ANN: Emacs on GNUstep / OS X 8.0-pre3

[Adrian Robert]

Hi all,

I've released the third "pre" version of Emacs for GNUstep / OS X at:

http://kamares.ucsd.edu/~arobert/GNUstep/emacs.html


Basically now 100% usable. Release highlights:

- bold and italic faces now supported (using font w/these variants)

- cut/paste and drag/drop support improved; drag/drop fully supported

- open/save files using GUI panels

- cursor and mouse highlighting rendering problems fixed

- other stability and rendering speed improvements


Should work out-of-box on OS X Panther and Jaguar.  Puma should also
work -- if massaging is still needed please let me know.

Status respecting backends on GNUstep is unchanged: works on Xlib,
has rendering anomalies under Art.  Specifically, menus are rendered
blank when they change (this may be Emacs's fault), and the letter
'f' is rendered in proportional spacing (from NSString
-drawAtPoint:withAttributes:) in all fonts tried (in some cases the
character after the 'f' must be 'i' or another 'f').

It is still necessary to use GNUstep from CVS (2005/01/25 or later)
and in addition apply a small patch to GUI.  This patch contains:

- Let NSApplication -run after -stop: work.
- Let NSScroller +scrollerWidth override work as on Cocoa.

Both of these add an instance variable and are therefore in
"pending" status.

This Emacs is fully functional should be stable for day-to-day use
on GNUstep and OS X, however problems may occur; this is still a
developer release.  *Please* let me know if you encounter a crash so
it can be investigated.

Release schedule: there will be one more "pre-" release fixing all
outstanding problems, then a hopefully short "rc-" series focusing
on internationalization support (LEIM, fontsets) and a simplified
installation process. (It's a bit ugly on both platforms currently.)

Some good news: the earlier contributors to this Emacs port have all
been contacted and (with a couple of exceptions) have agreed to
contribute their code to the FSF.  A small amount of code for which
this is not true has been removed and rewritten from scratch.  This
clears the way for making Emacs for *Step an "official" GNU Emacs,
and also for bringing it into the main tree should an update to
Emacs-21 be carried out.

Thanks again go to those of you providing feedback and help on Emacs
and/or answering my GNUstep questions.


-Adrian