NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #20/NN_1992_20.iso/spool/alt/lucidem/help/391

Text File | 1992-09-09 | 12.2 KB | 272 lines

Newsgroups: alt.lucid-emacs.help
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From: [e-mail] (Jamie Zawinski)
Subject: Lucid Emacs 19.3 released
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
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Date: Wed, 9 Sep 1992 20:38:15 GMT
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Lucid GNU Emacs 19.3 is now available.  This is a version of GNU Emacs derived
from an early version of Emacs version 19 from the Free Software Foundation.

(If you are already a user of version 19.2, you might want to skip ahead to
the section labeled "Differences Between 19.2 and 19.3".)

You can get it via anonymous FTP from the host labrea.Stanford.EDU (36.8.0.47).
It is currently available only by FTP.  We don't have the manpower to make
tapes right now.

Log in with the user "anonymous" and "username@host" as a password (that is,
your email address.)  Execute the command "cd pub/gnu/lucid/".  These are
the files you will find there:

  lemacs-19.3.tar.Z
    The complete source distribution.  This file is about 8 megabytes.
    When untarred and uncompressed, the source distribution will take up
    about 20 megs. You will need an additional 12 megs or so to compile it.

  lemacs-19.3-sun4.tar.Z
    This is a ready-to-run set of Sun4 executables, and a DOC file.  If
    you want to use these executables, you will still need to get the file
    lemacs-19.3.tar.Z, because Emacs cannot function very well without the
    lisp library online.  This file is about 1.7 megs, 3.8 megs when
    unpacked, 3 megs of which is the Emacs executable itself (2.1 megs if
    stripped.)

Don't forget to set "binary" mode when transferring these files.  Unpack them
with some variation of the command "zcat lemacs-19.3.tar.Z | tar -vxf -".

We have created two mailing lists for discussing our Emacs.

   [e-mail]    For reporting all bugs in Lucid GNU Emacs,
                including bugs in the compilation and
                installation procedures.

   [e-mail]    For random questions and conversation
                about using Lucid GNU Emacs.

To be added or removed from these mailing lists, send mail to
[e-mail] or [e-mail].

The bug-lucid-emacs and help-lucid-emacs mailing lists are archived on labrea,
and are bidirectionally gatewayed into the newsgroups alt.lucid-emacs.bug and
alt.lucid-emacs.help.

The bug-lucid-emacs and help-lucid-emacs mailing lists are archived on labrea.

Please do not send messages about problems with Lucid GNU Emacs to the FSF
GNU Emacs newsgroups and mailing lists ([e-mail],
[e-mail], gnu.emacs.help, gnu.emacs.bug, et cetera)
unless you are sure that the problem you are reporting is a problem with
both versions of GNU Emacs.  People who aren't subscribed to the Lucid GNU
Emacs mailing lists most likely are not interested in hearing about problems
with it.


Why Another Version of Emacs?
=============================

Lucid's latest product, Energize, is a C/C++ development environment.  Rather
than invent (and force our users to learn) a new user-interface, we chose to
build part of our environment on top of the world's best editor, GNU Emacs.
(Though our product is commercial, the work we did on GNU Emacs is free
software, and is useful without having to purchase our product.)

We needed a version of Emacs with mouse-sensitive regions, multiple fonts,
the ability to mark sections of a buffer as read-only, the ability to detect
which parts of a buffer has been modified, and many other features.

Why Not Epoch?
==============

For our purposes, the existing version of Epoch was not sufficient; it did
not allow us to put arbitrary pixmaps/icons in buffers, `undo' did not
restore changes to regions, regions did not overlap and merge their
attributes in the way we needed, and several other things.

We could have devoted our time to making Epoch do what we needed (and, in
fact, we spent some time doing that) but, since the FSF planned to include
Epoch-like features in their version 19, we decided that our efforts would be
better spent improving Emacs19 instead of Epoch.

Our original hope was that our changes to Emacs would be incorporated into
the "official" v19.  However, scheduling conflicts arose, and we found that,
given the amount of work still remaining to be done, we didn't have time to
merge with the FSF's code.  Consequently, we have released our work as a
forked branch of Emacs, instead of delaying any longer.

It seems likely that a merger of Epoch and Lucid Emacs will occur in the
not-too-distant future.

No Warranty
===========

Lucid GNU Emacs is distributed under exactly the same terms as GNU Emacs,
and thus has no warranty of any kind.  (However, Energize support contracts
include Lucid GNU Emacs support.)  We do not currently have plans to sell
support for Emacs independent of support for Energize.

What's Different?
=================

Lucid GNU Emacs *currently* requires X Windows to run, though it will not be
much work to make it run on dumb ttys again.  We plan to do this soon.

We have not personally tried to compile this version of Emacs under anything
but SunOS 4.1 on SparcStations, though others have successfully done so.  We
are very eager to get feedback about portability problems from those who
compile it on other systems.

We have reimplemented the basic input model in a more general way; instead of
X input being a special-case of the normal ASCII input stream, Emacs has a
concept of "input events", and ASCII characters are a subset of that.  The
events that Emacs knows about are not X events, but are a generalization of
them, so that Emacs can eventually be ported to different window systems.

We have reimplemented keymaps so that sequences of events can be stored into
them instead of just ASCII codes; it is possible to, for example, bind
different commands to each of the chords Control-h, Control-H, Backspace,
Control-Backspace, and Super-Shift-Backspace.  Key bindings, function key
bindings, and mouse bindings live in the same keymaps.

Input and display of all ISO-8859-1 characters is supported.

You can have multiple X Windows ("screens" in Emacs terminology).

Our Emacs has objects called "extents" and "faces", which are roughly
analogous to Epoch's "buttons," "zones," and "styles."  An extent is a region
of text (a start position and an end position) and a face is a collection of
textual attributes like fonts and colors.  Every extent is displayed in some
"face", so changing the properties of a face immediately updates the display
of all associated extents.  Faces can be screen-local: you can have a region
of text which displays with completely different attributes when its buffer
is viewed from a different X window.

The display attributes of faces may be specified either in lisp or through
the X resource manager.

Emacs use the MIT "Xt" toolkit instead of raw Xlib calls, which makes it be
a more well-behaved X citizen (and also improves portability).  A result of
this is that it is possible to include other Xt "Widgets" in the Emacs
window.  Also, Emacs understands the standard Xt command-line arguments.

Emacs understands the X11 "Selection" mechanism; it's possible to define
and customize selection converter functions and new selection types from
elisp, without having to recompile Emacs.

Emacs now supports the Zmacs/Lispm style of region highlighting, where the
region between the point and mark is highlighted when in its "active" state.

Emacs has a menubar, whose contents are customizable from emacs-lisp.
This menubar looks Motif-ish, but does not require Motif.  If you already
own Motif, however, you can configure Emacs to use a *real* Motif menubar
instead.  If you have OLIT ("OpenLook Intrinsics"), you can use an
OpenWindows-like menubar.

The initial load-path is computed at run-time, instead of at compile-time.
This means that if you move the Emacs executable and associated directories
to somewhere else, you don't have to recompile anything.

Emacs now supports floating-point numbers.

Emacs now knows about timers directly, instead of them being simulated by
a subprocess.

Emacs understands truenames, and can be configured to notice when you are
visiting two names of the same file.

If you're running on a sun SparcStation, you can specify sound files for
Emacs to play instead of the default X beep.

Much more detail about the differences between Lucid GNU Emacs and Emacs 18
can be found in the file .../etc/NEWS (accessible with ``C-h n''.)

Note that building Lucid GNU Emacs requires an ANSI C compiler, such as gcc.


Major Differences Between 19.2 and 19.3
=======================================

The ISO characters have correct case and syntax tables now, so the word-motion
and case-converting commands work sensibly on them.

If you set ctl-arrow to an integer, you can control exactly which characters
are printable.  (There will be a less crufty way to do this eventually.)

Menubars can now be buffer local; the function set-screen-menubar no longer
exists.  Look at GNUS and VM for examples of how to do this, or read
menubar.el.

When emacs is reading from the minibuffer with completions, any completions
which are visible on the screen will highlight when the mouse moves over them;
clicking middle on a completion is the same as typing it at the minibuffer.
Some implications of this:  The *Completions* buffer is always mousable.  If
you're using the completion feature of find-tag, your source code will be
mousable when you type M-.  Dired buffers will be mousable as soon as you
type ^X^F.  And so on.

The old isearch code has been replaced with a descendant of Dan LaLiberte's
excellent isearch-mode; it is more customizable, and generally less bogus.
You can search for "composed" characters.  There are new commands, too; see
the doc for ^S, or the NEWS file.

Note that ESC no longer terminates an isearch: LFD does instead.  This is
a change RMS has made in his v19 as well.  The old isearch variables (like
search-repeat-char) are no longer used; it's all done with keymaps now.
Please try to avoid the temptation to bind ESC to its old behavior; it was
always a bad idea to overload the meta-prefix-char in this way.  If you
don't have a LFD key, you can make some other key be the terminator (RET,
or F1, or whatever) but using ESC is more complicated because of its goofy
equivalence to Meta.

A patched GNUS 3.14 is included.

The user's manual now documents Lucid Emacs 19.3.

A few more modes have mouse and menu support.

The startup code should be a little more robust, and give you more reasonable
error messages when things aren't installed quite right (instead of the
ubiquitous "cannot open DISPLAY"...)

Subdirectories of the lisp directory whose names begin with a hyphen or dot
are not automatically added to the load-path, so you can use this to avoid
accidentally inflicting experimental software on your users.

I've tried to incorporate all of the portability patches that were sent to
me; I tried to solve some of the problems in different ways than the
patches did, so let me know if I missed something.

There's no `configure' support yet.  I've been sent patches to make 19.1
work with configure, but I haven't had time to integrate them into 19.3.

The OLIT menubar probably still doesn't work.  Fixes are welcome, as always.

Some systems will need to define NEED_STRDUP, NEED_REALPATH, HAVE_DREM, or
HAVE_REMAINDER in config.h.  Really this should be done in the appropriate
s- or m- files, but I don't know which systems need these and which don't.
If yours does, let me know which file it should be in.

I haven't made diffs, because they would be really huge, and I still don't
know a truly painless way to make diffs of an emacs source tree.

Check out these new packages:

blink-paren.el:    causes the matching parenthesis to flash on and off whenever
        the cursor is sitting on a paren-syntax character.

pending-del.el:    Certain commands implicitly delete the highlighted region:
        Typing a character when there is a highlighted region replaces
        that region with the typed character.

lhilit.el:    Attaches fonts/colors to patterns matching regular expressions.

font-lock.el:    Yet Another code-highlighting package, but this one is driven
        off of syntax tables, so that it understands block comments,
        strings, etc.  The insertion hook is used to fontify text as
        you type it in.  (This is fast now.)

shell-font.el:    Displays your shell-buffer prompt in boldface.