Newsletter Archive
Every issue of EmacsNews Weekly, the round-up of what's new in the Emacs world, published every Friday.
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The package management conversation resurfaced this week with a Reddit thread comparing package-vc, elpaca, and straight.el. It's a perennially useful discussion for anyone setting up a fresh config — package-vc has matured considerably as a built-in option, and the thread gives a clear picture…
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25 Sep 2026
47 articlesThe Chai package — which turns your Org-based book library into something you can read, highlight, search, and query with AI — has reached version 2.1. The key detail is note portability: highlights and annotations live in Org files you own, not a proprietary silo. For anyone building a reading…
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18 Sep 2026
40 articlesThe new Typewriter package caught my attention this week — a writing-focused mode that gives Emacs a distraction-free, centred writing experience. It joins a growing set of packages aimed at writers and note-takers who want Emacs to feel less like a code editor and more like a focused…
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11 Sep 2026
51 articlesSeveral new packages worth paying attention to arrived this week. maak.el is generating genuine interest — a Lisp-native command runner for project automation that integrates directly with Emacs and is written in Scheme. If you've found Makefiles an awkward fit for a Lisp-based environment, this…
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04 Sep 2026
66 articlesIt's been a solid week for new packages landing on MELPA. Two notable additions: org-draw brings drawing capabilities into Org buffers — useful for anyone who wants to sketch diagrams without leaving their notes — and schalu-compile, a compilation workflow tool aimed at smoothing out the…
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28 Aug 2026
55 articlesThe headline this week is clear: Emacs 31.1 has been officially released. Windows binaries and Android builds followed the source release within days — a sign that cross-platform packaging has matured. Irreal covered the release briefly, and Mickey Petersen at Mastering Emacs has published the…
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21 Aug 2026
55 articlesThe biggest story this week is the impending release of Emacs 31.1. As noted by Irreal and confirmed via the emacs-devel mailing list, Release Candidate 1 is now out, with the HISTORY file indicating a target release date of 2026-08-24. If you're running a recent Emacs build, now is the time to…
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14 Aug 2026
52 articlesgraph-fa2 0.2.3 has landed on MELPA, offering a pure-elisp ForceAtlas2 graph layout engine that runs in the background. It's a niche tool, but an impressive one for anyone doing graph visualisation inside Emacs. More immediately practical is runbox.el, which tackles a long-standing pain point:…
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07 Aug 2026
49 articlesA handful of interesting new packages and updates landed this week. The most practically useful addition for data scientists and statisticians is r-ts-mode hitting MELPA — a tree-sitter-backed major mode for R. If you work with R inside Emacs, this is worth trying over the older ess-r-mode:…
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31 Jul 2026
39 articlesThe biggest headline this week is Flycheck 38, which arrives with built-in Eglot support, inline diagnostics, and a native LSP client. For anyone doing serious development in Emacs, this is a meaningful release. Flycheck has long been the standard syntax-checking framework, and tighter Eglot…
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