I'm Sacha Chua, and here are
ten Emacs News highlights for 2021.
If you want to follow the links,
check out the wiki page at
https://emacsconf.org/2021/talks/news/ .
1. The Emacs developers are currently
working on Emacs 28.1,
which will be the next major release.
John Wiegley will share more Emacs 28 details
in his update, so check out his talk.
Andrea Corallo's giving a talk
on native compilation too.
2.
Org Mode is now at version 9.5.
New features include
a library for managing citations,
asynchronous session support
for code blocks,
and better control
of your agenda's appearance.
If you've been getting your Org packages
from Org ELPA,
you can update your configuration
to get Org from GNU ELPA
and org-contrib from NonGNU ELPA.
The new release of the Org Roam package
should be a faster and more consistent way
to use Org to manage a knowledgebase,
and org-roam-ui looks pretty snazzy.
The best way to keep up with Org changes
is to check out the blog This Month in Org.
3.
New Magit major release!
Jonas Bernoulli has split some functionality
into other packages so that
Emacs Lisp developers can use them, such as
magit-section, transient, and forge.
Here's an example of using magit-section
to manage groups of buffers.
You can learn more about Transient
in the talk on self-describing
smart domain-specific languages or DSLs.
4.
In terms of smaller packages, there's been
a lot of activity around completion.
Karthik has a great diagram,
and Prot explains how things work together.
I think the idea is that instead of having
one large completion system
like Helm or Icicles, you can choose
a few different, smaller packages
and configure them to work together.
If you're curious about this,
you might start with either selectrum
or vertico, which are both completion interfaces,
add marginalia for more information,
and try consult for many useful
completing commands.
There are so many options,
so it might be useful to check out
some discussions.
5.
Embark is usually mentioned as part of
that group of packages,
but it's well worth looking into
even if you use a different system.
Embark lets you have context-sensitive shortcuts
that work on things in buffers, minibuffers,
and even collections of things.
You can also use it
when you start doing one command
and then decide to do a different one instead.
For more ideas, check out
Fifteen Ways to Use Embark.
6.
Now that there are Emacs Lisp bindings
for tree-sitter, we can work more easily
with the structure of code instead of
just using regular expressions.
Check out the talk
on Tree-edit and structural editing
to learn more.
You can use tree-sitter for
intelligent snippets that get information
from the code around them,
editing Lisp expressions,
and navigating text objects in Evil mode.
(That's when Emacs is pretending to be Vi.)
Dynamic modules help us add more to Emacs
than Emacs Lisp easily offers,
such as structural editing in OCaml
and using Rust to figure out parentheses
and indentation for Lisp.
7.
Collaborative editing is now much easier
since the CRDT package is in GNU ELPA.
It allows multiple people to edit
the same file over the network,
using their own Emacs.
This means you can keep your own config
and keybindings, yay!
Watch the Emacs Research Group talk
for an example of how several people
used it to work together.
8.
In case you're still under the impression
that Emacs is just a text editor,
some folks have been working on
pretty neat graphical experiments.
These OpenGL bindings for Emacs Lisp
use an embedded xwidget,
while other prototypes use the SVG support
that's built into Emacs
for Gantt charts,
scribbles,
and even diagrams.
The color-picker from that one
looks particularly useful for CSS.
If you want to play around with adding SVGs
to your files and interfaces,
svg-icon
and svg-lib
might be good places to start. (Reddit)
Of course, there's always a place
for ASCII art,
especially with the new boxy package
that you can use for org files,
imenu navigation,
and even things in real life.
9.
There have been a lot of great posts, videos,
and livestreams about Emacs this year.
In addition to the ones
from System Crafters,
Emacs Elements,
and Protesilaos,
John Kitchin
and Mike Zamansky
are back, hooray!
And Marcin Borkowski has just finished
writing an intermediate textbook
Emacs Lisp, too!
10.
Lastly, if you want to chat
with other Emacs folks
and get help on Emacs, Org Mode,
or other topics,
the #emacs and #org-mode
Internet Relay Chat or IRC channels
are now on the libera.chat network
instead of Freenode.
If you'd like to add something I've missed,
please add them to the wiki page,
or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com .
That's all for this quick review.
Enjoy the rest of EmacsConf 2021!