Keeping your Emacs packages up to date is essential if you want the latest features, performance improvements, and security fixes. But manual updates can quickly become a chore — especially if you use Emacs as your main development environment and rely on dozens of packages.
For years, Emacs has relied on traditional techniques like regular expressions to provide syntax highlighting, indentation, and code navigation. While powerful and flexible, these approaches struggle to keep up with the complexity of modern programming languages. Enter Tree-sitter, a fast and incremental parsing library that is transforming how editors like Emacs understand code.
For decades, Emacs has relied on the X11 windowing system on Linux. As the Linux desktop ecosystem transitions towards Wayland, Emacs—like many long-lived applications—faces the challenge of adapting to a new display protocol while preserving its flexibility and deep configurability.
In this article, we’ll look at the current state of Emacs on Wayland, what works well today, and which areas are still under active development.
Large language models are increasingly useful for developers and writers who spend much of their time inside Emacs. Instead of switching between a browser or external app, you can bring AI assistance directly into your workflow. One of the most elegant tools for this is gptel, an Emacs package that provides a simple interface to local or remote LLMs.
When I want to test and learn a single package in Emacs it suits my best to create a simple empty emacs configuration directory in my src folder.
mkdir test-emacs-config
Then put in a very minimal .emacs file testing the package in question. The following sample tests the Vertico package.
If you've ever wished buffer-switching in Emacs felt a bit more like what you find in modern editors like VS Code or Sublime Text, the centaur-tabs package might just be the upgrade you're looking for. While Emacs excels at managing multiple open buffers, the experience can sometimes feel abstract—especially for users coming from tab-oriented editors. centaur-tabs brings a visual and intuitive tabbed interface to Emacs, improving buffer organization without compromising its flexible nature.
The Emacs editor is often a point of contention in discussions among software developers—especially those raised on the traditional Unix philosophy of building software: “do one thing and do it well.” For many, Emacs is either a miraculous, all-in-one productivity environment or a monolithic anomaly that breaks all the rules Unix tried to teach us.
Navigating in Emacs
It is important to be able to navigate your files easily.
Thanks to the customizability of emacs you can change the default behavior in a few easy steps.
Change your file search to swiper like this:
(global-set-key (kbd "C-s") 'counsel-grep-or-swiper)
Emacs can be extended with many different packages. The concept is called packages and with the following command you can se which packages are available and which are installed.
M-x package-list-packages
This will bring up a list like the following.
Why did I Choose to use Emacs? ... Because its more fun than Minecraft! :) - of course not. But the possibilities on how to use Emacs is fascinating. The thing that caught my interest for Emacs is the simple userinterface on the surface and the massive possibilities the lisp foundation gives you. Emacs is build around the lisp language that gives you the possibility to create macros for everything. Most of the time I work with PHP projects. This welcomes the php-mode package of Emacs.