Years ago when I first starting using Emacs seriously, one of my go to sites for inspiration and ideas was Dirk-Jan C. Binnema’s EMACS-FU. He always had good ideas, not the least of which is the wonderful email client mu4e that I and many others are still using today. Thirteen years ago, Binnema stopped blogging although his site was still active. Despite the fact that he was not blogging he was working on mu/mu4e and other projects.
Now, after all those years, he’s published another post on EMACS-FU. This times it’s about his just released new version (1.14.4) of mu4e. Most of the post is concerned with the mu4e changes in the latest release. A (very) broad summary of these changes are:
- Some enhancements in support of the Inbox Zero concept
- Support for MIME type icons
- Completion
- Language detection
- Attachment in replies
- Enhanced support for HTML messages
- Enhanced desktop notifications
By far the most exciting news for me is about Binnema’s work on xwidgets. As most of you probably know, Emacs’ support of xwidgets has been broken for a while because of changes to the xwidgets library that removed a feature that Emacs depended on. Binnema has fixed that so now (as of Emacs 31.1) Emacs can support up-to-date xwidgets libraries again. That’s a real boon for me because I use xwidgets for both email in mu4e and for Elfeed.
In any event, I’m thrilled to see Binnema’s return even if it amounts to no more than a visit. I do hope, however, that I won’t have to wait 13 years for his next post.