Q7.0.6: What’s new in SXEmacs 22.1.4?

• Many more image formats via FFI/libWand – Freundt.

  FFI-enabled SXEmacs can load up libWand and thus display any image format that libWand (ImageMagick) supports.

• Lots of updates to the ENT (Enhanced Number Types) code – Freundt.
• Mule is on by default – Youngs.
• Embeddable keyboard macros – Kuehl.

  This means that the following sort of thing is possible:

  C-x ( bar C-x )
  C-x ( foo C-x e C-x )
  
  C-x e
  => foo bar
  

• Default widgets/dialogs to Athena instead of Motif – Youngs.
• OpenSSL updates – Freundt.

  Digest, encryption, and decryption routines that operate on files has been added. Previously this was only available for buffers.

• Build reports have been revamped – Youngs, Freundt.

  The SXEmacs build report no longer conflicts with the XEmacs build-report.el. Plus ours also reports on shared lib dependencies and config.h stuff. Sending from Gnus is also supported.

• FFI updates/fixes – Youngs, Zajcev, Freundt.
• Ability to build postscript, pdf, and html docs – Ferreira.
• Double linked lists and bloom filters implemented – Freundt.

  Bloom filters are a space and time-efficient way to decide about the membership of an element to a given set. Using lisp-lists or vectors, one usually has to traverse the entire list or vector, before membership can be decided. Using hash tables, membership decision is in O(1) (bloom filters also decide in O(1)), but the hash-table’s size grows proportionally with the number n of elements, thus its space complexity is O(n), whereas Bloom filters take a constant amount of space regardless how many elements are in it.

• Lightning fast recursive version of directory-files – Freundt.

  It’s called ‘directory-files-recur’ and in some situations it is even faster than GNU’s find(1).

• Portuguese added to etc/HELLO – Ferreira.
• Massive improvements, enhancements for multimedia (audio) – Freundt.

  SXEmacs supports several "sound servers" like: OSS, NAS, ESD, Polypaudio, ALSA, and Jack. And media streams can be handled by sndfile, ffmpeg, sox, mad, xine, gstreamer. The SXEmacs developers recommend Polyp/ffmpeg whenever possible.

  And yes, SXEmacs can play mp3 files. :-)

• Autoconf fixes/updates – Youngs, Freundt.

  All of the enable/disable options have been converted to with/without options. This allows us to sort them into groups.

  Also fixes were made to allow building on FreeBSD and NetBSD.

• Big update for the FAQ – Youngs, Freundt.
• Server Sockets! – Ferreira.

  SXEmacs now has server sockets (Yay!). See ‘open-network-server-stream’.

• Compiler fixes (gcc 2.95) – Freundt.
• bug-reporter update – Youngs.

  ‘report-sxemacs-bug’ now directs people to our BugZilla installation at http://issues.sxemacs.org/

• Documentation updates/fixes/improvements – Youngs, Ferreira, Freundt.