Appendix E Emacs 24 Antinews

For those users who live backwards in time, here is information about downgrading to Emacs version 24.5. We hope you will enjoy the greater simplicity that results from the absence of many Emacs 25.3 features.

• Support for Cairo drawing has been removed. On GNU and Unix systems, you now have only one drawing engine—the venerable X Window system. No need to procrastinate on the dilemma whether you do or don’t want the new shiny Cairo thing. Hail, simplicity!
• Emacs still works on SGI IRIX systems. If you live backwards in time, this is actually a bonus, as IRIX systems will become more and more popular as you move farther back in time.
• Support for dynamically loaded modules has been removed. You get to use only the trusted Emacs codebase, with no additions. Those external modules written by some J.R. Hacker cannot be trusted anyway. Good riddance!
• We have greatly simplified the Emacs features which access the network by removing the Network Security Manager. No more annoying prompts about trusting this or that site or page—you asked for it, you get it, no questions asked! You, the user, are now in charge of any security issues related to sites whose certificates expired or didn’t exist in the first place. Giving the user the utmost freedom was and always will be the most important goal of Emacs development. We keep that goal even as we develop Emacs back in time.
• We made the output of C-h l much simpler and easier to grasp by removing the names of commands run by the recorded keystrokes. True Emacs lovers know their bindings by heart anyway, so why waste precious screen estate on that which is well known?
• Selection- and clipboard-related commands and variables got their historical names back. It’s now the definitive x-select-enable-clipboard again instead of the vague select-enable-clipboard, and all those gui-select-text, gui-get-primary-selection, etc. got their x-* names back. (What’s a “GUI”, anyway?) The only true window system with selections is the X Window system, so we stopped pretending that other platforms have anything similar to that. You now know when you invoke a command that accesses X.
• Passwords are no longer hidden when typed in -batch mode. It was a misfeature to have it not shown in the first place: who can type without seeing what they type? We couldn’t convince the users of GUI sessions to give up hiding the password, so we at least made it visible in batch mode, which is something every veteran Emacs user uses all the time. Stay tuned for un-hiding the password in GUI sessions as well as we downgrade progressively to previous Emacs versions.
• The nuisance with Unicode characters popping up all over the place has been amply dealt with. We’ve removed C-x 8 shorthands for characters such as ‘, ’, “, ”, €, ≤, and many others; as a nice benefit, this removes many useless entries at the beginning of the C-h b output. The electric-quote-mode has been deleted, so there’s only the one true quoting method now—using the plain-ASCII quote characters. And if that’s not enough, the doc strings and other messages show text quoted `like this' as they were written, instead of arbitrarily replacing them with Unicode “curved quote” characters ‘like this’. The text-quoting-style variable becomes therefore unneeded and was removed. As result, text produced by Emacs can be sent to those venerable teletypes again, yeah!

  For the same reasons, the character classes [:alpha:] and [:alnum:] again match any word-constituent character, and [:graph:] and [:print:] match every multibyte character. Confusing use of Unicode character properties is gone.

• I-search and query-replace no longer try to confuse you by using the “character-folding” magic. They will no longer find any characters you didn’t actually type, like find ⓐ when you actually typed a. Users who want to find some fancy character will have to type it explicitly.
• The desktop.el package no longer records window and frame configuration, and doesn’t attempt to restore them. You now have back your freedom of re-arranging your windows and frames anew each time you restore a session. This made the new backward-incompatible format of the .emacs.desktop file unnecessary, so the format was reverted back to what it was before Emacs 25. You can now again use the desktop file with all the previous versions of Emacs.
• We have reworked the Prettify Symbols mode to support only the default prettify-symbols-compose-predicate. No need to consider whether your major or minor mode needs its own prettifications; just use what came with Emacs. We also removed the prettify-symbols-unprettify-at-point option: once prettified, always prettified! These changes make the Prettify Symbols mode quite a lot simpler and easier to use.
• Support for nifty new features of xterm, such as access to the X selection and the clipboard, the “bracketed paste mode”, and other advanced capabilities has been removed. When you kill text in an xterm Emacs session, that text is only saved in the Emacs kill ring, without letting other applications have any way of accessing it. An xterm is just a text terminal, nothing more, nothing less. There should be no feature we support on xterm that isn’t supported on bare console terminals. For the same reasons, support for mouse-tracking on xterm was removed. We will continue this line of simplifications as we downgrade to previous versions of Emacs; stay tuned.
• Various features in package.el have been simplified. The “external” package status is no longer available. A package present on multiple archives will now be listed as many times as it is found: we don’t believe in concealing any information from the users. This and other similar simplifications made package-menu-toggle-hiding unnecessary, since there’s nothing to unhide now.
• The UP and DOWN keys in the minibuffer have been simplified to move by history items. No need to wonder whether you have moved to the next/previous item or to another line within the same item. Well-written commands shouldn’t allow too long history entries anyway; be sure to report any that do as bugs, so that we could fix them in past versions of Emacs.
• The VC mode was simplified by removing the support for “push” commands. Moving back in time means you will have less and less need to use modern version control systems such as Git, Bazaar, and Mercurial, so the necessity of using “push” commands will gradually disappear. We removed it from Emacs in advance, so that you won’t need to un-learn it when this command disappears, as it should.
• The support for full C/C++ expressions in macros has been removed from Hide-Ifdef mode. It now supports only the basic literal macros. As result, the user interface was simplified, and a number of useless commands have been removed from Hide-Ifdef mode. Further simplifications were made possible by removing support for some fancy new preprocessor directives, such as #if defined, #elif, etc.
• We have reverted to Etags for looking up definitions of functions, variables, etc. Commands such as M-. use tags tables, as they always have. This allowed the removal of the entire xref.el package and its many metastases in the other Emacs packages and commands, significantly simplifying those. No more complexities with the various “backends” that provide incoherent behavior that is hard to explain and remember; either the symbol is in TAGS or it isn’t. No more new user interfaces we never before saw in Emacs, either; if you want the next definition for the symbol you typed, just invoke C-u M-.—what could be simpler? As a nice side effect, you get to use your beloved tags-loop-continue and pop-tag-mark commands and their memorable bindings. The package.el package has been removed for similar reasons.
• (/ n) once again yields just n. Emacs Lisp is not Common Lisp, so compatibility with CL just complicates Emacs here.
• The functions filepos-to-bufferpos and bufferpos-to-filepos have been removed. Code that needs to find a file position by a buffer position or vice versa should adapt by reading the file with no conversions and counting bytes while comparing text. How hard can that be?
• We saw no need for the make-process primitive, so we removed it. The start-process primitive provides all the functionality one needs, so adding more APIs just confuses users.
• The functions bidi-find-overridden-directionality and buffer-substring-with-bidi-context were removed, in preparation for removing the whole bidi support when downgrading to Emacs 23.
• Horizontal scroll bars are no longer supported. Enlarge your windows and frames instead, or use truncate-lines and the automatic horizontal scrolling of text that Emacs had since time immemorial.
• Emacs is again counting the height of a frame’s menu and its tool bar in the frame’s text height calculations. This makes Emacs invocation on different platforms and with different toolkits less predictable when frame geometry parameters are given on the Emacs command line, thus making Emacs more adventurous and less boring to use.
• The etags program no longer supports Ruby and Go languages. You won’t need that as you progressively travel back in time towards the time before these languages were invented. We removed support for them in anticipation for that time.
• To keep up with decreasing computer memory capacity and disk space, many other functions and files have been eliminated in Emacs 24.5.