4.3 What is different about Emacs
25?
- Emacs can
now embed native widgets inside Emacs buffers, if you have gtk3
and webkitgtk3 installed. E.g., to access the embedded webkit
browser widget, type M-x
xwidget-webkit-browse-url.
- Emacs can now dynamically load
external modules compiled as shared libraries.
- C-x
8 has new shorthands for several popular characters, type
C-x 8 C-h to list shorthands.
- A new minor mode
global-eldoc-mode is enabled by default, and shows
in the echo area or in the mode line the argument list of the
Emacs Lisp form at point.
- On text terminals that
support the “bracketed paste mode” EMacs now uses
that mode by default. This mode allows Emacs to distinguish
between pasted text and text typed by the user.
- Emacs 25 comes with data
files imported from the latest Unicode Standard version
9.0.0.
- The support for
bidirectional editing was updated to include all the features
mandated by the latest Unicode Standard version 9.0.0.
- Search command can
now perform character folding in matches. This is analogous to
case folding, but instead of disregarding case variants, it
disregards wider classes of distinctions between similar
characters, such as matching different variants of double quote
characters, ignoring diacritics, etc.
- The Emacs Web
Browser EWW was extended to render text using variable-pitch
fonts, and got other new features.
- Rmail can now render
HTML mail messages, if Emacs is built with libxml2 or if you
have the Lynx browser installed.
- VC now has basic
support for
push commands, implemented for Bzr,
Git, and Hg.
-
Hide-IfDef mode now support full C/C++
expressions in macros, macro argument expansion, interactive
macro evaluation and automatic scanning of
#defined symbols.
- New package Xref
replaces Etags’s front-end and UI. Xref provides a
generic framework and new commands to find and move to
definitions of functions, macros, data structures etc., as well
as go back to the location where you were before moving to a
definition. It supersedes and obsoletes many Etags commands,
while still using the etags.el code that reads the TAGS tables
as one of its back-ends. As result, the popular key bindings
M-. and M-, have been changed to invoke
Xref commands.
- The new
package Project provides generic infrastructure for dealing
with projects.
- Emacs can now draw
horizontal scroll bars on some platforms that provide toolkit
scroll bars, namely Gtk+, Lucid, Motif and Windows.
Consult the Emacs NEWS file (C-h n)
for the full list of changes in Emacs 25.