Copyright (C) 2008-2024 Free Software Foundation, Inc. See the end of the file for license conditions. This file contains information about GNU Emacs on "Nextstep" platforms. The Nextstep support code works on many POSIX systems (and possibly W32) using the GNUstep libraries, and on macOS systems using the Cocoa libraries. Background ---------- Within Emacs, the port and its code are referred to using the term "Nextstep", despite the fact that no system or API has been released under this name in more than 10 years. Here's some background on why: NeXT, Inc. introduced the NeXTstep API with its computer and operating system in the late 1980's. Later on, in collaboration with Sun, this API was published as a specification called OpenStep. The GNUstep project started in the early 1990's to provide a free implementation of this API. Later on, Apple bought NeXT (some would say "NeXT bought Apple") and made OpenStep the basis of Mac OS X, calling the API "Cocoa". Since then, Cocoa has evolved beyond the OpenStep specification, and GNUstep has followed it. Thus, calling this port "OpenStep" is not technically accurate, and in the absence of any other determinant, we are using the term "Nextstep", both because it signifies the original inspiration that created these APIs, and because all of the classes and functions still begin with the letters "NS". (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nextstep) This Emacs port was first released in the early 1990's on the NeXT computer, and was successively updated to OpenStep, Rhapsody, Mac OS X, and then finally GNUstep, tracking GNU Emacs core releases in the meantime. Release History --------------- 1990-1992 1.0-3.0 (?) Michael Brouwer's socket/terminal communication based version (GUI ran as a separate process.) 1993/10/25 3.0.1 Last (?) release of Brouwer version. Supports NeXTstep 3.x and below. 1994/04/24 4.0 Carl Edman's version using direct API following the X-Windows port. NeXTstep 3.x only. 1995/06/15 4.1 Second (and last) Carl Edman release, based on Emacs 19.28. 1996/07/28 4.2 First Christian Limpach release, based on Emacs 19.29. ?? 5.0 ?? 1997/12/?? 6.0b1 Ported to OpenStep by Scott Bender. Updated to Emacs 20.2. ?? 6.0b2 (?) Scott Bender: ported to Rhapsody. 1999/05/?? 6.0b3 Scott Bender: "OS X Server", Emacs 20.3. 2001/06/25 7.0 Ported to Mac OS X (10.1) by Christophe de Dinechin. Release based on Emacs 20.7. Hosting moved to SourceForge. 2002/01/03 7.0.1 Bug fixes. 2002/08/27 7.0.2 Jaguar (Mac OS X 10.2) support. Added autoconf option for sys_nerr being in stdio. Added libncurses to the build libraries. Fixed a problem with ns-alternate-is-meta. Changed the icon color to blue, since Jaguar is yellow. 2004/10/07 8.0-pre1 Ported to GNUstep by Adrian Robert. 2004/11/04 8.0-pre2 Restored functionality on Mac OS X (menu code cleanup). Improved scrollbar handling and paste from other applications. File icons obtained properly from NSWorkspace. Dropped Gorm and Nib files. Background refresh bug fixed (in GNUstep). Various small fixes and code cleanups. Now starts up under Art. 2005/01/27 8.0-pre3 Bold and italic faces supported. Cursor and mouse highlighting rendering bugs fixed. Drag/drop and cut/paste interaction w/external apps fixed. File load/save panels available. Stability and rendering speed improvements. Some ObjC and VC mode bugs fixed. 2005/02/27 8.0-rc1 Dynamic path detection at startup so Emacs.app can be moved anywhere. Added binary packages and simplified source installation to running two scripts. Thorough cleanup of menu code; now fully functional. Fixed all detected memory leaks. Minor frame focus and title bugs fixed. 2005/03/30 8.0-rc2 "Configure" info directory now uses dynamic path setting, so info files can go under .app. Improved select() handling and PTY fixes so shell mode and tramp run smoothly. Significant rendering optimizations under GNUstep, and now works under Art backend. Non-Latin text rendering works (but not fontsets), and LEIM is bundled. UTF8 is used for clipboard interaction. Arrow cursor now used on scrollbar. objc-mode and tramp now bundled in site-lisp. 2005/05/30 8.0-rc3 Fixed bug with parsing of "easymenu" menus. Many problems with modes such as SLIME, MatLab, and Planner go away. Improved scrollbar handling and rendering speed. Color panel and other bug fixes. mac-fix-env utility. Font handling improvements (Mac OS X 10.3, 10.4): - heed 'GSFontAntiAlias' default - heed system antialiasing threshold - added 'UseQuickdrawSmoothing' default to invoke less heavy antialiasing 2005/07/05 8.0-rc4 Added a Preferences panel. Cleaned up rendering for synthetic italic fonts. Further improved menu parsing. Use system highlight color. Added previous- and next-mark history navigation commands bound to M-p,M-n. Miscellaneous bug fixes. 2005/08/04 8.0-rc5 All internal string handling changed to UTF-8. This means menu items, color and color list names, and a few other things will now display properly. It does NOT mean UTF-8 filenames are displayed correctly in the minibuffer. Also relating to UTF-8, contents of files using this coding can now be displayed (though not auto-recognized; add extensions to your default coding alist). Limited mac-roman support was also added (also sans recognition). Certain characters are not displayed properly due to a translation problem. (UTF-8 based on work by Otfried Cheong; mac-roman from emacs-21.) Partial support for "dead-key" handling now added. Transparency (e.g., M-x set-background-color ARGB88FFFFFF) improved: only the background is made transparent. Cursor drawing glitches fixed. Preferences handling improved. Fixed some portability problems on Tiger and Puma. 2005/09/12 8.0 Bundled ispell on Mac OS X. Minor bug fixes and stability improvements. Compiles under gcc-4. 2005/09/26 8.0.1 Correct clipped rendering for synthetic italics. Include the info directory. Fix grabenv. Bundle whitespace package. 2005/10/27 8.0.2 Correct rendering for wide characters during cursor movement. Fix bungled hack in ispell bundling. 2005/11/05 9.0-pre1 Updated to latest Emacs CVS code on unicode-2 branch (proposed to be released 2006/2007 as Emacs 23). 2005/11/11 9.0-pre2 Fix crashes for deiconifying and loading certain images. Improve vertical font metrics (fixes inaccurate page up/down, window size, and partial lines). Support better remapping of Alt/Opt and remapping of Command. More insistent defaulting of scrollbar to right. Modest improvements to build process. 2006/04/22 9.0-pre2a Stopgap interim release to sync w/latest unicode-2 CVS. Includes XPM and partial toolbar support. 2006/06/08 9.0-pre3 Major upgrade to keyboard handling: system-selected compositional input methods should now work, as well as more keys / keyboards. XPM, toolbar, and tooltip support. Some improvements to scrollbars, zoom, italic rendering, pasting, Color panel. Added function ns-set-background-alpha to work around inability to customize with numeric colors. 2006/12/24 9.0-rc1 Reworked font handling and text rendering to use Kenichi Handa's new font back-end system. Font sets are now supported and automatically created when a font is selected. Added recent X11 colors to Emacs.clr (remove ~/Library/Colors/Emacs.clr to pick up). Added ns-option-modifier, ns-control-modifier, ns-function-modifier customization variables. Update menus to Emacs 21+ conventions. Right mouse button now generates mouse-3 events. Various bug fixes and rendering improvements. 2007/09/10 9.0-rc2 Improve menubar, popup menu, and scrollbar behavior, let accented char entry work in isearch, follow system keymap for shortcut keys, fix border and box drawing, remove glitches in modeline drawing, support overstrike for unavailable bold fonts, fix XPM related crashes. Incremental font metrics caching and other performance improvements. Shared-lisp builds now possible. 2007/09/20 9.0-rc2a Interim release. New features: composed character display, colored fringe bitmaps, colored relief drawing, dynamic resizing, Bug fixes: popup menu position and selection, font width calculation, face color adaptation to background, submenu keyboard navigation. NOT TESTED ON GNUSTEP. 2007/11/19 9.0-rc3 Integrated the multi-TTY functionality from emacs core (however, mixed TTY and GUI sessions are not working yet). Support 10.5. Give site-lisp load precedence over lisp and add a compile option to prefer an additional directory, use miniaturized miniwindow images in some cases, rename cursor types for consistency w/other emacs terms, improved font selection for symbol scripts. Bug fixes: fringe and bitmap, frame deletion, resizing, cursor blink, workspace open-file, image backgrounds, toolbar item enablement, context menu positioning. 2008/07/15 (none) Merge to GNU Emacs CVS trunk. Contributors ------------ In addition to the folks listed in etc/AUTHORS responsible for GNU Emacs itself, the NeXTstep port owes to the following people: Carl Edman original author and maintainer, mainly UI Michael Brouwer heavy contributor, input handling and other areas Christian Limpach help / maintenance on NeXTstep Scott Bender OpenStep, Rhapsody ports Christophe de Dinechin macOS port Adrian Robert GNUstep port, update Emacs 20 -> 21+ Joe Reiss popup menu, dialog boxes; icons Andrew Athan font panel integration Scott Byer improved rendering code Scott Hess keyboard handling suggestions Rahul Abrol "hide others" patch Adam Ratcliffe preferences panel documentation Peter Dyballa assistance with non-ASCII rendering and keyboard handling David M. Cooke fix to XPM crash bug Carsten Bormann initial patch and assistance getting dired working for non-ASCII filenames Andrew Moore assistance on ns-mark-nav extension The GNUstep port was made possible through the assistance of Adam Fedor, Fred Kiefer, M. Uli Klusterer, Alexander Malmberg, Jonas Matton, and Riccardo Mottola. Leigh Smith maintained the SourceForge project for a period. Suggestions from Darcy Brockbank, Timothy Bissell, Scott Byer, David Griffiths, Scott Hess, Eberhard Mandler, John C. Randolph, and Bradley Taylor all helped things along at one point or another. Axel Seibert and Paul J. Sanchez offered their time and machines to make a binary release possible. We would also like to thank a number of people who kept up the constant supply of bug reports, suggested features and praise: Hardy Mayer, Gisli Ottarsson, Anthony Heading, David Bau, Jamie Zawinski, Martin Moncrieffe, Simson L. Garfinkel, Richard Stallman, Stephen Anderson, Ivo Welch, Magnus Nordborg, Tom Epperly, Andreas Koenig, Yves Arrouye, Anil Somayaji, Gregor Hoffleit; and the few hundred other people on the mailing list from whom we didn't hear much, but the presence of which assured us that maybe this project was actually worth doing. This file is part of GNU Emacs. GNU Emacs is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with GNU Emacs. If not, see .