GoKawiil
Tech News
EMACS, one of the first full-screen text editors, turns 50 this year, according to MIT Technology Review. It originated in 1976 on video terminals at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and was later rewritten for numerous operating systems, including Apple's Mac OS X.
Emacs, one of the earliest full-screen text editors, began running on video terminals at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1976 and remains in active use today. It grew out of the TECO editing language created by Dan Murphy in 1962 and Carl Mikkelsen's 1971 Control-R extension, which let programmers see live edits on screen rather than reprinting lines. The software was later ported to many operating systems, including a version Apple shipped with Mac OS X.
A personal computing writer describes switching away from Emacs to the macOS/iOS note app Bear, citing fatigue with Emacs and Org mode, before reversing course and moving all notes back into Emacs using the Denote package, which supports Markdown files natively. The migration involved exporting Bear's Markdown notes and using a Claude Code-assisted script to convert file names, links, and attachments.
A developer detailed a new static-site publishing setup for the Byzantine Systems blog that keeps writing entirely inside Emacs using Org-mode, while replacing an earlier Nix-and-scripts pipeline with a smaller, typed toolchain. The stack combines Org-mode and Babel for authoring, d2 for diagrams, Pandoc for conversion, Nix/flakes/devenv to pin the environment, and Gleam with Blogatto and Lustre to generate HTML without a separate templating language.
A Fly.io team post examines VSCode's remote SSH extension, noting that rather than running lightweight shell commands like Emacs's Tramp does, it deploys a Bash script that downloads and installs a full agent, including a Node.js binary, on the remote machine. The authors say they are exploring integration with this remote-editing flow because so many developers now use VSCode forks paired with LLM code-generation agents.
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.