mini-FAQ: emacs21 user visible changes.

[lawrence mitchell]

This is the latest incarnation of my mini-faq on things seemingly
most asked by users moving to emacs 21.

Thanks go to all those who pointed out omissions/improvements in
the last version.

This faq still does not have a home on the web, I think it
probably ought to go somewhere on the Emacs Wiki, at least for
the forseeable future (but which section, I wonder).

[f-up set to poster, if you feel it should go to the group,
please feel free to change this.]

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Preliminaries
 What this document addresses:

   This FAQ tries to answer (or at least gives pointers to) the
   questions regarding an upgrade from Emacs 20 to Emacs 21 which seem
   to come up most often on <news: gnu.emacs.help>.

   Note that this document is by no means meant to be a complete
   listing of all of Emacs' changes, merely those most commonly
   brought up on <news: gnu.emacs.help>.
   All of Emacs' user-visible changes are documented in the file
   etc/NEWS in your Emacs distribution.  You ought to be able to view
   this file by typing C-h N (or M-x view-emacs-news).

 What this document does not address:

   This FAQ is /not/ intended to be an introduction to using Emacs in
   general, or how to configure Emacs.  If you're completely new to
   Emacs, you might want to take a look at the Emacs Tutorial
   (the file etc/TUTORIAL in your Emacs distribution, accessible via
   C-h t).
   If you want a starting point for learning about how to configure
   Emacs, you might like to look at the Emacs Wiki <URL:
   http://www.emacswiki.org>.  Or the section Customization in the
   Emacs manual (Accessible via C-h i m Emacs RET m Customization RET).

 Some conventions used in this document:

   Users familiar with Emacs will want to skip over this section.

   How to read the keystroke commands:
    C-h means type "h" whilst holding down the control key.

 Thanks

   Thanks go to all those in <news: gnu.emacs.help> who pointed out
   errors and/or additions to this document, in particular (in no
   particular order):
   John Paul Wallington, Tim Heaney, Glenn Morris, Stefan Monnier,
   Lute Kamstra


Q1) I've just changed from Emacs 20.x to Emacs 21 and suddenly Emacs
    seems to take up a whole lot more horizontal screen space.

    Specifically, there's this annoying, one character wide column on the
    right that's taking up a column for no good reason.  And what
    happened to those backslash-type line-continuation markers that
    were in Emacs 20?

A1) Well, the columns on the right (and indeed the left) are called the
    "fringe".  Currently, there is no way to turn off the fringe in
    Emacs 21.{1,2}, however in Emacs 21.4 you will be able to switch
    it off.  Emacs 21.3 is only a bug-fix release, and as such, you
    will not be able to switch off the fringes in it.

    If the colour of the fringe is irritating, in Emacs 21.2 and
    greater, you can change it by customising the "fringe" face.

    Incidentally, Emacs 21 only takes up one column more than Emacs
    20, since the last column in both 20 and 21 are only used for
    line-continuation markers.

    The left hand fringe is also very useful when debugging from
    within Emacs, it has an arrow in it on the line that is currently
    being executed, so that it is easier to find one's place in the
    sourcefile.

    For more information, see the Emacs NEWS file (accessible via C-h N),
    and search for "Fringe".


Q2) I don't need the menubar type thing that's suddenly appeared and
    is taking all of my screen real estate.  How do I turn it off?

A2) This is called the "tool bar".  You can turn it off in a number of
    different ways, the easiest is to add (tool-bar-mode 0) to your
    ~/.emacs.  For more information, see either the Emacs NEWS file
    (accessible via C-h N) and search for "Tool bar support", or the
    Emacs manual (menu item "Tool Bars").


Q3) The cursor blinks and it really irritates me.

A3) The default mode for the cursor is now to blink.  You can turn this
     off by adding (blink-cursor-mode 0) in your .emacs.

     For more information see the documentation for the function
     `blink-cursor-mode' (C-h f blink-cursor-mode RET).


Q4) What are these tooltips doing?

A4) You can turn these off with `tooltip-mode', add (tooltip-mode 0)
     to your .emacs.


Q5) Emacs 21 doesn't have the same menu layout as Emacs 20:

    File | Edit | Options | Buffers | Tools | Help
    ----------------------------------------------
    in Emacs 21, as opposed to:

    Buffers | Files | Tools | Edit | Search | Help
    ----------------------------------------------
    in Emacs 20.

A5) This was dicussed for a long time on the emacs-devel mailing list,
    and it was decided that it would be better to make the menu bar
    layout more like that of most other applications, so as to make it
    easier for new users to find their way around Emacs.


    Note, you /can/ redefine the menu bar layout if you build
    Emacs yourself by changing the order in which the menu bar
    keymaps are defined in the file menu-bar.el before dumping
    Emacs.  However, this is far from being a trivial operation.


Q6) Emacs 21 has different scroll bars to Emacs 20.

A6) Emacs can now be built with a few different toolkits which decide
    what the scroll bars look like.  If you want the old-style
    non-toolkit scroll bars, you can configure Emacs with the option:
    --with-toolkit-scroll-bars=no.

    Please note, this is not a command-line option that you can give Emacs on
    startup, but rather you must rebuild Emacs from source and give
    the configure program that option.

    See the Emacs NEWS file (accessible via C-h N) and search for
    "Toolkit scroll bars" for more information.


Q7) The <home> and <end> keys have changed their default modes.

    In Emacs 20, <home> takes you to the beginning of the buffer, and
    <end> takes you to the end of the buffer.  This is not the case in
    Emacs 21.

A7) In Emacs 21 <home> runs the command `beginning-of-line' and <end>
    runs the command `end-of-line'.  If you don't like this behavior,
    and prefer Emacs 20's behaviour, you can have it back by adding
    the following to your .emacs:

    (global-set-key (kbd "<home>") 'beginning-of-buffer)
    (global-set-key (kbd "<end>") 'end-of-buffer)

    Not also that `beginning-of-buffer' and `end-of-buffer' are by
    default bound to M-< and M-> respectively.

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-- 
lawrence mitchell <wence@gmx.li>