Release v0.17.0

• Ecaml is now built and tested against Emacs 29.2 (was Emacs 27.2).

• Basic data types

  • Removed unused module type Customization.Enum
  • Customization.Type.Option is now an inline record with self-documenting fields. It corresponds to the Elisp customization type '(choice (const :tag "documentation for nil" nil) <some-other-type>).
  • Defun.defalias now allows the definition to be any value, not just a symbol, as the Elisp defalias allows.
  • Removed Symbol.set_function. Use Defun.defalias instead, which handles load-history, documentation, advice, etc. properly.
  • Hook now supports binding special hooks, including those whose functions return meaningful values. Hook.t, Hook_type.t, and Hook.Function.t now have an additional type parameter to track the return type of the hook functions.
  • Add variant Hook_type.Query_function for things like kill-buffer-query-functions.
  • Add Progress_reporter module, with bindings and helper functions for echo area progress reporters
  • Add Text.of_utf8_bytes_replacing_invalid, similar to Text.of_utf8_bytes but with error-handling if the OCaml string contains malformed UTF-8 sequences
  • Add Text.Property_name.help_echo and Text.Property_name.kbd_help bindings for Emacs mouse-over and idle help display functionality.
  • Add Timer.run_after_idle and Timer.run_after_idle_i for creating idle timers (run-with-idle-timer)

• Buffers

  • New function Buffer.find_by finds a live buffer using a predicate function
  • Current_buffer.replace_buffer_contents is assumed to always be available (requires Emacs 26+).
  • Removed function Current_buffer.describe_mode
  • Add Mode_line.Format.header_line_in_buffer, a binding for header-line-format (like mode-line-format, but for the buffer-local header line).
  • Add Mode_line.Format.empty and Mode_line.Format.string_verbatim helpers to make mode-line format constructs.

• Commands and user interaction

  • Removed Command.quit_flag binding for quit-flag. Ecaml now calls the process_input module function to poll for whether a blocking Async operation should be interrupted, and preserves the original quit signal instead of replacing it with an OCaml exception.

    If you need to set this variable for whatever reason, you can use Command.Private.request_quit, but this is not useful outside of tests.

  • Completing.read and Completing.read_multiple now accept collection parameter as string list instead of a variant type. The Elisp value variant was almost never used.
  • Add Prefix variant to Defun.Interactive.t for numerical prefix arguments. This corresponds to the p interactive specifier in Elisp.
  • Add Browse_url.browser-function, a binding for the browse-url-browser-function customization.
  • Add binding User.init_file for user-init-file variable. It is None if Emacs was started with -q or --no-init-file options.

• Major modes

  • Add Major_mode.Lisp_data for lisp-data-mode. Major_mode.Lisp, which is now unused, has been deleted.
  • Reworked the Tabulated_list API. Creating a Tabulated_list.t now requires specifying a function to extract a non-empty string ID for each record, rather than an arbitrary ID type. This change was required to provide a custom sorting function for each column, instead of just the native Emacs string comparison function.
  • Records (not just IDs) are now stored in the buffer itself and can be extracted by calling Tabulated_list.get_record_at_point_exn.

• System

  • Add optional argument to Directory.files_recursively: ?ignore_unreadable_dirs defaults to false and corresponds to the PREDICATE argument of directory-files-recursively.
  • Update the type of Filename.expand's ~in_dir argument. Default_directory_in_current_buffer is equivalent to omitting the second argument to expand-file-name.
  • Add optional arguments to Process.create: coding, query_before_exit, and stderr. These correspond to the :coding, :noquery (inverted) and :stderr arguments to make-process.