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Emacs Bedrock 2.0

2026-09-07 | original
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Why This Matters

Bedrock 2.0 is a fresh release of a deliberately minimal Emacs starter kit that ships as just two config files you copy and edit yourself, rather than a framework you have to learn. It matters because it lowers the notorious onboarding barrier to Emacs while keeping users in control of their own configuration. The release also marks a generational shift, dropping Emacs 29 support in favor of Emacs 31 features.

Key Takeaways
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Bedrock is a minimal, human-crafted starter-kit for Emacs, and today I’m pleased to announce that version 2.0 of Bedrock is available! This release requires Emacs 31, which came out in August 2026. If you are unable to upgrade Emacs that high, you should be able to remove some of the Emacs 31-specific config without too much trouble.

Bedrock is essentially a collection of better defaults for Emacs, and it uses no third-party packages in its base configuration. Part of the appeal of Emacs, of course, is the vast set of packages developed and maintained by the community, so Bedrock includes sample configurations for some of the most popular packages that I, personally, find utterly indispensable.

The idea behind Bedrock is a lot simpler than other “starter kits” or configuration frameworks: Bedrock is just an early-init.el and an init.el that you copy once into ~/.emacs.d/ , and then you modify those files directly as your needs grow and your experience with Emacs matures. The files contain enough comments to point you in the right direction when you want to dig into how something works, but not so much as to drown you in a sea of prose when you’re looking for code. The configuration for third-party packages lives in a separate extras/ folder, and you can copy individual packages’ configuration directly into init.el as-needed, or import groups of packages an entire file at a time.

Changes in Bedrock 2.0

This is a major release just because Bedrock is breaking its compatibility with Emacs 29, last released in 2024. Here is a summary of major changes in this version:

Bedrock now uses the lexical-binding: t cookie in all its .el files.

cookie in all its files. All packages declared with use-package get installed if not present on the system by default.

get installed if not present on the system by default. Use embark-auto-prefix-help-mode instead of which-key if the embark package is loaded.

instead of if the package is loaded. Remove wgrep in favor of built-in grep-change-to-grep-edit-mode .

in favor of built-in . Vastly improved tree-sitter configuration.

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