GNU Emacs NEWS -- history of user-visible changes. Copyright (C) 2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc. See the end of the file for license conditions. Please send Emacs bug reports to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. If possible, use M-x report-emacs-bug. This file is about changes in Emacs version 27. See file HISTORY for a list of GNU Emacs versions and release dates. See files NEWS.26, NEWS.25, ..., NEWS.18, and NEWS.1-17 for changes in older Emacs versions. You can narrow news to a specific version by calling 'view-emacs-news' with a prefix argument or by typing C-u C-h C-n. Temporary note: +++ indicates that all necessary documentation updates are complete. (This means all relevant manuals in doc/ AND lisp doc-strings.) --- means no change in the manuals is needed. When you add a new item, use the appropriate mark if you are sure it applies, * Installation Changes in Emacs 27.1 ** The new configure option '--with-json' adds support for JSON using the Jansson library. It is on by default; use 'configure --with-json=no' to build without Jansson support. The new JSON functions 'json-serialize', 'json-insert', 'json-parse-string', and 'json-parse-buffer' are typically much faster than their Lisp counterparts from json.el. ** Emacs has been ported to the -fcheck-pointer-bounds option of GCC. This causes Emacs to check bounds of some arrays addressed by its internal pointers, which can be helpful when debugging the Emacs interpreter or modules that it uses. If your platform supports it you can enable it when configuring, e.g., './configure CFLAGS="-g3 -O2 -mmpx -fcheck-pointer-bounds"' on Intel MPX platforms. * Startup Changes in Emacs 27.1 +++ ** Emacs can now be configured using an early init file. The file is called early-init.el, in `user-emacs-directory'. It is loaded very early in the startup process: in particular, before graphical elements such as the tool bar are initialized, and before the package manager is initialized. +++ ** Emacs now initializes package.el before loading the init-file. This is part of a change intended to eliminate the behavior of package.el inserting a call to (package-initialize) into the init-file, which was previously done when Emacs was started. Users who do not configure package.el variables such as `package-load-list' and `package-user-dir' need not make any configuration changes. Users who do configure such variables should place the configuration into the newly introduced early init file, which is loaded before package.el is initialized. * Changes in Emacs 27.1 --- ** The new option 'tooltip-resize-echo-area' avoids truncating tooltip text on GUI frames when tooltips are displayed in the echo area. Instead, it resizes the echo area as needed to accommodate the full tool-tip text. +++ ** New function 'logcount' calculates an integer's Hamming weight. +++ ** New function 'libxml-available-p'. This function returns non-nil if libxml support is both compiled in and available at run time. Lisp programs should use this function to detect built-in libxml support, instead of testing for that indirectly, e.g., by checking that functions like 'libxml-parse-html-region' return nil. * Editing Changes in Emacs 27.1 --- ** New variable 'x-wait-for-event-timeout'. This controls how long Emacs will wait for updates to the graphical state to take effect (making a frame visible, for example). +++ ** The new user option 'electric-quote-replace-double' controls whether '"' is also replaced in 'electric-quote-mode'. If non-nil, '"' is replaced by a double typographic quote. * Changes in Specialized Modes and Packages in Emacs 27.1 ** CSS mode --- *** A new command 'css-cycle-color-format' for cycling between color formats (e.g. "black" => "#000000" => "rgb(0, 0, 0)") has been added, bound to 'C-c C-f'. ** Dired +++ *** The new user option 'dired-create-destination-dirs' controls whether 'dired-do-copy' and 'dired-rename-file' should create non-existent directories in the destination. ** Ibuffer --- *** New filter ibuffer-filter-by-process; bound to '/E'. ** Edebug +++ *** The runtime behavior of Edebug's instrumentation can be changed using the new variables 'edebug-behavior-alist', 'edebug-after-instrumentation-function' and 'edebug-new-definition-function'. Edebug's behavior can be changed globally or for individual definitions. ** Enhanced xterm support *** New variable 'xterm-set-window-title' controls whether Emacs sets the XTerm window title. This feature is experimental and is disabled by default. ** Gamegrid ** ERT +++ *** New variable 'ert-quiet' allows to make ERT output in batch mode less verbose by removing non-essential information. --- *** Gamegrid now determines its default glyph size based on display dimensions, instead of always using 16 pixels. As a result, Tetris, Snake and Pong are more playable on HiDPI displays. ** Filecache --- *** Completing filenames in the minibuffer via 'C-TAB' now uses the styles as configured by the variable 'completion-styles'. ** New macros 'thunk-let' and 'thunk-let*'. These macros are analogue to 'let' and 'let*', but create bindings that are evaluated lazily. ** Eshell --- *** Expansion of history event designators is disabled by default. To restore the old behavior, use (add-hook 'eshell-expand-input-functions #'eshell-expand-history-references) * New Modes and Packages in Emacs 27.1 +++ ** Emacs can now visit files in archives as if they were directories. This feature uses Tramp and works only on systems which support GVFS, i.e. GNU/Linux, roughly spoken. See the chapter "(tramp) Archive file names" in the Tramp manual for full documentation of these facilities. * Incompatible Lisp Changes in Emacs 27.1 ** The FILENAME argument to 'file-name-base' is now mandatory and no longer defaults to 'buffer-file-name'. --- ** The function 'eldoc-message' now accepts a single argument. Programs that called it with multiple arguments before should pass them through 'format' first. Even that is discouraged: for ElDoc support, you should set 'eldoc-documentation-function' instead of calling 'eldoc-message' directly. ** Old-style backquotes now generate an error. They have been generating warnings for a decade. * Lisp Changes in Emacs 27.1 ** Internal parsing commands now use syntax-ppss and disregard open-paren-in-column-0-is-defun-start. This affects mostly things like forward-comment, scan-sexps, and forward-sexp when parsing backward. The new variable 'comment-use-syntax-ppss' can be set to nil to recover the old behavior if needed. --- ** The 'file-system-info' function is now available on all platforms. instead of just Microsoft platforms. This fixes a 'get-free-disk-space' bug on OS X 10.8 and later (Bug#28639). --- ** The function 'get-free-disk-space' returns now a non-nil value for remote systems, which support this check. +++ ** The function 'make-string' accepts an additional optional argument. If the optional third argument is non-nil, 'make-string' will produce a multibyte string even if its second argument is an ASCII character. ** New JSON parsing and serialization functions 'json-serialize', 'json-insert', 'json-parse-string', and 'json-parse-buffer'. These are implemented in C using the Jansson library. * Changes in Emacs 27.1 on Non-Free Operating Systems ---------------------------------------------------------------------- This file is part of GNU Emacs. GNU Emacs is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with GNU Emacs. If not, see . Local variables: coding: utf-8 mode: outline paragraph-separate: "[ ]*$" end: