Emacs 29 should be officially released soon. Many of you, I know, are already running it. For those that haven’t already taken the plunge, Emacs Elements has a series of three videos that cover the installation and some of the features of Emacs 29. The videos are from 3 months ago but somehow I missed them then.
The first video deals with compiling Emacs 29 from source. The steps are captured in a Bash script that works for Mint/Ubuntu and probably, with minimal adjustments, any other Linux distribution. It won’t work on Macs, of course, but the steps are pretty much the same and could be adapted without much work.
The build is pretty vanilla except for enabling SVG and native compilation with the aot (ahead of time) option. The aot options compiles the Elisp files to native code during the build process so that things are snappier when Emacs is run for the first time.
The second video is probably the most interesting for most of us. It takes a look at some of the new features in Emacs 29. I written about a number of posts and videos that talk about the Emacs 29 features [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] and it’s interesting how different the list of additions the commenters think are most important. Think of this video as one perspective on that question.
Finally, the last video discusses enhanced image features new to Emacs 29. I don’t deal with images much so I wasn’t too interested in this video but if you do work with images, it’s certainly worth a few minutes of your time.
The videos are all pretty short so you can probably fit one of them in whenever you have a few spare minutes.