Emacs 31.1 Arrives: The End of an Era and a Handful of Quality-of-Life Wins
What's New in Emacs 31.1?
Emacs 31.1 is out, and while it lacks a single headline feature, it delivers a suite of small but meaningful improvements. The release finally removes the deprecated unexec dumper, marking the end of an era after years of reliance on the portable dumper. A new user-lisp directory feature simplifies package management, while enhancements to minibuffer completions, window layout rotation, and tree-sitter grammar installation polish the daily experience. The editor also gains TTY child frame support and improved mouse handling in terminals.
The unexec dumper is finally gone for good. The end of an era.
- kstrauser
Between treesitter and eglot (read: LSP), there’s not much from other editors I miss when using Emacs. I’ve been on a Zed kick for a while but I hear the call of the GNU. This may be the week I declare .emacs bankruptcy and start again with a clean setup, seeing how much of my old third-party config I can replace with builtins.
- rtpg
Bit of a tangent but does anyone have good learning materials on doing things with Emacs Lisp beyond just staring at the source of packages?
I have the Mastering Emacs book and read through most of it, which gives me a good idea for some stuff... but I really would like to have good ideas for the right kind of design patterns for common things.
- bpye
Is there a better way to get started with Emacs than the built in tutorial? I've tried a couple times (due to increasing annoyance with VS Code), but have struggled to get to a point where I feel productive enough.
- wmedrano
I'm excited for the user-lisp/ changes. It'll let me create custom lightweight packages and have them lazily loaded by just sprinkling ;;;###autoload over interactive commands and modes.
- CodeCompost
The section under "User Lisp Directory" seems incomplete. I was expecting a second paragraph.