Emacs 20 Antinews
For those users who live backwards in time, here is information about downgrading to Emacs version 20. We hope you will enjoy the greater simplicity that results from the absence of many Emacs 21 features.
- The display engine has been greatly simplified by eliminating support
for variable-size characters and other non-text display features. This
avoids the complexity of display layout in Emacs 21. To wit:
- Variable-size characters are not supported in Emacs 20. You cannot use fonts which contain oversized characters, and using italic fonts can result in illegible display. However, text which uses variable-size fonts is unreadable anyway. With all characters in a frame laid out on a regular grid, each character having the same height and width, text is much easier to read.
- Emacs does not display images, or play sounds. It just displays text, as you would expect from a text editor.
- Specification of the font for a face now uses an XLFD font name, for compatibility with other X applications. This means that font attributes cannot be merged when combining faces; however, experience shows that mergers are bad economics. Face inheritance has also been removed, so no one can accumulate "too much face."
- Several face appearance attributes, including 3D, strike-through, and overline, have been eliminated.
- Emacs now provides its own "lean and mean" scroll bars instead of using those from the X toolkit. Toggle buttons and radio buttons in menus now look just like any other menu item, which simplifies them, and prevents them from standing out and distracting your attention from the other menu items.
- There are no toolbars and no tooltips; in particular, GUD mode cannot display variable values in a tooltip when you click on that variable's name. Instead, Emacs 20 provides a direct interface to the debugger, so that you can type appropriate debugger commands, such as display foo and print bar. As these commands use explicit words, their meaning is more self-evident.
- Colors are not available on text-only terminals. If you must have colors, but cannot afford to run X, you can now use the MS-DOG version of Emacs inside a DOS emulator.
- The mode line is not mouse-sensitive, since it is meant only to display information. Use keyboard commands to switch between buffers, toggle read-only and modified status, switch minor modes on and off, etc.
- The support for "wheeled" mice under X has been removed, because of their slow scroll rate, and because you will find fewer and fewer of these mice as you go back in time. Instead Emacs 20 provides the C-v and M-v keys for scrolling. (You can also use the scroll bar, but be advised that it, too, may be absent in yet earlier Emacs versions.)
- Busy-cursor display is gone, as it was found to be too hard to draw on displays whose resolution is getting lower and lower. This means that you get the standard kind of cursor blinking that your terminal provides.
- Some aspects of Emacs appearance, such as the colors of the scroll bar and the menus, can only be controlled via X resources. Since colors aren't supported except on X, it doesn't make any sense to do this in any way but the X way. For those users who aren't
