A few weird behaviours with emacs 21.3.1

[John Kliff Jochens]

Hi all,

I recently installed 21.3.1 compiled from source (Linux, gentoo 1.4 rc
4).
Everything just works flawlessly except for these few thing I wonder if
anyone can give me some hints:

- the region marking is behaving somewhat strange: in 21.2, when I
C-space and moved the cursor, the region I was selcting was highlighted
and the highlight dispeared only once I had the mark set (C-x C-x). Now,
this highlighting only works when I select a region with my mouse.

- when I put the cursor over a parenthesis (bracket, braces, etc) there
is no parenthesis ( braces, brackets, etc) matching. I remembered the
existence of paren-match (or what was it?), but I never had to use it to
achieve this behaviour and C-h d didn't give any hint of a function that
could be useful. Where am I going wrong with this?

Besides these (little) problems, I have another question. I have some
code in my .emacs that managed to make dired always change the content
of the current buffer instead of creating another one (code that was
posted in this mailing list not long ago). I was trying to change that
code to achieve the same behaviour with the Customize emacs. Any help?

I sinceerely thank you all for any help.

Cheers

John