From navindra Wed Sep 2 04:34:08 1998 Received: (from navindra@localhost) by lisa.cs.mcgill.ca (8.8.8/8.8.8) id EAA28141; Wed, 2 Sep 1998 04:34:07 -0400 (EDT) Date: Wed, 2 Sep 1998 04:34:07 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <199809020834.EAA28141@lisa.cs.mcgill.ca> From: Navindra Umanee To: navindra Subject: (fwd) GNU Emacs 20.3 released Cc: navindra Newsgroups: gnu.announce,gnu.emacs.bug,comp.os.linux.misc,alt.sources.d,gnu.emacs.announce,comp.emacs Organization: School Of Computer Science, McGill University, Montreal X-PGP-Public-Key: finger -l navindra@po-box.cs.mcgill.ca X-Plonked-By: Alexander Viro Status: O Content-Length: 13102 Lines: 304 -- forwarded message -- Path: news.mcgill.ca!newsflash.concordia.ca!sunqbc.risq.qc.ca!newsswitch.lcs.mit.edu!ai-lab!gnu.org!gnu From: Incoming FSF orders for 59 Temple Place Newsgroups: gnu.announce,gnu.emacs.bug,comp.os.linux.misc,alt.sources.d,gnu.emacs.announce,comp.emacs Subject: GNU Emacs 20.3 released Followup-To: gnu.emacs.bug Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1998 17:03:22 -0400 Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab Lines: 279 Approved: info-gnu@gnu.org Distribution: world Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: churchy.ai.mit.edu X-Trace: entertainment-tonight.ai.mit.edu 904597631 29878 18.43.0.47 (31 Aug 1998 21:07:11 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@entertainment-tonight.ai.mit.edu NNTP-Posting-Date: 31 Aug 1998 21:07:11 GMT To: info-gnu@gnu.org Xref: news.mcgill.ca gnu.announce:918 gnu.emacs.bug:23919 comp.os.linux.misc:291263 alt.sources.d:5963 gnu.emacs.announce:187 comp.emacs:35806 GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable real-time display editor and computing environment. It was first released in 1975. It is free software, distributed under the GNU General Public License. GNU Emacs 20.3 has much improved multilingual support and many other new features (see the etc/NEWS file for full details). GNU Emacs 20.3 source code is currently available from ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu and mirrors of that site (see list at the end of this message). The file leim-20.3.tar.gz contains the input methods for entering non-ASCII international characters when your keyboard does not support them. X Windows fonts for displaying international character sets are available in the separate package intlfonts-1.1.tar.gz, or as individual files in the ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/intlfonts-1.1-split/ directory. Bug reports should be sent to . A few of the changes in version 20.3 are... ** The new command C-x z (repeat) repeats the previous command including its argument. If you repeat the z afterward, it repeats the command additional times; thus, you can perform many repetitions with one keystroke per repetition. ** Emacs now supports on-the-fly spell checking by the means of a minor mode. It is called M-x flyspell-mode. You don't have to remember any other special commands to use it, and you will hardly notice it except when you make a spelling error. Flyspell works by highlighting incorrect words as soon as they are completed or as soon as the cursor hits a new word. ** The new command M-x speedbar displays a frame in which directories, files, and tags can be displayed, manipulated, and jumped to. The frame defaults to 20 characters in width, and is the same height as the frame that it was started from. Some major modes define additional commands for the speedbar, including Rmail, GUD/GDB, and info. *** The net-utils package makes some common networking features available in Emacs. Some of these functions are wrappers around system utilities (ping, nslookup, etc); others are implementations of simple protocols (finger, whois) in Emacs Lisp. There are also functions to make simple connections to TCP/IP ports for debugging and the like. *** highlight-changes-mode is a minor mode that uses colors to identify recently changed parts of the buffer text. ** query-replace-regexp is now bound to C-M-%. *** There is a new major mode, M-x vhdl-mode, for editing files of VHDL code. ** The new command M-x customize-changed-options lets you customize all the options whose meanings or default values have changed in recent Emacs versions. You specify a previous Emacs version number as argument, and the command creates a customization buffer showing all the customizable options which were changed since that version. Newly added options are included as well. *** The new package `midnight' lets you specify things to be done within Emacs at midnight--by default, kill buffers that you have not used in a considerable time. To use this feature, customize the user option `midnight-mode' to t. ** Changes to RefTeX mode RefTeX has been updated in order to make it more usable with very large projects (like a several volume math book). The parser has been re-written from scratch. *** There is a new alternative major mode for Perl, Cperl mode. It has many more features than Perl mode, and some people prefer it, but some do not. *** Gametree is a major mode for editing game analysis trees. The author uses it for keeping notes about his postal Chess games, but it should be helpful for other two-player games as well, as long as they have an established system of notation similar to Chess. *** The new minor mode checkdoc-minor-mode provides Emacs Lisp documentation string checking for style and spelling. The style guidelines are found in the Emacs Lisp programming manual. ** When you run M-x grep with a prefix argument, it figures out the tag around point and puts that into the default grep command. ** The new command M-* (pop-tag-mark) pops back through a history of buffer positions from which M-. or other tag-finding commands were invoked. ** GUD now supports jdb, the Java debugger, and pdb, the Python debugger. ** Emacs now supports "selective undo" which undoes only within a specified region. To do this, set point and mark around the desired region and type C-u C-x u (or C-u C-_). You can then continue undoing further, within the same region, by repeating the ordinary undo command C-x u or C-_. This will keep undoing changes that were made within the region you originally specified, until either all of them are undone, or it encounters a change which crosses the edge of that region. ** If you specify --unibyte when starting Emacs, then all buffers are unibyte, except when a Lisp program specifically creates a multibyte buffer. Setting the environment variable EMACS_UNIBYTE has the same effect. The --no-unibyte option overrides EMACS_UNIBYTE and directs Emacs to run normally in multibyte mode. The option --unibyte does not affect the reading of Emacs Lisp files, though. If you want a Lisp file to be read in unibyte mode, use -*-unibyte: t;-*- on its first line. That will force Emacs to read that file in unibyte mode regardless of how Emacs was started. ** You can specify the printer to use for commands that do printing by setting the variable `printer-name'. Just what a printer name looks like depends on your operating system. You can specify a different printer for the Postscript printing commands by setting `ps-printer-name'. ** You can use the command M-x diary-mail-entries to mail yourself a reminder about upcoming diary entries. See the documentation string for a sample shell script for calling this function automatically every night. ** All you need to do, to enable use of the Desktop package, is to set the variable desktop-enable to t with Custom. ** There is no need to do anything special, now, to enable Gnus to read and post multi-lingual articles. **** you can park outgoing mail messages into a disk-based queue and stimulate sending some or all of them later (handy for laptop users); there is also a queue for draft messages *** Dired has a new command: %g. It searches the contents of files in the directory and marks each file that contains a match for a specified regexp. *** VC Dired has been completely rewritten. It is now much faster, especially for CVS, and works very similar to ordinary Dired. *** Under CVS, if you merge changes from the repository into a working file, and CVS detects conflicts, VC now offers to start an ediff session to resolve them. Alternatively, you can use the new command `vc-resolve-conflicts' to resolve conflicts in a file at any time. It works in any buffer that contains conflict markers as generated by rcsmerge (which is what CVS uses as well). *** You can now transfer changes between branches, using the new command vc-merge (C-x v m). It is implemented for RCS and CVS. When you invoke it in a buffer under version-control, you can specify either an entire branch or a pair of versions, and the changes on that branch or between the two versions are merged into the working file. If this results in any conflicts, they may be resolved interactively, using ediff. *** In C Mode, "java" style now conforms to Sun's JDK coding style. *** Improvements (hopefully!) to the way CC Mode is loaded. You should now be able to do a (require 'cc-mode) to get the entire package loaded properly for customization in your .emacs file. A new variable c-initialize-on-load controls this and is t by default. ** Ispell changes. *** You can now spell check comments and strings in the current buffer with M-x ispell-comments-and-strings. Comments and strings are identified by syntax tables in effect. *** Generic region skipping implemented. A single buffer can be broken into a number of regions where text will and will not be checked. The definitions of the regions can be user defined. New applications and improvements made available by this include: o URLs are automatically skipped o EMail message checking is vastly improved. [ Most GNU software is compressed using the GNU `gzip' compression program. Source code is available on most sites distributing GNU software. Executables for various systems and information about using gzip can be found at the URL http://www.gzip.org. For information on how to order GNU software on CD-ROM and printed GNU manuals, see http://www.gnu.org/order/order.html or e-mail a request to: gnu@gnu.org By ordering your GNU software from the FSF, you help us continue to develop more free software. Media revenues are our primary source of support. Donations to FSF are deductible on US tax returns. The above software will soon be at these ftp sites as well. Please try them before ftp.gnu.org as ftp.gnu.org is very busy! A possibly more up-to-date list is at the URL http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html thanx -gnu@gnu.org Here are the mirrored ftp sites for the GNU Project, listed by country: United States: California - labrea.stanford.edu/pub/gnu, gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/GNU Hawaii - ftp.hawaii.edu/mirrors/gnu Illinois - uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu/pub/gnu (Internet address 128.174.5.14) Kentucky - ftp.ms.uky.edu/pub/gnu Maryland - ftp.digex.net/pub/gnu (Internet address 164.109.10.23) Michigan - gnu.egr.msu.edu/pub/gnu Missouri - wuarchive.wustl.edu/systems/gnu New York - ftp.cs.columbia.edu/archives/gnu/prep Ohio - ftp.cis.ohio-state.edu/mirror/gnu Tennessee - ftp.skyfire.net/pub/gnu Utah - jaguar.utah.edu/gnustuff Virginia - ftp.uu.net/archive/systems/gnu Washington - ftp.nodomainname.net/pub/mirrors/gnu Africa: South Africa - ftp.sun.ac.za/pub/gnu The Americas: Brazil - ftp.unicamp.br/pub/gnu Canada - ftp.cs.ubc.ca/mirror2/gnu Chile - ftp.inf.utfsm.cl/pub/gnu (Internet address 146.83.198.3) Costa Rica - sunsite.ulatina.ac.cr/GNU Mexico - ftp.uaem.mx/pub/gnu Asia and Australia: Australia - archie.au/gnu (archie.oz or archie.oz.au for ACSnet) Australia - ftp.progsoc.uts.edu.au/pub/gnu Japan - tron.um.u-tokyo.ac.jp/pub/GNU/prep Japan - ftp.cs.titech.ac.jp/pub/gnu Korea - cair-archive.kaist.ac.kr/pub/gnu (Internet address 143.248.186.3) Thailand - ftp.nectec.or.th/pub/mirrors/gnu (Internet address - 192.150.251.32) Europe: Austria - ftp.univie.ac.at/packages/gnu Czech Republic - ftp.fi.muni.cz/pub/gnu/ Denmark - ftp.denet.dk/mirror/ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu Finland - ftp.funet.fi/pub/gnu (Internet address 128.214.6.100) France - ftp.univ-lyon1.fr/pub/gnu France - ftp.irisa.fr/pub/gnu Germany - ftp.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/pub/comp/os/unix/gnu/ Germany - ftp.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/pub/gnu Germany - ftp.de.uu.net/pub/gnu Greece - ftp.ntua.gr/pub/gnu Greece - ftp.aua.gr/pub/mirrors/GNU (Internet address 143.233.187.61) Hungary - ftp.kfki.hu/pub/gnu Ireland - ftp.ieunet.ie/pub/gnu (Internet address 192.111.39.1) Netherlands - ftp.eu.net/gnu (Internet address 192.16.202.1) Netherlands - ftp.nluug.nl/pub/gnu Netherlands - ftp.win.tue.nl/pub/gnu (Internet address 131.155.70.100) Norway - ugle.unit.no/pub/gnu (Internet address 129.241.1.97) Poland - ftp.task.gda.pl/pub/gnu Spain - ftp.etsimo.uniovi.es/pub/gnu Sweden - ftp.isy.liu.se/pub/gnu Sweden - ftp.stacken.kth.se Sweden - ftp.luth.se/pub/unix/gnu Sweden - ftp.sunet.se/pub/gnu (Internet address 130.238.127.3) Also mirrors the Mailing List Archives. Switzerland - ftp.eunet.ch/mirrors4/gnu Switzerland - sunsite.cnlab-switch.ch/mirror/gnu (Internet address 193.5.24.1) United Kingdom - ftp.mcc.ac.uk/pub/gnu (Internet address 130.88.203.12) United Kingdom - unix.hensa.ac.uk/mirrors/gnu United Kingdom - ftp.warwick.ac.uk (Internet address 137.205.192.14) United Kingdom - SunSITE.doc.ic.ac.uk/gnu (Internet address 193.63.255.4) ] -- end of forwarded message -- -- So GNOME isn't really free, is it? Its supporters retain whining rights. - Tim Hanson on c.o.l.a