Appendix E Emacs 25 Antinews

For those users who live backwards in time, here is information about downgrading to Emacs version 25.3. We hope you will enjoy the greater simplicity that results from the absence of many Emacs 26.3 features.

• Emacs no longer defaults to requiring the GnuTLS library when you build it. Those who want the TLS functionality built-in will have to explicitly request it at build time—or forever hold their peace. We decided that having the TLS functionality doesn't justify annoying users or package builders with error messages about libgnutls absence. We also decided that if you do build with GnuTLS, we will allow versions of the library older than 2.12.2, as that version will become less and less available/popular as you move farther back in time.
• For similar reasons, we've reverted back to building our own version of movemail that retrieves POP3 mail as clear text via insecure channels. As you move back in time, the availability of secure alternatives to POP3 will diminish, and we are only keen to support that. We've also removed the --with-mailutils configure-time option, as it no longer makes sense for the observable past.
• We have removed support for systemd and similar services: we no longer provide a user init file for enabling Emacs support via those services, and we removed from the Emacs server the socket-launching support important for Emacs client operation under these services. Again, these services will lose popularity as you move back in time, so the code supporting them will be just dead code, bloating Emacs unnecessarily.
• Reproducible builds of Emacs are no longer supported, as past development will make that unnecessary.
• The --fg-daemon is gone, leaving only --daemon. No need to procrastinate on the dilemma whether you do or do not want the new shiny “headless Emacs” thingy. Hail, simplicity!
• As text terminals supporting true color will lose ground as you move back in time, we've removed support for 24-bit colors on text terminals. If you want colors on a text terminal, you should be fine with just 8 of them. (Truth being told, we think text terminals should be monochrome, but you will have to keep downgrading to older Emacs versions to have that feature back.)
• Emacs 25.3 no longer supports magic signatures of the form ‘#!/usr/bin/env interpreter’ in scripts. Moving back in time means you are getting closer to the ideal of the original Unix design where all the interpreters lived in a single directory /bin, so this fancy feature is simply becoming unnecessary ballast.
• The double-buffering feature of Emacs display on X has been removed. We decided that its complexity and a few random surprising side-effects aren't justified by the gains, even though those gains were hailed in some quarters. Yes, Emacs 25.3 will flicker in some use cases, but we are sure Emacs users will be able to suck it, as they have been doing for years. Since this feature is gone, we've also removed the inhibit-double-buffering frame parameter, which is now unnecessary.
• Non-breaking hyphens and ASCII characters displayed instead of unsupported quote characters are now again displayed using the escape-glyph face. We think having a single face instead of 3 different ones will make Emacs customization a much simpler job for users. For the same reason, we've removed the header-line-highlight face, leaving just highlight for any element of the Emacs display besides the mode line.
• You can no longer disable attempts of recovery from fatal exceptions such as C stack overflows and fatal signals. Since the recovery included in Emacs is reliable enough, we decided there was no reason to put your edits in danger of becoming lost when these situations happen. The variables attempt-stack-overflow-recovery and attempt-orderly-shutdown-on-fatal-signal are therefore removed.
• The list-timers command was removed, as we decided timers are not a user-level feature, and therefore users should not be allowed to mess with them. Ask an Emacs Lisp guru near you for help if you have a runaway timer in your session. (Of course, as you move back in time, such runaway timers will become less and less frequent, and actually timers might start shutting down automatically, as they cannot cope with time reversal.)
• Horizontal scrolling using the mouse or touchpad has been removed. In the past, wide monitors will become less popular, so horizontal scrolling will no longer be needed. Removal of the mouse support for horizontal scrolling is the first step towards its complete removal in prior Emacs versions.
• We have found the --tramp option of emacsclient too risky and too complicated, so we removed it to simplify the client code and its usage.
• The display-raw-bytes-as-hex variable is gone, so raw bytes can only be displayed as octal escapes. Emacs users should be able to convert from octal to any other base in their sleep!
• Displaying line numbers for a buffer is only possibly using add-on features, such as linum-mode, which can only display the numbers in the display margins. Line-number display using these features is also slow, as we firmly believe such a feature is un-Emacsy and should not have been included in Emacs to begin with. Consequently, display-line-numbers-mode was removed.
• On our permanent quest for simplifying Emacs, we've removed the support for passing command-line arguments and options to Emacs via the --alternate-editor option of emacsclient and ALTERNATE_EDITOR environment variable. There's only one True Emacs—the one that comes up when invoked as emacs, no need for all those fancy options!
• The complication known as “single-line horizontal scrolling” is no longer with you in Emacs 25.3. This feature was a bow to “other editors”; instead, let those other editors bow to Emacs by hscrolling the entire window at all times. Repeat after me: “The Emacs way is the Only Way!”
• The fancy case conversions of non-ASCII characters used in several locales, like Turkish and Greek, are removed, leaving the relations between upper and lower letter-case simple again, as they were in 7-bit ASCII. Likewise with ligatures that turn into multiple characters when their letter-case changes—gone.
• Enchant is no longer supported by ispell-buffer and similar spell-checking commands. As Enchant will gradually disappear while you move back in time, its support will become unnecessary anyway.
• Tramp lost its support for Google Drive repositories. Cloud storage is on its way to extinction as you move back in time, thus making this feature redundant.
• Several commands, deemed to be unnecessary complications, have been removed. Examples include replace-buffer-contents and apropos-local-variable.
• To keep up with decreasing computer memory capacity and disk space, many other functions and files have been eliminated in Emacs 25.3.