Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving

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• Hacker News
• Reading Rahul's post I got excited to build Emacs 31 from source, but reality occurred and I decided to wait for the release. I also like his articles on setting up Emacs.

  I don't care what tools other developers use but in January I made my two dev Macs 'VSCode free' and use Emacs for everything. Feels better!

  For decades I would spend tons of time experimenting with my Emacs setups but in the last few years I have been shifting to more out of the box experiences. I did write my own agentic coding platform in Emacs Lisp but I keep that separate from .emacs and .emacs.d

  by mark_l_watson
• I'm happy to see these improvements. One thing that has always been annoying with Emacs is how much configuration is required to get a modern editor going. Things like Doom Emacs, and Spacemacs try to solve that problem, but both feel far removed from vanilla emacs. I wish Emacs came with several presets so with a single line, you could transform the editor to different base points. For example, most devs want treesitter highlighting and LSP enabled by default. Why not have a preset like (preset-base-ide-1), so we don't need 200 lines of configuration before we can function? Instead we could build off of a much closer starting point.
  by xedrac
• > Tree-sitter that just works

  Hallelujah and thank you, sweet little baby Jesus. Now I can get rid of this bullshit from my dotfiles:

      rm -rf ~/.emacs.d/tree-sitter
      mkdir -p ~/.emacs.d/tree-sitter
      set _plat = windows
      if ( `uname` == Linux ) set _plat = linux
      if ( `uname` == Darwin ) set _plat = apple
      set _arch = x86
      if ( `arch` == arm64) set _arch = aarch64
      gh release -R emacs-tree-sitter/tree-sitter-langs download -p "*${_arch}*${_plat}*"
      tar -C ~/.emacs.d/tree-sitter --transform 's/^\(.*\.\(so\|dylib\|dll\)\)/libtree-sitter-\1/' -xzf tree-sitter-grammars*.tar.gz
      rm tree-sitter-grammars*.tar.gz
  

  That's csh, BTW, just like the Founding Fathers intended.
  by xenophonf
• If you do any kind of serious work, you need a text editor. Emacs is still one of the best around. It's fast. It's configurable. And it's under your control. You won't suddenly find your text editor "upgraded" with tons of new features you never asked for. It's all opt-in.
  by jlouis
• Systems like Emacs that are hyper-configurable via a text file seem tailor made for modern LLM's. If you've got a little bit of Emacs experience but bounced off of it because the learning curve was too steep I highly recommend diving back in with your agent. Agents are really good at setting up and maintaining your .emacs/init.el.
  by bryanlarsen
• This stuff all looks great, I can't wait to upgrade to 31 and then forget about all of it and just keep using Emacs the same way I have been for the past 20 years, /again/
  by gentooflux
• "Is anyone still using emacs?"

  Yes. I had to briefly visit the world of VSCode during a period of time when it had better AI integration than emacs did, but since I got Claude working well inside of emacs I've returned to 100% emacs. There just isn't anything like the old editors, built in the 80x24 terminal era, for getting huge swathes of code on your screen at once. I run a standard widescreen monitor with three vertical windows for emacs, each of which I often will break into two frames, so I can have up to six contexts active at once. I rarely do, but I frequently have 2 and 3. That's my entire 4K screen, full of code, usefully full of code. I'm not an IDE hater but they do put an awful lot of stuff on the screen that on a proportional basis I'm just not using as much as I use the code editor.

  I had been getting somewhat nervous about emacs' long term prospects about 10 years ago. I would read the release notes for major versions and generally not be particularly excited about anything. Somewhere around treesitter something seems to have revitalized the project. It may well have been treesitter that revitalized it overall. You end up with a lot more wood behind fewer arrows when the project is able to put more work into generally-useful tools rather than every single language community maintaining their own separate mode for each language.

  Now I am more excited about the major releases; for instance term issues are an issue for me with the aforementioned Claude integration. Not enough to stop me, but annoying. At the risk of saying something inflammatory to emacs fans, I feel like emacs is catching up to everything else better now... but it is catching up. It's getting easier to recommend it again as something you may want to seriously consider as a power-tool editor and not just something I used because I had 15 years of finger-experience with it and no significant reason to change. AI has eaten a lot of the IDE tools for me and you can type into a text box in emacs as well as you can anything else.

  I still occasionally bring up VSCode now to use the debugger, I still don't feel like I have as nice an experience with that as I do with emacs, but my debugging habits have always been able to deal with doing something a little extra to do a debugging session. By its very nature, you're committing some time to the process just to do the debugging itself, no matter how slick the UI for it may be, so a bit of overhead isn't so bad.

  by jerf
• "Is anyone still using emacs?"

  Yes, 34 years and no plans to switch.

  Emacs cursor movement keystrokes are quite widely supported elsewhere too which use GNU readline or implement at least subset themselves.

  Those work well also besides shells with Chromium/Chrome/Safari etc. many browsers input fields (address bar and text area). Cisco IOS, Juniper Junos, Netscreen load balancers too etc. IMHO makes jumping around CLI much much convenient and faster than moving hand to reach cursor keys.

  My only gripe is that Firefox and its derivatives it doesn't work any more. Long time ago it did work. And I have no idea why feature was dropped some rewrite.

  e: s/deadline/readline/g

  by mesrik