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Emacs 19.28 and 19.29 Antinews

For those users who live backwards in time, here is information about downgrading to Emacs version 19.28 or 19.29. We hope you will enjoy the greater simplicity that results from the absence of certain Emacs 19.34 features.

• This version doesn't support Windows NT, or the DEC Alpha.

• In Emacs 19.28, or even 19.29, the features for controlling indentation in C are much simpler. There is a separate variable for each aspect of indentation which you can control. Here is a list of them:

  c-indent-level

  Level of indentation of C statements with respect to containing block.

  c-label-offset

  Offset of C label lines and case statements relative to usual indentation.

  c-continued-brace-offset

  Extra indentation for substatements that start with open-braces. This is in addition to c-continued-statement-offset.

  c-continued-statement-offset

  Extra indentation for lines not starting new statements.

  c-brace-offset

  Extra indentation for braces, compared with other text in same context.

  c-brace-imaginary-offset

  Imagined indentation of a C open brace that actually follows a statement.

  c-argdecl-indent

  Indentation level of declarations of C function arguments.

• There is no support for editing formatted text. The text formatter TeX does a much better job of formatting than any formatted text editor; we recommend you learn to use it.

• C-Mouse-2 now runs the menu for setting the default font.

• F1 is no longer an alias for the Help key; you must actually type C-h if you want help.

• Integers and buffer sizes are limited to 24 bits on most machines. But as memory gets more expensive, you won't want to edit such large files any more.

• There are no indirect buffers, so you can only display one view of an outline. Meanwhile, the prefix key for Outline minor mode is now C-c C-o.

• When you are in Transient Mark mode, incremental search always deactivates the mark.

• Dynamic abbrev completion has been eliminated in 19.28, and some of the other dynamic abbrev customization features are also gone.

• In Dired, Occur mode, Compilation mode, and other such modes, you must use C-c C-c to select the item point is on. RET won't do it.

• M-x buffer-menu now displays the menu buffer in another window.

• The VC (version control) package no longer supports CVS or selecting branches other than the principal branch.

• There is no recover-session command; if Emacs crashes, you simply have to remember which files you were editing before the crash, and use recover-file on the individual files.

• In Emacs Lisp mode, C-M-x now lets defvar operate as it usually does--setting the value of the variable only if it has no value yet. Use ESC ESC to evaluate a Lisp expression, instead of M-:.

• GNU-standard long option names are not supported. (Real hackers prefer the shorter single-dash names, to save typing.) All the initial options must come before all the action options, and whatever initial options you use must appear in this order: `-t', `-d', `-nw', `-batch', `-q' or `-no-init-file', `-no-site-file', `-u' or `-user', `-debug-init'.

• Many special-case kludges for MS-DOS have been removed. This means that many features don't work on MS-DOS; however, the code of Emacs is much simpler.

  For instance, you cannot print from within Emacs, Dired doesn't support shell wildcards in filenames, some Lisp packages won't work because their standard filenames are invalid on MS-DOS, display-time doesn't work, Font Lock mode won't work unless you create some faces by hand first, and call-process cannot redirect stderr.

  As an additional bonus, you get random characters inserted into the buffer without a warning (unless you're clever enough to discover that setting visible-bell makes this problem to go away).

  In a word, it's a great relief for those who still need proof that MS-DOG isn't a real operating system.

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