EmacsNews

This Week in Emacs

Packages & Tools: A busy week for new MELPA arrivals and community-built tooling.

Chai 2.1 lands with expanded capabilities: The 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 workflow inside Emacs, this is a credible alternative to tools like Readwise.

magit-standup and vdiff-magit hit MELPA: Two Magit-adjacent packages appeared in the MELPA new packages feed this week. magit-standup collects recent git commits to help compile standup notes — a small but practical tool for anyone doing daily standups who already lives in Magit. vdiff-magit brings Magit integration to vdiff, a diff package that renders differences side-by-side directly in Emacs buffers rather than a separate window. If you've found Ediff's window management disorienting, vdiff-magit is worth a look.

elmacro appears on MELPA: elmacro, which converts recorded keyboard macros into readable Elisp, showed up as a new MELPA listing this week. It's a useful bridge for Emacs users who record macros habitually but want to move toward writing proper Elisp functions — it makes that transition considerably less intimidating.

Java and Maven tooling discussion: A developer is building a zero-config LSP setup for Java and Maven and inviting community input. Java support in Emacs has historically required significant configuration effort, so a zero-config approach would be a meaningful improvement. Worth following if that's your stack.

Microsoft 365 mail in mu4e via OAuth: An interesting thread showed how to pipe Outlook mail into mu4e using an existing Microsoft 365 login. For people in corporate Microsoft environments who want to read email in Emacs, authentication is often the missing piece — this thread addresses it directly.

Org Mode: A rich week across the Org ecosystem, with new tooling, a notable iOS app launch, and parser experiments.

Orger arrives on the iOS App Store: Orger, an Org-mode planner for iOS, is now publicly available. Mobile Org access has always been a weak point in the ecosystem, and a native iOS app that handles Org files properly is a meaningful step forward. Whether it integrates cleanly with your existing Org setup will depend on configuration, but it's worth watching.

D2 diagrams inside Emacs: Both Irreal and a Reddit thread highlighted D2 diagram integration for Emacs. D2 is a diagram scripting language, and being able to embed and render diagrams inside Org documents fits naturally into technical writing and documentation workflows.

org-rich-yank is back on MELPA: org-rich-yank — which pastes code into Org buffers with proper markup and a link back to its source — reappears as a MELPA listing. If you regularly pull code snippets into Org notes or documentation, this is a small but high-value addition.

org-roam-stats: a knowledge dashboard: org-roam-stats appeared on MELPA, offering a dashboard for org-roam users. For people running large note databases, visibility into your own note-taking patterns — which nodes are most connected, how the graph is growing — adds a useful reflective layer.

OrgWebAlchemy — parsing Org outside Emacs: A Reddit post described OrgWebAlchemy, a project that parses Org mode using Parsing Expression Grammars in Guile Scheme and converts the result to HTML. This is niche but interesting — it demonstrates that Org can function as a portable document format independent of Emacs, and that community interest in that direction is real.

Supertag V2 — rebuilding a personal note system: A writeup on Supertag V2 shared lessons from rebuilding a custom Org-based note-taking system from scratch. For anyone designing their own Org workflow, the reflections on what worked and what didn't are worth reading.

Switching from Obsidian to Org-mode: A popular thread on migrating from Obsidian to Org-mode — focusing on file tagging strategies — generated substantial community discussion. A useful reference for anyone currently mid-migration.

Development & Elisp: Tree-sitter, package managers, and performance were all active topics this week.

Pinned tree-sitter grammars via Nix flake: A Reddit post introduced an emacs-treesit-grammars Nix flake that pins specific tree-sitter grammar versions for use with Emacs's built-in treesit. Tree-sitter grammar binaries can break silently across version upgrades, and Nix handles pinning them reproducibly. If you're on NixOS or using Nix for configuration management, this is directly actionable.

Guix vs Nix for Emacs users: A community discussion compared Guix and Nix from an Emacs-user perspective. Both have become common choices for managing Emacs and its dependencies reproducibly, and the thread surfaced concrete tradeoffs around package availability, Elisp integration, and community size.

Long lines performance: Irreal highlighted ongoing work on improving Emacs performance with long lines — a practical issue for anyone who regularly opens minified files, certain data formats, or log files they don't control.

eglot vs lsp-mode discussion: The eglot vs lsp-mode debate resurfaced this week, widened to include etags and grep as legitimate alternatives. Worth reading if you're revisiting your code navigation setup — the thread reflects a growing view that simpler tools are fast enough for many workflows.

Community & News: Notable releases and upcoming events.

spacious-padding 0.9.0: Protesilaos Stavrou released spacious-padding version 0.9.0, his package for adding padding to Emacs UI elements. A steady release from one of the ecosystem's most prolific contributors.

sxhkdrc-mode 1.3.0: Prot also released sxhkdrc-mode 1.3.0, a mode for editing sxhkd keybinding configuration files — useful for those using sxhkd as part of a tiling window manager setup alongside Emacs.

Emacs live: Org LaTeX export — 2026-10-02: Protesilaos is joining Sacha Chua and Pedro for a live session on 2026-10-02 focused on Org LaTeX export. If academic writing, technical publishing, or LaTeX workflows are part of your Emacs life, this is one to catch or watch afterwards.

Sacha Chua's weekly news roundup: The 2026-09-21 Emacs news is out — a comprehensive link roundup for anything I may have missed here.

presence.el — status and messaging inside Emacs: A Hacker News submission for presence.el, which adds online status and simple messaging to Emacs. Early and experimental, but an interesting demonstration of Emacs as a communication platform.

Emacs 31.1 on Windows — false positive AV alerts: A Stack Exchange thread addressed reports of Emacs 31.1 for Windows triggering antivirus alerts. The consensus: this is a false positive common with freshly compiled Windows binaries, not actual malware. Worth knowing if you support Windows Emacs users.

Prot's denote find-file tip: Protesilaos shared a tip on finding files within the denote-directory — a small workflow improvement for Denote users.

Deep Dive

The Org Ecosystem Keeps Expanding Outward

What strikes me most looking at this week's content is how much energy is flowing into the Org-mode ecosystem — and how much of it is pushing outward, beyond Emacs itself.

The arrival of Orger on the iOS App Store is a good example of this. Mobile has always been Org's weak point — syncing files is straightforward enough, but actually working with them on a phone has required workarounds. A native iOS app that treats Org files properly is a meaningful step toward Org functioning as a genuinely cross-platform format rather than an Emacs-local one. Combined with OrgWebAlchemy — which implements an Org parser in Guile Scheme entirely outside Emacs — it suggests a real, if quiet, movement to establish Org as a portable document format that doesn't depend on Emacs to be useful.

This matters for everyday Emacs users because it strengthens the case for investing in Org-based workflows. If your notes, tasks, and writing live in Org files, a growing ecosystem of tools that can read and render those files makes that investment more durable.

The LSP and Navigation Question Isn't Settled

The eglot vs lsp-mode vs grep thread reflects something real: eglot's inclusion in Emacs core has reopened a conversation many thought was settled. lsp-mode won on features and configurability for years. But eglot's simplicity, its presence in core, and the improving quality of language servers have made the lighter option genuinely competitive. The thread — alongside the zero-config Java/Maven LSP effort — suggests the community is actively renegotiating what good enough looks like for code intelligence in Emacs. My read: eglot is increasingly the right starting point, with lsp-mode remaining the better choice for users who need its deeper feature set.

Reproducibility Tooling Is Maturing

The pinned tree-sitter grammars Nix flake and the Guix vs Nix discussion both point to a broader maturation in how serious Emacs users manage their environments. Grammar pinning in particular solves a concrete problem: upgrading a tree-sitter grammar and having syntax highlighting or structural editing break without warning. The Nix flake approach handles this cleanly. It's a niche solution, but for developers who've adopted Nix-based Emacs configurations, it fills a real gap.

Small Tools, Real Value

I keep coming back to magit-standup and elmacro as examples of a healthy pattern in the Emacs ecosystem: small, sharply focused packages that do one thing well. magit-standup doesn't try to be a project management tool — it just makes your daily standup slightly less tedious. elmacro doesn't replace learning Elisp — it meets you where you are and helps you move forward. The MELPA new packages feed regularly surfaces tools like these, and I think they deserve more attention than larger, higher-profile releases. Sometimes the thing that changes your daily workflow isn't a new framework — it's a small package that solves exactly one problem you have every morning.