9 What the Future Holds

This is part 9 of the XEmacs Frequently Asked Questions list. This section will change frequently, and (in theory) should contain any interesting items that have transpired recently. (But in practice it’s not getting updated like this.)

This section also contains descriptions of the new features in all the recent releases of XEmacs. For the most part, the information below is a synopsis of the more complete information that can be found in the file ‘NEWS’ in the ‘etc’ directory of the XEmacs distribution. You can view this file in XEmacs using C-h n or the ‘Help’ menu.

Information on older versions of XEmacs can be find in ‘ONEWS’ in the same directory, or ‘OONEWS’ for really old versions.

9.0: Changes

9.0: Changes

Q9.0.1: What new features will be in XEmacs soon?

#### Write me.

Q9.0.2: What’s new in XEmacs 21.4?

21.4 was the "stable" version of the 21.2 series, which was considered "experimental" throughout its life; thus there were no "official" releases at all. In essence, XEmacs is now following the "alternating" scheme of Linux, where at any point there are at least two different development branches, one "stable" and one "experimental". Periodic releases happen in both branches, but those in the experimental branch are not tested as well, and there’s no guarantee they will work at all. The experimental branch is open to any and all code that’s acceptable to the developers; the stable branch, however, is in general limited only to bug fixes, and all contributions are carefully reviewed to make sure they will increase and not decrease stability.

21.3 never existed at all; it was decided to follow the Linux scheme exactly, where odd-numbered series are experimental and even-numbered ones stable.

The following lists summarizes the essential changes made in this version. For a fuller list, see the ‘NEWS’ in the ‘etc’ directory of the XEmacs distribution, or use C-h n or the ‘Help’ menu to view this file inside of XEmacs.

User-visible changes in XEmacs 21.4

• The delete key now deletes forward by default.
• Shifted motion keys now select text by default.
• You can now build XEmacs with support for GTK+ widget set.
• ~/.xemacs/init.el is now the preferred location for the init file. (XEmacs now supports a ‘~/.xemacs/init.el’ startup file. Custom file will move to ~/.xemacs/custom.el.)
• Much-improved sample init.el, showing how to use many useful features.
• XEmacs support for menu accelerators has been much improved.
• Default menubar improvements. (Default menubar has many new commands and better organization. The font-menu is now available under MS Windows.)
• Dialog box improvements, including a real file dialog box. (XEmacs now has a proper file dialog box under MS Windows (and GTK)! The old clunky file dialog box is improved. Keyboard traversal now works correctly in MS Windows dialog boxes. There is a Search dialog box available from ‘Edit->Find...’)
• New buffer tabs.
• There is a new MS Windows installer, netinstall, ported from Cygwin.
• The subprocess quote-handling mechanism under Windows is much improved.
• Printing support now available under MS Windows.
• Selection improvements. (Kill and yank now interact with the clipboard under Windows. MS Windows support for selection is now much more robust. Motif selection support is now more correct (but slower).)
• Mail spool locking now works correctly.
• International support changes. (The default coding-priority-list is now safer. International keysyms are now supported under X. MS Windows 1251 code page now supported. Czech, Thai, Cyrillic-KOI8, Vietnamese, Ethiopic now supported. Proper support for words in Latin 3 and Latin 4.)
• Help buffers contain hyperlinks, and other changes.
• The modeline’s text is now scrollable.
• The mouse wheel under MS Windows now functions correctly.
• Interactive searching and matching case improvements. (Incremental search will now highlight all visible matches. Interactive searches always respect uppercase characters.)
• Rectangle functions rewritten to avoid inserting extra spaces.
• New command ‘kill-entire-line’ that always kills the entire line.
• Default values correctly stored in minibuffer histories.
• You can now create "indirect buffers", like in GNU Emacs.
• Pixel-based scrolling has been implemented.
• Operation progress can be displayed using graphical widgets.
• User names following a tilde can now be completed at file name prompts.
• XEmacs can now play sound using Enlightenment Sound Daemon (ESD).
• X-Face support is now available under MS Windows.
• The PostgreSQL Relational Database Management System is now supported.
• Indentation no longer indents comments that begin at column zero.
• Face and variable settings can have comments in Customize.
• New locations for early package hierarchies.
• The ‘auto-save’ library has been greatly improved.
• New variable ‘mswindows-alt-by-itself-activates-menu’.
• Other init-file-related changes. (Init file in your home directory may be called ‘.emacs.el’. New command-line switches -user-init-file and -user-init-directory.)
• Etags changes. See ‘NEWS’ for full details.

Lisp and internal changes in XEmacs 21.4

Not yet written.

Q9.0.3: What’s new in XEmacs 21.1?

21.1 was the "stable" version of "experimental" 21.0 series. See section What’s new in XEmacs 21.4?.

The following lists summarizes the essential changes made in this version. For a fuller list, see the ‘NEWS’ in the ‘etc’ directory of the XEmacs distribution, or use C-h n or the ‘Help’ menu to view this file inside of XEmacs.

User-visible changes in XEmacs 21.1

• XEmacs is now supported under Microsoft Windows 95/98 and Windows NT/2000/XP operating systems. To discuss Windows-specific issues, subscribe to the mailing list at xemacs-winnt-request@xemacs.org.
• XEmacs has been unbundled into constituent installable packages.
• Other notable changes: The ‘Options’ menu has been ported to Custom; XEmacs now is able to choose X visuals and use private colormaps; You can drag the vertical divider of "horizontally" (side-by-side) split windows.
• Building changes: XEmacs can be built with support for 31-bit Lisp integers and 32-bit pointers (previously, it was 28-bit integers and pointers); XEmacs can be built with LDAP support; ‘dir’ files can be removed in the Info subsystem, and will be regenerated on-the-fly.
• New packages: ‘imenu’, ‘popper’, ‘gdb-highlight’
• Package changes: Many changes to ‘cc-mode’, ‘gnus’, ‘gnuclient’. See ‘NEWS’ for full details.
• New commands, variables and functions: center-to-window-line (like recenter but doesn’t force a redisplay); variable user-full-name (customize what your full name looks like in mail); M-x customize-changed-options (customize options whose default values changes because you upgraded your XEmacs); M-x add-log-convert (converts an old-style ChangeLog buffer to new-style); M-x zap-up-to-char (like zap-to-char but doesn’t delete the char searched for); commands to store, retrieve and increment numbers in registers, useful for macros.
• Changes to commands, variables, and functions: M-x query-replace and friends operate only on the region when it’s active; echo-keystrokes can now be a floating-point number; M-. searches exact tag matches before inexact ones; function user-full-name with no arguments returns the var user-full-name; a prefix arg to M-: and C-h c inserts the result in the current buffer.
• Other changes: Under X, new application class ‘XEmacs’; byte-compilation of user-specs now works.
• XEmacs/Mule (internationalization) changes: Mule support now works on TTY’s; Egg/SJ3 input method now officially supported (Quail and Egg/Skk already available through LEIM since 20.3); localized Japanese menubars if XEmacs is built with the right support.

Lisp and internal changes in XEmacs 21.1

• Specifier changes: The window locale now has a higher precedence than the buffer locale when instantiating; new macro let-specifier; new specifiers vertical-scrollbar-visible-p, horizontal-scrollbar-visible-p’, scrollbar-on-left-p, scrollbar-on-top-p, vertical-divider-always-visible-p, vertical-divider-shadow-thickness, vertical-divider-line-width, vertical-divider-spacing; specifiers and symbols whose value is a specifier allowed as modeline specifications.
• Frame focus changes: focus-follows-mouse works like FSF, prevents any attempt to permanently change the selected frame; new function focus-frame sets the window system focus a frame; new macros save-selected-frame and with-selected-frame.
• Window function changes: select-window now has optional argument NORECORD to inhibit recording a buffer change; vertical-motion now correctly handles optional WINDOW argument and has new optional argument PIXELS, to have the returned values be in pixels; new function vertical-motion-pixels; new functions window-text-area-pixel-{width,height,edges}; new functions shrink-window-pixels and enlarge-window-pixels; new function window-displayed-text-pixel-height.
• Other function changes: Arithmetic comparison functions <, >, =, /= now accept a variable number of arguments; hashtables now have a consistent read/print syntax; keyword symbols cannot be set to a value other than themselves; concat no longer accepts integer arguments; new function string, like list, vector, etc.; new function temp-directory (OS-independent way to get a temp directory); load-average has optional argument USE-FLOATS; make-event implemented completely; new function function-interactive (returns a function’s interactive spec); new functions lmessage, lwarn (printf-like versions of display-wessage, display-warning); new keyword :version to defcustom.
• Performance: when the new GNU Malloc aka Doug Lea Malloc is available, it will be used (better performance on libc6 Linux systems); tracking line-numbers in modeline is now efficient; profiling records a call-count of all called functions, retrievable through profile-call-count-results.
• Startup and path searching: code to assemble paths at startup rewritten for new package system; new function split-path (splits by path-separator); Info-default-directory-list obsolete, use Info-directory-list instead; site-lisp is deprecated and no longer on the load-path by default.

Q9.0.4: What’s new in XEmacs 20.4?

XEmacs 20.4 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.

Q9.0.5: What’s new in XEmacs 20.3?

XEmacs 20.3 was released in November 1997. It contains many bugfixes, and a number of new features, including Autoconf 2 based configuration, additional support for Mule (Multi-language extensions to Emacs), many more customizations, multiple frames on TTY-s, support for multiple info directories, an enhanced gnuclient, improvements to regexp matching, increased MIME support, and many, many synches with GNU Emacs 20.

The XEmacs/Mule support has been only seriously tested in a Japanese locale, and no doubt many problems still remain. The support for ISO-Latin-1 and Japanese is fairly strong. MULE support comes at a price—about a 30% slowdown from 19.16. We’re making progress on improving performance and XEmacs 20.3 compiled without Mule (which is the default) is definitely faster than XEmacs 19.16.

XEmacs 20.3 is the first non-beta v20 release, and will be the basis for all further development.

Q9.0.6: What’s new in XEmacs 20.2?

The biggest changes in 20.2 include integration of EFS (the next generation of ange-ftp) and AUC Tex (the Emacs subsystem that includes a major mode for editing Tex and LaTeX, and a lot of other stuff). Many bugs from 20.0 have been fixed for this release. 20.2 also contains a new system for customizing XEmacs options, invoked via M-x customize.

XEmacs 20.2 is the development release (20.0 was beta), and is no longer considered unstable.

For older news, see the file ‘ONEWS’ in the ‘etc’ directory of the XEmacs distribution.

This document was generated by Aidan Kehoe on December 27, 2016 using texi2html 1.82.