EmacsNews

This Week in Emacs

Packages & Tools

Several 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 is worth a look. The Reddit thread has useful early impressions.

Two tab-related packages also landed this week. modern-tab gives Emacs's tab bar a cleaner look, while auto-tab-groups — now on MELPA — automatically opens and closes tab groups in response to your commands. Both are practical improvements for anyone using tab-bar-mode as a workspace organiser.

aperture is a new selection-preview package inspired by Neovim's Telescope. It's early, but the core idea — previewing selections in context — is something Vertico and Consult users have wanted for a while.

For anyone dealing with slow completions, the most immediately useful piece this week is James Cherti's guide on why Consult async searches feel sluggish and what to do about it. The culprit is usually input throttling and async gap settings — and the fixes are straightforward config changes that anyone using consult-ripgrep or consult-fd can apply right away. It surfaced on both Lobsters and the Emacs subreddit, which suggests it's a widespread pain point.

buffer-terminator quietly solves a real problem: automatically closing stale buffers to reduce clutter and keep things running smoothly. If your buffer list tends to sprawl by end of day, it's worth a look.

Irreal covered practical guidance on optimising startup with use-package — a recurring topic, but with genuinely useful detail on :defer and lazy-loading strategies.

Org Mode

Several interesting Org-related tools appeared this week. org-table-widget caught my eye: it makes Org tables significantly easier to read without changing edit behaviour — a clean separation of display and underlying plain text that keeps Org feeling fresh without compromising its format.

org-grid is a new tool for laying out Org content in grid structures, useful for dashboards and structured notes. org-kanban landed on MELPA, implementing kanban boards as Org dynamic blocks — a natural fit for existing Org workflows that doesn't require a separate application.

Three more new MELPA packages round out the Org news: org-roam-gt brings improvements to org-roam, org-bookmarks adds bookmark management within Org, and org-timegrid now works on Android Emacs — a small but meaningful milestone for mobile users.

There was also a lively community discussion on whether people are exporting from Org to LaTeX or switching to Typst. Opinion is split: Typst is gaining traction for documents that don't need the full LaTeX ecosystem, while LaTeX remains the standard for academic and scientific work.

Development & Elisp

The most ambitious project this week is rau — a Wayland window manager written in pure Elisp. It's firmly in experimental territory rather than daily-driver material, but it's a striking demonstration of how far Elisp can reach into system-level territory.

canvas-minimap is a pixel-based minimap built on Emacs 32's new canvas image type — a concrete example of the canvas API enabling UI possibilities that simply weren't available before. Worth watching as Emacs 32 sees wider adoption.

compile-angel 1.2.2 was released, improving automatic byte and native compilation of Elisp files. If startup time matters and you haven't tried it, it's one of the more impactful performance tools currently available.

el-patch also appeared in the MELPA new packages feed — useful for customising third-party packages without forking them.

Configuration & Workflows

A community heads-up worth sharing: doomemacs.com is not affiliated with the Doom Emacs project. The official home remains GitHub. Worth knowing if you direct newcomers anywhere.

On themes: Prot's Doric themes received coverage from Irreal, Vulkanite — 26 atmospheric dark variants with Kanagawa-inspired aesthetics — is attracting interest, and Modus-zenburn combines the accessibility-focused Modus framework with the classic Zenburn palette.

Community & News

The headline story this week is Emacs Bedrock 2.0. Bedrock is a deliberately minimal starter configuration — enough structure to be productive without hiding what Emacs actually is. Version 2.0 is a significant update, and the Reddit discussion shows genuine enthusiasm. For anyone who finds Doom or Spacemacs overwhelming but wants more than a blank init.el, it's worth a serious look.

The September 2026 Emacs meetup recap video is available for anyone who missed the live session.

Sacha Chua's weekly Emacs news is out as always — her comprehensive roundup runs alongside this one.

Deep Dive

The Texture of a Busy Week

Looking across this week's activity, much of it clusters around two persistent themes: making things faster, and making things more readable. Neither is glamorous, but both determine whether Emacs feels like a joy or a friction point on any given afternoon.

The Consult async performance guide is a good example of the first. Consult has become the go-to completion framework for users who've moved on from Helm or Ivy, but its async search commands have a reputation for feeling sluggish in large projects. The issue isn't ripgrep or fd — those tools are fast. The bottleneck is usually how Emacs throttles and batches results, specifically the consult-async-input-throttle and consult-async-refresh-delay settings. Knowing where the slowdown actually lives is what turns a frustrating experience into a smooth one, and the fixes are just config changes.

On readability, org-table-widget reflects a broader pattern I've noticed: people are increasingly unwilling to accept that plain-text files have to look plain. Aesthetic and ergonomic expectations for Emacs have risen, and packages that add visual clarity without touching the underlying text format are meeting a real demand.

Bedrock 2.0 deserves more than a passing mention. The starter configuration landscape has long been dominated by Doom and Spacemacs — comprehensive, opinionated, and occasionally overwhelming. Bedrock has always taken a different position: give newcomers just enough to be productive without obscuring how Emacs works. Version 2.0 suggests this philosophy has staying power, and the community response indicates real appetite for a middle path between vanilla Emacs and a full distribution. As Emacs itself has improved — better defaults, more built-in functionality — the case for minimal starters has only grown stronger.

The appearance of rau and canvas-minimap in the same week feels like a signal about where Emacs 32's new capabilities are pointing. The canvas image type is enabling UI experiments that weren't previously possible, and the window manager project — however impractical — shows the community's appetite for pushing Emacs into new territory is undiminished. maak.el fits the same pattern: rather than wrapping shell tools, it treats Emacs as the natural home for build automation logic. These projects share a vision of Emacs not just as an editor but as a computing environment — an idea that's been the community's north star for decades, and shows no sign of fading.