EmacsNews

This Week in Emacs

Packages & Tools: New arrivals and session management get a spotlight

It'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 build-and-run cycle. Neither has extensive documentation yet, so treat these as packages to explore rather than drop straight into a production config.

On the more mature end, easysession.el hit version 1.3.0, and if you haven't looked at this package, it's worth your attention. It positions itself as a replacement for desktop.el, handling not just buffers but tab-bar state, Dired windows, narrowing, indirect buffers, Magit buffers, and scratch buffers — the full picture of a working session. For anyone who regularly loses context when restarting Emacs, this is the kind of tool that changes your daily rhythm.

Also worth noting: gaudy-cl brings semantic font-locking to Common Lisp, which for Lispers is a meaningful quality-of-life improvement — visually distinguishing variables, functions, macros, and special forms makes navigating CL code considerably easier.

LSP diagnostic icons in the gutter generated some discussion this week, with users sharing configurations for icon-based diagnostics in the fringe alongside lsp-mode. It's a cosmetic change with real navigational value, and the thread is worth reading if you want more visual feedback from your language server. kirigami.el 1.2.0 continues to develop its unified folding interface — normalising folding behaviour across different major modes, which is exactly the kind of ergonomic consistency Emacs often lacks out of the box.

There's also a new terminal emulator to watch: el-be-back. Yes, another one — but the Emacs terminal space remains active, and competition here is healthy. Separately, vterm and Ghostty compatibility came up, relevant for anyone who has switched to Ghostty as their system terminal.

Org Mode: Mobile, Android, and the ecosystem beyond the desktop

The most notable Org news this week is mobile. Two separate projects surfaced: Org Mobile, a new Android app built for Org-mode workflows, and Grove, another Android app targeting note-taking and task management with Org compatibility. The mobile gap has always been one of Org's real friction points, and two independent projects appearing in the same week suggests genuine momentum. Both appear to be early-stage, so calibrate expectations accordingly — but it's encouraging to see energy here.

On the reading and focus front, a practical guide to using Eww and Elfeed for distraction-free reading is a good reminder that RSS and web browsing can live entirely inside Emacs with a bit of configuration. A thread on achieving a satisfying writing setup in Org-mode is also worth reading if you use Emacs for long-form writing — the discussion covers visual-line-mode, fonts, margins, and export pipelines with practical detail.

The Org-mode PDF quicksheet in PEL is a handy keyboard-shortcut reference for anyone who doesn't want to dig through documentation.

Also notable: an SVG weekly calendar backed by Org files, with mouse and keyboard support and an optional day strip for Org Agenda. It's a visually striking take on the calendar problem and worth a look if you spend a lot of time in Org Agenda. There's also an Org Agenda desktop widget — bringing your agenda out of Emacs and onto the desktop itself.

Configuration & Workflows: Organising your init and fine-tuning the setup

Config organisation was a theme this week. Irreal covered the topic of how to structure an Emacs config, and a separate post from andros.dev goes into personal config organisation in detail. Both are worth reading if your init file has grown unwieldy. There's no single right answer to structuring a config as it scales, but seeing different approaches is always useful.

Startup time remains a perennial concern. A guide to deferred loading with use-package appeared this week alongside a thread on measuring startup time more accurately than emacs-init-time alone allows. These two make a natural pairing: measure first, then defer where it actually helps.

For LaTeX users, a thread on Emacs LaTeX setup and a post on improving Org table styling with tabularray are both worth bookmarking. AUCTeX configuration and the Org-to-LaTeX export pipeline remain a deep area, and the community keeps refining the path.

Dired got some attention too — both a Hacker News post on fixing Dired defaults and a practical tweaks thread offer useful snippets for making Dired less frustrating out of the box.

Development & Elisp: Emacs 31 features and tooling notes

Protesilaos Stavrou published a video and writeup on completion-preview-mode and the Completions buffer in Emacs 31, which is timely — this is one of the more significant features in the upcoming release, offering inline completion previews without requiring a third-party package. If you're tracking Emacs 31, Prot's explanation is the clearest I've seen.

There's also a community report of a crash fix in Emacs 31.1 — specifically in in-buffer completion, where exit-minibuffer was being called outside a minibuffer context. Good to see these edge cases being caught ahead of release.

Tree-sitter on Apple Silicon got some attention with a workaround for grammar detection issues on M1 Max. If you're on macOS with an M-series chip and have hit mysterious tree-sitter failures, that thread is worth checking. A new markdown-ts-appear package also appeared on Hacker News, offering rendered Markdown with the source revealed at point in Emacs 31 — a neat trick that tree-sitter makes possible.

Community & News: Meetups, distributions, and the state of things

The Emacs ATX meetup happened this week in Austin — local Emacs groups remain alive and well. Wakib-emacs v2 was released — this is the "Emacs for the rest of us" distribution aimed at more conventional key-binding expectations, and a v2 release suggests ongoing development commitment.

A post on Emacs security settings that might silently compromise your system is worth reading regardless of how confident you feel about your config — some defaults and common patterns are worth auditing. An epub-reader package also appeared, handling reflow and CJK line-breaking properly — a more robust alternative to existing EPUB solutions.

Finally, the ellm plain-text LLM agent appeared this week — LLM integration in Emacs continues to proliferate, and a plain-text approach has obvious appeal for Org users. And Pimacs — an Emacs UI for Pi (presumably Raspberry Pi) — is an interesting niche project that landed on Hacker News.

Deep Dive

The Mobile Moment and What It Signals

The emergence of two separate Android Org-mode apps in a single week — Org Mobile and Grove — is worth pausing on. The mobile problem has been Org's persistent weak point for years. MobileOrg exists but has been largely stagnant, and most serious Org users have landed on workarounds: syncing plain text files, using Beorg on iOS, or simply accepting the gap. Two independent projects targeting Android in the same week isn't coincidence — it reflects a broader pattern of the Emacs ecosystem maturing around its weakest points.

This connects to a wider theme worth noting: the Emacs ecosystem is increasingly filling in the edges. The SVG weekly calendar backed by Org files, the Org Agenda desktop widget, and the mobile apps all reflect the same impulse — making Org's data visible and accessible beyond the Emacs frame itself. Emacs has long been exceptional at capturing and organising information but less good at surfacing it at the right moment, in the right place. These projects are trying to close that gap.

Emacs 31 Is Taking Shape

Prot's deep-dive into completion-preview-mode is a useful checkpoint on where Emacs 31 stands. The completion story in Emacs has evolved considerably — from the Vertico/Corfu/Consult ecosystem becoming the de facto standard for many users, to core changes that start bringing some of that capability into vanilla Emacs. completion-preview-mode offering inline previews without requiring Corfu is meaningful for users who prefer a leaner setup, and it signals that core developers are paying attention to what third-party packages have demonstrated is valuable.

The crash fix in in-buffer completion being caught and reported publicly is a good sign for the health of Emacs 31's development process — community members are actively testing pre-release builds and feeding back. The tree-sitter grammar detection issue on M1 is a reminder that macOS integration still has rough edges, but workarounds exist and the community is documenting them.

Configuration as Craft

The parallel threads on config organisation this week — Irreal's take and the andros.dev post — reflect something real about where many long-term Emacs users find themselves. The initial excitement of building a config gives way to maintenance burden as years of accumulated snippets, package configs, and workarounds pile up. There's a reason these posts resonate: almost everyone with a multi-year Emacs config has a section they're quietly embarrassed about.

The pairing of the deferred loading guide with the accurate startup timing post is particularly useful. It's easy to add :defer t everywhere without understanding what you're actually gaining. Measuring before and after gives you ground truth, and these two resources together make a practical workflow: establish a baseline, then defer with intention. That kind of evidence-based approach is what separates good config practice from superstition — and it's the kind of thing the Emacs community is genuinely good at producing.