Re: port x-symbol to GNU emacs 24.

[Stefan Monnier]

> Emacs' overlays serve the same purpose as XEmacs' extents, and I think
> there is or has been some 3rd-party package providing a unified API for
> overlays and extents.

Indeed there is: it's overlay.el (which adds Emacs's API to XEmacs and
hence doesn't help here).

> But I have no clue what specifiers are...

Presumably this code was not run in Emacs-21, so you'll have to figure
out why (maybe some `fboundp' which returned t in Emacs-21 but doesn't
any more?).

> I just downloaded x-symbol 4.5.1, and in its x-symbol-emacs.el there are
> several aliases defined for things that error for you.  For example,
> `map-extents' is made an alias for `cl-map-overlays'.

Was renamed to cl--map-overlays back in the cl-lib overhaul.

David wrote:
> The main "not elsewhere" category I see are XEmacs' extensive input
> modes (grid which is sort of a buffer-based menu, keyboard input methods
> quite better sorted and convenient than what Quail offers and with
> better feedback).  Its buffer reencoding is a rather mixed blessing, but
> it works with more than just TeX modes.

I never found the buffer-reencoding very convincing/convenient and even
less so nowadays, but indeed I sometimes miss the various input methods
of X-Symbol.  Ideally, those should be extracted into their own package.


        Stefan