Emacs 22 Antinews
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For those users who live backwards in time, here is information about downgrading to Emacs version 22.3.  We hope you will enjoy the greater simplicity that results from the absence of many Emacs EMACSVER features.

  * The Fontconfig font library is no longer supported.  To specify a font, you must use an XLFD (X Logical Font Descriptor).  The other ways of specifying fonts---so-called ``Fontconfig'' and ``GTK'' font names---are clearly redundant, and have been removed.

  * We have switched to a character representation specially designed for Emacs.  Rather than forcing all the widely used scripts artificially into alignment, as Unicode does, Emacs treats them all equally, giving each one a place in the space of character codes.  Thus, scripts do not need to fight over characters used in each one of them, as each has its own variant, and they all are different as far as Emacs is concerned.  For example, there's a Latin-1 c-cedilla character, and there's a Latin-2 c-cedilla; searching a buffer for the Latin-1 variant will only find that variant, but not the others.  This design allows us to eliminate the confusing practice in Emacs 23 whereby one character can simultaneously belong to any number of charsets.

  * Emacs now uses its own special internal encoding for non-ASCII characters, known as emacs-mule.  This was imperative to support several different variants of the same character, each one belonging to its own script: emacs-mule marks each character with its script, to better discern them from one another.

  * For simplicity, the functions encode-coding-region and decode-coding-region no longer accept an argument saying where to store the result of their conversions.  The result always replaces the original, so there's no need to look for it elsewhere.

  * Emacs no longer performs font anti-aliasing.  If your fonts look ugly, try choosing a larger font and increasing the screen resolution. Admittedly, this becomes difficult as you go further back in time, since available screen resolutions will decrease.

  * Emacs has added support for some soon-to-be-non-obsolete platforms. These include GNU/Linux systems based on libc version 5, BSD systems based on the COFF executable format, Solaris versions less than 2.6, and many more.

  * Emacs can no longer display frames on X windows and text terminals (ttys) simultaneously.  If you start Emacs as an X application, the Emacs job can only create X frames; if you start Emacs on a tty, the Emacs job can only use that tty.  No more confusion about which type of frame emacsclient will use in any given Emacs session!

  * Emacs can no longer be started as a daemon.  We decided that having an Emacs sitting silently in the background with no visual manifestation anywhere in sight is too confusing.

  * Transient Mark mode is now disabled by default.  Furthermore, some commands that operate specifically on the region when it is active and Transient Mark mode is enabled (such as fill-paragraph ispell-word, and indent-for-tab-command), no longer do so.

  * The line motion commands, C-n and C-p, now move by logical text lines, not screen lines.  Even if a long text line is continued over multiple screen lines, C-n and C-p treat it as a single line, because that's ultimately what it is.

  * Visual Line mode, which provides ``word wrap'' functionality, has been removed.  You can still use Long Lines mode to gain an approximation of word wrapping, though this has some drawbacks---for instance, syntax highlighting often doesn't work well on wrapped lines.

  * The variable shift-select-mode has been deleted; holding shift while typing a motion command no longer creates a temporarily active region.  You can still create temporarily active regions by dragging the mouse.

  * C-l now runs recenter instead of recenter-top-bottom.  This always sets the current line at the center of the window, instead of cycling through the center, top, and bottom of the window on successive invocations of C-l.  This lets you type C-l C-l C-l C-l to be absolutely sure that you have recentered the line.

  * Typing M-n at the start of the minibuffer history list no longer attempts to generate guesses of possible minibuffer input.  It instead does the straightforward thing, by issuing the message End of history; no default available.

  * Individual buffers can no longer display faces specially.  The text scaling commands C-x C-+, C-x C--, and C-x C-0 have been removed, and so has the buffer face menu bound to S-down-mouse-1.

  * VC no longer supports fileset-based operations on distributed version control systems (DVCSs) such as Arch, Bazaar, Subversion, Mercurial, and Git.  For instance, multi-file commits will be performed by committing one file at a time.  As you go further back in time, we will remove DVCS support entirely, so start migrating your projects to CVS.

  * To keep up with decreasing computer memory capacity and disk space, many other functions and files have been eliminated in Emacs 22.3.