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A developer describes discovering pkgsrc, NetBSD's portable package manager, and using it to build software like Emacs from source outside of NetBSD itself. The post explains that pkgsrc, forked long ago from FreeBSD's Ports collection, runs on Linux, macOS, and Solaris while keeping packages cleanly separated from the operating system's base files.
The Consult package for Emacs deliberately delays asynchronous search commands like consult-ripgrep and consult-grep using debounce, throttle, and refresh-delay settings rather than firing a new search on every keystroke. Users can lower these default values, such as setting consult-async-input-debounce to 0.05 seconds, to make the interface feel snappier and closer to how Counsel behaves.
A new Emacs package, maak.el, lets developers discover, inspect and run Maak tasks directly from the editor's minibuffer. Maak is a build and automation tool that replaces traditional Makefiles with GNU Guile Scheme, and the plugin adds completion support, argument prompting, and asynchronous execution through Emacs's native compile system.
The minimal Emacs starter-kit Bedrock has reached version 2.0, dropping support for the older Emacs 29 branch and requiring Emacs 31, released in August 2026. The update auto-installs any use-package declarations, swaps which-key for embark-auto-prefix-help-mode when embark is present, removes wgrep in favor of a built-in alternative, and adds lexical-binding declarations across its files.
The newly released Emacs 31 includes a tree-sitter-based mode for editing Markdown files, called markdown-ts-mode, though it is not enabled by default and is labeled experimental. Despite that label, the mode already supports the full CommonMark spec and most of GitHub Flavored Markdown, plus extras like code block editing, table-of-contents tools, and integration with converters such as pandoc. Users must manually load the library, for example via use-package or autoload, since Emacs won't switch to it automatically when opening .md files.
Emacs 31.1 has shipped without one dominant flagship feature, instead delivering a batch of quality-of-life improvements. Notable changes include broader tree-sitter support with a long-requested automatic grammar installer, and the formal deprecation of the decades-old unexec memory-dumping mechanism used to speed up startup. A planned new garbage collector was left out and pushed to the next major release, Emacs 32.