It was announced a couple of hours ago, Emacs 29’s branch is now cut from the master branch! This means the emacs-29 branch will from now no longer receive any new feature, but only bug fixes.

So, what’s new with this new major release? I skimmed over the NEWS file, and here are the changes which I find interesting and even exciting for some.

Article updated on December 22nd at 14:05 UTC

Major features

A couple of major improvements will be most likely present, here are the ones that stand out the most for me.

Eglot is now part of Emacs core

During the last couple of years, LSP has given text editors incredible capabilities, giving them IDE-like features relatively easily. Aside from Elisp development, most of the code I write is now done with the help of an LSP server, running along Emacs and analysing my code, suggesting and performing changes and actions for me.

Several integrations of LSP exist for Emacs, such as LSP Mode, Eglot, and lsp-bridge. Among the three, Eglot is now part of Emacs core! No longer do you need to install a package, simply register an LSP server and autocompletion, documentation, error detection, and other features will become available right away!

I must admit I don’t really know Eglot, I personally use LSP Mode, but with this addition to Emacs core, I might attempt the switch.

Tree-Sitter is also part of Emacs core

In case you didn’t know, Emacs’ current syntax highlighting is currently based on a system of regexes. Although it is not the worst thing to use, it’s not the best either, and it can become quite slow on larger files.

Tree-Sitter parses programming languages based into a concrete syntax tree. From there, not only can syntax highlighting can be done at high speed, but a much deeper analysis of the code is possible and actions such as syntax manipulation can also be achieved since the syntax tree itself is available as an object which can be manipulated!

In case you want some more information on Tree-Sitter itself, you can check out the official Tree-Sitter website, or you can even check this talk out given by Tree-Sitter’s creator, Max Brunsfeld.

Well, this is now a native solution in Emacs! Currently, Emacs’ Tree-Sitter supports the current major modes :

• bash-ts-mode
• c-ts-mode
• c++-ts-mode
• csharp-ts-mode
• css-ts-mode
• java-ts-mode
• js-ts-mode
• json-ts-mode
• python-ts-mode
• typescript-ts-mode

Tree-Sitter also holds for now a special status in the new emacs-29 branch since new features can still be added to it, as its merge with the master branch is still recent. So we might see the list of major modes for Emacs get a bit longer yet, especially considering Tree-Sitter tries to make adding new languages relatively easy.

If you can’t wait to test Tree-Sitter, there is already another package available for Emacs you can use right now. Just be aware this is not the same package as the one that got integrated into Emacs.

Install packages from source with package.el

If you use Straight, you might be familiar with installing packages directly from their Git repository. Well, good news, it is now possible to install packages from Git using Emacs’ built-in packaging system package.el! It can be done with the new function package-vc-install, and packages installed that way can be updated with package-vc-update or package-vc-update-all.

On the topic of package.el, there is also the new function package-report-bug which allows Emacs users to report bugs to the developers of a package directly from Emacs! Be aware though, it only works for packages installed through package.el. Since I’m a use-package and straight.el user, there is no package listed when I invoke the command.

Org mode 9.6

As confirmed by one of org-mode maintainers Bastien Guerry on a French-speaking Emacs mailing list, Org 9.6 is set to be part of Emacs 29! There is an official article on this release, which is already available on GNU ELPA!

use-package in Emacs core

It has also been confirmed on the Emacs development mailing list that use-package, an awesome package manager, is set to be part of Emacs 29, although it initially wasn’t included in the emacs-29 branch.

Pure GTK Emacs is here for Wayland!

One of the major issues Emacs had on Linux was its dependency on Xorg when running in GUI mode. When running Xorg, it’s not really an issue, but Wayland has become more and more common during the last years, and even with the existence of XWayland, this became an annoyance.

Well, fear not, for pure GTK Emacs is here! It can now be built Xorg-free and run natively in Wayland!

Be aware though that Wayland is basically the only use-case for pure GTK Emacs. If you don’t use Wayland, Emacs will display a warning message, as it will most likely cause issues if you are running Xorg. In my case, I sometimes see some ghost text when the content of a buffer updates (I still need pure GTK though, since I alternate between Xorg and Wayland).

Compile EmacsLisp files ahead of time

With Emacs 28 came the ability to natively compile EmacsLisp if your Emacs was built with the ability to do so, using GCC’s Just In Time library. This results in quite the impressive boost in performance, which made Emacs much snappier than it was before. The only issue I had was Emacs would only compile its EmacsLisp files when they were loaded for the first time.

This is no longer the case! If you now compile Emacs with --with-native-compilation=aot, Emacs’ native EmacsLisp files will be natively compiled along with Emacs itself! Be aware though, it can be slow on most machines, so the time you save by not compiling these files when launching Emacs for the first time is basically transferred to when compiling Emacs itself. Is it worth your time? In my case, I would say yes, because when I compile Emacs, I’m generally not in a hurry. But in your case? Well, test it out and see for yourself.

Native access to SQLite databases

Emacs can now be built with native support for SQLite and the sqlite3 library. In fact, this is now a default behaviour, since you need to pass --without-sqlite3 to Emacs’ build configuration script in order to prevent it.

This comes with a new sqlite-mode which allows you to explore SQLite databases within Emacs and to interact with them. Check out the sqlite-mode-open-file function!

HaikuOS support

For all three HaikuOS users out there, good news, you now have access to Emacs! (In all seriousness, I should check out HaikuOS one day)

Moreover, it also supports an optional window-system port to Haiku with --with-be-app. Be aware, you will need the Haiku Application Kit development headers and a C++ compiler. Otherwise, Emacs will only run in the terminal. If you want to also add Cairo to the mix, you can add --with-be-cairo.

New major mode for C#

csharp-mode is now a native major mode for Emacs and is based on cc-mode.

Minor features

It’s easier to use Emacs in scripts!

If you like to write scripts and especially writing Lisp scripts, Emacs now supports the option -x in order to execute scripts written in EmacsLisp. When executing such a script with #!/usr/bin/emacs -x as its shebang, Emacs will not read its init file (like with -Q) and will instead execute the Elisp code right away and return the last value to the caller of the script (most likely the shell you called the script from).

TRAMP natively supports Docker, Podman, and Kubernetes

Three new connections are now available for TRAMP:

• docker
• podman
• kubernetes

You will now be able to access your containerized environment right from Emacs without the need to write custom code.

Custom user directory

It is now easier to launch custom Emacs profiles without the need of tools such as chemacs2 with the addition of the flag --init-directory. This can set to any directory Emacs’ user-emacs-directory which includes the init.el which comes along with it. Yet another reason for me not to use a .emacs file, but the init.el file instead.

Support for Webp images

For quite some time, Emacs has been able to display images, but not webp yet. Well, this is now fixed! And in fact, support for webp images became the default behaviour, since you need to pass --without-webp to Emacs’ configuration script to disable webp support.

C++ mode now supports the C++20 standard

Yep. There’s nothing more to say, really. Happy coding!

Better handling of .pdmp files

Emacs has had for a few version the ability to dump its state into a pdmp file for faster startup time. Well now, when creating such a file, it will include in its name a fingerprint of its current state, although it will still prioritize an emacs.pdmp file if it exists.

Better mouse and touchpad support

Emacs now uses XInput 2, which enables Emacs to support more input events, such as touchpad events. For instance, by default, a pinch gesture on a touchpad increases or decreases the text size of the current buffer. This is thanks to the new event pinch, which comes along with touch-end.

Unicode 15.0 and emojis

Emacs now supports Unicode 15.0, which is currently the latest Unicode version. Although this is not directly related, quite a few new emoji-related features have been introduced. The new prefix C-x 8 e now leads to a few new commands related to emojis:

C-x 8 e e or C-x 8 e i

Insert an emoji (emoji-insert)

C-x 8 e s

Search an emoji (emoji-search)

C-x 8 e l

List all emojis in a new buffer (emoji-list)

C-x 8 e r

Insert a recently inserted emoji (emoji-recent)

C-x 8 e d

Describe an emoji (emoji-describe)

C-x 8 e + and C-x 8 e -

Increase and decrease the size of any character, but especially emojis (emoji-zoom-increase and emoji-zoom-decrease respectively)

There is also the new input method emoji which allows you to type for instance :⁣grin: in order to get the emoji 😁.

True background transparency

Up until recently, if you wanted transparency with Emacs, you had no choice but to make the whole frame transparent, including text and images.

Thanks to the frame parameter alpha-background and its related alphaBackground X resource, it is now possible to set transparency only for the frame’s background without affecting any of the other elements on screen.

WebKit inspector in Emacs’ WebKit widget browser

You can now access the WebKit inspector when using the WebKit widget browser in Emacs, given you are using a version of Emacs which has been compiled with it. I wish there was a keybinding or at least a function for it, but apparently you can only open it with a right click and select Inspect Element. Still nice to have.

Some news for Windows

Although it has been available for Linux users since Emacs 26.1, Windows finally has access to double-buffering to reduce display flicker. If you wish to disable it, you can set the frame parameter inhibit-double-buffering to nil.

Emacs also follows Windows’ dark mode with Windows 10 (version 1809) and onwards.

Emacs also now uses Windows’ native API to render images. This includes BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, and TIFF images. Other formats, however, still rely on other dependencies and libraries to properly work, such as Webp images.

What’s next?

With Emacs 29 being cut, development on the master branch will now go towards Emacs 30. Is there anything we can expect yet?

It’s still very early to say, most stable features merged into master went to Emacs 29, and only the feature/pkg and feature/improved-lock-narrowing branches seem to have received commits less than a week prior to the day of writing this, and I do not know the status of other branches that received commits during the past few weeks such as feature/package+vc or feature/eglot2emacs (which I assume both got merged).

However, there are currently talks about including use-package into Emacs! I’m a bit disappointed it won’t make it into Emacs 29, but progress is being made on scratch/use-package, and you can always check the mailing list to check its status such as here. Update: Rejoice! As mentioned above, use-package is actually set to land in Emacs 29!