B. Emacs 19 Antinews

For those users who live backwards in time, here is information about downgrading to Emacs version 19. We hope you will enjoy the greater simplicity that results from the absence of certain Emacs 20 features.

• The multibyte character and end-of-line conversion support have been eliminated entirely. (Some users consider this a tremendous improvement.) Character codes are limited to the range 0 through 255 and files imported onto Unix-like systems may have a ^M at the end of each line to remind you to control MS-DOG type files.

• Fontsets, coding systems and input methods have been eliminated as well.

• The mode line normally displays the string `Emacs', in case you forget what editor you are using.

• Scroll bars always appear on the right-hand side of the window. This clearly separates them from the text in the window.

• The M-x customize feature has been replaced with a very simple feature, M-x edit-options. This shows you all the user options right from the start, so you don't have to hunt for the ones you want. It also provides a few commands, such as s and x, to set a user option.

• The DELETE key does nothing special in Emacs 19 when you use it after selecting a region with the mouse. It does exactly the same thing in that situation as it does at all other times: delete one character backwards.

• C-x C-w no longer changes the major mode according to the new file name. If you want to change the mode, use M-x normal-mode.

• In Transient Mark mode, each window displays highlighting for the region as it exists in that window.

• Outline mode doesn't use overlay properties; instead, it hides a line by converting the preceding newline into code 015. Magically, however, if you save the file, the 015 character appears in the file as a newline.

• There is now a clever way you can activate the minibuffer recursively even if enable-recursive-minibuffers is nil. All you have to do is switch windows to a non-minibuffer window, and then use a minibuffer command. You can pile up any number of minibuffer levels this way, but M-x top-level will get you out of all of them.

• We have removed the limit on the length of minibuffer history lists; they now contain all the minibuffer arguments you have used since the beginning of the session.

• Dynamic abbrev expansion now handles case conversion in a very simple and straightforward way. If you have requested preserving case, it always converts the entire expansion to the case pattern of the abbrev that you have typed in.

• The compose-mail command does not exist; C-x m now runs mail directly.

• There is no way to quote a file name with special characters in it. What you see is what you get: if the name looks remote, it is remote.

• M-x grep-find has been eliminated, because grep has never been lost.

• Some Dired commands have been rearranged: two-character sequences have been replaced with quick single-character commands:
  • For dired-mark-executables, type *.
  • For dired-mark-directories, type /.
  • For dired-mark-symlinks, type @.
  • For dired-change-marks, type c.
  • For dired-unmark-all-files, type C-M-?.
  • For dired-unmark-all-marks, type C-M-? RET.

  But if you want to use dired-flag-garbage-files, &, you'll just have to stop living in the past.

• In C mode, you can now specify your preferred style for block comments. If you want to use the style

  /* blah blah */

  then you should set the variable c-block-comments-indent-p to t.

• To customize faces used by Font Lock mode, use the variable font-lock-face-attributes. See its documentation string for details.

• For efficiency, Font Lock mode now uses by default the minimum supported level of decoration for the selected major mode.

• If you kill a buffer, any registers holding saved positions in that buffer are changed to point into limbo.

• The function set-frame-font has been renamed to set-default-font.

• The variable tex-main-file doesn't exist. Of course, you can create the variable by setting it, but that won't do anything special.

• The scroll-preserve-screen-position variable has been eliminated; and so has the feature that it controls.

• We have eliminated the functions add-untranslated-filesystem and remove-untranslated-filesystem, and replaced them with a simpler function, using-unix-filesystems.

• To keep up with decreasing computer memory capacity, many other functions and files have been eliminated in Emacs 19. There's no need to mention them all here. If you try to use one of them, you'll get an error message to tell you that it is undefined or unbound.