3 ms·

Emacs 31.1 will release on 8/24

89 points by birdculture 2mo ago

jwr 2mo ago
I have been using Emacs for 32 years now. It had its ups and downs: there was a period of very slow development, which led to the XEmacs fork, which I used for many years. These days I see a renaissance of sorts. First, the development progress is excellent. Second, Emacs turned out to be the ultimate material for AI. I no longer write my own Emacs functions. I tell AI to modify the Emacs behavior the way I want. I now have a development environment that I fully control. Windows open where I want them. Keystrokes do what I want them to do. I have tools for annotating Claude Code plans in Emacs and plenty of other functionality. Without AI, I would never be able to implement all these tiny fixes and improvements. It would cost me too much time. And in other IDEs, I would have to "ask for permission", because not every behavior is exposed and modifiable. In Emacs, almost everything is, and you can change the behavior of other packages, too. It feels great to have a development environment that I am in control of and that won't disappear tomorrow, like so many other IDEs did.
- pama 2mo ago
  Similar story here (user since early 90s). I wish more AI harnesses could also have a dumb-terminal mode in addition to the fully non-interactove mode, so they could all stay naturally searchable/copyable in simple comint buffers. Even the best current terminal emulators within Emacs are not great to recursively handle Emacs (or modern AI TUI) well enough, so I occasionally also use a shell putside Emacs.
  - baokaola 2mo ago
    Have you tried Ghostel for this? I'm one of the Ghostel maintainers so if you have any particular harness that behaves poorly in Ghostel we'd like to know about it so we can fix it.
    - ixsploit 2mo ago
      Thanks so much for your work. I moved to emacs to have a better integration between cli and the editor I am using and ghostel is a tremendous improvement over vterm.
    - pama 2mo ago
      Thanks! I hadn't tried it. I've started using it today; I limited a couple options about dired-local and images in kitty due to concerns from upstream security audits, but otherwise looks fantastic.
  - jwr 2mo ago
    Ghostel is fantastic for this. It is very fast, fully compatible, and you can quickly enter a copy-paste mode with C-c C-t. With ace-jump this makes for very efficient copying. Since I started using Ghostel, my Claude Code and Codex sessions started gradually migrating into Emacs. They work just as well as in a terminal and managing them is more convenient. This is also why I can't really find any use for all those newfangled tools that are intended to help with managing multiple coding sessions.
    - pama 2mo ago
      Thanks! Agreed ghostel looks fantastic. I still wish there was an in between a full TUI and a full non-interactive version, but switching to ghostel means I can fully live within emacs again.
    - dakra 2mo ago
      > you can quickly enter a copy-paste mode with C-c C-t. With ace-jump this makes for very efficient copying. You probably know this already, Ghostel tries to make interaction with the Emacs buffer as seamless as possible (obviously all configurable). Of course there's line-mode where everything is just a normal buffer, like a better M-x shell replacement. And in semi-char-mode there's a lot of config options that automatically toggle copy-mode when it makes sense, e.g. isearch, consult-line, etc. avy needs some extra config, see https://dakra.github.io/ghostel/#mouse-selection https://dakra.github.io/ghostel/#mouse-selection (advice-add 'avy-action-goto :after #'ghostel-maybe-leave-input) then you can just use avy like normal and after the jump you're automatically in copy- (or emacs-)mode and when done copying, you're automatically back to the live terminal input.
  - znpy 2mo ago
    > I wish more AI harnesses could also have a dumb-terminal mode you don't need that, you can use an acp (agent-client protocol) client like agent-shell - https://github.com/xenodium/agent-shell https://github.com/xenodium/agent-shell I've tried it with cursor and it works okay.
- LiamPowell 2mo ago
  LLMs are particularly strong for this because it really doesn't matter if the code is a hacked together mess. Most user configs are already like that anyway.
  - alex1138 2mo ago
    They're going to grow so powerful that they start scoffing at training data "You want me to follow the example of THIS idiot?!"
BoingBoomTschak 2mo ago
Related cool thing: Emacs may be getting a new GC in 32, https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/feature/igc3/README-IGC https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/feature/igc3/READ...
lp4v4n 2mo ago
It's hard to explain my relationship with Emacs, but starting it is the first thing I do when I turn on my computer. I don't use it much for development these days, but I always have a bunch of buffers open and I do a lot of residual work on it. If I install Linux on my computer, the first thing I always do is install Emacs, it's like a kind of default environment for doing everything text related, and it feels incredibly unfamiliar not to have it open all the time.
mcookly 2mo ago
For those who use Emacs on macOS, I highly recommend upgrading to 31.1 ASAP since several memory leaks have been fixed by Przemysław Alexander Kamiński [1] et al. [1]: Author of "Emacs: The macOS Bug" (<https://xlii.space/eng/emacs-the-macos-bug/ https://xlii.space/eng/emacs-the-macos-bug/>), which surfaced on HN some time ago.
- BoingBoomTschak 2mo ago
  Well, once MacPorts (https://ports.macports.org/port/emacs https://ports.macports.org/port/emacs) has it!
  - mcookly 2mo ago
    Agreed! I've been building from source for now, and I can't wait to return to the MacPorts version as soon as it is available.
  - rickstanley 2mo ago
    So many choices! Emacs-plus from brew, Macports and https://emacsformacosx.com https://emacsformacosx.com, I wonder how they differ from one another. As someone who wants vanilla experience, should I get from emacsformacosx.com?
    - BoingBoomTschak 2mo ago
      In my experience, you want "emacs-app", which is just upstream emacs compiled with Aqua support (https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/blob/81b99bcf7c59b532954aff6b6bb5c77eb23ba754/editors/emacs/Portfile#L266 https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/blob/81b99bcf7c59...) to avoid going through XQuartz.
- znpy 2mo ago
  i usually get my emacs from https://emacsformacos.com/ https://emacsformacos.com/ but it seems to be stuck on version 30.2 :(
  - 2mo ago
jmclnx 2mo ago
Maybe Emacs 31.1 will be able to use OpenBSD's RCS Utilities. One can hope :) To use RCS with Emacs on OpenBSD, you need to install GNU's version of RCS (grcs). Congratulations to the team.

89 points by birdculture 2mo ago

jwr 2mo ago

I have been using Emacs for 32 years now. It had its ups and downs: there was a period of very slow development, which led to the XEmacs fork, which I used for many years. These days I see a renaissance of sorts. First, the development progress is excellent. Second, Emacs turned out to be the ultimate material for AI. I no longer write my own Emacs functions. I tell AI to modify the Emacs behavior the way I want. I now have a development environment that I fully control. Windows open where I want them. Keystrokes do what I want them to do. I have tools for annotating Claude Code plans in Emacs and plenty of other functionality. Without AI, I would never be able to implement all these tiny fixes and improvements. It would cost me too much time. And in other IDEs, I would have to "ask for permission", because not every behavior is exposed and modifiable. In Emacs, almost everything is, and you can change the behavior of other packages, too. It feels great to have a development environment that I am in control of and that won't disappear tomorrow, like so many other IDEs did.

pama 2mo ago
Similar story here (user since early 90s). I wish more AI harnesses could also have a dumb-terminal mode in addition to the fully non-interactove mode, so they could all stay naturally searchable/copyable in simple comint buffers. Even the best current terminal emulators within Emacs are not great to recursively handle Emacs (or modern AI TUI) well enough, so I occasionally also use a shell putside Emacs.
- baokaola 2mo ago
  Have you tried Ghostel for this? I'm one of the Ghostel maintainers so if you have any particular harness that behaves poorly in Ghostel we'd like to know about it so we can fix it.
  - ixsploit 2mo ago
    Thanks so much for your work. I moved to emacs to have a better integration between cli and the editor I am using and ghostel is a tremendous improvement over vterm.
  - pama 2mo ago
    Thanks! I hadn't tried it. I've started using it today; I limited a couple options about dired-local and images in kitty due to concerns from upstream security audits, but otherwise looks fantastic.
- jwr 2mo ago
  Ghostel is fantastic for this. It is very fast, fully compatible, and you can quickly enter a copy-paste mode with C-c C-t. With ace-jump this makes for very efficient copying. Since I started using Ghostel, my Claude Code and Codex sessions started gradually migrating into Emacs. They work just as well as in a terminal and managing them is more convenient. This is also why I can't really find any use for all those newfangled tools that are intended to help with managing multiple coding sessions.
  - pama 2mo ago
    Thanks! Agreed ghostel looks fantastic. I still wish there was an in between a full TUI and a full non-interactive version, but switching to ghostel means I can fully live within emacs again.
  - dakra 2mo ago
    > you can quickly enter a copy-paste mode with C-c C-t. With ace-jump this makes for very efficient copying. You probably know this already, Ghostel tries to make interaction with the Emacs buffer as seamless as possible (obviously all configurable). Of course there's line-mode where everything is just a normal buffer, like a better M-x shell replacement. And in semi-char-mode there's a lot of config options that automatically toggle copy-mode when it makes sense, e.g. isearch, consult-line, etc. avy needs some extra config, see https://dakra.github.io/ghostel/#mouse-selection https://dakra.github.io/ghostel/#mouse-selection (advice-add 'avy-action-goto :after #'ghostel-maybe-leave-input) then you can just use avy like normal and after the jump you're automatically in copy- (or emacs-)mode and when done copying, you're automatically back to the live terminal input.
- znpy 2mo ago
  > I wish more AI harnesses could also have a dumb-terminal mode you don't need that, you can use an acp (agent-client protocol) client like agent-shell - https://github.com/xenodium/agent-shell https://github.com/xenodium/agent-shell I've tried it with cursor and it works okay.
LiamPowell 2mo ago
LLMs are particularly strong for this because it really doesn't matter if the code is a hacked together mess. Most user configs are already like that anyway.
- alex1138 2mo ago
  They're going to grow so powerful that they start scoffing at training data "You want me to follow the example of THIS idiot?!"

BoingBoomTschak 2mo ago

Related cool thing: Emacs may be getting a new GC in 32, https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/feature/igc3/README-IGC https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/feature/igc3/READ...

lp4v4n 2mo ago

It's hard to explain my relationship with Emacs, but starting it is the first thing I do when I turn on my computer. I don't use it much for development these days, but I always have a bunch of buffers open and I do a lot of residual work on it. If I install Linux on my computer, the first thing I always do is install Emacs, it's like a kind of default environment for doing everything text related, and it feels incredibly unfamiliar not to have it open all the time.

mcookly 2mo ago

For those who use Emacs on macOS, I highly recommend upgrading to 31.1 ASAP since several memory leaks have been fixed by Przemysław Alexander Kamiński [1] et al. [1]: Author of "Emacs: The macOS Bug" (<https://xlii.space/eng/emacs-the-macos-bug/ https://xlii.space/eng/emacs-the-macos-bug/>), which surfaced on HN some time ago.

BoingBoomTschak 2mo ago
Well, once MacPorts (https://ports.macports.org/port/emacs https://ports.macports.org/port/emacs) has it!
- mcookly 2mo ago
  Agreed! I've been building from source for now, and I can't wait to return to the MacPorts version as soon as it is available.
- rickstanley 2mo ago
  So many choices! Emacs-plus from brew, Macports and https://emacsformacosx.com https://emacsformacosx.com, I wonder how they differ from one another. As someone who wants vanilla experience, should I get from emacsformacosx.com?
  - BoingBoomTschak 2mo ago
    In my experience, you want "emacs-app", which is just upstream emacs compiled with Aqua support (https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/blob/81b99bcf7c59b532954aff6b6bb5c77eb23ba754/editors/emacs/Portfile#L266 https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/blob/81b99bcf7c59...) to avoid going through XQuartz.
znpy 2mo ago
i usually get my emacs from https://emacsformacos.com/ https://emacsformacos.com/ but it seems to be stuck on version 30.2 :(
- 2mo ago

jmclnx 2mo ago

Maybe Emacs 31.1 will be able to use OpenBSD's RCS Utilities. One can hope :) To use RCS with Emacs on OpenBSD, you need to install GNU's version of RCS (grcs). Congratulations to the team.