In yesterday’s post I reported that Eli Zaretskii had cut the Emacs-29 release branch. That was good news because it meant that Emacs 29.1 itself was on its way. Lucien Cartier-Tilet (Phundrak) has a much more comprehensive post that parsed the NEWS file entry and spells out what we can expect with Emacs 29.
The major enhancements are
- Eglot
- Tree-sitter
- Installation from source with
package.el - Wayland
- Precompilation of Elisp files
- Native access to SQLite databases
- HaikuOS support
- Major mode for C#
There are also several minor enhancements. You can read all about those and the details of the major enhancements in Phundrak’s post.
Emacs 28 saw the introduction of native compilation and was, therefore, a major release and a huge step forward. Emacs 29 also has several major enhancements and even if you don’t judge it as groundbreaking as Emacs 28, it’s still an important step forward and will bring many important enhancements to our favorite editor.
Be sure to take a look at Phundrak’s post to see what’s coming. As I said in yesterday’s post, Emacs 29.1 is still a ways out but the process is underway and we will soon see the fruits of all the effort that our heroic Emacs developers have devoted to this release.