path: root/2022/captions/emacsconf-2022-devel--emacs-development-updates--john-wiegley--main.vtt

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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.