12 ms·

Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving

471 points by frou_dh 3mo ago

bogometer 3mo ago
>treesit-auto-install-grammar Sweet. GLP1 for my .emacs!
arikrahman 3mo ago
Excited to try out the native frame transposition this update and how it plays with pgtk
jerf 3mo ago
"Is anyone still using emacs?" Yes. I had to briefly visit the world of VSCode during a period of time when it had better AI integration than emacs did, but since I got Claude working well inside of emacs I've returned to 100% emacs. There just isn't anything like the old editors, built in the 80x24 terminal era, for getting huge swathes of code on your screen at once. I run a standard widescreen monitor with three vertical windows for emacs, each of which I often will break into two frames, so I can have up to six contexts active at once. I rarely do, but I frequently have 2 and 3. That's my entire 4K screen, full of code, usefully full of code. I'm not an IDE hater but they do put an awful lot of stuff on the screen that on a proportional basis I'm just not using as much as I use the code editor. I had been getting somewhat nervous about emacs' long term prospects about 10 years ago. I would read the release notes for major versions and generally not be particularly excited about anything. Somewhere around treesitter something seems to have revitalized the project. It may well have been treesitter that revitalized it overall. You end up with a lot more wood behind fewer arrows when the project is able to put more work into generally-useful tools rather than every single language community maintaining their own separate mode for each language. Now I am more excited about the major releases; for instance term issues are an issue for me with the aforementioned Claude integration. Not enough to stop me, but annoying. At the risk of saying something inflammatory to emacs fans, I feel like emacs is catching up to everything else better now... but it is catching up. It's getting easier to recommend it again as something you may want to seriously consider as a power-tool editor and not just something I used because I had 15 years of finger-experience with it and no significant reason to change. AI has eaten a lot of the IDE tools for me and you can type into a text box in emacs as well as you can anything else. I still occasionally bring up VSCode now to use the debugger, I still don't feel like I have as nice an experience with that as I do with emacs, but my debugging habits have always been able to deal with doing something a little extra to do a debugging session. By its very nature, you're committing some time to the process just to do the debugging itself, no matter how slick the UI for it may be, so a bit of overhead isn't so bad.
- hoppp 3mo ago
  The two complaints I hear is: 1.Memorizing how to use it has a big learning curve. 2.Wrist pain from pressing button combinations all the time. Otherwise plenty of people still use it and it's great. Just hard to pick up for new users.
  - xedrac 3mo ago
    I've only ever used emacs in vim mode (evil-mode). Its vim emulation is the best I've seen anywhere.
    - DonHopkins 3mo ago
      It's terribly inefficient for emacs vi emulation mode to actually quit emacs when you type ":q", because it takes much longer for emacs to start up than vi, and people use a long-running emacs a lot differently than they use disposable vi's. UniPress[1] Emacs's vi emulation mode would actually flip you over to an emacs shell buffer when you typed :q, and the shell would recognize when you typed "vi foo.c" and flip back over to a vi emulator buffer instead of actually running vi, but INSTANTLY, since changing buffers in a running emacs was much faster than actually starting up a new vi process. So die-hard vi users didn't have to re-learn their muscle memory, and could just stay in the same emacs all the time, while the same old emacs alternately flipped between pretending to be a shell, and pretending to be vi. [1] "Evil Software Hoarder Emacs": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26113192 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26113192
      - dieggsy 3mo ago
        I use emacs --daemon with emacsclient for this. I always have a running emacs instance, and connect with the client. Opening and quitting a client is near instant.
        noufalibrahim 3mo ago
        Yup. I've aliased it to e and and it works just fine. Sort of "send file into Emacs". I've also added some elisp to say things like e something.c:43 so that it opens it up at line 43. I used have a ep which I could pipe something into and it would put it in Emacs buffer but that stopped working somewhere I never got around to fixing it.
scoops_ 3mo ago
Wow, auto install treesitter grammars, editable xref, transposing window layouts, speed bar as a side window in frame, I had no idea any of these things were coming and were all some passing thoughts I’ve had in the last few weeks “it would be cool if this was supported OOTB”. Some dreams do come true!
xedrac 3mo ago
I'm happy to see these improvements. One thing that has always been annoying with Emacs is how much configuration is required to get a modern editor going. Things like Doom Emacs, and Spacemacs try to solve that problem, but both feel far removed from vanilla emacs. I wish Emacs came with several presets so with a single line, you could transform the editor to different base points. For example, most devs want treesitter highlighting and LSP enabled by default. Why not have a preset like (preset-base-ide-1), so we don't need 200 lines of configuration before we can function? Instead we could build off of a much closer starting point.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- nehal3m 3mo ago
  As a Vim user (just admitting to my ignorance here), is it not feasible to make something like this yourself? Emacs is said to be flexible and extensible enough, or at least I’m under the impression that it has that reputation. I imagine it would take a lot of time, maybe. Any greybeards that do this?
  - emodendroket 3mo ago
    Yeah, it'd be easy, but the hard part is getting people to agree what the standard will be. Plus, frankly, a lot of people (myself included) who want a richer experience are pretty much just happy turning on emacs keybindings in VSCode or IntelliJ or whatever.
    - worthless-trash 3mo ago
      Richer in vscode, i'm not so sure.
  - tmtvl 3mo ago
    It is fairly trivial to make something 'like it', but what people advocating for this stuff want is for it to be shipped with regular plain old normal GNU Emacs so they can set it up quickly and easily in an Emacs installation on a work laptop (and it may make it easier to convert people to Emacs for those who care about that).
mark_l_watson 3mo ago
Reading Rahul's post I got excited to build Emacs 31 from source, but reality occurred and I decided to wait for the release. I also like his articles on setting up Emacs. I don't care what tools other developers use but in January I made my two dev Macs 'VSCode free' and use Emacs for everything. Feels better! For decades I would spend tons of time experimenting with my Emacs setups but in the last few years I have been shifting to more out of the box experiences. I did write my own agentic coding platform in Emacs Lisp but I keep that separate from .emacs and .emacs.d
bryanlarsen 3mo ago
"Is anyone still using emacs?" I use emacs --daemon instead of tmux inside my agent sandbox for session permanence and portability. A full editor rather than a layer between me and my editor. I can even waypipe the client windows if I want mouse support.
- jsw97 3mo ago
  I do the dinosaur version of this, with screen and xpra. Works great. CC and codex being terminal-native may make terminal-based (or at least terminal-comfortable) editors seem more natural to a broader set of people.
  - bryanlarsen 3mo ago
    Why use screen? Just leave your emacs --daemon running, and when you reconnect, run emacsclient and all your buffers are back. And you only have to learn one method for arranging frames rather than both emacs' and screen's.
Snoddas 3mo ago
I realize I've missed a lot. Someone should write an Emacs guide for people who haven't meaningfully touched their .emacs since the early 2000s
- bryanlarsen 3mo ago
  There's a lot of Emacs information on the internet, and your agent has been trained on it.
  - baokaola 3mo ago
    For real, ask your agent to do anything in Emacs and it simply knows how to do it.
- TFNA 3mo ago
  The bulk of the Mastering Emacs blog is a decade old at this point, but its philosophy and the information it provides is still very relevant for any graybeard wanting to get up to date.
- cvdub 3mo ago
  It’s already built in! C-h n view-emacs-news
- egl2020 3mo ago
  I'm a pretty conservative emacs user, partly because I don't want to spend time tinkering to get things to work consistently across Windows, ubuntu, and mac os -- all of which I use daily. My most "modern" adoption is probably using lsp and eglot with various language modes, notably golang and rust. Should I consider adding tree-sitter into the mix?
  - internet_points 3mo ago
    Nah. It's great that they're making it less of a hassle to use, but it's still going to be more of a hassle than just using the plain regex-based modes, and treesitter in itself doesn't really make much of an improvement if you already have working syntax highlighting for some mode. The main exception is if you want to program in a language that only has a treesitter-mode, or I suppose if the regular mode has quite buggy syntax highlighting / the ts-mode has much better features. (There are also fancy minor mode packages like combobulate that make special use of treesitter, but that's tinkering territory.)
bryanlarsen 3mo ago
Systems like Emacs that are hyper-configurable via a text file seem tailor made for modern LLM's. If you've got a little bit of Emacs experience but bounced off of it because the learning curve was too steep I highly recommend diving back in with your agent. Agents are really good at setting up and maintaining your .emacs/init.el.
- seanc 3mo ago
  I agree. It's amazing. I feel like I've got a private Emacs consultant at my elbow.
  - DonHopkins 3mo ago
    I know a bunch of people (including me) who decades ago wished they had a private sendmail.cf expert at their elbow, and even a few sendmail.cf experts who were sick and tired of always being asked to help random people with their sendmail.cf file for free. Maybe there will be a resurgance of terribly obscure totally unique quirky configuration files for all these vibe coded apps, unique enough that they don't appear in the training data, so you have to hire real humans to sit at your elbow and help you!
    - kstrauser 3mo ago
      I came into that after sendmail.m4 got popular. I'm not sure if that's better or worse.
      - DonHopkins 3mo ago
        m4 is what makes Gnu Autotools so delightful!
        kstrauser 3mo ago
        Look, gang! A brand new sentence!
- 3mo ago
RahulMJ 3mo ago
Thanks for sharing, frou_dh! Author here btw :)
tmtvl 3mo ago
Nice to know sr-speedbar can finally be retired. It works fine, but fewer external packages means simpler config.
DonHopkins 3mo ago
It's nice to hear the emacs terminal emulator has gotten some love, after all the controversy about the nasty language that used to be in its source code, which rms moved out to a separate file after somebody complained. Open source with profanity in comments is statistically better than code without it: https://blog.desdelinux.net/en/open-source-with-profanity-in-comments-is-statistically-better-than-code-without-it/ https://blog.desdelinux.net/en/open-source-with-profanity-in... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36621699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36621699 DonHopkins on July 6, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: Open source code with profanity in comments is sta... The original terminal emulator terminal.el in gnu emacs, written by mly (Richard Mlynarik), was particularly salty. I finally tracked down a copy, but it looks like somebody complained and in 1990 it was begrudgingly cleaned up a bit, so some of the worst stuff was moved out into a separate file called term-nasty.el for posterity (you, here, now), so as not to give "in to the pressure to censor obscenity that currently threatens freedom of speech and of the press in the US" (oh, Richard <3 ): https://opensource.apple.com/source/emacs/emacs-59.0.80/emacs/lisp/ChangeLog.3 https://opensource.apple.com/source/emacs/emacs-59.0.80/emac... 1990-08-26 Richard Stallman (rms@mole.ai.mit.edu) * terminal.el: Move possibly offensive comments to term-nasty.el. https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/freeware/v10/emacs/common/lisp/terminal.el https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/freeware/v10/emacs/common/li... [...] ;; disgusting unix-required shit ;; Are we living twenty years in the past yet? (defun te-losing-unix () nil) [...] ;; (A version of the following comment which might be distractingly offensive ;; to some readers has been moved to term-nasty.el.) ;; unix lacks ITS-style tty control... (defun te-process-output (preemptable) ;;>> There seems no good reason to ever disallow preemption (setq preemptable t) [...] ;; I suppose if I split the guts of this out into a separate ;; function we could trivially emulate different terminals ;; Who cares in any case? (Apart from stupid losers using rlogin) [...] (?\C-b . te-backward-char) ;; should be C-d, but un*x ;; pty's won't send \004 through! ;; Can you believe this? [...] ;; Did I ask to be sent these characters? ;; I don't remember doing so, either. ;; (Perhaps some operating system or ;; other is completely incompetent...) [...] ;;-- Not-widely-known (ie nonstandard) flags, which mean ;; o writing in the last column of the last line ;; doesn't cause idiotic scrolling, and ;; o don't use idiotische c-s/c-q sogenannte ;; ``flow control'' auf keinen Fall. "LP:NF:" ;;-- For stupid or obsolete programs "ic=^p_!:dc=^pd!:al=^p^o!:dl=^p^k!:ho=^p= :" ;;-- For disgusting programs. ;; (VI? What losers need these, I wonder?) "im=:ei=:dm=:ed=:mi:do=^p^j:nl=^p^j:bs:"))) [...] (setq te-process (start-process "terminal-emulator" (current-buffer) "/bin/sh" "-c" ;; Yuck!!! Start a shell to set some terminal ;; control characteristics. Then start the ;; "env" program to setup the terminal type ;; Then finally start the program we wanted. (format "%s; exec %s" te-stty-string (mapconcat 'te-quote-arg-for-sh (cons program args) " "))))) [...] ;;;; what a complete loss [...] https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/freeware/v10/emacs/common/lisp/term-nasty.el https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/freeware/v10/emacs/common/li... ;;; term-nasty.el --- Damned Things from terminfo.el ;;; This file is in the public domain, and was written by Stallman and Mlynarik ;;; Commentary: ;; Some people used to be bothered by the following comments that were ;; found in terminal.el. We decided they were distracting, and that it ;; was better not to have them there. On the other hand, we didn't want ;; to appear to be giving in to the pressure to censor obscenity that ;; currently threatens freedom of speech and of the press in the US. ;; So we decided to put the comments here. ;;; Code: These comments were removed from te-losing-unix. ;(what lossage) ;(message "fucking-unix: %d" char) This was before te-process-output. ;; fucking unix has -such- braindamaged lack of tty control... And about the need to handle output characters such as C-m, C-g, C-h and C-i even though the termcap doesn't say they may be used: ;fuck me harder ;again and again! ;wa12id!! ;(spiked) ;;; term-nasty.el ends here Note to the gentle readers: "wa12id" stands for "with a 12 inch dildo". Jamie Zawinski kept Lucid Emacs nasty: https://groups.google.com/g/gnu.misc.discuss/c/U5oXKOfWinQ/m/xek-XhmQ9eoJ https://groups.google.com/g/gnu.misc.discuss/c/U5oXKOfWinQ/m... Noah Friedman, Aug 3, 1992, 4:54:20 AM In article <15i2n9...@hal.com> wood...@hal.com (Nathan Hess) writes: >In article <FRIEDMAN.9...@nutrimat.gnu.ai.mit.edu>, friedman@gnu (Noah Friedman) writes: >>It's by no means necessary, but it's funny. >Along the same lines, look at lisp/terminal.el Of course, terminal.el is actually useful, albeit not terribly powerful. (and terminal.el is pretty mild compared to some of the other things I've seen written by mly. :-)) Incidentally, a lot of terminal.el has been rewritten in version 19. Too bad... I liked all the variable names and comments in the original. Jamie Zawinski, Aug 5, 1992, 12:40:38 AM In the FSF-distributed Emacs 19, the obscenities (will) have been stripped from terminal.el, though they are preserved in a file called term-nasty.el, to avoid appearing to bow to the censors. In Lucid GNU Emacs, terminal.el will remain as nasty as it ever was. -- Jamie "Truth, Justice, and the Fucking First Amendment" Zawinski
jmclnx 3mo ago
Thanks for your work. Please, if you have something to do with Emacs, can you review this for NetBSD and OpenBSD when using gtk3: https://www.unitedbsd.com/d/1621-emacs-30-wxaw https://www.unitedbsd.com/d/1621-emacs-30-wxaw The issue was traced to library xinput2, when compiled with '--without-xinput2' the issue does not occur. But I do not know if that is something that Emacs can address.
mfld 3mo ago
Very cool! Looking forward to try out the xref and markdown features. The latter becomes increasingly important since the developer community at large seems to disagree with org-mode being the superior syntax...
gentooflux 3mo ago
This stuff all looks great, I can't wait to upgrade to 31 and then forget about all of it and just keep using Emacs the same way I have been for the past 20 years, /again/
- intrasight 3mo ago
  LOL. So true! Except for tree-sitter. That's something I'll be investing time in.
  - EGreg 3mo ago
    Investing your time how exactly
    - copperx 3mo ago
      As a contributor, of course.
- frantathefranta 3mo ago
  1. Upgrade to Emacs version +1 2. Remove MELPA packages that are now part of Emacs 3. Go to step 1 when new version comes out
- taeric 3mo ago
  The post not long ago about how far the built in autocomplete has come got me to trim down a bit of my config. Seeing that treesit stuff is getting folded in, I may make another effort at trimming down. It is crazy nice how invisible the native compilation became.
  - setopt 3mo ago
    Which autocomplete mode? fido-vertical-mode, completion-preview-mode, or something else that I should maybe look into? I switched from vertico to fido-vertical myself, but still use company for in-buffer completions. I tried corfu and completion-preview several times but didn’t get something I’m happy with from it.
asimovDev 3mo ago
back in 2nd year of university I remember thinking that vim is complicated so i went with Emacs. Now after using vim for couple years , I can't imagine going to Emacs and learning it. The availability of vim emulation in majority of text editors and IDEs has been a lifesaver although the brief time I used Magit I was enamored I gotta say. I tried lazygit recently and it evoked the same feeling I had when trying Magit for the first time
- joshuastuden 3mo ago
  Emacs evil-mode gives you vim bindings.
huflungdung 3mo ago
[dead]
pdyc 3mo ago
I have been using Emacs for more than a decade, and I was always excited about the features. But with AI, something has changed. I no longer type/edit that much. Recently, LSP stopped working, and I was completely oblivious to it for about a week. Earlier, something like this would have been a major annoyance.
- TFNA 3mo ago
  Emacs is more than a dev environment for coders. Some of us here use it for everything that can possibly be represented in text form: our TODO lists, our calendar, our RSS reader, our mail reader, etc. Me, I even maintain billing spreadsheets for a side business as Org-Mode tables. New features in the latest Emacs releases, and in successive releases of individual packages, have brought some nice improvements in those areas.
- bryanlarsen 3mo ago
  In 2026 I'm using the editor less and using magit a lot more. IOW, emacs has become more indispensable, not less.
whacked_new 3mo ago
I recently sifted through a bunch of tagged entries in a text file, where each entry had a json array of image names, but the images resided on a remote server. I basically wanted a program that could detect if the cursor was on an image name, and display it on the right. There's a bajillion ways to do this, some might even involve writing an html file and launching a remote server and tunneling and using a browser and what not. But no! ChatGPT wrote 20 lines of elisp code. I add a tramp basepath, open the text file, and got exactly what I needed. Need any behavior changes, callbacks, transformations? Modify, eval expression, new behavior! I asked ChatGPT what other system I can use to achieve the same effect. The best answer it gave was neovim. No, neovim can't do that with the same degree of ease. Disappointing and amazing at the same time. The drawback of the emacs approach in my case is the tramp latency. To speed things up we'd want to add prefetch and that's gonna be much more than 20 lines and C-x e
mesrik 3mo ago
"Is anyone still using emacs?" Yes, 34 years and no plans to switch. Emacs cursor movement keystrokes are quite widely supported elsewhere too which use GNU readline or implement at least subset themselves. Those work well also besides shells with Chromium/Chrome/Safari etc. many browsers input fields (address bar and text area). Cisco IOS, Juniper Junos, Netscreen load balancers too etc. IMHO makes jumping around CLI much much convenient and faster than moving hand to reach cursor keys. My only gripe is that Firefox and its derivatives it doesn't work any more. Long time ago it did work. And I have no idea why feature was dropped some rewrite. e: s/deadline/readline/g
- jpmattia 3mo ago
  45 years for me. I don't even think about keystrokes anymore.
- ot 3mo ago
  > GNU deadline I think you mean readline?
  - mesrik 3mo ago
    Sure. Browser autocorrect there just tried to be helpful :/
    - mindcrime 3mo ago
      That said, I'm kinda hoping somebody does create a "GNU deadline" project now. I'm curious to see what kind of project it would be.
      - sph 3mo ago
        A weird, inscrutable project management tool for the shell written in Perl 4 and Guile Scheme, that the ten people in the world who learned to operate it swear it is the greatest piece of productivity software ever invented.
dosisking 3mo ago
"Is anyone still using emacs?" I'd like to, but there is currently a RAM shortage
- bitwize 3mo ago
  By all means go back to the lean, memory-efficient VS Code, then
  - zhxhhshshs 3mo ago
    There is a superior, faster and more efficient alternative just at your fingertips waiting to unleash its magnificent power if you would only dare to dream big.
    - bitwize 3mo ago
      Oh, you mean that little modal editor I use to tweak config files? [j_jonah_jameson_laughing.mp4]
- bryanlarsen 3mo ago
  Emacs stands for "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping". But in 2026 eight megabytes is pretty cheap.
slyrus 3mo ago
Have they fixed MacOS startup performance yet? ISTR some post about why faster CPUs were making emacs even slower on startup. Seems to have gotten worse over the years.
- jlouis 3mo ago
  You boot Emacs once as a server. Then you connect through that server through emacsclient. It is your OS after all.
  - slyrus 3mo ago
    Sure, that's one approach. But it shouldn't take 45 seconds to spin up a new "emacs -nw" process, IMO. There's something pathological going on.
    - ergonaught 3mo ago
      emacs -nw takes about 2 seconds on my mac. I don't use server/daemon, and those 2 seconds are processing my startup elisp files (it's ready nearly instantly without prepping my junk).
dschrempf 3mo ago
Emacs is the best. Thanks a lot for writing this up!
- zhxhhshshs 3mo ago
  It is definitely not the best. It is an acceptable but inferior product when compared to the gold standard. I have spoken!
  - joshuastuden 3mo ago
    Emacs can give you all the vim key bindings. Vim can't do that.
  - dschrempf 3mo ago
    Well, that was a bit of pun. Of course, it is not the best for everybody. However, I am sure that it is the best editor for me!
AlphaGeekZulu 3mo ago
I am always a little bit puzzled with the versions. I use Emacs from Snap on Ubuntu. I have to use the pgtk channel, because Wayland. pgtk/stable is 30.2, pgtk/edge is 32.0.50. Version 31 is not even offered on snap, in none of the channels. I am running on edge (32.0.50) with no problems.
mediumsmart 3mo ago
30.2 is as far as I am willing to go. Happy travels.
- hollerith 3mo ago
  Same here. I'd probably still be using 24.4 if I didn't want PGTK support.
- scoops_ 3mo ago
  I’m curious as to why - is it a matter of stability/feature completeness in 30.2 that you don’t need or want to bother with new releases? Or that you don’t like the direction of the project past that point?
jlouis 3mo ago
If you do any kind of serious work, you need a text editor. Emacs is still one of the best around. It's fast. It's configurable. And it's under your control. You won't suddenly find your text editor "upgraded" with tons of new features you never asked for. It's all opt-in.
- hollerith 3mo ago
  >You won't suddenly find your text editor "upgraded" with tons of new features you never asked for. I never asked for native compilation implemented via the trampoline technique, which increases attack surface (because it causes Emacs to routinely execute files in a known-by-attackers location in my home directory) and makes debugging harder, but I'm stuck with it if I want my Emacs to speak the Wayland protocol (and I do). Ditto the clumsy bolting-on of lexical scope.
  - DunningKruger9 3mo ago
    [dead]
  - vkazanov 3mo ago
    Native compilation is optional as you surely know. It also has nothing to do with Wayland. And what's wrong with adding lexical scope!? I do have some concerns about certain features but the ones listed do work, and work great.
    - hollerith 3mo ago
      You can't build an Emacs with Wayland (PGTK) support without native comp. ./configure will complain and refuse to do it.
      - vkazanov 3mo ago
        This sounds like a bug! I mean, this makes libgccjit a hard dependency for pgtk which just doesnt make sense
  - 3mo ago
xenophonf 3mo ago
> Tree-sitter that just works Hallelujah and thank you, sweet little baby Jesus. Now I can get rid of this bullshit from my dotfiles: rm -rf ~/.emacs.d/tree-sitter mkdir -p ~/.emacs.d/tree-sitter set _plat = windows if ( `uname` == Linux ) set _plat = linux if ( `uname` == Darwin ) set _plat = apple set _arch = x86 if ( `arch` == arm64) set _arch = aarch64 gh release -R emacs-tree-sitter/tree-sitter-langs download -p "*${_arch}*${_plat}*" tar -C ~/.emacs.d/tree-sitter --transform 's/^$.*\.\(so\|dylib\|dll$\)/libtree-sitter-\1/' -xzf tree-sitter-grammars*.tar.gz rm tree-sitter-grammars*.tar.gz That's csh, BTW, just like the Founding Fathers intended.
Nikhil37475 3mo ago
[flagged]
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
jcgrillo 3mo ago
It's so refreshing to see emacs just sticking to its guns and getting solidly, steadily better over the years. Inspirational, even. This is how software should be. Can't wait for all the tree-sitter improvements!
RedCinnabar 3mo ago
What’s the appeal of an editor like Emacs in 2026? Why’d anyone still use when most jobs nowadays require you to work inside a container (and therefore use VSCode container extension)?
- dietr1ch 3mo ago
  Can't you ssh into them? If so, in emacs you can just open /ssh:host:path/to/file and remotely edit that file. Even if you didn't have emacs, I don't think you are forced to use VSCode. You could just use sshfs and use any local editor, but I guess other editors also have remote editing plugins
- bryanlarsen 3mo ago
  I was using TRAMP to do that in Emacs 20 years ago. These days I use emacs-server in the container and waypipe my frames.
shuvrojit 3mo ago
Emacs works perfectly in sync with claude code/codex/opencode or any cli ai coding tools, it's never going to go away.
- ryanolsonx 3mo ago
  How do you use it in relation to claude?
  - wilkystyle 3mo ago
    Not the person you're replying to, and I have no idea what they were referring to, but I use agent-shell.el and it is incredible: https://github.com/xenodium/agent-shell https://github.com/xenodium/agent-shell xenodium is doing some amazing work (and not just on agent-shell, either!)
  - joshuastuden 3mo ago
    Agent-shell.el and claude-code-ide.el Agent-shell is like the Claude code CLI. Claude-code-ide is like cursor with ghost completions/auto complete, chat, etc.
  - joshuastuden 3mo ago
    Agent-shell.el for the CLI experience that's integrated with emacs. You can send things from emacs to your Claude code prompt and it will include the file and line numbers. There's also claude-code-ide.el that gives you more of a cursor like experience with autocomplete, simple chat, etc.
    - bryanlarsen 3mo ago
      claude-code-ide runs the claude TUI inside a term inside emacs with a little bit of editor integration on top. It's closer to the standard CLI experience than agent-shell is.
- human305893 3mo ago
  Any tips. Or blogs/info you've found that you could share?
johanvts 3mo ago
Excellent news! But what are the odds that “treesit-auto-install-grammar” is going to work on Windows? Finding precompiled grammars is so annoying. Windows support would be fantastic, and im hoping these improvements come to eglot next.
antics9 3mo ago
> kill-region-dwim fixes a decades-old papercut. Set it to 'emacs-word and hitting C-w with no active region kills a word backwards instead of signalling an error. Thank you! No more: (defun cutregion-or-killword (beginning end) "Kills region if marked else backward kills word." (interactive "r") (if (use-region-p) (kill-region beginning end) (backward-kill-word 1))) (global-set-key (kbd "C-w") 'cutregion-or-killword)
ddrake18 3mo ago
I am getting SSL certificate errors trying to access this -- but it's in the Wayback Machine: <https://web.archive.org/web/20260618141735/https://www.rahuljuliato.com/posts/emacs-31-around-the-corner https://web.archive.org/web/20260618141735/https://www.rahul...>
- RahulMJ 3mo ago
  Thanks, I've got some trouble with hosting and all the traffic. Should be normalized now.
themafia 3mo ago
> If you've ever built a three-window layout and then wished the editor pane were on the other side, these do the job and keep every buffer in place while they're at it. I built a tmux like buffer manager. So I can just pick a window, press Alt-F#, and switch that pane over to whatever buffer I want. It's super easy to even display the same buffer twice but in different panes. If you're using one without the other you're going to have a bad time. If I want to change layouts I just close panes down to one and then open it up in the configuration I like. Then I just switch to each pane and Alt-F# the correct content into it.
agentultra 3mo ago
Exciting stuff, especially the tree-sitter changes. Emacs is a fine weapon. And one that grows with you over the years of honing it to perfection. Nothing else compares.
opengears 3mo ago
doom emacs with evil (vim keybindings) and org-mode is the absolute killer app.

471 points by frou_dh 3mo ago

bogometer 3mo ago

>treesit-auto-install-grammar Sweet. GLP1 for my .emacs!

arikrahman 3mo ago

Excited to try out the native frame transposition this update and how it plays with pgtk

jerf 3mo ago

"Is anyone still using emacs?" Yes. I had to briefly visit the world of VSCode during a period of time when it had better AI integration than emacs did, but since I got Claude working well inside of emacs I've returned to 100% emacs. There just isn't anything like the old editors, built in the 80x24 terminal era, for getting huge swathes of code on your screen at once. I run a standard widescreen monitor with three vertical windows for emacs, each of which I often will break into two frames, so I can have up to six contexts active at once. I rarely do, but I frequently have 2 and 3. That's my entire 4K screen, full of code, usefully full of code. I'm not an IDE hater but they do put an awful lot of stuff on the screen that on a proportional basis I'm just not using as much as I use the code editor. I had been getting somewhat nervous about emacs' long term prospects about 10 years ago. I would read the release notes for major versions and generally not be particularly excited about anything. Somewhere around treesitter something seems to have revitalized the project. It may well have been treesitter that revitalized it overall. You end up with a lot more wood behind fewer arrows when the project is able to put more work into generally-useful tools rather than every single language community maintaining their own separate mode for each language. Now I am more excited about the major releases; for instance term issues are an issue for me with the aforementioned Claude integration. Not enough to stop me, but annoying. At the risk of saying something inflammatory to emacs fans, I feel like emacs is catching up to everything else better now... but it is catching up. It's getting easier to recommend it again as something you may want to seriously consider as a power-tool editor and not just something I used because I had 15 years of finger-experience with it and no significant reason to change. AI has eaten a lot of the IDE tools for me and you can type into a text box in emacs as well as you can anything else. I still occasionally bring up VSCode now to use the debugger, I still don't feel like I have as nice an experience with that as I do with emacs, but my debugging habits have always been able to deal with doing something a little extra to do a debugging session. By its very nature, you're committing some time to the process just to do the debugging itself, no matter how slick the UI for it may be, so a bit of overhead isn't so bad.

hoppp 3mo ago
The two complaints I hear is: 1.Memorizing how to use it has a big learning curve. 2.Wrist pain from pressing button combinations all the time. Otherwise plenty of people still use it and it's great. Just hard to pick up for new users.
- xedrac 3mo ago
  I've only ever used emacs in vim mode (evil-mode). Its vim emulation is the best I've seen anywhere.
  - DonHopkins 3mo ago
    It's terribly inefficient for emacs vi emulation mode to actually quit emacs when you type ":q", because it takes much longer for emacs to start up than vi, and people use a long-running emacs a lot differently than they use disposable vi's. UniPress[1] Emacs's vi emulation mode would actually flip you over to an emacs shell buffer when you typed :q, and the shell would recognize when you typed "vi foo.c" and flip back over to a vi emulator buffer instead of actually running vi, but INSTANTLY, since changing buffers in a running emacs was much faster than actually starting up a new vi process. So die-hard vi users didn't have to re-learn their muscle memory, and could just stay in the same emacs all the time, while the same old emacs alternately flipped between pretending to be a shell, and pretending to be vi. [1] "Evil Software Hoarder Emacs": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26113192 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26113192
    - dieggsy 3mo ago
      I use emacs --daemon with emacsclient for this. I always have a running emacs instance, and connect with the client. Opening and quitting a client is near instant.
      - noufalibrahim 3mo ago
        Yup. I've aliased it to e and and it works just fine. Sort of "send file into Emacs". I've also added some elisp to say things like e something.c:43 so that it opens it up at line 43. I used have a ep which I could pipe something into and it would put it in Emacs buffer but that stopped working somewhere I never got around to fixing it.

scoops_ 3mo ago

Wow, auto install treesitter grammars, editable xref, transposing window layouts, speed bar as a side window in frame, I had no idea any of these things were coming and were all some passing thoughts I’ve had in the last few weeks “it would be cool if this was supported OOTB”. Some dreams do come true!

xedrac 3mo ago

I'm happy to see these improvements. One thing that has always been annoying with Emacs is how much configuration is required to get a modern editor going. Things like Doom Emacs, and Spacemacs try to solve that problem, but both feel far removed from vanilla emacs. I wish Emacs came with several presets so with a single line, you could transform the editor to different base points. For example, most devs want treesitter highlighting and LSP enabled by default. Why not have a preset like (preset-base-ide-1), so we don't need 200 lines of configuration before we can function? Instead we could build off of a much closer starting point.

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
nehal3m 3mo ago
As a Vim user (just admitting to my ignorance here), is it not feasible to make something like this yourself? Emacs is said to be flexible and extensible enough, or at least I’m under the impression that it has that reputation. I imagine it would take a lot of time, maybe. Any greybeards that do this?
- emodendroket 3mo ago
  Yeah, it'd be easy, but the hard part is getting people to agree what the standard will be. Plus, frankly, a lot of people (myself included) who want a richer experience are pretty much just happy turning on emacs keybindings in VSCode or IntelliJ or whatever.
  - worthless-trash 3mo ago
    Richer in vscode, i'm not so sure.
- tmtvl 3mo ago
  It is fairly trivial to make something 'like it', but what people advocating for this stuff want is for it to be shipped with regular plain old normal GNU Emacs so they can set it up quickly and easily in an Emacs installation on a work laptop (and it may make it easier to convert people to Emacs for those who care about that).

mark_l_watson 3mo ago

Reading Rahul's post I got excited to build Emacs 31 from source, but reality occurred and I decided to wait for the release. I also like his articles on setting up Emacs. I don't care what tools other developers use but in January I made my two dev Macs 'VSCode free' and use Emacs for everything. Feels better! For decades I would spend tons of time experimenting with my Emacs setups but in the last few years I have been shifting to more out of the box experiences. I did write my own agentic coding platform in Emacs Lisp but I keep that separate from .emacs and .emacs.d

bryanlarsen 3mo ago

"Is anyone still using emacs?" I use emacs --daemon instead of tmux inside my agent sandbox for session permanence and portability. A full editor rather than a layer between me and my editor. I can even waypipe the client windows if I want mouse support.

jsw97 3mo ago
I do the dinosaur version of this, with screen and xpra. Works great. CC and codex being terminal-native may make terminal-based (or at least terminal-comfortable) editors seem more natural to a broader set of people.
- bryanlarsen 3mo ago
  Why use screen? Just leave your emacs --daemon running, and when you reconnect, run emacsclient and all your buffers are back. And you only have to learn one method for arranging frames rather than both emacs' and screen's.

Snoddas 3mo ago

I realize I've missed a lot. Someone should write an Emacs guide for people who haven't meaningfully touched their .emacs since the early 2000s

bryanlarsen 3mo ago
There's a lot of Emacs information on the internet, and your agent has been trained on it.
- baokaola 3mo ago
  For real, ask your agent to do anything in Emacs and it simply knows how to do it.
TFNA 3mo ago
The bulk of the Mastering Emacs blog is a decade old at this point, but its philosophy and the information it provides is still very relevant for any graybeard wanting to get up to date.
cvdub 3mo ago
It’s already built in! C-h n view-emacs-news
egl2020 3mo ago
I'm a pretty conservative emacs user, partly because I don't want to spend time tinkering to get things to work consistently across Windows, ubuntu, and mac os -- all of which I use daily. My most "modern" adoption is probably using lsp and eglot with various language modes, notably golang and rust. Should I consider adding tree-sitter into the mix?
- internet_points 3mo ago
  Nah. It's great that they're making it less of a hassle to use, but it's still going to be more of a hassle than just using the plain regex-based modes, and treesitter in itself doesn't really make much of an improvement if you already have working syntax highlighting for some mode. The main exception is if you want to program in a language that only has a treesitter-mode, or I suppose if the regular mode has quite buggy syntax highlighting / the ts-mode has much better features. (There are also fancy minor mode packages like combobulate that make special use of treesitter, but that's tinkering territory.)

bryanlarsen 3mo ago

Systems like Emacs that are hyper-configurable via a text file seem tailor made for modern LLM's. If you've got a little bit of Emacs experience but bounced off of it because the learning curve was too steep I highly recommend diving back in with your agent. Agents are really good at setting up and maintaining your .emacs/init.el.

seanc 3mo ago
I agree. It's amazing. I feel like I've got a private Emacs consultant at my elbow.
- DonHopkins 3mo ago
  I know a bunch of people (including me) who decades ago wished they had a private sendmail.cf expert at their elbow, and even a few sendmail.cf experts who were sick and tired of always being asked to help random people with their sendmail.cf file for free. Maybe there will be a resurgance of terribly obscure totally unique quirky configuration files for all these vibe coded apps, unique enough that they don't appear in the training data, so you have to hire real humans to sit at your elbow and help you!
  - kstrauser 3mo ago
    I came into that after sendmail.m4 got popular. I'm not sure if that's better or worse.
    - DonHopkins 3mo ago
      m4 is what makes Gnu Autotools so delightful!
      - kstrauser 3mo ago
        Look, gang! A brand new sentence!
3mo ago

RahulMJ 3mo ago

Thanks for sharing, frou_dh! Author here btw :)

tmtvl 3mo ago

Nice to know sr-speedbar can finally be retired. It works fine, but fewer external packages means simpler config.

DonHopkins 3mo ago

It's nice to hear the emacs terminal emulator has gotten some love, after all the controversy about the nasty language that used to be in its source code, which rms moved out to a separate file after somebody complained. Open source with profanity in comments is statistically better than code without it: https://blog.desdelinux.net/en/open-source-with-profanity-in-comments-is-statistically-better-than-code-without-it/ https://blog.desdelinux.net/en/open-source-with-profanity-in... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36621699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36621699 DonHopkins on July 6, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: Open source code with profanity in comments is sta... The original terminal emulator terminal.el in gnu emacs, written by mly (Richard Mlynarik), was particularly salty. I finally tracked down a copy, but it looks like somebody complained and in 1990 it was begrudgingly cleaned up a bit, so some of the worst stuff was moved out into a separate file called term-nasty.el for posterity (you, here, now), so as not to give "in to the pressure to censor obscenity that currently threatens freedom of speech and of the press in the US" (oh, Richard <3 ): https://opensource.apple.com/source/emacs/emacs-59.0.80/emacs/lisp/ChangeLog.3 https://opensource.apple.com/source/emacs/emacs-59.0.80/emac... 1990-08-26 Richard Stallman (rms@mole.ai.mit.edu) * terminal.el: Move possibly offensive comments to term-nasty.el. https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/freeware/v10/emacs/common/lisp/terminal.el https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/freeware/v10/emacs/common/li... [...] ;; disgusting unix-required shit ;; Are we living twenty years in the past yet? (defun te-losing-unix () nil) [...] ;; (A version of the following comment which might be distractingly offensive ;; to some readers has been moved to term-nasty.el.) ;; unix lacks ITS-style tty control... (defun te-process-output (preemptable) ;;>> There seems no good reason to ever disallow preemption (setq preemptable t) [...] ;; I suppose if I split the guts of this out into a separate ;; function we could trivially emulate different terminals ;; Who cares in any case? (Apart from stupid losers using rlogin) [...] (?\C-b . te-backward-char) ;; should be C-d, but un*x ;; pty's won't send \004 through! ;; Can you believe this? [...] ;; Did I ask to be sent these characters? ;; I don't remember doing so, either. ;; (Perhaps some operating system or ;; other is completely incompetent...) [...] ;;-- Not-widely-known (ie nonstandard) flags, which mean ;; o writing in the last column of the last line ;; doesn't cause idiotic scrolling, and ;; o don't use idiotische c-s/c-q sogenannte ;; ``flow control'' auf keinen Fall. "LP:NF:" ;;-- For stupid or obsolete programs "ic=^p_!:dc=^pd!:al=^p^o!:dl=^p^k!:ho=^p= :" ;;-- For disgusting programs. ;; (VI? What losers need these, I wonder?) "im=:ei=:dm=:ed=:mi:do=^p^j:nl=^p^j:bs:"))) [...] (setq te-process (start-process "terminal-emulator" (current-buffer) "/bin/sh" "-c" ;; Yuck!!! Start a shell to set some terminal ;; control characteristics. Then start the ;; "env" program to setup the terminal type ;; Then finally start the program we wanted. (format "%s; exec %s" te-stty-string (mapconcat 'te-quote-arg-for-sh (cons program args) " "))))) [...] ;;;; what a complete loss [...] https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/freeware/v10/emacs/common/lisp/term-nasty.el https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/freeware/v10/emacs/common/li... ;;; term-nasty.el --- Damned Things from terminfo.el ;;; This file is in the public domain, and was written by Stallman and Mlynarik ;;; Commentary: ;; Some people used to be bothered by the following comments that were ;; found in terminal.el. We decided they were distracting, and that it ;; was better not to have them there. On the other hand, we didn't want ;; to appear to be giving in to the pressure to censor obscenity that ;; currently threatens freedom of speech and of the press in the US. ;; So we decided to put the comments here. ;;; Code: These comments were removed from te-losing-unix. ;(what lossage) ;(message "fucking-unix: %d" char) This was before te-process-output. ;; fucking unix has -such- braindamaged lack of tty control... And about the need to handle output characters such as C-m, C-g, C-h and C-i even though the termcap doesn't say they may be used: ;fuck me harder ;again and again! ;wa12id!! ;(spiked) ;;; term-nasty.el ends here Note to the gentle readers: "wa12id" stands for "with a 12 inch dildo". Jamie Zawinski kept Lucid Emacs nasty: https://groups.google.com/g/gnu.misc.discuss/c/U5oXKOfWinQ/m/xek-XhmQ9eoJ https://groups.google.com/g/gnu.misc.discuss/c/U5oXKOfWinQ/m... Noah Friedman, Aug 3, 1992, 4:54:20 AM In article <15i2n9...@hal.com> wood...@hal.com (Nathan Hess) writes: >In article <FRIEDMAN.9...@nutrimat.gnu.ai.mit.edu>, friedman@gnu (Noah Friedman) writes: >>It's by no means necessary, but it's funny. >Along the same lines, look at lisp/terminal.el Of course, terminal.el is actually useful, albeit not terribly powerful. (and terminal.el is pretty mild compared to some of the other things I've seen written by mly. :-)) Incidentally, a lot of terminal.el has been rewritten in version 19. Too bad... I liked all the variable names and comments in the original. Jamie Zawinski, Aug 5, 1992, 12:40:38 AM In the FSF-distributed Emacs 19, the obscenities (will) have been stripped from terminal.el, though they are preserved in a file called term-nasty.el, to avoid appearing to bow to the censors. In Lucid GNU Emacs, terminal.el will remain as nasty as it ever was. -- Jamie "Truth, Justice, and the Fucking First Amendment" Zawinski

jmclnx 3mo ago

Thanks for your work. Please, if you have something to do with Emacs, can you review this for NetBSD and OpenBSD when using gtk3: https://www.unitedbsd.com/d/1621-emacs-30-wxaw https://www.unitedbsd.com/d/1621-emacs-30-wxaw The issue was traced to library xinput2, when compiled with '--without-xinput2' the issue does not occur. But I do not know if that is something that Emacs can address.

mfld 3mo ago

Very cool! Looking forward to try out the xref and markdown features. The latter becomes increasingly important since the developer community at large seems to disagree with org-mode being the superior syntax...

gentooflux 3mo ago

This stuff all looks great, I can't wait to upgrade to 31 and then forget about all of it and just keep using Emacs the same way I have been for the past 20 years, /again/

intrasight 3mo ago
LOL. So true! Except for tree-sitter. That's something I'll be investing time in.
- EGreg 3mo ago
  Investing your time how exactly
  - copperx 3mo ago
    As a contributor, of course.
frantathefranta 3mo ago
1. Upgrade to Emacs version +1 2. Remove MELPA packages that are now part of Emacs 3. Go to step 1 when new version comes out
taeric 3mo ago
The post not long ago about how far the built in autocomplete has come got me to trim down a bit of my config. Seeing that treesit stuff is getting folded in, I may make another effort at trimming down. It is crazy nice how invisible the native compilation became.
- setopt 3mo ago
  Which autocomplete mode? fido-vertical-mode, completion-preview-mode, or something else that I should maybe look into? I switched from vertico to fido-vertical myself, but still use company for in-buffer completions. I tried corfu and completion-preview several times but didn’t get something I’m happy with from it.

asimovDev 3mo ago

back in 2nd year of university I remember thinking that vim is complicated so i went with Emacs. Now after using vim for couple years , I can't imagine going to Emacs and learning it. The availability of vim emulation in majority of text editors and IDEs has been a lifesaver although the brief time I used Magit I was enamored I gotta say. I tried lazygit recently and it evoked the same feeling I had when trying Magit for the first time

joshuastuden 3mo ago
Emacs evil-mode gives you vim bindings.

huflungdung 3mo ago

[dead]

pdyc 3mo ago

I have been using Emacs for more than a decade, and I was always excited about the features. But with AI, something has changed. I no longer type/edit that much. Recently, LSP stopped working, and I was completely oblivious to it for about a week. Earlier, something like this would have been a major annoyance.

TFNA 3mo ago
Emacs is more than a dev environment for coders. Some of us here use it for everything that can possibly be represented in text form: our TODO lists, our calendar, our RSS reader, our mail reader, etc. Me, I even maintain billing spreadsheets for a side business as Org-Mode tables. New features in the latest Emacs releases, and in successive releases of individual packages, have brought some nice improvements in those areas.
bryanlarsen 3mo ago
In 2026 I'm using the editor less and using magit a lot more. IOW, emacs has become more indispensable, not less.

whacked_new 3mo ago

I recently sifted through a bunch of tagged entries in a text file, where each entry had a json array of image names, but the images resided on a remote server. I basically wanted a program that could detect if the cursor was on an image name, and display it on the right. There's a bajillion ways to do this, some might even involve writing an html file and launching a remote server and tunneling and using a browser and what not. But no! ChatGPT wrote 20 lines of elisp code. I add a tramp basepath, open the text file, and got exactly what I needed. Need any behavior changes, callbacks, transformations? Modify, eval expression, new behavior! I asked ChatGPT what other system I can use to achieve the same effect. The best answer it gave was neovim. No, neovim can't do that with the same degree of ease. Disappointing and amazing at the same time. The drawback of the emacs approach in my case is the tramp latency. To speed things up we'd want to add prefetch and that's gonna be much more than 20 lines and C-x e

mesrik 3mo ago

"Is anyone still using emacs?" Yes, 34 years and no plans to switch. Emacs cursor movement keystrokes are quite widely supported elsewhere too which use GNU readline or implement at least subset themselves. Those work well also besides shells with Chromium/Chrome/Safari etc. many browsers input fields (address bar and text area). Cisco IOS, Juniper Junos, Netscreen load balancers too etc. IMHO makes jumping around CLI much much convenient and faster than moving hand to reach cursor keys. My only gripe is that Firefox and its derivatives it doesn't work any more. Long time ago it did work. And I have no idea why feature was dropped some rewrite. e: s/deadline/readline/g

jpmattia 3mo ago
45 years for me. I don't even think about keystrokes anymore.
ot 3mo ago
> GNU deadline I think you mean readline?
- mesrik 3mo ago
  Sure. Browser autocorrect there just tried to be helpful :/
  - mindcrime 3mo ago
    That said, I'm kinda hoping somebody does create a "GNU deadline" project now. I'm curious to see what kind of project it would be.
    - sph 3mo ago
      A weird, inscrutable project management tool for the shell written in Perl 4 and Guile Scheme, that the ten people in the world who learned to operate it swear it is the greatest piece of productivity software ever invented.

dosisking 3mo ago

"Is anyone still using emacs?" I'd like to, but there is currently a RAM shortage

bitwize 3mo ago
By all means go back to the lean, memory-efficient VS Code, then
- zhxhhshshs 3mo ago
  There is a superior, faster and more efficient alternative just at your fingertips waiting to unleash its magnificent power if you would only dare to dream big.
  - bitwize 3mo ago
    Oh, you mean that little modal editor I use to tweak config files? [j_jonah_jameson_laughing.mp4]
bryanlarsen 3mo ago
Emacs stands for "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping". But in 2026 eight megabytes is pretty cheap.

slyrus 3mo ago

Have they fixed MacOS startup performance yet? ISTR some post about why faster CPUs were making emacs even slower on startup. Seems to have gotten worse over the years.

jlouis 3mo ago
You boot Emacs once as a server. Then you connect through that server through emacsclient. It is your OS after all.
- slyrus 3mo ago
  Sure, that's one approach. But it shouldn't take 45 seconds to spin up a new "emacs -nw" process, IMO. There's something pathological going on.
  - ergonaught 3mo ago
    emacs -nw takes about 2 seconds on my mac. I don't use server/daemon, and those 2 seconds are processing my startup elisp files (it's ready nearly instantly without prepping my junk).

dschrempf 3mo ago

Emacs is the best. Thanks a lot for writing this up!

zhxhhshshs 3mo ago
It is definitely not the best. It is an acceptable but inferior product when compared to the gold standard. I have spoken!
- joshuastuden 3mo ago
  Emacs can give you all the vim key bindings. Vim can't do that.
- dschrempf 3mo ago
  Well, that was a bit of pun. Of course, it is not the best for everybody. However, I am sure that it is the best editor for me!

AlphaGeekZulu 3mo ago

I am always a little bit puzzled with the versions. I use Emacs from Snap on Ubuntu. I have to use the pgtk channel, because Wayland. pgtk/stable is 30.2, pgtk/edge is 32.0.50. Version 31 is not even offered on snap, in none of the channels. I am running on edge (32.0.50) with no problems.

mediumsmart 3mo ago

30.2 is as far as I am willing to go. Happy travels.

hollerith 3mo ago
Same here. I'd probably still be using 24.4 if I didn't want PGTK support.
scoops_ 3mo ago
I’m curious as to why - is it a matter of stability/feature completeness in 30.2 that you don’t need or want to bother with new releases? Or that you don’t like the direction of the project past that point?

jlouis 3mo ago

If you do any kind of serious work, you need a text editor. Emacs is still one of the best around. It's fast. It's configurable. And it's under your control. You won't suddenly find your text editor "upgraded" with tons of new features you never asked for. It's all opt-in.

hollerith 3mo ago
>You won't suddenly find your text editor "upgraded" with tons of new features you never asked for. I never asked for native compilation implemented via the trampoline technique, which increases attack surface (because it causes Emacs to routinely execute files in a known-by-attackers location in my home directory) and makes debugging harder, but I'm stuck with it if I want my Emacs to speak the Wayland protocol (and I do). Ditto the clumsy bolting-on of lexical scope.
- DunningKruger9 3mo ago
  [dead]
- vkazanov 3mo ago
  Native compilation is optional as you surely know. It also has nothing to do with Wayland. And what's wrong with adding lexical scope!? I do have some concerns about certain features but the ones listed do work, and work great.
  - hollerith 3mo ago
    You can't build an Emacs with Wayland (PGTK) support without native comp. ./configure will complain and refuse to do it.
    - vkazanov 3mo ago
      This sounds like a bug! I mean, this makes libgccjit a hard dependency for pgtk which just doesnt make sense
- 3mo ago

xenophonf 3mo ago

> Tree-sitter that just works Hallelujah and thank you, sweet little baby Jesus. Now I can get rid of this bullshit from my dotfiles: rm -rf ~/.emacs.d/tree-sitter mkdir -p ~/.emacs.d/tree-sitter set _plat = windows if ( `uname` == Linux ) set _plat = linux if ( `uname` == Darwin ) set _plat = apple set _arch = x86 if ( `arch` == arm64) set _arch = aarch64 gh release -R emacs-tree-sitter/tree-sitter-langs download -p "*${_arch}*${_plat}*" tar -C ~/.emacs.d/tree-sitter --transform 's/^$.*\.\(so\|dylib\|dll$\)/libtree-sitter-\1/' -xzf tree-sitter-grammars*.tar.gz rm tree-sitter-grammars*.tar.gz That's csh, BTW, just like the Founding Fathers intended.

Nikhil37475 3mo ago

[flagged]

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

jcgrillo 3mo ago

It's so refreshing to see emacs just sticking to its guns and getting solidly, steadily better over the years. Inspirational, even. This is how software should be. Can't wait for all the tree-sitter improvements!

RedCinnabar 3mo ago

What’s the appeal of an editor like Emacs in 2026? Why’d anyone still use when most jobs nowadays require you to work inside a container (and therefore use VSCode container extension)?

dietr1ch 3mo ago
Can't you ssh into them? If so, in emacs you can just open /ssh:host:path/to/file and remotely edit that file. Even if you didn't have emacs, I don't think you are forced to use VSCode. You could just use sshfs and use any local editor, but I guess other editors also have remote editing plugins
bryanlarsen 3mo ago
I was using TRAMP to do that in Emacs 20 years ago. These days I use emacs-server in the container and waypipe my frames.

shuvrojit 3mo ago

Emacs works perfectly in sync with claude code/codex/opencode or any cli ai coding tools, it's never going to go away.

ryanolsonx 3mo ago
How do you use it in relation to claude?
- wilkystyle 3mo ago
  Not the person you're replying to, and I have no idea what they were referring to, but I use agent-shell.el and it is incredible: https://github.com/xenodium/agent-shell https://github.com/xenodium/agent-shell xenodium is doing some amazing work (and not just on agent-shell, either!)
- joshuastuden 3mo ago
  Agent-shell.el and claude-code-ide.el Agent-shell is like the Claude code CLI. Claude-code-ide is like cursor with ghost completions/auto complete, chat, etc.
- joshuastuden 3mo ago
  Agent-shell.el for the CLI experience that's integrated with emacs. You can send things from emacs to your Claude code prompt and it will include the file and line numbers. There's also claude-code-ide.el that gives you more of a cursor like experience with autocomplete, simple chat, etc.
  - bryanlarsen 3mo ago
    claude-code-ide runs the claude TUI inside a term inside emacs with a little bit of editor integration on top. It's closer to the standard CLI experience than agent-shell is.
human305893 3mo ago
Any tips. Or blogs/info you've found that you could share?

johanvts 3mo ago

Excellent news! But what are the odds that “treesit-auto-install-grammar” is going to work on Windows? Finding precompiled grammars is so annoying. Windows support would be fantastic, and im hoping these improvements come to eglot next.

antics9 3mo ago

> kill-region-dwim fixes a decades-old papercut. Set it to 'emacs-word and hitting C-w with no active region kills a word backwards instead of signalling an error. Thank you! No more: (defun cutregion-or-killword (beginning end) "Kills region if marked else backward kills word." (interactive "r") (if (use-region-p) (kill-region beginning end) (backward-kill-word 1))) (global-set-key (kbd "C-w") 'cutregion-or-killword)

ddrake18 3mo ago

I am getting SSL certificate errors trying to access this -- but it's in the Wayback Machine: <https://web.archive.org/web/20260618141735/https://www.rahuljuliato.com/posts/emacs-31-around-the-corner https://web.archive.org/web/20260618141735/https://www.rahul...>

RahulMJ 3mo ago
Thanks, I've got some trouble with hosting and all the traffic. Should be normalized now.

themafia 3mo ago

> If you've ever built a three-window layout and then wished the editor pane were on the other side, these do the job and keep every buffer in place while they're at it. I built a tmux like buffer manager. So I can just pick a window, press Alt-F#, and switch that pane over to whatever buffer I want. It's super easy to even display the same buffer twice but in different panes. If you're using one without the other you're going to have a bad time. If I want to change layouts I just close panes down to one and then open it up in the configuration I like. Then I just switch to each pane and Alt-F# the correct content into it.

agentultra 3mo ago

Exciting stuff, especially the tree-sitter changes. Emacs is a fine weapon. And one that grows with you over the years of honing it to perfection. Nothing else compares.

opengears 3mo ago

doom emacs with evil (vim keybindings) and org-mode is the absolute killer app.