EmacsNews

This Week in Emacs

Packages & Tools: package-load-indicator shows you which packages are loading during init as it happens. If you've ever sat through a slow startup wondering what Emacs was doing, or needed to work out the order in which things initialise, it gives you immediate visual feedback. For email, mu4e-send-later adds scheduled sending to mu4e. You can draft a message now and have it go out at a sensible hour.

hutch is a new local code review interface for Magit. It's aimed at developers who want lightweight review tooling without leaving Emacs. stripspace.el 1.0.6 removes trailing whitespace automatically. It can preserve the cursor column and limit cleanup to buffers that started out clean, which is more careful than a plain before-save-hook. supersonic.el 0.6.0, a Subsonic music player client, added UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) support, so it can now reach more speakers and devices.

The Eglot debate came up again. Someone who has used Emacs for decades without LSP or Eglot asked what they might be missing by skipping Language Server Protocol tooling. The thread is useful whichever side you're on, and it complements the eglot-vs-lsp-mode conversation I've been tracking. The community's short answer: it depends heavily on your language ecosystem.

The biggest community-wide story is the Reddit API shutdown on November 13th, which will cut off Reddit access from within Emacs entirely. If you follow Reddit feeds in elfeed or use any package that talks to the Reddit API, expect it to stop working. It's worth deciding now where you'll follow Emacs discussion afterwards. More in the deep-dive.

Org Mode: excali-mode shipped two releases this week. 0.2.0 introduced a diagram DSL (a small domain-specific language for describing diagrams) with explicit placement and Org Babel support. 0.3.0 presents it as an Org-mode whiteboard inside Emacs. With Babel support, diagrams live in ordinary Org code blocks and can be regenerated from within the document, which suits writers and researchers working in literate documents. I noted excali-mode's arrival last week as part of the canvas storyline.

The GitHub Org rendering problem I flagged last week is still generating discussion, and a fresh thread confirms the issue is widespread. As far as the community can tell, GitHub hasn't fixed it. If you share .org files publicly, keep an exported fallback ready.

A thread on deeper layers of Org-mode laziness explains how Org's lazy loading and folding work. It's worth a careful read if you work with large Org files.

Configuration & Workflows: A well-received post on configuring the Emacs UI for better latency and perceived responsiveness covers UI-level settings such as inhibit-compacting-font-caches, idle timers, and frame parameters. It deals with in-session responsiveness rather than startup time. Emacs can start quickly and still feel sluggish in use, and this post addresses that problem directly.

persp-mode-tab-bar adds a tab bar to persp-mode and Doom workspaces. You get visual workspace indicators without changing how you manage sessions. Doom users trying to customise completion colours should know about a Doom Themes issue that overrides completions-highlight. It may explain face changes that don't seem to take effect.

If you build from master, a thread on building Emacs 32 from source collects advice on which configure options are worth enabling, particularly for the new canvas and display features.

Development & Elisp: A community member fixed a tree-sitter syntax highlighting bug in indirect buffers that the maintainers had declined to address. If you use indirect buffers with tree-sitter modes, for narrowing, multi-mode editing, or Org src blocks, this fix is worth a look.

The LLM library reached version 0.33.0. Its headline feature is "decisions", a structured way for LLM-backed packages to present choices to the user. Since many Emacs AI tools build on this library, its API changes reach well beyond the library itself.

M-x Machina is a new workspace for running and observing autonomous coding agents inside Emacs, rather than a completion tool. It's early days.

There's progress on display in Emacs 32 too. The master branch now supports scaling for underline, overline, and similar face attributes. Separately, a small change in xdisp.c, part of Emacs's display code, cut allocations by roughly 42% in boxed-text workloads. Low-level improvements like this benefit everyone, especially in heavily fontified buffers.

Also new on MELPA: dired-gitignore, a minor mode that hides gitignored files in dired. It's a tidy addition if you navigate projects in dired.

Community & News: Irreal covered "The Future of Emacs", which feels timely given the Reddit news and ongoing AI debates. Irreal's plain text computing piece also prompted someone to resurface Keith Waclena's "Use GNU Emacs" from the University of Chicago Library. It's an underappreciated guide that the community recommended warmly.

Prot announced a spontaneous live stream on denote-data development for October 7th, continuing his open development of the Denote caching layer. He also previewed two upcoming additions to the doric-themes collection, doric-meadow and doric-mountain.

"After nearly 40 years with Emacs, I think I'm ready to move on" drew a lot of discussion, as these posts always do. For the other side, read Jack Baty's "I tried to move my notes out of Emacs. I failed. Again", a candid account of what keeps people here.

Deep Dive

The Reddit deadline matters more than it looks

After November 13th, accessing Reddit from Emacs will become impossible for packages that rely on the API, and RSS-based access appears to be going away too. Losing a feed is inconvenient, but the bigger question is where community conversation goes next.

r/emacs has been an informal town square: a welcoming place to share discoveries, ask questions, and announce packages. The mailing lists, Emacs Stack Exchange, and codelogs like Prot's all remain. Mastodon has been gaining traction in the wider free-software community, but the Emacs presence there is still fragmented. I'll be watching whether this pushes announcements towards Discourse instances, the official lists, or somewhere else.

Against that backdrop, Jack Baty's piece on failing to move his notes out of Emacs is self-aware and funny, but it makes a real point. A mature Emacs setup is costly to leave, and that same investment keeps paying off. This week alone brought scheduled email sending, smarter trailing-whitespace cleanup, UPnP music playback, and a new code review interface.

excali-mode and the canvas story

Two releases in one week, 0.2.0 with Babel integration and 0.3.0 as an explicit Org whiteboard, show a package settling on a clear purpose. Babel support is what lifts it beyond novelty. An embedded image is static, but a diagram defined in an Org code block can be regenerated and exported alongside the document. That fits a literate workflow instead of interrupting it.

This ties into the canvas storyline I've followed since the canvas patch was merged into Emacs 32 in August. The progression from a low-level API, through proof-of-concept packages like canvas-minimap and canvas-browser, to practical tools is moving faster than I expected. excali-mode is the first of these I'd describe as ready for real work rather than demonstration.

The LLM layer matures

The LLM library, maintained by Andrew Hyatt, has become the plumbing for a growing number of AI-related Emacs packages. Version 0.33.0's "decisions" feature lets an LLM present discrete choices back to the user. That's a step towards agent-style interactions that feel native to Emacs rather than bolted on. M-x Machina launched the same week as a dedicated coding agent workspace, which suggests developers are starting to build serious tooling on that foundation. The AI policy debates I covered last week remain unresolved, but the tools keep arriving regardless.