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Hello, it's time for another Emacs development update.
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I want to thank the organizers of EmacsConf
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for putting this together
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and also the maintainers of Emacs
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with a special thanks to Eli Zaretskii.
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It's really he who gave me this information
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so that I could pass it along to you.
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The main thing to discuss this time
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with regard to what's been going on with Emacs is Emacs 29.
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The release cycle for Emacs 29 should begin in December
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when a branch will be cut and the release work will start.
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We should be seeing Emacs 29 coming out fairly soon.
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Here's just a brief overview
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of some of the things to look forward to
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coming up in Emacs 29.
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Overlays have been re-implemented.
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If you haven't used them before,
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overlays are a way to apply a set of properties
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over a range of text so that
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you can have things like mouse clicks
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take on different behavior
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depending on where it happens in the text.
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This is different than text properties
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which associate the properties with the text itself.
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Overlays do not alter the text in any way
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and they simply, as the name suggests,
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overlay on the buffer.
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Now previously, overlays were implemented as linear lists
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which got very slow when there were
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a lot of overlays in a buffer.
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Now they're being re-implemented as trees,
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so that searching should be very fast, and
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in fact, comparable to text properties.
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This is already on the master branch
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and (more or less) is ready for release.
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Eglot has been ported into Emacs.
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Eglot is an LSP [Language Server Protocol] client for Emacs,
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one of the two that are often used.
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But now it's going to be included in core,
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so it's considered official
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and will be well integrated with other Emacs features.
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There's going to be a Tree-sitter library.
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Tree-sitter is a way of building fast incremental parsers.
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There's a website on Tree-sitter if you Google for that.
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This can be used for various features,
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but first and foremost, it'll be used
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for fontification and indentation in Emacs.
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Instead of heuristics and regular expressions,
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you can now build your fontifications
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based on a parse tree.
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There's a branch now that supports this
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for several modes already, like Python, TypeScript,
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and JavaScript.
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We don't have anyone yet working on it for C mode
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but Eli has challenged whether anyone
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in the community is interested.
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He would love to see Tree-sitter support added for C mode,
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because this has been quite slow
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when dealing with very, very large files
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and Tree-sitter should help that.
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There have been significant improvements
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in dealing with very long lines.
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This is something that has been
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a long time frequent complaint.
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Emacs becomes rather unusable
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if you open a giant file that's a single long line.
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Anyone who's ever tried to open a 30 megabyte JSON file
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that's all on one line will know this pain.
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Some modes, however, will have to adapt to this change,
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because sometimes access to the whole buffer
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is now forcefully restricted.
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If the mode requires access to the entire buffer
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at all times to work, then the developer of that mode
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will need to devise some simplifications
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so that they don't require that complete access.
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For example, if a mode used to go way back
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to the beginning of the buffer
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in order to determine if there's an unbalanced parenthesis,
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this won't work in the new long lines support mode,
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because the entire buffer is not always available.
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Emacs is sort of doing some
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restricting of the buffer heuristically
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in order to keep the visible range working
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very, very quickly now.
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Emacs can now build directly with SQLite.
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This means that SQLite databases
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can be directly accessible from Emacs.
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Should be nice for anyone whose mode wants to
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cache or store some queryable data.
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The XInput extension is now up to version 2.
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There are many extensions in this specification.
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From the user's point of view,
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it enables things like smooth scrolling and touch devices.
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Emacs will now use this by default on all systems
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where the library is installed.
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It should be on every modern system that uses X.
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There's also a pure GTK build in Emacs 29.
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The purpose of this is to allow Emacs
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on systems without X, such as Wayland or Broadway,
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to be able to have a graphical build of Emacs.
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There's also lots of improvements to drag and drop
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on X systems, for people who like drag and drop.
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And there's support for double buffering on Microsoft Windows.
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The last of the headline features
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coming for Emacs 29 is emoji input.
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So there will now be a prefix key,
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C-x 8 e for emoji input,
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along with several new commands to insert emoji
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by various forms of shorthand.
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There will even be an input method
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where you can write the plain English names of emojis
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and have the symbol inserted.
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So that rounds out some of the features
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coming up for Emacs 29.
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Sounds like an exciting release
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and it should be headed your way soon.
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I hope everybody has fun at the conference
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and enjoy yourselves.
