Today is a great day for Emacs - Emacs 29.1 has just been released1! Every Emacs release is special, but I haven’t been so excited about a new version of Emacs in ages. Why so?

Reason #1 - pure GTK front-end (a.k.a. pgtk). This also means that now Emacs supports natively Wayland. Which in tern means that it’s easier than ever to run Emacs in Windows’s WSL. This is huge!

Reason #2 - built-in support for the massively popular Language Server Protocol via eglot. eglot has existed for a while, but it’s nice to see it bundled with Emacs going forward. This will certainly make Emacs better positioned to complete with “modern” editors like VS Code.

Reason #3 - built-in support for TreeSitter. This means that a few years down the road we’ll have many Emacs major modes that are much faster, more robust and feature-rich. It’s infinitely easier to built a major mode using a real parser instead of using regular expressions.2 Lots of built-in modes have already been updated to have a version using TreeSitter internally (e.g. c-ts-mode, typescript-ts-mode, python-ts-mode and ruby-ts-mode). Frankly, I can’t think of a bigger improvement in Emacs in the almost 20 years I’ve been an Emacs user. Exciting times ahead!

You can read all about the new release here. I’ll likely write a few articles about some of the new features in the weeks and months to come. In Emacs We Trust! M-x Forever!

P.S. Feel free to share in the comments what are you most excited about.

  1. You can read the official release announcement here. ↩

  2. I wrote more about those benefits in the context of clojure-mode here. ↩