacs 22.2).

17.8. set-buffer-multibyte now signals an error in narrowed buffers.

17.9. The CL package's 「get-setf-method」 function no longer exists.

Generalized variables are now part of core Emacs Lisp, and implemented differently to the way cl.el used to do it. It is not possible to define a compatible replacement for 「get-setf-method」. See the file gv.el for internal details of the new implementation.

17.10. The arguments of 「dbus-register-signal」 are no longer just strings,

but keywords or keyword-string pairs. The old argument list will still be supported for Emacs 24.x.

17.11. Miscellaneous name changes

Some Lisp symbols have been renamed to correct their spelling, or to be more consistent with standard Emacs terminology.

17.11.1. Renamed functions

  1. 「hangul-input-method-inactivate」 -> 「hangul-input-method-deactivate」
  2. 「inactivate-input-method」 -> deactivate-input-method
  3. 「quail-inactivate」 -> 「quail-deactivate」
  4. 「robin-inactivate」 -> 「robin-deactivate」
  5. 「viper-inactivate-input-method」 -> 「viper-deactivate-input-method」
  6. 「viper-inactivate-input-method-action」 ->

    「viper-deactivate-input-method-action」

  7. 「ucs-input-inactivate」 -> 「ucs-input-deactivate」

17.11.2. Renamed hooks

The old hooks are still supported for backward compatibility, but they are deprecated and will be removed eventually.

  1. 「input-method-inactivate-hook」 -> input-method-deactivate-hook
  2. 「robin-inactivate-hook」 -> 「robin-deactivate-hook」
  3. 「quail-inactivate-hook」 -> 「quail-deactivate-hook」

17.11.3. Renamed variables

  1. 「follow-deactive-menu」 -> 「follow-inactive-menu」
  2. 「inactivate-current-input-method-function」 ->

    deactivate-current-input-method-function

17.12. Some obsolete functions, variables, and faces have been removed:

17.12.1. 「last-input-char」, 「last-command-char」, 「unread-command-char」

17.12.2. 「facemenu-unlisted-faces」

17.12.3. 「rmail-decode-mime-charset」

17.12.4. 「iswitchb-read-buffer」

17.12.5. 「sc-version」, 「sc-submit-bug-report」

17.12.6. 「set-char-table-default」

17.12.7. 「string-to-sequence」 (use string-to-list or string-to-vector)

17.12.8. 「compile-internal」

17.12.9. 'modeline'

17.12.10. 「mode-line-inverse-video」

17.12.11. 「follow-mode-off-hook」

17.12.12. 「cvs-commit-buffer-require-final-newline」

(use 「log-edit-require-final-newline」 instead)

17.12.13. 「cvs-changelog-full-paragraphs」

(use 「log-edit-changelog-full-paragraphs」 instead)

17.12.14. 「cvs-diff-ignore-marks」, 「cvs-diff-buffer-name」

17.12.15. 「vc-ignore-vc-files」 (use vc-handled-backends instead)

17.12.16. 「vc-master-templates」 (use vc-handled-backends instead)

17.12.17. 「vc-checkout-carefully」

18. Lisp Changes in Emacs 24.3

18.1. CL-style generalized variables are now in core Elisp.

'setf' is autoloaded; 'push' and 'pop' accept generalized variables. You can define your own generalized variables using gv-define-simple-setter, gv-define-setter, etc.

18.2. Emacs tries to macroexpand interpreted (non-compiled) files during load.

This can significantly speed up execution of non-byte-compiled code, but can also bump into previously unnoticed cyclic dependencies. These are generally harmless: they will simply cause the macro calls to be left for later expansion (as before), but will result in a warning ("Eager macro-expansion skipped due to cycle") describing the cycle. You may wish to restructure your code so this does not happen.

18.3. New sampling-based Elisp profiler.

Try M-x profiler-start, do some work, and then call M-x profiler-report. When finished, use M-x profiler-stop. The sampling rate can be based on CPU time or memory allocations.

18.4. 'defun' also accepts a (declare DECLS) form, like 'defmacro'.

The interpretation of the DECLS is determined by defun-declarations-alist.

18.5. New macros setq-local and defvar-local.

18.6. Face underlining can now use a wave.

18.7. read-regexp has a new argument HISTORY; the first argument PROMPT

of read-regexp accepts a string ending with a colon and space, and its second argument DEFAULTS can be a list of strings accessible via 【M-n】 in the minibuffer ahead of other hard-coded useful regexp-related values. More commands use read-regexp now to read their regexp arguments.

18.8. Completion

18.8.1. New function completion-table-with-quoting to handle completion

in the presence of quoting, such as file completion in shell buffers.

18.8.2. New function completion-table-subvert to use an existing completion

table, but with a different prefix.

18.9. Debugger

18.9.1. New error type and new function user-error.

These do not trigger the debugger.

18.9.2. New option 「debugger-bury-or-kill」, saying what to do with the

debugger buffer when exiting debug.

18.9.3. Set debug-on-message to enter the debugger when a certain

message is displayed in the echo area. This can be useful when trying to work out which code is doing something.

18.9.4. New var inhibit-debugger, automatically set to prevent accidental

recursive invocations.

18.10. Window handling

18.10.1. New command fit-frame-to-buffer adjusts the frame height to

fit the contents.

18.10.2. The command fit-window-to-buffer can adjust the frame height

if the new option fit-frame-to-buffer is non-nil.

18.10.3. New macro with-temp-buffer-window, similar to

with-output-to-temp-buffer.

18.10.4. temp-buffer-resize-mode no longer resizes windows that have been

reused.

18.10.5. New option switch-to-buffer-preserve-window-point to restore a

window's point when switching buffers.

18.10.6. New display action alist entries window-height and window-width

specify the size of new windows created by display-buffer.

18.10.7. New display action alist entry 「pop-up-frame-parameters」, if

non-nil, specifies frame parameters to give any newly-created frame.

18.10.8. New display action alist entry 「inhibit-switch-frame」, if non-nil,

tells display action functions to avoid changing which frame is selected.

18.10.9. New display action alist entry previous-window, if non-nil,

specifies window to reuse in display-buffer-in-previous-window.

18.10.10. New display action functions display-buffer-below-selected,

and display-buffer-in-previous-window.

18.10.11. The functions get-lru-window, get-mru-window and get-largest-window

now accept a third argument to avoid choosing the selected window.

18.10.12. Additional values recognized for option window-combination-limit.

18.10.13. The following variables are obsolete, as they can be replaced by

appropriate entries in the display-buffer-alist function introduced in Emacs 24.1:

  1. 「dired-shrink-to-fit」
  2. display-buffer-reuse-frames
  3. 「display-buffer-function」
  4. special-display-buffer-names
  5. special-display-frame-alist
  6. special-display-function
  7. special-display-regexps

18.11. Time

18.11.1. current-time-string no longer requires that its argument's year

must be in the range 1000..9999. It now works with any year supported by the underlying C implementation.

18.11.2. current-time now returns extended-format time stamps

(HIGH LOW USEC PSEC), where the new PSEC slot specifies picoseconds. PSEC is typically a multiple of 1000 on current machines. Other functions that use this format, such as file-attributes and format-time-string, have been changed accordingly. Old-format time stamps are still accepted.

18.11.3. The format of timers in timer-list and timer-idle-list is now

[TRIGGERED-P HI-SECS LO-SECS USECS REPEAT-DELAY FUNCTION ARGS IDLE-DELAY PSECS]. The PSECS slot is new, and uses picosecond resolution. It can be accessed via the new 'timer–psecs' accessor.

18.11.4. Last-modified time stamps in undo lists now are of the form

(t HI-SECS LO-SECS USECS PSECS) instead of (t HI-SECS . LO-SECS).

18.12. EIEIO

18.12.1. Improved security when handling persistent objects:

  1. 「eieio-persistent-read」 now features optional arguments for specifying

    the class to load, as well as a flag stating whether subclasses are allowed; if provided, other classes will be rejected by the reader. For compatibility with existing code, if the class is omitted only a warning is issued.

  2. New specialized reader for pulling in classes and signaling errors

    without evaluation of suspicious code.

  3. All slots that contain objects must have a :type. Slots with lists

    of objects must use a new type predicate for a list of an object type.

18.12.2. Support for find-function and similar utilities, through the addition

of filename support to generated symbols.

18.13. Floating point functions now always return special values like NaN,

instead of signaling errors, if given invalid args; e.g., (log -1.0). Previously, they returned NaNs on some platforms but signaled errors on others. The affected functions are 'acos', 'asin', 'tan', 'exp', 'expt', 'log', 'log10', 'sqrt', and 'mod'.

18.14. New fringe bitmap 「exclamation-mark」.

18.15. Miscellaneous changes to special forms and macros

18.15.1. 'defun' and 'defmacro' are now macros rather than special forms.

18.15.2. 'kbd' is now a function rather than a macro.

18.16. Miscellaneous new functions

18.16.1. set-temporary-overlay-map sets up a temporary keymap that

takes precedence over most other maps for a short while (normally one key).

18.16.2. 'autoloadp' tests if its argument is an autoloaded object.

18.16.3. autoload-do-load performs the autoloading operation.

18.16.4. buffer-narrowed-p tests if the buffer is narrowed.

18.16.5. file-name-base returns a file name sans directory and extension.

18.16.6. function-get fetches a function property, following aliases.

18.16.7. 'posnp' tests if an object is a 'posn'.

18.16.8. system-users returns the user names on the system.

18.16.9. system-groups returns the group names on the system.

18.16.10. tty-top-frame returns the topmost frame of a text terminal.

18.17. The following functions and variables are obsolete:

18.17.1. 「automount-dir-prefix」 (use directory-abbrev-alist)

18.17.2. 「buffer-has-markers-at」

18.17.3. 「macro-declaration-function」 (use macro-declarations-alist)

18.17.4. 「window-system-version」 (provides no useful information)

18.17.5. 「dired-pop-to-buffer」 (use dired-mark-pop-up)

18.17.6. 「query-replace-interactive」

18.17.7. 「font-list-limit」 (has had no effect since Emacs < 23)

19. Changes in Emacs 24.3 on Non-Free Operating Systems

19.1. Cygwin builds can use the native MS Windows user interface.

Pass '–with-w32' to configure. The default remains the X11 interface.

19.2. Two new functions are available in Cygwin builds:

「cygwin-convert-file-name-from-windows」 and 「cygwin-convert-file-name-to-windows」. These functions allow Lisp code to access the Cygwin file-name mapping machinery to convert between Cygwin and Windows-native file and directory names.

19.3. When invoked with the -nw switch to run on the Windows text-mode terminal,

Emacs now supports mouse-highlight, help-echo (in the echo area), and mouse-autoselect-window.

19.4. On MS Windows Vista and later Emacs now supports symbolic links.

19.5. On MS Windows, you can pass '–without-libxml2' to configure.bat to omit

support for libxml2, even if its presence is detected.

19.6. On OS X, the Nextstep port requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later.

19.7. On OS X, configure no longer automatically adds the Fink "/sw"

directories to the search path. You must add them yourself if you want them.

20. Changes in Emacs 24.2

20.1. This is mainly a bug-fix release.

21. Installation Changes in Emacs 24.1

21.1. Emacs can be compiled with Gtk+ 3.0 if you pass –with-x-toolkit=gtk3

to configure. Note that other libraries used by Emacs, RSVG and GConf, also depend on Gtk+. You can disable them with –without-rsvg and –without-gconf.

21.2. Emacs can be compiled with GnuTLS support.

This happens by default if a suitably recent version of the library is found at build time. To prevent this, use the configure option '–without-gnutls'. See below for GnuTLS features.

21.3. Emacs can be compiled with SELinux support.

This happens by default if a suitably recent version of the library is found at build time. To prevent this, use the configure option '–without-selinux'. See below for SELinux features.

21.4. Emacs can be compiled with ImageMagick support.

This happens by default if a suitably recent version of the library is found at build time. To prevent this, use the configure option '–without-imagemagick'. See below for ImageMagick features. This feature is not available for the Nextstep or MS ports.

21.5. Emacs can be compiled with libxml2 support.

This happens by default if a suitably recent version of the library is found at build time. To prevent this, use the configure option '–without-xml2'. See below for libxml2 features.

21.6. By default, the installed Info and man pages are compressed.

You can disable this by configuring –without-compress-info.

21.7. New configure option –with-wide-int.

With it, Emacs integers typically have 62 bits, even on 32-bit machines. On 32-bit hosts, this raises the limit on buffer sizes from about 512 MiB to about 2 GiB.

21.8. New configure options: –with-mmdf, –with-mail-unlink, –with-mailhost.

These provide no new functionality, they just remove the need to edit lib-src/Makefile by hand in order to use the associated features.

21.9. New configure option –enable-use-lisp-union-type.

This is only useful for Emacs developers to debug certain types of bugs. This is not a new feature; only the configure flag is new.

21.10. The standalone programs digest-doc and sorted-doc are removed.

Emacs now uses Lisp commands doc-file-to-man and doc-file-to-info.

21.11. The standalone program 'fakemail' is removed.

If you need it, feedmail.el provides a superset of the functionality.

22. Startup Changes in Emacs 24.1

22.1. The –unibyte, –multibyte, –no-multibyte, and –no-unibyte

command line arguments, and the EMACSUNIBYTE environment variable, no longer have any effect. (They were declared obsolete in Emacs 23.)

22.2. New command line option '–no-site-lisp' removes site-lisp directories

from load-path. -Q now implies this. This option does not affect the EMACSLOADPATH environment variable (and hence has no effect for Nextstep builds).

23. Changes in Emacs 24.1

23.1. Completion

23.1.1. Many packages now use the completion-at-point command,

rather than implementing separate completion commands.

23.1.2. completion-at-point now handles tags and semantic completion.

23.1.3. Completion in a non-minibuffer now tries to detect the end of completion

and pops down the Completions buffer accordingly.

23.1.4. New option completion-cycle-threshold allows completion cycling.

23.1.5. New option completion-category-overrides for overriding the

default completion style in certain circumstances.

23.1.6. New completion style 'substring'.

23.1.7. Completion of buffer names uses 'substring' completion by default.

23.1.8. The option 「widget-complete-field」 has been removed.

23.2. Mail changes

23.2.1. The first time you try sending mail, Emacs asks for a mail method.

This is implemented by a new default for send-mail-function, which is sendmail-query-once. This offers to use the smtpmail package, or to use the old defaults relying on external mail facilities (「sendmail-send-it」 on GNU/Linux and other Unix-like systems, and mailclient-send-it on Windows).

23.2.2. Typing 【C-c m】 in the buffer made by 'M-x report-emacs-bug'

transfers the report to your desktop's preferred mail client, if there is one. This uses either the "xdg-email" utility, or Mac OS's "open" command.

23.2.3. See Changes in Specialized Modes and Packages for SMTPmail changes

and Mail mode changes

23.3. Emacs server and client changes

23.3.1. New option 「server-port」 specifies the port for TCP Emacs servers.

23.3.2. New emacsclient argument -q/–quiet suppresses some status messages.

23.3.3. New emacsclient argument –frame-parameters specifies the frame

parameters of any newly-created graphical frame.

23.3.4. If emacsclient shuts down due to Emacs signaling an error,

its exit status is 1.

23.3.5. New emacsclient argument –parent-id ID.

This opens a client frame in parent X window ID, via XEmbed, similar to the –parent-id argument to Emacs.

23.4. Internationalization changes

23.4.1. Emacs now supports display and editing of bidirectional text.

Right-to-left (RTL) scripts, such as Arabic, Farsi, and Hebrew, are displayed in the correct visual order as expected by users of those scripts. The display reordering is a "full bidirectionality" class implementation of the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm (UBA). Buffers with no RTL text should look exactly the same as before.

  1. New buffer-local variable bidi-display-reordering.

    To disable display reordering in a buffer, change this to nil.

  2. New buffer-local variable bidi-paragraph-direction.

    If nil (the default), Emacs determines the base direction of each paragraph from its text, as specified by the UBA. Setting the value to 「right-to-left」 or 「left-to-right」 forces a base direction on each paragraph.

    Paragraphs with right-to-left base direction are displayed starting at the right window edge.

23.4.2. Enhanced support for characters with no glyphs in available fonts,

or, on text terminals, characters that cannot be encoded by the terminal coding system. The new option glyphless-char-display-control specifies how to display them: as a hexadecimal code in a box, a thin 1-pixel space, an empty box, etc.

23.4.3. New input methods for Farsi and Bulgarian

(farsi-isiri-9147, farsi-transliterate-banan, bulgarian-alt-phonetic).

23.4.4. nobreak-char-display now also highlights Unicode hyphen chars

(U+2010 and U+2011).

23.4.5. New Hebrew translation of the Emacs Tutorial.

Type 'C-u C-h t' to choose it in case your language setup doesn't automatically select it.

23.5. An Emacs Lisp package manager is now included.

This is a convenient way to download and install additional packages, from a package repository at https://elpa.gnu.org.

23.5.1. M-x list-packages shows a list of packages, which can be

selected for installation.

23.5.2. New command describe-package, bound to 【C-h P】.

23.5.3. By default, all installed packages are loaded automatically when

Emacs starts up. To disable this, set package-enable-at-startup to nil. To specify the packages to load, customize package-load-list.

23.6. Custom theme changes

23.6.1. New command 'M-x customize-themes', which provides a convenient

interface for enabling and disabling Custom themes.

23.6.2. New option custom-theme-load-path is the load path for themes.

Emacs no longer looks for Custom themes in load-path. The default value of custom-theme-load-path says to look for themes in custom-theme-directory, followed by a subdirectory of data-directory named "themes/", which contains a small selection of built-in Custom themes.

23.6.3. New option custom-safe-themes records known-safe theme files.

If a theme is not in this list, Emacs queries before loading it, and offers to save the theme to custom-safe-themes automatically. By default, all themes included in Emacs are treated as safe.

23.7. Improved GTK integration

23.7.1. GTK scroll-bars are now placed on the right by default.

The function set-scroll-bar-mode can change this.

23.7.2. GTK tool bars can have just text, just images or images and text.

Customize tool-bar-style to choose the style. On a Gnome desktop, the default is taken from desktop settings.

23.7.3. GTK tool bars can be placed on any edge of the frame.

The frame-parameter tool-bar-position controls this. It takes the values top, left, right or bottom. The Options => Show/Hide menu has entries for this.

23.7.4. The default colors for selected text (the 'region' face) are taken

from the GTK theme when Emacs is built with GTK.

23.7.5. Emacs uses GTK tooltips by default if built with GTK.

You can disable this by changing 'x-gtk-use-system-tooltips' to nil.

23.8. Graphical interface changes

23.8.1. On graphical displays, the mode-line no longer ends in dashes.

Also, the first dash (which does not indicate anything) is just displayed as a space.

23.8.2. menu-bar-select-buffer-function lets you choose another operation

instead of switch-to-buffer when selecting an item in the Buffers menu.

23.8.3. Lucid menus and dialogs can display antialiased fonts if Emacs is

built with Xft. These fonts can be set via X resources, for example: Emacs.pane.menubar.font: Courier-12

23.9. Exiting changes

23.9.1. Emacs now calls kill-emacs if it receives SIGTERM or SIGHUP,

or if it receives a SIGINT signal in batch mode.

23.9.2. kill-emacs-hook is now also run in batch mode.

Third-party code which adds to kill-emacs-hook should check if they do the right thing in batch mode.

23.10. Scrolling changes

23.10.1. New scrolling commands scroll-up-command and scroll-down-command

(bound to C-v/[next] and M-v/[prior]) do not signal errors at top/bottom of buffer at first key-press (instead they move to top/bottom of buffer) when scroll-error-top-bottom is non-nil.

23.10.2. New option scroll-error-top-bottom (see above).

23.10.3. New scrolling commands scroll-up-line and scroll-down-line

scroll a line instead of full screen.

23.10.4. New property 「scroll-command」 should be set on a command's symbol to

define it as a scroll command affected by scroll-preserve-screen-position.

23.10.5. If you customize scroll-conservatively to a value greater than 100,

Emacs will never recenter point in the window when it scrolls due to cursor motion commands or commands that move point (e.f., 'M-g M-g'). Previously, you needed to use most-positive-fixnum as the value of scroll-conservatively to achieve the same effect.

23.10.6. "Aggressive" scrolling now honors the scroll margins.

If you customize scroll-up-aggressively or scroll-down-aggressively and move point off the window, Emacs now scrolls the window so as to avoid positioning point inside the scroll margin.

23.11. Basic SELinux support has been added.

This requires Emacs to be linked with libselinux at build time.

23.11.1. Emacs preserves the SELinux file context when backing up.

Also, the function copy-file has an extra optional argument for preserving SELinux context, and the return value of backup-buffer now includes the SELinux context.

23.11.2. New functions file-selinux-context and set-file-selinux-context

get and set the SELinux context of a file.

23.12. Trash changes

23.12.1. delete-by-moving-to-trash now only affects commands that specify

trashing. This avoids inadvertently trashing temporary files.

23.12.2. Calling delete-file or delete-directory with a prefix argument

now forces true deletion, regardless of delete-by-moving-to-trash.

23.13. File- and directory-local variable changes

23.13.1. You can stop directory local vars from applying to subdirectories.

Add an element (subdirs . nil) to the alist portion of any variables settings to indicate that the section should not apply to subdirectories.

23.13.2. Directory local variables can apply to some file-less buffers.

Affected modes include dired, vc-dir, and log-edit. For example, adding "(diff-mode . ((mode . whitespace)))" to .dir-locals.el will turn on whitespace-mode for vc-diff buffers. Modes should call hack-dir-local-variables-non-file-buffer to support this.

23.13.3. Using "mode: MINOR-MODE" to enable a minor mode is deprecated.

Instead, use "eval: (minor-mode 1)".

23.13.4. The variable 「inhibit-first-line-modes-regexps」 has been renamed

to inhibit-local-variables-regexps. As the name suggests, it now applies to ALL file local variables, not just -*- lines. The associated 「inhibit-first-line-modes-suffixes」 has been renamed in the corresponding way.

23.14. Window changes

23.14.1. The quit-window command now restores the last buffer displayed

in the quitted window.

23.14.2. Resizing an Emacs frame now preserves proportional window sizes,

modulo restrictions like window minimum sizes and fixed-size windows.

23.14.3. The behavior of display-buffer is now customizable in detail.

  1. New option display-buffer-base-action specifies a list of

    user-determined display "actions" (functions and optional arguments for choosing the displaying window).

    This takes precedence over the default display action, which is specified by display-buffer-fallback-action.

  2. New option display-buffer-alist maps buffer name regexps to

    display actions, taking precedence over display-buffer-base-action.

23.14.4. New option window-combination-limit.

The new option window-combination-limit allows to return the space obtained for resizing or creating a window more reliably to the window from which such space was obtained.

23.14.5. New option window-combination-resize.

The new option window-combination-resize allows to split a window that otherwise cannot be split because it's too small by stealing space from other windows in the same combination. Subsequent resizing or deletion of the window will resize all windows in the same combination as well.

23.14.6. New option frame-auto-hide-function lets you choose between

iconifying or deleting a frame when burying a buffer in a dedicated frame, or quitting a window showing a buffer in a frame of its own.

23.14.7. New commands maximize-window and minimize-window.

These maximize and minimize the size of a window within its frame.

23.14.8. New commands switch-to-prev-buffer and switch-to-next-buffer.

These functions allow to navigate through the live buffers that have been shown in a specific window.

23.15. Minibuffer changes

23.15.1. The inactive minibuffer has its own major mode minibuffer-inactive-mode.

This is handy for minibuffer-only frames, and is also used for the feature where mouse-1 pops up Messages"', which can now easily be changed.

23.15.2. Minibuffers set truncate-lines to nil.

If you want to change the value to something else, you could use for example minibuffer-setup-hook.

23.16. auto-mode-case-fold is now enabled by default.

23.17. backup-by-copying-when-mismatch now defaults to t.

23.18. New basic faces 'error', 'warning', 'success'.

These are used to highlight text indicating failure, caution or successful operation.

23.19. New option list-colors-sort defines the color sort order

for list-colors-display.

23.20. The variable focus-follows-mouse now always defaults to nil.

24. Editing Changes in Emacs 24.1

24.1. Search changes

24.1.1. C-y in Isearch is now bound to isearch-yank-kill, instead of

isearch-yank-line.

24.1.2. M-y in Isearch is now bound to isearch-yank-pop, instead of

isearch-yank-kill.

24.1.3. M-s C-e in Isearch is now bound to isearch-yank-line.

24.2. New commands count-words-region and count-words.

24.2.1. M-= is bound to count-words-region, not 「count-lines-region」.

The count-words-region command, when called interactively, reports the number of lines, words, and characters in the region. It is a superset of the old 「count-lines-region」, which is now an obsolete alias for it.

24.3. The command just-one-space (M-SPC), if given a negative argument,

also deletes newlines around point.

24.4. Deletion changes

24.4.1. New option delete-active-region.

If non-nil, [delete] and DEL delete the region if it is active and no prefix argument is given. If set to 'kill', those commands kill instead.

24.4.2. New command delete-forward-char, bound to [delete].

This is meant for interactive use, and obeys delete-active-region. The command delete-char does not obey delete-active-region.

24.4.3. delete-backward-char is now a Lisp function.

Apart from obeying delete-active-region, its behavior is unchanged. However, the byte compiler now warns if it is called from Lisp; Lisp callers should use delete-char with a negative argument instead.

24.4.4. The option 「mouse-region-delete-keys」 has been deleted.

24.5. Selection changes.

The default handling of clipboard and primary selections has been changed to conform with modern X applications. In short, most commands for killing and yanking text now use the clipboard, while mouse commands use the primary selection.

In the following, we provide a list of these changes, followed by a list of steps to get the old behavior back if you prefer that.

24.5.1. select-active-regions now defaults to t.

Merely selecting text (e.g. with drag-mouse-1) no longer puts it in the kill ring. The selected text is put in the primary selection, if the system possesses a separate primary selection facility (e.g. X).

  1. select-active-regions also accepts a new value, 'only'.

    This means to only set the primary selection for temporarily active regions (usually made by mouse-dragging or shift-selection); "ordinary" active regions, such as those made with C-SPC followed by point motion, do not alter the primary selection.

  2. mouse-drag-copy-region now defaults to nil.

24.5.2. mouse-2 is now bound to mouse-yank-primary.

This pastes from the primary selection, ignoring the kill-ring. Previously, mouse-2 was bound to mouse-yank-at-click.

24.5.3. 'x-select-enable-clipboard' now defaults to t on all platforms.

24.5.4. 'x-select-enable-primary' now defaults to nil.

Thus, commands that kill text or copy it to the kill-ring (such as M-w, C-w, and C-k) also use the clipboard—not the primary selection.

  1. The "Copy", "Cut", and "Paste" items in the "Edit" menu are now

    exactly equivalent to M-w, C-w, and C-y respectively.

  2. Note that on MS-Windows, 'x-select-enable-clipboard' was already

    non-nil by default, as Windows does not support the primary selection between applications.

24.5.5. To return to the previous behavior, do the following:

  1. Change select-active-regions to nil.
  2. Change mouse-drag-copy-region to t.
  3. Change 'x-select-enable-primary' to t (on X only).
  4. Change 'x-select-enable-clipboard' to nil.
  5. Bind mouse-yank-at-click to mouse-2.

24.5.6. Support for X cut buffers has been removed.

24.5.7. X clipboard managers are now supported.

To inhibit this, change 'x-select-enable-clipboard-manager' to nil.

24.6. New command 【C-x r N】 (rectangle-number-lines) numbers the lines

in the current rectangle. With a prefix argument, this prompts for a number to count from and for a format string.

24.7. redisplay-dont-pause now defaults to t.

This makes Emacs feel more responsive to editing commands that arrive at high rate, example: if you lean on some key, because stopping redisplay in the middle (when this variable is nil) forces more expensive updates later on, and Emacs appears to be unable to keep up.

24.8. The behavior of <TAB> for active regions in Text mode has changed.

In Text and related modes, typing <TAB> (indent-for-tab-command) when the region is active causes Emacs to indent all the lines in the region, aligning them with the line previous to the first line in the region (or with the left margin if there is no previous line).

24.9. When 'occur' is called with a prefix argument, matching strings are

collected into the 'Occur' buffer without line numbers. If there are parenthesized subexpressions in the specified regexp, 'occur' reads replacement text that may contain \\& and \\N whose convention follows replace-match.

25. Changes in Specialized Modes and Packages in Emacs 24.1

25.1. Archive Mode has basic support for browsing and updating 7z archives.

25.2. BibTeX mode

25.2.1. BibTeX mode now supports biblatex.

Use the variable 「bibtex-dialect」 to select different BibTeX dialects. 「bibtex-entry-field-alist」 is now an obsolete alias for 「bibtex-BibTeX-entry-alist」.

25.2.2. New command 「bibtex-search-entries」, bound to C-c C-a.

25.2.3. New 「bibtex-entry-format」 option sort-fields, disabled by default.

25.2.4. New variable 「bibtex-search-entry-globally」.

25.3. Browse-url

25.3.1. New option browse-url-mailto-function specifies how to handle "mailto:%22s.

25.3.2. The default browser used by the package is now the "xdg-open" program,

on platforms that support it. This calls your desktop's preferred browser.

25.4. Calc

25.4.1. Support for musical notes.

25.4.2. Support for logarithmic units.

25.4.3. No longer uses the tex prefix for TeX specific unit names when

using TeX or LaTeX mode.

25.4.4. New option to highlight selections using faces.

25.4.5. 「calc-histogram」 has the option of using a vector to determine the bins.

25.4.6. New "O" option prefix.

25.4.7. Use the "O" prefix to "d r" (「calc-radix」) to turn on twos-complement mode.

25.5. Calendar, Diary, and Appt

25.5.1. Diary entries can contain non-printing "comments".

See the variable 「diary-comment-start」.

25.5.2. Appointments can specify their individual warning times.

See the variable 「appt-warning-time-regexp」.

25.5.3. The function specified by 「appt-disp-window-function」 may be passed

lists of arguments if multiple appointments are due at similar times. If you are using a custom function for this, you should update it.

25.5.4. New function 「diary-hebrew-birthday」.

25.5.5. Elements of 「calendar-day-abbrev-array」 and 「calendar-month-abbrev-array」

may no longer be nil, but must all be strings.

25.5.6. The obsolete (since Emacs 22.1) method of enabling the appt

package by adding 「appt-make-list」 to 「diary-hook」 has been removed. Use appt-activate instead.

25.5.7. Some appt variables (obsolete since Emacs 22.1) have been removed:

appt-issue-message (use the function appt-activate) appt-visible/appt-msg-window (use the variable appt-display-format)

25.5.8. Some diary function aliases (obsolete since Emacs 22.1) have been removed:

view-diary-entries, list-diary-entries, show-all-diary-entries

25.6. CC Mode

25.6.1. New feature to "guess" the style in an existing buffer.

The main entry point is M-x c-guess.

25.6.2. Java Mode now supports Java 5.0 (Tiger) and 6 (Mustang).

25.6.3. 'c-beginning-of-defun' and 'c-end-of-defun' now respect nested scopes.

Thus C-M-a will, by default, go to the beginning of the immediate function, not the top level.

25.6.4. "Macros with semicolons" can be registered for correct indentation.

Where such a macro ends a line (no semicolon) the next statement is no longer parsed as a statement continuation.

25.7. Comint and modes derived from it use the standard completion code.

25.8. Compilation mode

25.8.1. Compilation mode can be used without Font Lock mode.

「compilation-parse-errors-function」 is now obsolete.

25.8.2. New variable 「compilation-filter-start」, which is bound while

「compilation-filter-hook」 runs. It records the start position of the text inserted by 「compilation-filter」.

25.8.3. 「compilation-error-screen-columns」 and 「compilation-first-column」

are obeyed in the editing buffer. So programming language modes can set them, whereas previously only the value in the Compilation buffer was used.

25.9. Customize

25.9.1. Customize buffers now contain a search field.

The search is performed using customize-apropos. To turn off the search field, set custom-search-field to nil.

25.9.2. Options in customize group buffers start out hidden if not customized.

Use the arrow to the left of the option name to toggle visibility.

25.9.3. custom-buffer-sort-alphabetically now defaults to t.

25.9.4. The color widget now has a "Choose" button, which allows you to

choose a color via list-colors-display.

25.10. D-Bus

25.10.1. It is now possible to access buses other than the default system

or session bus.

25.10.2. The 「dbus-register-method」 and 「dbus-register-property」 functions

optionally do not register names.

25.10.3. The new function 「dbus-register-service」 registers a known service

name on a D-Bus without also registering a property or a method.

25.11. Dired-x

25.11.1. C-x C-j (dired-jump) and C-x 4 C-j (dired-jump-other-window),

if called with a prefix argument, read a file name from the minibuffer instead of using the current buffer.

25.11.2. The "dired local variables" feature of Dired-x is obsolete.

The standard directory local variables feature replaces it.

25.12. ERC changes

25.12.1. New options 「erc-autojoin-timing」 and 「erc-autojoin-delay」,

controlling attempts to autojoin a channel.

25.12.2. New variable 「erc-coding-system-precedence」: If we use 'undecided'

as the server coding system, this variable will then be consulted. The default is to decode strings that can be decoded as utf-8 as utf-8, and do the normal 'undecided' decoding for the rest.

25.13. Eshell changes

25.13.1. The default value of 「eshell-directory-name」 has changed

to be an "eshell" directory in user-emacs-directory. The old "~/.eshell/" directory is still used if it exists, though.

25.14. gdb-mi

25.14.1. The M-x gdb command now uses the GDB Machine Interface protocol.

It now supports multithread non-stop debugging and simultaneous debugging of several threads.

25.15. Image mode

25.15.1. RET (image-toggle-animation) toggles animation, if applicable.

Animation plays once, unless the option image-animate-loop is non-nil.

25.16. Info

25.16.1. New command M-x info-display-manual displays a named Info manual.

If that manual is already visited in some Info buffer, it displays that buffer. (This is handy if you have many manuals in many info buffers, and don't remember the name of the buffer visiting the manual you want to consult.) Otherwise, it loads and displays the manual.

25.16.2. 'e' is now bound to end-of-buffer rather than to 「Info-edit」.

This is for compatibility with the stand-alone Info reader program, and also because 「Info-edit」 is a rarely used command that is disabled by default.

25.17. Mail mode changes (not Message mode)

25.17.1. New command M-x mail-add-attachment for adding MIME attachments

25.17.2. The command M-x mail-attach-file was renamed to M-x mail-insert-file.

(Its name is misleading, since it has nothing to do with MIME attachments.) The old name is now an obsolete alias to the new name.

25.18. MH-E has been updated to MH-E version 8.3.1.

See MH-E-NEWS for details.

25.19. Modula-2 mode provides auto-indentation.

25.20. mpc.el: Can use pseudo tags of the form tag1|tag2 as a union of two tags.

25.21. nXML mode no longer binds C-RET to nxml-complete.

Completion is now performed via completion-at-point, bound to C-M-i or M-TAB. If nxml-bind-meta-tab-to-complete-flag is non-nil (the default), this performs tag completion.

25.22. Org mode has been updated to version 7.8.09.

See ORG-NEWS for details.

25.23. Prolog mode has been completely revamped, with lots of additional

functionality such as more intelligent indentation, electricity, support for more variants, including Mercury, and a lot more.

25.24. Rmail

25.24.1. The command 「rmail-epa-decrypt」 decrypts OpenPGP data

in the Rmail incoming message.

25.24.2. The variable 「rmail-message-filter」 no longer has any effect.

This change was made in Emacs 23.1 but was not advertised at the time. Try using rmail-show-message-hook instead.

25.25. Shell mode

25.25.1. M-x shell prompts for the shell path name if the default directory

is a remote file name and neither the environment variable $ESHELL nor the variable 「explicit-shell-file-name」 is set.

25.25.2. TAB is now bound to the standard completion-at-point command,

which now implements the pcomplete rules for shell command completion.

25.26. SMTPmail

25.26.1. SMTPmail now uses encrypted connections (via STARTTLS) by default

if the mail server supports them. This uses either built-in GnuTLS support, or the starttls.el library. Customize 「smtpmail-stream-type」 to change this.

25.26.2. The variable 「smtpmail-auth-credentials」 has been removed.

By default, the information is now stored in the file ~/.authinfo. This was the default value of smtpmail-auth-credentials. If you had customized smtpmail-auth-credentials to a list of user names and passwords, those settings are not used. During your first connection to the smtp server, Emacs will prompt for the user name and password, and offer to save them to ~/.authinfo. Or you can manually copy the credentials to ~/.authinfo. For example, if you had

(setq smtpmail-auth-credentials '(("mail.example.org" 25 "jim" "s!cret")))

then the equivalent line in ~/.authinfo would be

machine mail.example.org port 25 login jim password s!cret

See the auth-source manual for more information, example: on encrypting the credentials file.

25.26.3. The variable 「smtpmail-starttls-credentials」 has been removed.

If you had that set, you need to put

machine smtp.whatever.foo port 25 key "~/.mysmtptls.key" cert "~/.mysmtptls.cert"

in your ~/.authinfo file instead.

25.26.4. SMTPmail defaults to using the address in the From: header as the

SMTP MAIL FROM envelope. To override this, set 「mail-envelope-from」 to the address you wish to use instead.

25.27. SQL mode

25.27.1. New options 「sql-port」, 「sql-connection-alist」, 「sql-send-terminator」,

and 「sql-oracle-scan-on」.

25.27.2. New options controlling prompting for login parameters.

Each supported product has a custom variable 'sql-*-login-params', which is a list of the parameters to be prompted for before a connection is established.

25.27.3. The command sql-product-interactive now takes a prefix argument,

which causes it to prompt for an SQL product.

25.27.4. Product-specific SQL interactive commands now take prefix arguments.

These commands (sql-sqlite, sql-postgres, sql-mysql, etc.), given a prefix argument, prompt for a name for the SQL interactive buffer. This reduces the need for calling 「sql-rename-buffer」.

25.27.5. SQL interactive modes suppress command continuation prompts, and

replace tabs with spaces. The first change impacts multiple line SQL statements entered with C-j between each line, statements yanked into the buffer and statements sent with 'sql-send-' functions. The second prevents the MySQL and Postgres interpreters from listing object name completions when sent text via 'sql-send-' functions.

25.27.6. New command sql-connect starts a predefined SQLi session,

using the login parameters from 「sql-connection-alist」.

25.27.7. New "Save Connection" menu item in SQLi buffers.

This gathers the login params specified for the SQLi session, if it was not started by a connection, and saves them as a new connection.

25.27.8. New commands for listing database objects and details:

sql-list-all and sql-list-table.

25.27.9. An API for manipulating SQL product definitions has been added.

25.28. TeX modes

25.28.1. latex-electric-env-pair-mode keeps \begin..\end matched on the fly.

25.29. Tramp

25.29.1. New inline access method "ksu" (kerberized su).

25.29.2. The following access methods are discontinued: "ssh1old",

"ssh2old", "scp1old", "scp2old", "imap", "imaps" and "fish".

25.29.3. The user option remote-file-name-inhibit-cache controls whether

remote file attributes are cached for better performance.

25.29.4. The option 「ange-ftp-binary-file-name-regexp」 has changed its

default value to "".

25.29.5. Handlers for file-selinux-context and set-file-selinux-context

for remote machines which support SELinux.

25.30. New function url-queue-retrieve, which behaves like url-retrieve,

but with limits (「url-queue-parallel-processes」, 「url-queue-timeout」) on the degree of parallelism.

25.31. VC and related modes

25.31.1. Support for pulling on distributed version control systems.

The command C-x v + (vc-pull) runs a "pull" operation, if it is supported (currently with Bzr, Git, and Mercurial), to update the current branch and working tree. A prefix argument means to prompt the user for specifics, example: a pull location.

25.31.2. vc-update is now an alias for vc-pull.

25.31.3. Support for merging on distributed version control systems.

The command C-x v m (vc-merge) now runs a "merge" operation, if it is supported (currently with Bzr, Git, and Mercurial), to merge changes from another branch into the current one. It prompts for specifics, example: a merge source.

25.31.4. New option 「vc-revert-show-diff」 controls whether vc-revert

shows a diff while querying the user. It defaults to t.

25.31.5. Log entries in some Log View buffers can be toggled to display a

longer description by typing RET (log-view-toggle-entry-display). This is currently supported for Bzr, Git, and Mercurial (to support another backend, define a 「log-view-expanded-log-entry-function」). In the Log View buffers made by C-x v L (vc-print-root-log), you can use this to display the full log entry for the revision at point.

25.31.6. New command vc-ediff allows visual comparison of two revisions

of a file similar to vc-diff, but using ediff backend.

25.31.7. The option 「vc-initial-comment」 was removed in Emacs 23.2, but

this was not advertised at the time.

25.31.8. 「vc-toggle-read-only」 is an obsolete alias for 「toggle-read-only」.

Since Emacs 23, it has done the same thing as 「toggle-read-only」, but this was not advertised at the time.

25.32. Obsolete modes

25.32.1. abbrevlist.el

25.32.2. erc-hecomplete.el (use erc-pcomplete.el instead)

25.32.3. partial-completion-mode (complete.el) is obsolete.

You can get a comparable behavior with: (setq completion-styles '(partial-completion initials)) (setq completion-pcm-complete-word-inserts-delimiters t)

25.32.4. pc-mode.el is obsolete (CUA mode is much more comprehensive).

25.32.5. pgg is obsolete (use EasyPG instead).

25.32.6. sregex.el is obsolete, since rx.el is a strict superset.

25.32.7. s-region.el and pc-select.el are obsolete.

They are superseded by shift-select-mode, enabled by default since 23.1.

25.32.8. vc-mcvs.el is obsolete (for lack of a maintainer).

25.33. Miscellaneous

25.33.1. The Landmark game is now invoked with 'landmark', not 'lm'.

Its functions and variables have been similarly renamed.

25.33.2. In 「ido-file-completion-map」, C-v is no longer bound to 「ido-toggle-vc」.

(This interfered with cua-mode.)

25.33.3. f90.el has some support for Fortran 2008 syntax.

25.33.4. copyright-fix-years can optionally convert consecutive years to ranges.

25.33.5. New command nato-region converts text to NATO phonetic alphabet.

26. New Modes and Packages in Emacs 24.1

26.1. Occur Edit mode applies edits made in Occur buffers to the

original buffers. It is bound to "e" in Occur mode.

26.2. New global minor mode electric-pair-mode.

When enabled, typing an open parenthesis automatically inserts the matching closing one.

26.3. New global minor mode electric-indent-mode.

When enabled, typing certain characters triggers reindentation. Major modes wishing to use this can set electric-indent-chars or electric-indent-functions.

26.4. New global minor mode electric-layout-mode.

When enabled, typing certain characters automatically inserts newlines. Major modes wishing to use this can set electric-layout-rules.

26.5. tabulated-list.el provides a generic major mode for tabulated data,

from which other modes can be derived.

26.6. pcase.el provides the ML-style pattern matching macro 'pcase'.

26.7. secrets.el is an implementation of the Secret Service API, an

interface to password managers like GNOME Keyring or KDE Wallet. The Secret Service API requires D-Bus for communication. The command 「secrets-show-secrets」 offers a buffer with a visualization of the secrets.

26.8. notifications.el provides an implementation of the Desktop

Notifications API. It requires D-Bus for communication.

26.9. soap-client.el supports access to SOAP web services from Emacs.

soap-inspect.el is an interactive inspector for SOAP WSDL structures.

26.10. New generic mode, xmodmap-generic-mode, for xmodmap files.

26.11. New emacs-lock.el package.

The previous version has been moved to obsolete/old-emacs-lock.el. Now, there is a proper minor mode emacs-lock-mode. Protection against exiting Emacs and killing the buffer can be set separately. The mechanism for automatically turning off protection for buffers with dead inferior processes has been generalized.

27. Incompatible Lisp Changes in Emacs 24.1

27.1. Passing a nil argument to a minor mode function call now ENABLES

the minor mode unconditionally. This is so that you can write e.g.

(add-hook 'text-mode-hook #'foo-mode)

to enable foo-mode in Text mode buffers, removing the need for 「turn-on-foo-mode」 style functions. This affects all mode commands defined by define-minor-mode. If called interactively, the mode command still toggles the minor mode.

27.2. The return value of backup-buffer has changed.

It is now a list of three elements, where the second element is a list describing the original file's SELinux context. If Emacs or the system lacks SELinux support, the context list is (nil nil nil nil). See "Basic SELinux support" above, under "Changes in Emacs 24.1".

27.3. 「char-direction-table」 and the 「char-direction」 function were deleted.

They were buggy and inferior to the new support of bidirectional editing introduced in Emacs 24. If you need the bidirectional properties of a character, use get-char-code-property with the last argument 「bidi-class」.

27.4. copy-directory now copies the source directory as a subdirectory

of the target directory, if the latter is an existing directory. The new optional arg COPY-CONTENTS, if non-nil, makes the function copy the contents directly into a pre-existing target directory.

27.5. For mouse click input events in the text area, the Y pixel

coordinate in the POSITION list now counts from the top of the text area, excluding any header line. Previously, it counted from the top of the header line.

27.6. Support for "old-style" backquotes, obsolete for 10+ years, has

been further reduced. Now a backquote not followed by a space is always treated as a "new-style" backquote. Please remove all "old-style" backquotes from your code. If your code uses backquotes as documented in the Elisp manual, and compiles without warning, then you have nothing to do in this regard. Code not following the appropriate conventions may fail to compile.

The most common cause of trouble seems to be an old-style backquote followed by a newline. Another cause of trouble is vector notation for key sequence notation: instead of [(control ,)] and [(control ')], you should write [(control ?,)] and [(control ?')], which will work in older Emacsen too.

27.7. The macro 「eval-at-startup」 was removed in Emacs 23.2, but this

was not advertised at the time. The function custom-initialize-delay replaced all known uses.

27.8. view-buffer now treats special mode-class in the same way that

view-file has since Emacs 22 (i.e. it won't enable View mode if the major mode is special).

27.9. Menu and tool bar changes

27.9.1. During startup, Emacs no longer adds entries for 「menu-bar-lines」

and 「tool-bar-lines」 to default-frame-alist and initial-frame-alist. With these alist entries omitted, make-frame checks the value of the variable menu-bar-modetool-bar-mode to determine whether to create a menu-bar or tool-bar, respectively. If the alist entries are added, they override the value of menu-bar-modetool-bar-mode.

27.9.2. The menu bar bindings's caches are not used any more.

Use (where-is-internal <def> nil t) instead.

27.10. Regions created by mouse dragging are now normal active regions,

similar to those created by shift-selection (see Selection changes above). In previous Emacs versions, these regions were delineated by 「mouse-drag-overlay」; that variable has been removed.

27.11. The fourth argument of filter-buffer-substring has been removed.

If you want to remove text properties from the final result, simply pass the result through substring-no-properties.

27.12. cl.el no longer provides 「cl-19」.

27.13. The following obsolete functions and aliases have been removed

(the appropriate new function is given in parentheses; "not needed" means you can just remove all calls to the function in question):

27.13.1. 「comint-kill-output」 (comint-delete-output)

27.13.2. 「decompose-composite-char」 (char-to-string)

27.13.3. 「outline-visible」 (「outline-invisible-p」)

27.13.4. 「internal-find-face」 ('facep')

27.13.5. 「internal-get-face」 ('facep' and check-face)

27.13.6. 「frame-update-faces」 (not needed)

27.13.7. 「frame-update-face-colors」 (frame-set-background-mode)

27.13.8. 'x-frob-font-weight' and 'x-frob-font-slant' ('make-face-*' functions)

27.13.9. 'x-make-font-bold' and 'x-make-font-demibold' (make-face-bold)

27.13.10. 'x-make-font-italic' and 'x-make-font-oblique' (make-face-italic)

27.13.11. 'x-make-font-bold-italic' (make-face-bold-italic)

27.13.12. 'x-make-font-unbold' (make-face-unbold)

27.13.13. 'x-make-font-unitalic' (make-face-unitalic)

27.13.14. 「mldrag-drag-mode-line」 (mouse-drag-mode-line)

27.13.15. 「mldrag-drag-vertical-line」 (mouse-drag-vertical-line)

27.13.16. 「iswitchb-default-keybindings」 (iswitchb-mode)

27.13.17. 「char-bytes」 (== 1)

27.13.18. 「isearch-return-char」 (isearch-printing-char)

27.13.19. 「make-local-hook」 (not needed)

27.13.20. 「set-screen-height」 (set-frame-height)

27.13.21. 「set-screen-width」 (set-frame-width)

27.14. The following obsolete variables and varaliases have been removed

(the appropriate new variable is given in parentheses):

27.14.1. 「checkdoc-minor-keymap」 (「checkdoc-minor-mode-map」)

27.14.2. 「vc-header-alist」 (「vc-BACKEND-header」)

27.14.3. 「directory-sep-char」 (== ?/)

27.14.4. 「font-lock-defaults-alist」 (font-lock-defaults)

27.14.5. 'e' (float-e).

27.15. The following obsolete files were removed:

sc.el, x-menu.el, rnews.el, rnewspost.el

27.16. The format of the finder-inf.el file has changed, since the Finder

mechanism is now based on the package system. The variable 「finder-package-info」 is replaced by 'package–builtins' and 「finder-keywords-hash」.

27.17. When generating autoloads, update-directory-autoloads no longer

assumes every inspected file is in your load-path. It instead generates relative names according to the current load-path.

28. Lisp Changes in Emacs 24.1

28.1. Code can now use lexical scoping by default instead of dynamic scoping.

The lexical-binding variable enables lexical scoping for local variables. It is typically set via a file-local variable in the first line of the file, in which case it applies to all the code in that file.

28.1.1. 'eval' takes a new optional argument 'lexical' to choose the new lexical

binding instead of the old dynamic binding mode.

28.1.2. Lexically scoped interpreted functions are represented with a new form

of function value which looks like (closure ENV ARGS &rest BODY).

28.1.3. New macro 'letrec' to define recursive local functions.

28.1.4. 'defvar' and 'defconst' now mark the variable as special (dynamic).

So do 'defcustom' and other forms that call 'defvar' as a subroutine.

28.1.5. New function special-variable-p to check whether a variable is

declared as dynamically bound.

28.1.6. The form ((lambda …) …) is deprecated.

28.2. An Emacs Lisp testing tool is now included.

Emacs Lisp developers can use this tool to write automated tests for their code. See the ERT info manual for details.

28.3. Changes for bidirectional display and editing

28.3.1. New function current-bidi-paragraph-direction.

This returns the base direction of the paragraph at point.

28.3.2. New function bidi-string-mark-left-to-right.

Given a string containing characters from right-to-left scripts, this function returns another string which can be safely inserted into a buffer, such that any following text will be always displayed to the right of that string. (This works by appending an invisible Unicode "LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK" character if the argument string might need it.)

This is useful when the buffer has overall left-to-right paragraph direction and you need to insert a string whose contents are not known in advance, without disrupting the layout of the line.

28.4. Window changes

28.4.1. Window tree functions are accessible in Elisp.

Functions are provided to return the parent, siblings or child windows of any window including internal windows (windows not associated with a buffer) in the window tree.

  1. New function window-valid-p gives non-nil for live and internal

    windows.

  2. Window manipulation can deal with internal windows.

    Many window handling functions like split-window, delete-window, or delete-other-windows as well as the window resizing functions can now act on any window including internal ones.

28.4.2. window-total-height/-width vs window-body-height/-width.

The function window-height has been renamed to window-total-height and window-width has been renamed to window-body-width. The old names are provided as aliases. Two new functions window-total-width and window-body-height are provided.

28.4.3. Window parameters specific to window handling functions.

For each window you can specify a parameter to override the default behavior of a number of functions like split-window, delete-window and delete-other-windows. The variable ignore-window-parameters allows to ignore processing such parameters.

28.4.4. New semantics of third argument of split-window.

The third argument of split-window has been renamed to SIDE and can be set to any of the values 'below, 'right, 'above, or 'left to make the new window appear on the corresponding side of the window that shall be split. Any other value of SIDE will cause split-window to split the window into two side-by-side windows as before.

28.4.5. Window resizing functions.

A new standard function for resizing windows called window-resize has been introduced. This and all other functions for resizing windows no longer delete any windows when they become too small.

28.4.6. Deleting the selected window now selects the most recently selected

live window on that frame instead.

28.4.7. adjust-window-trailing-edge adjustments.

adjust-window-trailing-edge can now deal with fixed-size windows and is able to resize other windows if a window adjacent to the trailing edge cannot be shrunk any more. This makes its behavior more similar to that of Emacs 21 without compromising, however, its inability to delete windows which was introduced in Emacs 22.

28.4.8. Window-local buffer lists.

Windows now have local buffer lists. This means that removing a buffer from display in a window will preferably show the buffer previously shown in that window with its previous window-start and window-point positions. This also means that the same buffer may be automatically shown twice even if it already appears in another window.

28.4.9. switch-to-buffer has a new optional argument FORCE-SAME-WINDOW,

which if non-nil requires the buffer to be displayed in the currently selected window, signaling an error otherwise. If nil, another window can be used, example: if the selected one is strongly dedicated.

28.4.10. split-window-vertically and split-window-horizontally renamed

to split-window-below and split-window-right respectively. The old names are kept as aliases.

28.4.11. Display actions

  1. The second arg to display-buffer and pop-to-buffer is now

    named ACTION, and takes a display action of the same form as display-buffer-base-action (see Changes, above). A non-nil, non-list value is treated specially, as the old meaning.

  2. New variable display-buffer-overriding-action.
  3. The procedure of display-buffer etc. to choose a window is

    determined by combining display-buffer-overriding-action, display-buffer-alist, the ACTION arg, display-buffer-base-action, and display-buffer-fallback-action. The second and fourth of these are user-customizable variables.

    See the docstring of display-buffer for details.

28.4.12. New functions window-state-get and window-state-put.

These functions allow to save and restore the state of an arbitrary frame or window as an Elisp object.

28.5. Completion

28.5.1. New variable completion-extra-properties used to specify extra

properties of the current completion:

  • :annotation-function, same as the old completion-annotate-function.
  • :exit-function, function to call after completion took place.

28.5.2. Functions on completion-at-point-functions can return any of the

properties valid for completion-extra-properties.

28.5.3. 「completion-annotate-function」 is obsolete.

28.5.4. New 'metadata' method for completion tables. The metadata thus returned

can specify various details of the data returned by all-completions:

  • 'category' is the kind of objects returned (e.g., 'buffer', 'file', …), used to select a style in completion-category-overrides.
  • 「annotation-function」 to add annotations in Completions.
  • 「display-sort-function」 to specify how to sort entries in Completions.
  • 「cycle-sort-function」 to specify how to sort entries when cycling.

28.5.5. 「minibuffer-local-filename-must-match-map」 is not used any more.

Instead, the bindings in minibuffer-local-filename-completion-map are combined with minibuffer-local-must-match-map.

28.5.6. New variable completing-read-function allows overriding the

behavior of completing-read.

28.6. glyphless-char-display can now distinguish between graphical and

text terminal display, via a char-table entry that is a cons cell.

28.7. pre-command-hook/post-command-hook are not reset to nil on error.

Instead, the offending function is removed.

28.8. New hook types

28.8.1. New function run-hook-wrapped for running an abnormal hook by

passing the hook functions as arguments to a "wrapping" function. Like run-hook-with-args-until-success, it stops at the first non-nil return value.

28.8.2. New macro with-wrapper-hook for running an abnormal hook as a

set of "wrapping" filters, similar to around advice. (A version of this macro was actually added in Emacs 23.2 but was not advertised at the time.)

28.9. Debugger changes

28.9.1. New macro condition-case-unless-debug.

(This was actually added in Emacs 23.1 as condition-case-no-debug, but not advertised)

28.9.2. The macro with-demoted-errors.

It was also added in Emacs 23.1, but not advertised.

28.9.3. Variable 「stack-trace-on-error」 removed.

28.9.4. The debugger can now "continue" from an error, which means it will

jump to the error handler as if the debugger had not been invoked instead of jumping all the way to the top-level.

28.9.5. Set debug-on-event to enter the debugger on events like SIGUSR1.

This can be useful when inhibit-quit is set.

28.10. The new function 「server-eval-at」 allows evaluation of Lisp forms on

named Emacs server instances.

28.11. call-process and call-process-region allow a '(:file "file")' spec

to redirect STDOUT to a file.

28.12. The function format-time-string now supports the %N directive,

for higher-resolution time stamps.

28.13. New input reading functions

28.13.1. New function read-char-choice reads a restricted set of

characters, discarding any inputs not inside the set.

28.13.2. The command read-color now requires a match for a color name

or RGB triplet, instead of signaling an error if the user provides invalid input.

  1. facemenu-read-color is now an alias for read-color.

28.14. 「image-library-alist」 is renamed to dynamic-library-alist.

The variable is now used to load all kind of supported dynamic libraries, not just image libraries. The previous name is still available as an obsolete alias.

28.15. Syntax parsing changes

28.15.1. New variable syntax-propertize-function.

This replaces font-lock-syntactic-keywords which is now obsolete. This allows syntax-table properties to be set independently from font-lock: just call syntax-propertize to make sure the text is propertized. Together with this new variable come a new hook syntax-propertize-extend-region-functions, as well as two helper functions: syntax-propertize-via-font-lock to reuse old font-lock-syntactic-keywords as-is; and syntax-propertize-rules which provides a new way to specify syntactic rules.

28.15.2. Syntax tables support a new "comment style c" additionally to style b.

28.16. New hook post-self-insert-hook, run after self-insert-command.

28.17. frame-local variables cannot be let-bound any more.

28.18. Major and minor mode changes

28.18.1. set-auto-mode now respects mode: local variables at the end of files,

as well as those in the -*- line.

28.18.2. prog-mode is a new major mode from which programming modes

should be derived.

  1. prog-mode-hook can be used to enable features for programming

    modes, example: (add-hook 'prog-mode-hook #'flyspell-prog-mode) to enable on-the-fly spell checking for comments and strings.

28.18.3. New hook change-major-mode-after-body-hook, run by

run-mode-hooks just before any other mode hooks.

28.18.4. Enabled globalized minor modes can be disabled in specific major modes.

If the global mode is global-FOO-mode, then run (FOO-mode -1) in the major mode's hook, where FOO-mode toggles the mode on a per-buffer basis.

28.18.5. define-minor-mode accepts new keywords :variable, :after-hook.

28.19. File-handling changes

28.19.1. delete-file and delete-directory now accept optional arg TRASH.

Trashing is performed if TRASH and delete-by-moving-to-trash are both non-nil. Interactively, TRASH defaults to t, unless a prefix argument is supplied (see Trash changes, above).

28.19.2. New file predicates: file-equal-p, file-in-directory-p.

28.19.3. New function file-size-human-readable.

28.20. Tool-bars can display separators.

Tool-bar separators are handled like menu separators in menu-bar maps, i.e. via menu entries of the form '(menu-item "–")'.

28.21. Image API

28.21.1. Animated images support (currently animated gifs only).

  1. image-animated-p returns non-nil if an image can be animated.
  2. image-animate animates a supplied image spec.
  3. image-animate-timer returns the timer object for an image that

    is being animated.

28.21.2. 「image-extension-data」 has been renamed to image-metadata.

The old name is an obsolete alias to the new one.

28.21.3. Image mode can view any image type that ImageMagick supports.

This requires Emacs to be built with ImageMagick support.

  1. New function 「imagemagick-types」, defined if ImageMagick support

    is enabled, returns a list of image file extensions that your ImageMagick installation supports.

  2. New function imagemagick-register-types enables ImageMagick

    image types in Image mode and in create-image and other helper functions.

  3. New option imagemagick-types-inhibit excludes certain

    ImageMagick image types from imagemagick-register-types.

  4. With ImageMagick support, there are extra Image mode commands to

    resize and rotate images: image-transform-fit-to-height, image-transform-fit-to-width, image-transform-set-rotation, and image-transform-set-scale.

28.22. compose-mail now accepts an optional 8th arg, RETURN-ACTION, and

passes it to the mail user agent function. This argument specifies an action for returning to the caller after finishing with the mail. For example, this is used by Rmail to optionally delete a mail window.

28.23. XML and HTML parsing

If Emacs is compiled with libxml2 support, there are two new functions: libxml-parse-html-region (which parses "real world" HTML) and libxml-parse-xml-region (which parses XML). Both return an Emacs Lisp parse tree.

28.24. Networking and encryption changes

28.24.1. open-network-stream can now be used to open an encrypted stream.

It now accepts an optional ':type' parameter for initiating a TLS connection, directly or via STARTTLS. To do STARTTLS, additional parameters (':end-of-command', ':success', ':capabilities-command') must also be supplied.

28.24.2. New library gnutls.el.

The new function gnutls-available-p returns non-nil if Emacs is built with GnuTLS support. The main entry points are 「open-gnutls-stream」 and 「gnutls-negotiate」. It's easiest to use these functions through open-network-stream, because that can upgrade connections through STARTTLS opportunistically or use plain SSL, depending on your needs. For debugging, set gnutls-log-level greater than 0.

28.24.3. New primitive secure-hash that supports many secure hash algorithms:

md5, sha1, sha2, sha224, sha256, sha384, and sha512. The lisp library sha1.el has been removed. The 'sha1' feature is provided by default.

28.25. Isearch

28.25.1. New hook isearch-update-post-hook that runs in isearch-update.

28.26. Progress reporters can now "spin".

The MIN-VALUE and MAX-VALUE arguments of make-progress-reporter can now be nil, or omitted. This makes a "non-numeric" reporter. Each time you call progress-reporter-update on that progress reporter, with a nil or omitted VALUE argument, the reporter message is displayed with a "spinning bar".

28.27. New variable revert-buffer-in-progress-p is true while a buffer is

being reverted, even if the buffer has a local revert-buffer-function.

28.28. New variables delayed-warnings-list and delayed-warnings-hook.

If delayed-warnings-list is non-nil, the command loop calls delayed-warnings-hook after post-command-hook. At present, this is only used by Emacs on some platforms to display warnings during startup, which might otherwise not be noticed. This uses the functions display-delayed-warnings and collapse-delayed-warnings.

28.29. rx.el has a new 「group-n」 construct for explicitly numbered groups.

28.30. New function make-composed-keymap that constructs a new keymap

from multiple input maps. You can use this to make a keymap that inherits from multiple maps, eg: (set-keymap-parent newmap (make-composed-keymap othermap parent))

28.31. New function string-prefix-p.

(This was actually added in Emacs 23.2 but was not advertised at the time.)

28.32. New reader macro ## that stands for the empty symbol.

This means that the empty symbol can now be read back. Also, #: by itself (when not immediately followed by a possible symbol character) stands for an empty uninterned symbol.

28.33. New math functions 'isnan', 'copysign', 'frexp', 'ldexp'.

28.34. The following functions and variables are obsolete:

28.34.1. 「tooltip-use-echo-area」 is obsolete.

Rather than setting this to t, disable Tooltip mode instead.

28.34.2. buffer-substring-filters is obsolete.

Use filter-buffer-substring-functions instead.

28.34.3. 「byte-compile-disable-print-circle」 is obsolete.

28.34.4. 「deferred-action-list」 and 「deferred-action-function」 are obsolete.

Use post-command-hook instead.

28.34.5. 「font-lock-maximum-size」 is obsolete.

29. Changes in Emacs 24.1 on Non-Free Operating Systems

29.1. On MS Windows, Emacs warns when using the obsolete init file _emacs,

and also when HOME is set to C:\ by default.

29.2. New configure.bat options

29.2.1. –enable-checking builds Emacs with extra runtime checks.

29.2.2. –distfiles specifies files to be included in binary distribution.

29.2.3. –without-gnutls disables automatic GnuTLS detection.

29.2.4. –lib for general library linkage, works with the USERLIBS build variable.

29.3. New make target 'dist' to create binary distribution for MS Windows.

29.4. The Lisp function 「w32-default-color-map」 is now obsolete.

(It is only used internally in the Emacs C code.)

29.5. Customize ns-auto-hide-menu-bar to have the menu-bar hidden, but

reappear on mouse-over. (Requires Mac OS X 10.6 or later.)

29.6. On Mac OS X, dragging a file into Emacs visits the file, like on

other platforms, rather than inserting its contents into the buffer.

This file is part of GNU Emacs.

GNU Emacs is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with GNU Emacs. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Created: 2023-08-03 Thu 12:13

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