Posts

• Jul 22, 2026

  Dedicate Windows with toggle-window-dedicated

  You’ve carefully arranged your windows just the way you want them - source code on the left, tests on the right, maybe a shell at the bottom. Then you run some command that calls display-buffer, and suddenly one of your carefully placed windows gets hijacked to show a *Help* buffer or a compilation log. We’ve all been there.

  The display-buffer machinery is one of Emacs’s most powerful features, but also one of its most frustrating. Emacs 30 adds a simple, practical tool to help tame it: toggle-window-dedicated.

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• Jul 21, 2026

  Right-aligned Mode Line Elements

  Emacs users have long wanted the ability to push certain mode line elements to the right edge of the window. Think of it like having a left-aligned and right-aligned section in your mode line - buffer name on the left, maybe the time or some status info on the right.

  Before Emacs 30, achieving this required various hacks involving padding calculations and propertized strings. It was doable, but fragile and ugly.

  Emacs 30 makes it trivial with mode-line-format-right-align.

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• Jul 20, 2026

  Flymake Can Now Show Diagnostics at the End of the Line

  If you’ve used modern editors like VS Code, you’ve probably noticed how they display error and warning messages inline, right at the end of the offending line. It’s a nice touch - you don’t have to hover over a squiggly underline or check a separate diagnostics buffer to see what’s wrong.

  Emacs 30 brings this capability to Flymake with the new flymake-show-diagnostics-at-end-of-line option.

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• Jul 18, 2026

  which-key is Now Built-in

  which-key is one of those packages I recommend to pretty much everyone - newcomers and grizzled Emacs veterans alike. You start a key sequence like C-x, pause for a moment, and it pops up a handy cheat sheet of every key that can follow. I’ve had it in my config for ages, and I suspect a lot of you have as well.

  Here’s the good news - as of Emacs 30 you don’t need to install it anymore. which-key is now a built-in package, so there’s one less thing to fetch from MELPA when you set up Emacs on a fresh machine.

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• Jul 17, 2026

  Tree-sitter Modes Still Need a Syntax Table

  When you write a tree-sitter major mode, it’s tempting to think the parser handles everything. It doesn’t. Tree-sitter drives font-lock, indentation, and structural navigation, but a whole layer of everyday Emacs behavior still runs on the humble syntax table: forward-sexp and friends, electric-pair-mode, delete-pair, forward-word, and anything built on syntax-ppss. (I wrote about that structural layer in Essential Structured Navigation and Editing Commands.)

  I got a sharp reminder of this while building neocaml, my tree-sitter mode for OCaml. The grammar parsed everything beautifully, yet delete-pair and sexp motion kept misbehaving around a couple of OCaml constructs. The fix turned out to be a classic tool that long predates tree-sitter: syntax-propertize-function. Here’s the story - it tripped me up for a good while, so maybe it’ll spare you some head-scratching.

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