alt.hn

8/24/2026 at 1:07:22 PM

What's New in Emacs 31.1?

https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/whats-new-in-emacs-311

by geospeck

8/24/2026 at 11:31:28 PM

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.

by rtpg

8/25/2026 at 12:49:38 AM

Have you read through the Emacs Lisp Intro and Elisp manuals in Info? The latter is especially helpful as a reference.

by MarsIronPI

8/25/2026 at 1:05:27 AM

I started getting a little more into ELisp after reading The Land of Lisp, though its probably a bit basic. If I were to try to get better at ELisp through reading books/docs, I'd look into Common Lisp material.

by wmedrano

8/24/2026 at 3:21:05 PM

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.

by kstrauser

8/24/2026 at 9:14:55 PM

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.

by wmedrano

8/24/2026 at 5:25:12 PM

I was annoyed by some of the comments in the "Packages" section, because it is clear that the author didn't try anything out but just scattered a few comments though out the file.

Regarding :vc and :load-path, this was obsoleted transitively due to the obsoleting of package-vc-install-from-checkout, which has portability issues. Bug#80604 goes into the background for this. This is NOT an obsoletion of the :vc keyword for use-package.

Regarding package-autosuggest, this is disabled because it doesn't interest most users. It is targeted at new users who aren't familiar with the packages, and might be interested in new major modes. Experienced users are generally either familiar with the packages and use them or prefer to stay in fundamental mode. The minor mode is enabled as part of the newcomers theme!

No mention of package-review-policy, which especially in the "age of AI" is an important feature is you want to be careful about external code you are using on your system.

Oh and on the topic of the newercomers theme, the reason it is not mentioned "higher up" in the NEWS file, besides it being the wrong section, is that it is highlighted on the splash screen, where new users are going to find it, instead of a NEWS file.

by pkal