What's new in Emacs 31.1 (masteringemacs.org)

68 pointsby geospeck16 hours ago11 comments

kstrauser 14 hours ago

Between treesitter and eglot (read: LSP), there’s not much from other editors I miss when using Emacs. I’ve been on a Zed kick for a while but I hear the call of the GNU. This may be the week I declare .emacs bankruptcy and start again with a clean setup, seeing how much of my old third-party config I can replace with builtins.

wmedrano an hour ago

Are there any Zed features you're going to miss? Is the AI notable?

kstrauser 12 minutes ago

Not really, no. Zed’s a fine editor and I have nothing but good to say about it. I just happen to prefer Emacs more. Its keystrokes are burned into my muscle memory. And because its config files are literally executable code, there’s nothing too crazy for Emacs. Can it do XYZ? Absolutely, if you tell it to!

As to AI: Emacs continues to have zero built in. If you like it, though, it supports any agent you might want to use. I was highly amused the first time I wanted to use my own company’s agent and found it was already well-supported by a popular package.

And honestly, Emacs + a coding agent = magic for anyone who wanted to use it but was intimidated by Elisp. “Hey Droid, tell Emacs to swap the command and option keys on my Mac.” “Ok, done!” It’s a ludicrously powerful combo.

rtpg 6 hours ago

Bit of a tangent but does anyone have good learning materials on doing things with Emacs Lisp beyond just staring at the source of packages?

I have the Mastering Emacs book and read through most of it, which gives me a good idea for some stuff... but I really would like to have good ideas for the right kind of design patterns for common things.

MarsIronPI 4 hours ago

Have you read through the Emacs Lisp Intro and Elisp manuals in Info? The latter is especially helpful as a reference.

wmedrano 4 hours ago

I started getting a little more into ELisp after reading The Land of Lisp, though its probably a bit basic. If I were to try to get better at ELisp through reading books/docs, I'd look into Common Lisp material.

rootnod3 17 minutes ago

All of Prot's packages[1] are really nicely designed imho.

[1]: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/

wmedrano 8 hours ago

I'm excited for the user-lisp/ changes. It'll let me create custom lightweight packages and have them lazily loaded by just sprinkling ;;;###autoload over interactive commands and modes.

Quitschquat an hour ago

Anyone know if Zaretskii resigned over the portable dumper?

hirvi74 26 minutes ago

I hope my Treesitter issue has been fixed with macOS. I gave up on the problem about this time last year.

By installing the grammars on the user's behalf, I think I might be in luck!

I don't remember the exact issue, but I remember having to dig through the release histories of each of the poorly documented ABI version for each language to find whichever versions was compatible.

I've got my fingers crossed.

pkal 12 hours ago

I was annoyed by some of the comments in the "Packages" section, because it is clear that the author didn't try anything out but just scattered a few comments though out the file.

Regarding :vc and :load-path, this was obsoleted transitively due to the obsoleting of package-vc-install-from-checkout, which has portability issues. Bug#80604 goes into the background for this. This is NOT an obsoletion of the :vc keyword for use-package.

Regarding package-autosuggest, this is disabled because it doesn't interest most users. It is targeted at new users who aren't familiar with the packages, and might be interested in new major modes. Experienced users are generally either familiar with the packages and use them or prefer to stay in fundamental mode. The minor mode is enabled as part of the newcomers theme!

No mention of package-review-policy, which especially in the "age of AI" is an important feature is you want to be careful about external code you are using on your system.

Oh and on the topic of the newercomers theme, the reason it is not mentioned "higher up" in the NEWS file, besides it being the wrong section, is that it is highlighted on the splash screen, where new users are going to find it, instead of a NEWS file.