New in Epsilon 14

Epsilon 14 began beta testing in March 2020, and was released on 20 October 2020. This page describes its new features. You can also read about the features we added in previous versions. Purchase your update here.

Epsilon 14 includes these operating system versions:

A graphical version that runs under all versions of Windows since Windows Vista, plus a Window Console Mode executable.
A macOS application that can run as an X11 program or a terminal program.
Linux packages in both .rpm and .deb formats, plus a version for FreeBSD. Each runs as an X11 program under X11, or as a terminal program on the console or terminals.

All versions above share most customization files. (The Epsilon distribution also includes older versions of Epsilon that run under OS/2 and DOS.)

Major New Features

Epsilon is now a 64-bit program. (On most platforms a 32-bit version is also available.) All have the same features and can share the same state files.
The new compare-files command compares all files matching a pattern to corresponding files in another directory, showing which files are identical, different, or missing. You can compare entire hierarchies by naming two directories, or use ** in a pattern to compare only certain file types in the hierarchy. The new compare-files-method variable controls whether it compares by examining file contents (the default), just checks file dates and sizes, or compares bytes. Run compare-files with a prefix argument and it will prompt for that, how to compare runs of spaces and tabs (normally determined by compare-files-ignore-spaces) and other comparison options. In the resulting listing, there are keys to examine or further compare individual file pairs in various ways, or copy files in either direction. Some of these keys now work in diff and visual-diff buffers too.
You can now use environment variables when typing file names, using the syntax %TEMP% under Windows, and $TEMP or ${TEMP} for macOS, Linux and FreeBSD. Completion works too. When a value has a list of directories, Epsilon converts it into a file pattern, so a pattern like %INCLUDE%\std*.h (or $INCLUDE/std*.h) matches files in any INCLUDE directory. Windows shell folder names are also recognized, and you can add your own shorthand names. The new file-interpret-env-vars variable controls this. The new syntax also works in find-linked-file.
There are new commands for navigating in source files. The goto-next-declaration command on Ctrl-c Ctrl-n and goto-previous-declaration on Ctrl-c Ctrl-p move to the next or previous global declaration or definition of a function or variable. The goto-next-definition and goto-previous-definition commands are similar but move by definitions, ignoring declarations. The commands work in all modes that support tagging.
C mode now highlights matching #if/#else/#endif lines in the same way it highlights matching parentheses, controlled by the new 2 bit in auto-show-c-delimiters. (The 4 bit makes Epsilon skip highlighting when point is after the preprocessor keyword, such as in the expression part of an #if, but is not on by default.)
C mode now colors "#if 0" blocks as comments. The new c-color-preproc-if-pattern variable determines what counts as an #if 0 block, so you can make other #if-like preprocessor lines start comment coloring too.

MS-Windows-Specific Changes

On Windows, the dired file pattern *: now matches all local drives (but see the new drive-match-types variable), so you can use dired on *: and then descend into each drive.
Epsilon for Windows now moves and resizes itself at startup if needed to ensure it's visible on at least one monitor. The new -vf flag controls the details.
Epsilon for Windows now looks better on high DPI screens under Windows 10.
Epsilon for Windows can now overwrite hidden files.
The configure-epsilon command in Epsilon for Windows was reimplemented, and Epsilon now uses a different installation system under Windows. An installer that does not require Administrator privileges and performs a per-user install is now available separately.
The new session-restore-exclude-file-types variable may be used to tell Epsilon for Windows not to include network files or those on removable drives when saving a session file.
Epsilon for Windows now works around a Windows issue that prevents directly renaming directories to change their case.
The draw-column-markers variable in Epsilon for Windows now allows defining up to 100 column markers.

MacOS/Linux/FreeBSD-Specific Changes

Under X11, Epsilon now sets the mouse cursor to different shapes in a way similar to Windows, and its default shape is now an I-beam instead of an arrow. (Setting the std_pointer variable to 0 under X11 using Alt-x set-any-variable restores the former arrow cursor.)
On Unix and Mac systems, the set-font and set-color commands in the X11 environment have been reimplemented (to eliminate their dependence on a 32-bit-only helper program).
The Linux version's packages now install into /opt by default instead of /usr/local, and includes a new Epsilon icon for window manager menus.
Epsilon for macOS is now code-signed and uses a new startup helper program. It has various changes to work better with macOS 10.15 Catalina's privacy dialogs, new default shell, etc. It now requires macOS 10.9 or later.
The preserve-filename-case variable recognizes two new bit values. In Epsilon for macOS, the 16 bit makes Epsilon treat file names as case-sensitive (instead of the default, case-preserving). In Epsilon for Linux/FreeBSD, the 32 bit makes Epsilon treat file names as case-preserving (by default they're case-sensitive). (Under Windows, Epsilon retrieves this information from the OS separately for each drive.)
On macOS, Linux, and FreeBSD, you can now set the 32 bit in the dired-layout variable to make dired show the full date including year and seconds for all files. (By default it mimics the format of ``ls -l'', showing either a year or hours and minutes, never both and never seconds.)
Epsilon for X11 will now read any custom X11 resource definitions you put in a file named ~/.epsilon/Xcustomresources. The new optional setting "Epsilon.recordPosition: 1" in this file makes Epsilon for X11 remember and restore its window position.

New Default Values And Bindings

Pressing <Enter> in the modes for HTML, XML, and PHP now reindents the current line before moving to the new one, as a result of new default values for the html-reindent-previous-line, xml-reindent-previous-line, and php-reindent-previous-line variables. Set these back to zero if you don't want this behavior.
Epsilon for Windows now uses the Consolas font by default instead of Courier New. If you've previously selected a font other than the default, Epsilon will continue using that.
Epsilon for Windows now treats the <Tab> key differently in dialog boxes. When the focus is on an Epsilon window within the dialog, it now performs completion, just as in non-Windows versions of Epsilon. Previously it cycled through the dialog's controls. The want-gui-prompts variable recognizes the new bit value 2, which makes <Tab> in dialog boxes cycle through the controls, as in previous Windows versions. Similarly, the <Escape> key now performs completion in such instances, just as in non-GUI versions, and the 4 bit restores <Escape>'s old behavior of canceling the dialog. A setting of 7 restores Epsilon 13's treatment of both these two keys.
Count-words is now bound to Ctrl-c Ctrl-w.
The want-auto-save variable now defaults to 1, so Epsilon will now create autosave files by default. Saving a file deletes its autosaved version (which by default has a name like #file.cpp.asv#).
The message-history-size variable's default is now 1 million characters, so the #messages# buffer can hold many more messages.
The sentence-end-double-space variable now defaults to 0, meaning paragraph filling now uses one space after a sentence, not two.
The html-paragraph-is-container variable now defaults to 1, meaning it assumes HTML's p element is used as a container. (Very old HTML code sometimes used these tags as paragraph separators, with no </p> tags. Epsilon no longer scans HTML files to see if they seem to use this old style. You can set this variable back 2 if you must maintain ancient HTML files and want Epsilon to scan each HTML file.)
The default color scheme in non-console environments, standard-gui, now uses dark brown instead of black for keywords in C mode and modes based on it, and for function names in Visual Basic mode. You can use Alt-x set-color to change the colors.

Buffer-specific Variables and File Variables

Many variables that control indenting rules and other features have been made buffer-specific, so they can have a different value in each buffer. These are: auto-fill-comment-rules, c-access-spec-offset, c-align-break-with-case, c-align-contin-lines, c-align-contin-max-offset, c-align-contin-max-width, c-align-extra-space, c-align-inherit, c-align-open-paren, c-align-selectors, c-auto-fill-mode, c-biggest-declarator, c-brace-offset, c-case-offset, c-contin-offset, c-delete-trailing-spaces, c-fill-column, c-indent-after-extern-c, c-indent-after-namespace, c-label-indent, c-param-decl, c-reindent-previous-line, c-tab-always-indents, c-top-braces, c-top-contin, c-top-struct, c-top-template, closeback, comment-repeat-indentation-lines, css-indent, fill-c-comment-plain, html-indent, html-style-rules, indent-preprocessor-contin, java-indent, matchdelim, new-c-comments, php-top-level-indent, python-indent, recognize-password-prompt, reindent-c-comments, reindent-c-preprocessor-lines, reindent-one-line-c-comments, reindent-perl-comments, tcl-indent, topindent, vhdl-indent, xml-indent.
Files can use a special syntax to tell Epsilon the appropriate settings for editing that specific file (for instance, the tab size or mode to use); these are called file variables. Now, instead of only using a fixed list of known file variable names, Epsilon lets any numeric buffer-specific variable be used as a file variable, including all the ones listed above. That also means if an extension defines a new numeric buffer-specific variable, it can immediately be used as a file variable.
Epsilon's file variables feature now loads any .epsilon_vars file in its customization directory and applies its settings to all files. Settings in per-directory .epsilon_vars files have precedence, as do file variables set by individual files. You can now tell Epsilon to search a file's hierarchy for an .epsilon_vars file in a parent directory by setting use-file-variables.
All .epsilon_vars files can now use Basenames blocks to more conveniently apply rules to files by their basename, not just their extension or full path. File variables can now be defined in terms of other file variables, including simple expressions.

Language Mode Improvements

When no region is highlighted, comment-region now operates on the current line.
The new comment-region-options variable has bits that control how comment-region behaves: whether comments should be indented, whether indented comments should be recognized, and if blank lines should be skipped. Any mode can define a variable that includes its name, such as python-comment-region-options, and comment-region will use those settings in place of comment-region-options.
The new NSIS mode supports editing .nsi files, adding variables auto-show-nsis-delimiters and nsis-auto-show-delim-chars.
C mode now works with more varieties of JavaScript's syntax for defining functions, and its syntax highlighting now supports JavaScript's template literals (backquote-surrounded and with interpolated expressions).
The new c-align-inherit variable controls how much extra indentation lines specifying C++ inheritance (those following a line ending in : in a multi-line function header) should receive. A value of -1 indents it like any other continuation line.
The tag-options variable's new bit 2 (now the default) makes the select-tag-file command look up the directory hierarchy from the current file when suggesting a new tag file.
Epsilon now tries to auto-detect when a here document in Perl or PHP contains HTML code, and color it appropriately. New variables perl-heredoc-syntax, php-heredoc-syntax, and shell-heredoc-syntax configure this. For each of Perl, PHP, and Shell mode, you can make Epsilon assume here documents are always HTML (or TeX), let Epsilon try to detect the right language, or only color here blocks as HTML or TeX when the here document's terminating string ends in ".html" or ".tex" (as in previous versions).
In Makefiles, Alt-i (list-make-preprocessor-conditionals) now recognizes both Gnu Make and Microsoft Nmake syntax for conditionals on all systems, instead of choosing which one to recognize based on whether the Windows version of Epsilon was running or not.
Python mode now colors function names with a specific color, as in most other modes.
TeX mode's feature for synchronizing with a DVI previewer now also works with PDF files. The manual explains how to configure Epsilon and a suitable PDF program so you can Ctrl-click on TeX source and jump to the resulting PDF output, and vice versa, using SyncTeX with the jump-to-dvi command, which has also been enhanced to handle mainfile declarations. And TeX's matching delimiter highlighting now skips over delimiters inside/outside comments or math mode, depending on whether the original delimiter was inside such blocks.
Some Shift-F1 context help default definitions were changed to search the web instead of looking for installed help files. Such definitions can now use new shorthands to search for results on a specific website, and optionally, go immediately to the best match. Code in .m and .js files now uses specific rules instead of the generic C mode rule. The commands select-help-files and search-all-help-files were removed, since they only worked with ancient help file formats.
When C mode scans for function definitions, it skips over the standard macros _ANSI_ARGS, __P, and PROTO that can appear within their signatures. You can now expand this list of macro names by modifying the new c-prototype-macro-names variable. And Epsilon now uses this list in more contexts.
C mode's c-align-open-paren variable now understands a new option. Set it to 2 to make Epsilon use alternate logic when indenting lines within a multi-line expression, depending on what character appears before the line break.
C mode no longer thinks C++14's use of ' as a digit separator in numeric constants begins a character constant, and understands C++'s raw string syntax. Tagging and displaying the current function's name work better with C++ template syntax. C, C++, and Java keywords added in more recent versions of those languages are now colored as keywords.
You can now set the c-align-contin-lines variable to -1 if you don't want to limit alignment rules by column. This value acts like an infinitely large value.
When parsing the buffer for the name of the current function, C mode assumes by default that a } right brace character found at the left margin marks the end of a top-level block (such as a function, class, or structure definition). If you must edit code formatted with the } of inner blocks also on the left margin, you can now set the new c-quick-scan variable to zero. (On very large files, this can make updating the function name shown on the mode line much slower.)
Epsilon now recognizes that it should use Shell mode for more types of files.

Other Improvements

The save-all-buffers command now reports which files it saved.
File names and tag names may now be up to 4095 characters long (previously, 255 and 1023 respectively).
The right-click context menu now has a "Web Search" item, which runs the new web-search command to open a tab in your browser displaying the results. You can edit the web-search-url variable to change the search provider used.
In a concurrent process buffer, completion now works on environment variable names (in addition to file and command names).
Epsilon now tries to set the buffer directory of ssh and telnet buffers to a suitable scp or ftp URL, so that commands like find-file will prompt with a more useful default path.
If an external curl or wget program is installed, Epsilon can run it to display https:// URLs in a buffer.
When typing a URL at a file prompt, completion now works on the host name and user name portion. Epsilon uses its prompt response history to collect matching host names and user names. Similarly, when typing the path portion of an http or https URL, Epsilon completes using previous responses that match the partial URL.
The new all-read-only variable can be used to make buffers read-only by default.
The new this-buffer-grep command provides a shortcut for grepping just the current buffer.
The grep and file-query-replace commands now skip files over 2 GB in size by default. The new grep-ignore-file-max-size variable controls this.
The new select-and-grep command lets you set up named shorthand sets of ignore rules, then select which set to use. By default, the "all" set makes grep search all matching files, no matter their name, extension, or size, instead of excluding many binary-type files and very large files.
The filter-region and shell-command commands, on Alt-| and Alt-!, now interpret a negative argument to mean "prompt for the buffer name to receive the program's output". As before, the default is to use a standard name, and an argument greater than one puts the output in the current buffer (for filter-region only, replacing the region's text send to the external program).
Dired mode now recognizes @ to toggle the read-only property of a given file. The quick-dired-command on Alt-o also recognizes this key, so Alt-o @ toggles the current file's read-only status.
File name templates now recognize new codes %h for the host name of a URL and %c for Epsilon's customization directory.
The new set-bookmark-automatically variable may be used to make Epsilon set a bookmark at the previous location following a search.
Epsilon now supports mice with up to five buttons, via new key codes. By default, buttons four and five page up and down.
The mode-format variable now understands a new code %o to display the numeric value of Epsilon's variable "point" (the character count from the start of the buffer).
To improve performance, on buffers bigger than 10 MB, Epsilon no longer updates the function name (or other mode-specific contextual information) displayed in the mode line when you click and drag the scroll box. You can set this size limit with the new variable mouse-update-during-scroll. Epsilon will update the mode line once you release the mouse button.
Displaying text with syntax highlighting and extremely long lines while in horizontal scrolling mode is now much faster.
For safety, dired no longer permits you to mark the .. parent directory entry for deletion, and suggests you edit the parent directory and delete it from there.
Regular expressions now understand <ident> as a synonym for <word>, matching a letter, digit, or underscore character.
If you set the epsilon-manual-port variable to make Epsilon help requests use Lugaru's website, instead of a local help server, it now selects the correct version of the manual, based on its own version number.
When a buffer has no newline at the very end, the blank space to the right of the last character is now painted with the same color and attribute as subsequent blank lines, instead of the color and attribute of the last character in the buffer.

Unicode Support

In regular expressions, <hspace> and <wspace> now match Unicode's various space-like characters. As a result, the commands delete-blank-lines, delete-horizontal-space, and others now treat Unicode's various space-like characters as types of spaces.
Epsilon's show-spaces mode (toggled by Shift-F6) was improved to display a variety of space-like and zero-width Unicode characters more clearly. The hex display mode in set-show-graphic (Ctrl-F6) now displays hex codes for Unicode characters too.
The message to choose an encoding because a file contains Unicode characters now shows the names of the characters and uses a clearer format.
The new command unicode-convert-to-ascii replaces some Unicode and Windows-1252 punctuation characters in the buffer (or highlighted region) with their nearest ASCII equivalent. It converts various quote-like characters to ' or ", various hyphen-like characters to -, and so forth, though it does not try to strip accents from letters.
The clipboard-convert-unicode variable recognizes a new bit. Setting bit 4 tells Epsilon to convert Unicode clipboard characters being pasted into an 8-bit buffer only if they have a corresponding ASCII (range 0-127) equivalent, and this is now the default. If you prefer the previous behavior, you can set this variable to 3, which makes Epsilon also convert certain Unicode characters with no ASCII equivalent to Extended ASCII (128-255, Windows-1252), and perform the reverse conversion when putting text back on the clipboard.
Epsilon's Unicode data (character names, for example) was updated to Unicode 9.0.
The show-point command (Ctrl-x =) when at a Unicode surrogate character now displays the name of the complete character.

EEL Extension Language

In EEL code, ints are now 64-bit. (As a consequence, Epsilon can now edit files bigger than 2 GB, though little work to improve performance on such large files has been done yet.) The new int32 type was added to EEL, and the TYPE_INT32 code is now defined for primitives like new_variable() and vartype().
The mouse_cursor variable is now a simple number instead of a pointer to a special structure. Existing EEL code of the form "mouse_cursor = &horiz_arrows;" must be modified by deleting the &.
We added the EEL primitives iscntrl(), isgraph(), ispunct(), isprint(), and isxdigit() to report on various character properties. The set_character_property() primitive recognizes new codes like C_PUNCT for customizing these primitives.
The new unicode_character_name() primitive retrieves the name of any Unicode character, given its number, or vice versa, and can interpret surrogate characters too. EEL programmers can now use the convenience macros IS_LEADING_SURROGATE() and IS_TRAILING_SURROGATE() to check if a character is a Unicode surrogate character.
The new aside() primitive writes some text to the #messages# buffer without displaying it.
In EEL, numeric constants starting with zero, like 0123, are no longer interpreted as octal, for consistency with Alt-x eval. Prefixes such as 0x, 0o, and 0b (hexadecimal, octal, binary) may still be used to specify the base of a numeric constant.
EEL's new get_substitution_variables() primitive lets Epsilon perform completion on environment variable names in file names.
EEL programmers can use these handy new EEL subroutines: regex_replace_in_string(), numtoi_with_base(), url_is_a_directory(), count_matches_in_buffer().
Epsilon's encoding of RGB colors now matches HTML's. Any old code that uses hardwired color numbers instead of macros like MAKE_RGB() must be updated. (For example, change a hex value in the format 0xBBGGRR to MAKE_RGB(0xRR, 0xGG, 0xBB).)
Since EEL now supports 64-bit numbers, some primitives could be simplified. The EEL primitives new_file_read() and new_file_write() no longer accept optional 32-bit lowstart and highstart arguments that provided limited 64-bit file support, since their start parameter is now 64 bits. Likewise, the check_file() primitive's fsize_high field was removed, since its fsize field can now hold a full 64-bit size, and its 32-bit raw_file_date_high and raw_file_date_low fields were combined into one 64-bit raw_file_date.
EEL code can set some new flags in the buffer_not_saveable variable to control different aspects of buffer saving and warning.
The is_win32 variable is now called is_mswindows, and it has new values to distinguish the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Epsilon.
The _display_class array was expanded so it can remap all the characters Epsilon can display, not just the first 256.
Epsilon's win_help_string() and win_help_contents() primitives can no longer handle .chm and .col files.
The toolbar_add_button() primitive in Epsilon for Windows now recognizes five more standard icon names, and Alt-x show-view-bitmaps displays them.
EEL code can now use the new use_alternate_dialog_tag variable to select a different dialog tag, meaning Epsilon for Windows will save and restore the size of that dialog separately from others.

Last Updated: 9 November 2020