EmacsNews

This Week in Emacs

Packages & Tools: A 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: tree-sitter modes generally offer more accurate syntax highlighting, better structural editing, and improved performance. Pair it with Eglot for a modern R development environment without leaving your editor.

On the more niche but genuinely delightful end, now-playing.el was announced this week — a remote control interface to the macOS Music app, letting you manage playback and browse your library without leaving Emacs. There's also a Reddit thread with discussion. It's macOS-only and fairly specialised, but a good example of the kind of "why not?" package this community keeps producing.

The bible-gateway package received a substantial update this week, adding touch-typing verse memorisation, reading plans, and a transient menu interface. Whatever your interest in the subject matter, the transient-based UI is worth studying as a pattern for building keyboard-driven menus in your own packages.

MELPA also welcomed consult-gh-forge, a Magit/Forge integration for the consult-gh GitHub browsing package. If you already use consult-gh to search GitHub from within Emacs, this brings Forge's pull request and issue editing workflows into the same interface — a meaningful improvement for developers with heavy GitHub usage. Also new on MELPA: evil-keypad, a modal command dispatch layer for evil-mode users looking for Helix- or Kakoune-style keybinding ergonomics.

Org Mode: Several practical threads are worth your attention this week. An ongoing discussion on handling images in Org workflows covers inline display, managing external image files, and exporting — a perennial pain point with a lot of creative community solutions. If your Org notes involve screenshots or diagrams, the responses are worth browsing.

For anyone using Org-agenda for task management, a post on Ashish Panigrahi's blog walks through surfacing completed tasks from the previous week in agenda views. It's a small but genuinely useful workflow tip for weekly reviews in Org. Someone new to Org also posted an advanced concepts tutorial that the community has engaged with positively — worth pointing newer users towards.

On the friction side, slow LaTeX previews came up on Stack Exchange again. This is a recurring frustration for people doing heavy mathematical writing in Org, and while the answers typically discuss the available rendering backends, it remains genuinely rough in practice. The question of syncing Org files via OneDrive also generated discussion — relevant for anyone in a corporate environment where other sync tools aren't available.

Configuration & Workflows: A dired configuration thread inspired by yazi keymaps is collecting community configs — good reading if you use dired heavily and want to tighten up your file management workflow. The parallel to yazi (the terminal file manager) reflects a clear appetite for bringing snappy, keyboard-driven navigation into Emacs's built-in tools.

According to Irreal, displaying the active clock in your mode line or frame title is a small but satisfying configuration for keeping your current Org clock entry visible at a glance. If you use org-clock for time tracking, not having to switch buffers to check it is a genuine quality-of-life improvement. Irreal also touched on inserting the em dash in Emacs — which sounds trivial but matters if you write prose in Emacs and want to avoid reaching for special character menus.

There's also a doom-on-emacs project from minad on Lobsters — separate from the Doom Emacs distribution, this appears to be an experiment with a particular structural approach to Emacs configuration. Given that minad is the author of vertico, corfu, and consult, it's worth watching.

The grid-table 0.3.0 release deserves mention: this package brings editable tables with horizontal and vertical cell merging to Emacs and Org, addressing a longstanding limitation of Org's built-in table support for complex layouts.

Development & Elisp: A well-written piece on Emacs Lisp macros made the rounds on Lobsters and Reddit this week, attracting substantive discussion. Macro writing sits at the boundary between casual Elisp use and genuinely extending Emacs to fit your thinking — worth reading if you've wanted to go deeper there.

A community member also shared a 4coder-style scope hint implementation — subtle UI annotations that show which scope a closing delimiter belongs to. It's a visual aid common in some modern editors, and it's interesting to see it prototyped in Emacs Lisp.

Community & News: Protesilaos published a new video on the speedbar built-in file explorer in the context of Emacs 31, generating discussion on Reddit. Speedbar has been in Emacs for decades but largely overlooked in favour of third-party sidebars — the renewed attention is worth noting, particularly if Emacs 31 brings improvements to it. Prot also did a live session with linkarzu covering workflow, Org capture, and project management — good viewing if you want to see Emacs used in practice rather than just configured.

The Emacs ATX meetup took place in Austin this week, a reminder that in-person Emacs communities still exist and are worth supporting. Sacha Chua's weekly news compilation is out as usual and remains the most comprehensive link aggregation in the ecosystem.

Deep Dive

The texture of a healthy ecosystem: Looking across this week's activity, what strikes me most isn't any single package or release — it's the range of things people are building and discussing simultaneously. R support via tree-sitter, macOS media control, scope hints borrowed from 4coder, editable merged-cell tables for Org, modal keypad dispatch for evil users. The breadth suggests an ecosystem driven by people solving their own specific problems rather than chasing trends.

Tree-sitter's quiet march continues: The arrival of r-ts-mode on MELPA is the latest in a steady stream of community-contributed tree-sitter major modes filling in language coverage. The pattern is now well-established: someone writes a ts-mode, publishes it to MELPA, and it gradually becomes the default recommendation for that language. If you work in R, Python, Rust, Go, or most other commonly used languages, there's almost certainly a tree-sitter mode worth evaluating by now.

The UI experimentation thread: Several separate developments this week share an underlying impulse — making Emacs feel more visually legible without abandoning its keyboard-first nature. The 4coder scope hints prototype, the imenu-list customisation thread, and the responsive interactive UI experiment all point in the same direction: people are pushing at what's possible when an Emacs buffer is treated as a UI surface. This connects to the renewed interest in speedbar that Prot's video is generating — there's a real question in the community about whether Emacs needs third-party sidebar packages at all, or whether the built-ins can be tuned into something genuinely good.

Org as infrastructure, not just markup: The image handling discussion, the LaTeX preview frustrations, the OneDrive sync thread, and the weekly review workflow post all point to the same reality: for many users, Org-mode is load-bearing infrastructure for their entire knowledge management and task system. The friction points are real and recurring. LaTeX preview performance in particular keeps appearing, and while newer rendering backends have improved things, the experience can still feel rough compared to dedicated LaTeX editors. If this affects you, it's worth checking whether switching to dvisvgm or the native SVG preview pathway helps in your setup.

AI in the workflow: Two threads this week touched on AI tools — someone sharing enthusiasm for ECA (editor code assistant) for agentic coding, and a more reflective post on AI's effect on motivation to develop as a software engineer. That second thread is tangential to Emacs strictly speaking, but it appeared here because this community tends to attract people who care about craft and intentionality in their tooling — the same values that draw people to Emacs in the first place. The tension between "AI makes me more productive" and "AI makes programming feel hollow" is something this community is well-placed to think through carefully.

EWW deserves a second look: The piece on EWW making the rounds on Hacker News is a useful reminder that Emacs's built-in web browser is more capable than most people assume — particularly for reading documentation, browsing text-heavy sites, and staying in a keyboard-driven flow. If you've dismissed it as a toy, it might be worth another look.