Version History

See also the user visible changes for 5.25.

Note: This release contains changes that might not be compatible with current user setups (although it's believed that these incompatibilities will only show up in very uncommon circumstances). However, since the impact is uncertain, these changes may be rolled back depending on user feedback. Therefore there's no forward compatibility guarantee wrt the new features introduced in this release.

• New initialization procedure for the style system.

  When the initial style for a buffer is determined by CC Mode (from the variable c-default-style), the global values of style variables now take precedence over the values specified by the chosen style. This is different from the old behavior: previously, the style-specific settings would override the global settings. This change makes it possible to do simple configuration in the intuitive way with Customize or with setq lines in one's .emacs file.

  By default, the global value of every style variable is the new special symbol set-from-style, which causes the value to be taken from the style system. This means that in effect, only an explicit setting of a style variable will cause the "overriding" behavior described above.

  Also note that global settings override style-specific settings only when the initial style of a buffer is chosen by a CC Mode major mode function. When a style is chosen in other ways - for example, by a call like (c-set-style "gnu") in a hook, or via M-x c-set-style - then the style-specific values take precedence over any global style values. In Lisp terms, global values override style-specific values only when the new second argument to c-set-style is non-nil; see the function documentation for more info.

  The purpose of these changes is to make it easier for users, especially novice users, to do simple customizations with Customize or with setq in their .emacs files. On the other hand, the new system is intended to be compatible with advanced users' customizations as well, such as those that choose styles in hooks or whatnot. This new system is believed to be almost entirely compatible with current configurations, in spite of the changed precedence between style and global variable settings when a buffer's default style is set.

  (Thanks to Eric Eide for clarifying this explanation a bit.)

  • c-offsets-alist is now a customizable variable.

    This became possible as a result of the new initialization behavior.

    This variable is treated slightly differently from the other style variables; instead of using the symbol set-from-style, it will be completed with the syntactic symbols it doesn't already contain when the style is first initialized. This means it now defaults to the empty list to make all syntactic elements get their values from the style system.

  • Compatibility variable to restore the old behavior.

    In case your configuration doesn't work with this change, you can set c-old-style-variable-behavior to non-nil to get the old behavior back as far as possible.

• Improvements to line breaking and text filling.

  CC Mode now handles this more intelligently and seamlessly wrt the surrounding code, especially inside comments. For details see the new chapter about this in the manual.

  • New variable to recognize comment line prefix decorations.

    The variable c-comment-prefix-regexp has been added to properly recognize the line prefix in both block and line comments. It's primarily used to initialize the various paragraph recognition and adaptive filling variables that the text handling functions uses.

  • New variable c-block-comment-prefix.

    This is a generalization of the now obsolete variable c-comment-continuation-stars to handle arbitrary strings.

  • CC Mode now uses adaptive fill mode.

    This to make it adapt better to the paragraph style inside comments.

    It's also possible to use other adaptive filling packages inside CC Mode, notably Kyle E. Jones' Filladapt mode (http://wonderworks.com/). A new convenience function c-setup-filladapt sets up Filladapt for use inside CC Mode.

    Note though that the 2.12 version of Filladapt lacks a feature that causes it to work suboptimally when c-comment-prefix-regexp can match the empty string (which it commonly does). A patch for that is available from the CC Mode web site.

  • It's now possible to selectively turn off auto filling.

    The variable c-ignore-auto-fill is used to ignore auto fill mode in specific contexts, e.g. in preprocessor directives and in string literals.

  • New context sensitive line break function c-context-line-break.

    It works like newline-and-indent in normal code, and adapts the line prefix according to the comment style when used inside comments. If you're normally using newline-and-indent, you might want to switch to this function.

  • c-hanging-comment-starter-p and c-hanging-comment-ender-p are obsolete.

    The new comment handling code no longer consults these two variables. It instead detects how the "hangingness" of the comment delimiters look like currently and simply keeps them that way.

• Fixes to IDL mode.

  It now does a better job in recognizing only the constructs relevant to IDL. E.g. it no longer matches class as the beginning of a struct block, but it does match the CORBA 2.3 valuetype keyword. Thanks to Eric Eide.

• Improvements to the Whitesmith style.

  It now keeps the style consistently on all levels and both when opening braces hangs and when they don't.

  • New lineup function c-lineup-whitesmith-in-block.

• New lineup functions c-lineup-template-args and c-indent-multi-line-block.

  See their docstrings for details. c-lineup-template-args does a better job of tracking the brackets used as parens in C++ templates, and is used by default to line up continued template arguments.

• c-lineup-comment now preserves alignment with a comment on the previous line.

  It used to instead preserve comments that started in the column specified by comment-column.

• c-lineup-C-comments handles "free form" text comments.

  In comments with a long delimiter line at the start, the indentation is kept unchanged for lines that start with an empty comment line prefix. This is intended for the type of large block comments that contain documentation with its own formatting. In these you normally don't want CC Mode to change the indentation.

• The c syntactic symbol is now relative to the comment start instead of the previous line, to make integers usable as lineup arguments.

• All lineup functions have gotten docstrings.

• More preprocessor directive movement functions.

  c-down-conditional does the reverse of c-up-conditional. c-up-conditional-with-else and c-down-conditional-with-else are variants of these that also stops at #else lines (suggested by Don Provan).

• Minor improvements to many movement functions in tricky situations.