Appendix E Emacs 22 Antinews

For those users who live backwards in time, here is information about downgrading to Emacs version 22.3. We hope you will enjoy the greater simplicity that results from the absence of many Emacs 23.3 features.

• We have switched to a character representation specially designed for Emacs. Rather than forcing all the widely used scripts into artificial alignment, as Unicode does, Emacs treats them all equally, giving each one a place in the space of character codes. We have eliminated the confusing practice, in Emacs 23, whereby one character can belong to multiple character sets. Now each script has its own variant, and they all are different as far as Emacs is concerned. For example, there's a Latin-1 c-cedilla character, and there's a Latin-2 c-cedilla; searching a buffer for the Latin-1 variant only finds that variant, but not the others.
• Emacs now uses its own special internal encoding for non-ASCII characters, known as ‘emacs-mule’. This was imperative to support several different variants of the same character, each one belonging to its own script: ‘emacs-mule’ marks each character with its script, to better discern them from one another.
• For simplicity, the functions encode-coding-region and decode-coding-region no longer accept an argument saying where to store the result of their conversions. The result always replaces the original, so there's no need to look for it elsewhere.
• Emacs no longer performs font anti-aliasing. If your fonts look ugly, try choosing a larger font and increasing the screen resolution. Admittedly, this becomes difficult as you go further back in time, since available screen resolutions will decrease.
• The Fontconfig font library is no longer supported. To specify a font, you must use an XLFD (X Logical Font Descriptor). The other ways of specifying fonts—so-called “Fontconfig” and “GTK” font names—are redundant, so they have been removed.
• Transient Mark mode is now disabled by default. Furthermore, some commands that operate specifically on the region when it is active and Transient Mark mode is enabled (such as fill-paragraph ispell-word, and indent-for-tab-command), no longer do so.
• Holding <shift> while typing a motion command no longer creates a temporarily active region, since that's inconsistent with how Emacs normally handles keybindings. The variable shift-select-mode has been deleted. You can, however, still create temporarily active regions by dragging the mouse.
• The line motion commands, C-n and C-p, now move by logical text lines, not screen lines. Even if a long text line is continued over multiple screen lines, C-n and C-p treat it as a single line, because that's ultimately what it is.
• Visual Line mode, which provides “word wrap” functionality, has been removed. You can still use Long Lines mode to gain an approximation of word wrapping, though this has some drawbacks—for instance, syntax highlighting often doesn't work well on wrapped lines.
• C-l now runs recenter instead of recenter-top-bottom. This always sets the current line at the center of the window, instead of cycling through the center, top, and bottom of the window on successive invocations. This lets you type C-l C-l C-l C-l to be absolutely sure that you have recentered the line.
• The way Emacs generates possible minibuffer completions is now much simpler to understand. It matches alternatives to the text before point, ignoring the text after point; it also does not attempt to perform partial completion if the first completion attempt fails.
• Typing M-n at the start of the minibuffer history list no longer attempts to generate guesses of possible minibuffer input. It instead does the straightforward thing, by issuing the message ‘End of history; no default available’.
• Individual buffers can no longer display faces specially. The text scaling commands C-x C-+, C-x C--, and C-x C-0 have been removed, and so has the buffer face menu bound to S-down-mouse-1.
• VC no longer supports fileset-based operations on distributed version control systems (DVCSs) such as Arch, Bazaar, Subversion, Mercurial, and Git. For instance, multi-file commits will be performed by committing one file at a time. As you go further back in time, we will remove DVCS support entirely, so you should migrate your projects to CVS.
• Rmail now uses a special file format, Babyl format, specifically designed for storing and editing mail. When you visit a file in Rmail, or get new mail, Rmail converts it automatically to Babyl format.
• Emacs can no longer display frames on X windows and text terminals (ttys) simultaneously. If you start Emacs as an X application, it can only create X frames; if you start Emacs on a tty, it can only use that tty. No more confusion about which type of frame emacsclient will use in any given Emacs session!
• Emacs can no longer be started as a daemon. You can be sure that if you don't see Emacs, then it's not running.
• Emacs has added support for many soon-to-be-non-obsolete platforms, including VMS, DECstation, SCO Unix, and systems lacking alloca. Support for Sun windows has been added.
• To keep up with decreasing computer memory capacity and disk space, many other functions and files have been eliminated in Emacs 22.3.