EmacsNews Weekly - October 30, 2026

From the editor

I'd urge you to read James Cherti's Eglot performance guide. If you've found the language server sluggish and switched to lsp-mode, this might change your mind before the switch becomes permanent.

Timothy Johnson

Packages & Tools: Two packages stand out for editing this week. region-cursors places cursor overlays at both ends of the active region. It's a small visual cue, but useful if you've ever lost track of where a selection started during a complex edit. For Lisp writers, the tree-guide.el roundup covers a family of packages that use tree-sitter to make structural Lisp editing easier to navigate. They don't replace paredit or lispy. They add guidance overlays that show which form you're inside.

teleprompter.el turns any buffer into a scrolling teleprompter. It's niche, but if you record screencasts, talks, or video essays, you can read your script without leaving Emacs.

James Cherti published a thorough guide to tuning Eglot for performance. It pairs well with the Eglot guides I covered last week on per-project settings, auto-formatting on save, and auto-applying safe code actions. Together they make a solid reference for building an Eglot setup from scratch. If you found Eglot sluggish and went back to lsp-mode, read this before making that switch permanent.

mu4e 1.14.4 is out. A community thread reports odd HTML email rendering in this release, so check it before upgrading if you handle a lot of HTML-heavy mail in mu4e.

welkomscherm v1.2.1 is a small, calm start screen for Emacs. It sits between a blank scratch buffer and a heavier dashboard.el setup: minimal by design, but extensible. The Codeberg page has examples.

Mercurial users: ahg is now on MELPA. It's an Emacs interface for Hg modelled on Magit-style interaction.

Org Mode: Grove, which appeared in September as one of two new Android Org apps, has been renamed Bloom and is now on F-Droid and Google Play. The F-Droid release matters if you prefer open distribution channels. There's also a new Android entrant: KorgNote, a note-taking and calendar app based on Org-mode. Since September, mobile Org has gone from almost nothing to several options on both Android and iOS.

The developer of Linen, an Android plain-text notes app, is seeking testers. It isn't built specifically for Org, but plain-text notes and Org workflows often overlap.

For a practical example of connecting tools, see this post on tracking PRs waiting for review with mu, Org-mode, and AI. It pulls review requests from email into Org so you can track them without leaving Emacs.

GNU Hyperbole 9.3.2 is out. Hyperbole is a hyperlink and action system that works across buffers, files, and contexts. It takes some patience to learn, and each release is a good reminder to give it another look.

evil-org is now on MELPA. That makes it easier to install and keep updated if you use Evil keybindings with Org-mode.

Sacha Chua published her 2026-10-26 Emacs News roundup. Check it for anything I've missed.

Configuration & Workflows: A detailed post on code folding covers kirigami, tree-sitter, hide-show, Org, and XML folding in one place. Folding that behaves consistently across modes is a common configuration headache, so a single guide to the options, including tree-sitter-aware folding, is welcome. The accompanying Reddit thread drew an enthusiastic response.

Irreal explained how to control where isearch starts, so it doesn't always begin at point. It's a small change that helps if you often search within regions. Irreal also looked at Electric Quote Mode, which converts straight quotes to typographic quotes as you type. It's useful for prose and less so for code.

A third Irreal post covers dictating into Emacs, which is becoming more practical as speech recognition improves. It's worth a look for accessibility or to rest your hands during long writing sessions.

A thread on colouring paths in Vertico with Consult has snippets for making file paths easier to read in the minibuffer.

Development & Elisp: Supertag 0.4.0 adds a "lifestreams-style" stream agent that generates summaries. Supertag is one of the more experimental packages combining AI and Org.

A comparison of Orgzly-revived and Orgzly-native asks readers to guess which version is written entirely in Elisp. It shows how far Elisp can go in building what looks like a native Android app.

A thread on Emacs 31 problems on M5 Macs documents issues on that hardware. With the Windows antivirus false positives I covered in August and September, it looks like platform-specific problems, including some tied to native compilation, are still part of Emacs 31's settling-in period.

rewind was published this week. The announcement is light on detail, so see the thread for what it does.

Community & News: Emacs turns 50 this week. Very few editors have adapted and kept an active community for five decades. The steady flow of new packages in every issue of this newsletter suggests that community is in good health.

Prot released doric-themes 1.4.0. Doric is his minimal, structured alternative to the fuller Modus themes. If you like monochrome or near-monochrome setups, a community thread on white-background monochrome themes lists several lesser-known options.

Sacha Chua published an analysis of 11 years and 564 posts of Emacs News, which Irreal also covered. It traces what the community has cared about over more than a decade, which topics rose and faded, and which persisted.

Finally, a post on "Emacs and its many interfaces" and the resurfaced 2018 essay "Buy into the Emacs Platform" are both circulating this week. They make fitting reading for the anniversary.

Emacs turns 50 this week, which makes this issue more reflective than usual. The 2018 essay Buy into the Emacs Platform argues that the value of Emacs lies in the platform rather than any single feature. That argument holds up well against this week's activity.

Much of what appeared this week builds on existing capability rather than adding new features. James Cherti's Eglot performance guide completes a series that is now one of the better practical references for building a language-server setup on built-in Emacs features. The folding post works the same way. It doesn't introduce a new package. It maps what already works across modes. Guides like these, which make existing features easier to use, are a sign of a maturing ecosystem. If you've put off configuring Eglot or folding because the information seemed scattered, these are good places to start.

Mobile Org has moved faster than I expected. Grove became Bloom and arrived on F-Droid in the same week that KorgNote appeared, so Android users now have several Org-based apps, all released within weeks of each other. The F-Droid release is good news for users who prefer open-source distribution. The open question is the one I've raised since September: how well do these apps handle the full Org feature set when syncing files you also edit in desktop Emacs? If you try one, test it against a copy of your files first.

The Reddit API shutdown on 13 November is now two weeks away. For now, r/emacs still carries announcements, workflow posts, and releases as usual, and most of this issue's links point there. But much of the best content already starts on the mailing lists, on Codeberg, and on personal blogs like Prot's codelog and Irreal. Reddit has mostly gathered links to that work rather than producing it. Losing it will hurt, but the original sources will remain. If you rely on r/emacs for news, now is a good time to follow those sources directly. I'll be watching where announcements land after the cutoff. EmacsConf 2026 is confirmed and coming up, and it will be a natural gathering point.

Fifty years is a long time for any software to stay this active. This week mixed small tools like a teleprompter and a calm start screen with a decade-long look back at Emacs News and a birthday thread. As usual, the mundane and the significant arrived side by side.

Until next week,
Timothy Johnson
Digital & Research Compute Platforms, Johnson Matthey
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