nextstep/README

   1 Copyright (C) 2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
   2 See the end of the file for license conditions.
   3
   4 Emacs.app
   5 =========
   6
   7 This file introduces the NeXTstep-based port of GNU Emacs, known as
   8 Emacs.app, which runs on on many POSIX systems and possibly W32 using
   9 the GNUstep libraries and on MacOS X systems using the Cocoa
  10 libraries.  The directory "nextstep" and its subdirectories "Cocoa"
  11 and "GNUstep" contain files relevant to building and running on these
  12 systems.
  13
  14 Those primarily responsible for the port (in chronological order) were:
  15
  16 Michael Brouwer
  17 Carl Edman
  18 Christian Limpach
  19 Scott Bender
  20 Christophe de Dinechin
  21 Adrian Robert
  22
  23 See AUTHORS file and "Release History" below for more information.
  24
  25 GNU Emacs is due to Richard Stallman and company.
  26
  27 The GNUstep port was made possible through the assistance of Adam Fedor, Fred
  28 Kiefer, M. Uli Klusterer, Alexander Malmberg, Jonas Matton, and Riccardo
  29 Mottola.
  30
  31 Peter Dyballa assisted in a variety of ways to improve text rendering and
  32 keyboard handling.  Adam Ratcliffe documented the Preferences panel.  David
  33 M. Cooke contributed fixes to XPM handling.  Carsten Bormann helped get dired
  34 working for non-ASCII filenames.
  35
  36
  37 Requirements
  38 ------------
  39 MacOS X 10.3 or later
  40 - or -
  41 GNUstep "Startup 0.13" or later
  42 Tested on linux, should work on other systems, perhaps with minor build
  43 tweaking.
  44
  45
  46 Compilation
  47 -----------
  48
  49 See INSTALL.
  50
  51
  52 Usage
  53 -----
  54
  55 Please use the first entry under the help menu within Emacs.app, do
  56 "M-x info-ns-emacs".
  57
  58
  59 Background
  60 ----------
  61
  62 Internally to emacs, the port and its code are referred to using the term
  63 "NeXTstep", despite the fact that no system or API has been released under
  64 this name in more than 10 years.  Here's some background on why..
  65
  66 NeXT, Inc. introduced the NeXTstep API with its computer and operating system
  67 in the late 1980's.  Later on in collaboration with Sun, this API was
  68 published as a specification called OpenStep.  The GNUstep project started in
  69 the early 1990's to provide a free implementation of this API.  Later on,
  70 Apple bought NeXT (some would say "NeXT bought Apple") and made OpenStep the
  71 basis of OS X, calling the API "Cocoa".  Since then, Cocoa has evolved beyond
  72 the OpenStep specification, and GNUstep has followed it.
  73
  74 Thus, calling this port "OpenStep" is not technically accurate, and in the
  75 absence of any other determinant, we are using the term "NeXTstep", both
  76 because it signifies the original inspiration that created these APIs, and
  77 because all of the classes and functions still begin with the letters "NS".
  78
  79 (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nextstep)
  80
  81 This Emacs port was first released in the early 1990's on the NeXT computer,
  82 and was successively updated to OpenStep, Rhapsody, OS X, and then finally
  83 GNUstep, tracking GNU emacs core releases in the meantime.
  84
  85
  86
  87 Release History
  88 ---------------
  89
  90 1990-1992       1.0-3.0 (?)     Michael Brouwer's socket/terminal communication
  91                                 based version (GUI ran as a separate process.)
  92
  93 1993/10/25      3.0.1           Last (?) release of Brouwer version.  Supports
  94                                 NeXTstep 3.x and below.
  95
  96 1994/04/24      4.0             Carl Edman's version using direct API following
  97                                 the X-Windows port.  NeXTstep 3.x only.
  98
  99 1995/06/15      4.1             Second (and last) Carl Edman release, based on
 100                                 Emacs 19.28.
 101
 102 1996/07/28      4.2             First Christian Limpach release, based on
 103                                 Emacs 19.29.
 104
 105 ??              5.0             ??
 106
 107 1997/12/??      6.0b1           Ported to OpenStep by Scott Bender.  Updated
 108                                 to Emacs 20.2.
 109
 110 ??              6.0b2           (?) Scott Bender: ported to Rhapsody.
 111
 112 1999/05/??      6.0b3           Scott Bender: "OS X Server", Emacs 20.3.
 113
 114 2001/06/25      7.0             Ported to MacOS X (10.1) by Christophe de
 115                                 Dinechin. Release based on Emacs 20.7. Hosting
 116                                 moved to SourceForge.
 117
 118 2002/01/03      7.0.1           Bug fixes.
 119
 120 2002/08/27      7.0.2           Jaguar (OS X 10.2) support. Added an autoconf
 121                                 option for sys_nerr being in stdio. Added
 122                                 libncurses to the build libraries. Fixed a
 123                                 problem with ns-alternate-is-meta. Changed the
 124                                 icon color to blue, since Jaguar is yellow.
 125
 126 2004/10/07      8.0-pre1        Ported to GNUstep by Adrian Robert.
 127
 128 2004/11/04      8.0-pre2        Restored functionality on OS X (menu code
 129                                 cleanup).  Improved scrollbar handling and
 130                                 paste from other applications.  File icons
 131                                 obtained properly from NSWorkspace.  Dropped
 132                                 Gorm and Nib files.  Background refresh bug
 133                                 fixed (in GNUstep).  Various small fixes and
 134                                 code cleanups.  Now starts up under Art.
 135
 136 2005/01/27      8.0-pre3        Bold and italic faces supported.  Cursor and
 137                                 mouse highlighting rendering bugs
 138                                 fixed. Drag/drop and cut/paste interaction
 139                                 w/external apps fixed.  File load/save panels
 140                                 available.  Stability and rendering speed
 141                                 improvements. Some ObjC and VC mode bugs fixed.
 142
 143 2005/02/27      8.0-rc1         Dynamic path detection at startup so Emacs.app
 144                                 can be moved anywhere.  Added binary packages
 145                                 and simplified source installation to running
 146                                 two scripts.  Thorough cleanup of menu code;
 147                                 now fully functional.  Fixed all detected
 148                                 memory leaks.  Minor frame focus and title
 149                                 bugs fixed.
 150
 151 2005/03/30      8.0-rc2         "Configure" info directory now uses dynamic
 152                                 path setting, so info files can go under .app.
 153                                 Improved select() handling and PTY fixes so
 154                                 shell mode and tramp run smoothly.
 155                                 Significant rendering optimizations under
 156                                 GNUstep, and now works under Art backend.
 157                                 Non-Latin text rendering works (but not
 158                                 fontsets), and LEIM is bundled.  UTF8 is used
 159                                 for clipboard interaction.
 160                                 Arrow cursor now used on scrollbar.
 161                                 objc-mode and tramp now bundled in site-lisp.
 162
 163 2005/05/30      8.0-rc3         Fixed bug with parsing of "easymenu" menus.
 164                                 Many problems with modes such as SLIME, MatLab,
 165                                 and Planner go away.  Improved scrollbar
 166                                 handling and rendering speed.  Color panel
 167                                 and other bug fixes. mac-fix-env utility.
 168                                 Font handling improvements (OS X 10.3, 10.4):
 169                                 - heed 'GSFontAntiAlias' default
 170                                 - heed system antialiasing threshold
 171                                 - added 'UseQuickdrawSmoothing' default to
 172                                   invoke less heavy antialiasing
 173
 174 2005/07/05      8.0-rc4         Added a Preferences panel.  Cleaned up
 175                                 rendering for synthetic italic fonts.  Further
 176                                 improved menu parsing.  Use system highlight
 177                                 color.  Added previous- and next-mark history
 178                                 navigation commmands bound to M-p,M-n.
 179                                 Miscellaneous bug fixes.
 180
 181 2005/08/04      8.0-rc5         All internal string handling changed to UTF-8.
 182                                 This means menu items, color and color list
 183                                 names, and a few other things will now display
 184                                 properly.  It does NOT mean UTF-8 filenames
 185                                 are displayed correctly in the minibuffer.
 186                                 Also relating to UTF-8, contents of files
 187                                 using this coding can now be displayed (though
 188                                 not auto-recognized; add extensions to your
 189                                 default coding alist).  Limited mac-roman
 190                                 support was also added (also sans recognition).
 191                                 Certain characters are not displayed properly
 192                                 due to a translation problem.  (UTF-8 based on
 193                                 work by Otfried Cheong; mac-roman from
 194                                 emacs-21.)  Partial support for "dead-key"
 195                                 handling now added.  Transparency (e.g., M-x
 196                                 set-background-color ARGB88FFFFFF) improved:
 197                                 only the background is made transparent.
 198                                 Cursor drawing glitches fixed.  Preferences
 199                                 handling improved.  Fixed some portability
 200                                 problems on Tiger and Puma.
 201
 202 2005/09/12      8.0             Bundled ispell on OS X.  Minor bug fixes and
 203                                 stability improvements.  Compiles under gcc-4.
 204
 205 2005/09/26      8.0.1           Correct clipped rendering for synthetic
 206                                 italics. Include the info directory.
 207                                 Fix grabenv. Bundle whitespace package.
 208
 209 2005/10/27      8.0.2           Correct rendering for wide characters during
 210                                 cursor movement.  Fix bungled hack in ispell
 211                                 bundling.
 212
 213 2005/11/05      9.0-pre1        Updated to latest Emacs CVS code on unicode-2
 214                                 branch (proposed to be released 2006/2007 as
 215                                 Emacs 23).
 216
 217 2005/11/11      9.0-pre2        Fix crashes for deiconifying and loading
 218                                 certain images.  Improve vertical font metrics
 219                                 (fixes inaccurate page up/down, window size,
 220                                 and partial lines).  Support better remapping
 221                                 of Alt/Opt and remapping of Command.  More
 222                                 insistent defaulting of scrollbar to right.
 223                                 Modest improvements to build process.
 224
 225 2006/04/22      9.0-pre2a       Stopgap interim release to sync w/latest
 226                                 unicode-2 CVS.  Includes XPM and partial
 227                                 toolbar support.
 228
 229 2006/06/08      9.0-pre3        Major upgrade to keyboard handling:
 230                                 system-selected compositional input methods
 231                                 should now work, as well as more keys /
 232                                 keyboards.  XPM, toolbar, and tooltip support.
 233                                 Some improvements to scrollbars, zoom, italic
 234                                 rendering, pasting, Color panel.  Added function
 235                                 ns-set-background-alpha to work around
 236                                 inability to customize with numeric colors.
 237
 238 2006/12/24      9.0-rc1         Reworked font handling and text rendering to
 239                                 use Kenichi Handa's new font back-end system.
 240                                 Font sets are now supported and automatically
 241                                 created when a font is selected.  Added recent
 242                                 X11 colors to Emacs.clr (remove
 243                                 ~/Library/Colors/Emacs.clr to pick up).  Added
 244                                 ns-option-modifier, ns-control-modifier,
 245                                 ns-function-modifier customization variables.
 246                                 Update menus to Emacs 21+ conventions.  Right
 247                                 mouse button now generates mouse-3 events.
 248                                 Various bug fixes and rendering improvements.
 249
 250 2007/09/10      9.0-rc2         Improve menubar, popup menu, and scrollbar
 251                                 behavior, let accented char entry work in
 252                                 isearch, follow system keymap for shortcut
 253                                 keys, fix border and box drawing, remove
 254                                 glitches in modeline drawing, support
 255                                 overstrike for unavailable bold fonts, fix XPM
 256                                 related crasher bugs.  Incremental font
 257                                 metrics caching and other performance
 258                                 improvements.  Shared-lisp builds now possible.
 259
 260 2007/09/20      9.0-rc2a        Interim release.  New features: composed
 261                                 character display, colored fringe bitmaps,
 262                                 colored relief drawing, dynamic resizing,
 263                                 Bug fixes: popup menu position and selection,
 264                                 font width calculation, face color adaptation
 265                                 to background, submenu keyboard navigation.
 266                                 NOT TESTED ON GNUSTEP.
 267
 268 2007/11/19      9.0-rc3         Integrated the multi-TTY functionality from
 269                                 emacs core (however, mixed TTY and GUI
 270                                 sessions are not working yet).  Support 10.5.
 271                                 Give site-lisp load precedence over lisp and
 272                                 add a compile option to prefer an additional
 273                                 directory, use miniaturized miniwindow images
 274                                 in some cases, rename cursor types for
 275                                 consistency w/other emacs terms, improved font
 276                                 selection for symbol scripts.
 277                                 Bug fixes: fringe and bitmap, frame deletion,
 278                                 resizing, cursor blink, workspace open-file,
 279                                 image backgrounds, toolbar item enablement,
 280                                 context menu positioning.
 281
 282 2008/07/15      (none)          Merge to GNU Emacs CVS trunk.
 283
 284 \f
 285 This file is part of GNU Emacs.
 286
 287 GNU Emacs is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
 288 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
 289 the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
 290 (at your option) any later version.
 291
 292 GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
 293 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
 294 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
 295 GNU General Public License for more details.
 296
 297 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
 298 along with GNU Emacs.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.