EmacsNews

This Week in Emacs

Packages & Tools: The week's biggest release is VM 9.0.0, a major version of one of Emacs's oldest email clients. VM predates mu4e and notmuch by decades, and a new major version suggests active development, not just maintenance. If you're choosing an Emacs mail client, it deserves a fresh look.

refactor.el is a new package that moves Eglot's code actions, rename, and quickfixes into a standalone interface. Eglot's built-in handling of these features works but is minimal. refactor.el aims to give you more control over the refactoring operations your language server supports. It pairs well with this week's Eglot configuration guides (see Configuration & Workflows).

ghostel 0.58 is the latest release of one of the faster terminal emulators available inside Emacs. supersonic.el v0.7.4 is now on MELPA and adds support for Music Assistant as a backend. bookmark-gt covers bookmark-management gaps that the built-in bookmark system leaves open.

Two new packages target reading:

• wordwise.el shows Kindle-style vocabulary hints above words in a reading buffer. It's useful for language learners or anyone working through dense technical material.
• Readq is an incremental reading tool. Like SuperMemo-style workflows, it lets you gradually extract and review the parts of a text that matter.

Flick is a quick font picker, so you can try a different font without going through set-frame-font. For Evil users, evil-matchit 5.0.0 is a major version of the package that jumps between matching delimiters and tags.

New on MELPA: svelte-mode for Svelte developers, and ethan-wspace, which offers more configurable whitespace handling than the built-in options.

Org Mode: The headline is that a new LaTeX preview system has been merged into Org-mode. LaTeX preview problems came up in this newsletter in both August and September, so this is a welcome change. The post doesn't detail what changed, but community reaction is positive. If you use inline maths or LaTeX fragments in Org, this is the development to follow.

org-semantic adds embedding-based search to Org-mode. Instead of matching exact keywords, it finds notes by similarity of meaning. For large note collections, it offers another way to surface relevant material alongside tools like org-roam.

org-diff-src shows character-level diffs inside Org source blocks without opening Ediff. That's a handy improvement if you iterate on code blocks in literate programming documents.

orgwarrior makes your Org agenda available from the terminal, your phone, and AI clients, while your running Emacs does the actual Org processing. Because it uses your live Emacs as the backend instead of syncing files, it avoids much of the usual sync complexity.

A new iOS Org app also arrived on the App Store. With Orger last month and two Android apps in September, mobile Org users now have several options to choose from.

Configuration & Workflows: Three Eglot guides this week work well as a set:

• James Cherti's guide to configuring Eglot for Python with .dir-locals.el and pylsp shows how to keep per-project language server settings inside the repository, so they travel with the code.
• A post on automatically applying safe Eglot code actions on save.
• A post on auto-formatting code on save with Eglot.

Together they show how to build an Eglot setup that handles routine fixes and formatting automatically.

If you use company-box and have seen it take over your help buffer, this thread discusses the problem and ways to fix it.

Copy-on-write git worktrees explains how to use copy-on-write filesystem features with git worktrees. It pairs naturally with roost, a new package for running coding agents in git worktrees and tmux from Emacs.

A thread on persistent sessions and window restoration collects what people use to save and restore Emacs sessions, from desktop.el to persp-mode to custom solutions. It's a good place to compare approaches before choosing one.

Irreal covered debugging init.el files, a useful refresher if something in your configuration broke after upgrading to Emacs 31.

Development & Elisp: Prot has added AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md files to all his packages to limit how AI coding agents interact with them. It's a concrete, maintainer-level response to AI tooling, and more on it is in the deep-dive below.

flymake-elisp-config, new on MELPA, sets up load-path for Flymake in Emacs Lisp mode. If you write packages and Flymake keeps flagging require calls that should work, this fixes it.

ElNeo is a new Matrix client for Emacs with native end-to-end encryption. Its architecture is modelled on telega. If you use Matrix for team or community chat, it's worth trying.

Prot also announced a live stream on extracting the Modus themes core, part of ongoing restructuring work on themes that many Emacs users rely on every day.

Community & News: EmacsConf 2026 is confirmed, and Prot has announced he'll take part. EmacsConf is the community's annual online conference and usually features some of the year's most interesting packages and workflow ideas. With Reddit access from within Emacs ending on 13 November, as I covered last week, EmacsConf, the mailing lists, and blogs like Prot's codelog are likely to become more important places to follow community news.

For lighter reading, there's Irreal's EMACS-FU post. And grid-table resurfaced, this time highlighting its spreadsheet features inside Emacs: Excel-style keybindings, dynamic arrays, and formulas.

Deep Dive

The LaTeX preview merge: fixing one of Org's rough edges

The most technically important development this week is probably the new LaTeX preview system merged into Org-mode. I've flagged LaTeX preview friction repeatedly. It was a pain point in August, it came up again in September, and it mattered enough that Prot, Sacha Chua, and Pedro planned a live session on Org LaTeX export at the time.

This week's community posts don't explain what has changed, so I won't guess at specifics. The approach is clear, though. The problem is being fixed inside Org itself instead of being left for users to work around in their own configurations. If LaTeX notation is part of your daily writing, whether for maths, physics, or anything else, follow this as it reaches Org releases.

The AI layer thickens, and Prot draws a line

The AI storyline became more concrete this week. Several new tools and posts appeared:

• varde for managing AI coding agent sessions
• roost for running agents in git worktrees and tmux
• an enthusiastic personal account of LLM-assisted Emacs configuration

Alongside all this, Prot added AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md files to all his packages. These files tell AI agents explicitly what they may and may not do with his code.

This is less a philosophical statement than a maintainer setting boundaries around his own work. It's also a model other package authors could adopt with little effort.

The tension is real. Tools like roost make it easy to point agents at a codebase. Meanwhile, maintainers have little visibility into how agents have used or changed their code before a patch arrives. Prot's approach is one practical answer. The broader ELPA/GNU debate about AI-generated contributions, which I covered last week, remains unresolved, and this week's developments suggest it won't settle quietly.

Mobile Org now has real options

The mobile Org picture has changed faster than I expected. I noted last month that Orger had arrived on iOS. This week another iOS app landed, and orgwarrior takes a different route entirely. It uses your running Emacs as a live backend instead of syncing files.

That's three distinct approaches to the same problem. Mobile used to be Org's obvious weak spot. Now the question is which tradeoffs suit you. orgwarrior deserves particular attention if you have a machine running Emacs that your phone can reach. It gives you agenda access without file syncing, which has always been the most awkward part of using Org on a phone.