privy to X arcana,
we've provided good default colors that should make everybody happy.
Emacs 20 adds new lines to the buffer when you move down from the last
line with C-n or a down-arrow.
The variable show-trailing-whitespace has no special meaning, so
trailing whitespace on a line is now always displayed correctly: as
empty space. To see if a line ends with spaces or tabs, type C-e
on that line. Likewise, empty lines at the end of the buffer are not
marked in any way; use M-> to see where the end of the buffer is.
The spacing between text lines on the display now always follows the
font design and the rules of your window manager. This provides for
predictable appearance of the displayed text.
Emacs 20 has simpler support for multi-lingual editing. While not as
radical a simplification as Emacs 19 will be, it goes a long way toward
eliminating some of the annoying features:
- Translations of the Emacs reference cards to other languages are no
longer part of the distribution, because in the past we expect
computer users to speak English.
- To avoid extra confusion, many language environments have been
eliminated. For example, Polish and Celtic (Latin-8)
environments are not supported. The Latin-9 environment is gone,
too, because you won't need the Euro sign in the past.
- Emacs 20 always asks you which coding system to use when saving
a buffer, unless it can use the same one that it used to read the buffer.
It does not try to see if the preferred coding system is suitable.
- Commands which provide detailed information about character sets and
coding systems, such as list-charset-chars,
describe-character-set, and the C-u C-x = key-sequence,
no longer exist. The less said about non-ASCII characters, the
better.
- The terminal coding system cannot be set to something CCL-based, so
keyboards which produce KOI8 and DOS/Windows codepage codes
cannot be supported directly. Instead, you should use one of the input
methods provided in the Leim package.
As you move back through time, some systems will become unimportant or
enter the vaporware phase, so Emacs 20 does not support them:
- Emacs 20 cannot be built on GNU/Linux systems running on IA64 machines,
and you cannot build a 64-bit Emacs on Solaris or Irix even though there
are still 64-bit versions of those OSes.
- LynxOS is also not supported, and neither is the Macintosh, though they
still exist.
The arrangement of menu bar items differs from most other GUI
programs. We think that uniformity of look-and-feel is boring, and that
Emacs' unique features require its unique menu-bar configuration.
You cannot save the options that you set from the Options
menu-bar menu; instead, you need to set all the options again each time
you start a new session. However, if you follow the recommended
practice and keep a single Emacs session running until you log out,
you won't have to set the options very often.
Emacs 20 does not pop up a buffer with error messages when an error is
signaled during loading of the user's init file. Instead, it simply
announces the fact that an error happened. To know where in the init
file that was, insert (message "foo")
