Emacs 31.1 Arrives: The End of an Era and a Handful of Quality-of-Life Wins

I've just started getting into emacs and am almost done with what I think is my final config (just adding vertico, consult and marginalia, haven't added them all, but got vertico and consult working in a mostly default state, still need to tweak a bit).

Then I am going to try to learn more of the navigation keys (I got some of the basics (mostly)) but still need more experience beyond the basics. I am able to get my odin/raylib code to compile with C-c C-c. I even hand compiled 30.1 from github to update from Debians older defaults. The only problem I ran into was forgetting how I got it so when I launched the client it didn't duplicate the icon on my kde taskbar/panel. Uninstalling the old setup must have removed my copy of the start up rules/desktop window name. But got that settled after a bit of searching.

I am trying my hardest not to use EVIL, but it's so tempting, because I've gotten used to modal. But I want to use the full power as mostly established with the key combos.

I'm not sure how much of these features will matter to me as I'm not sure I've used much of the full system. Anything that makes it faster is nice. So far it's been smooth, but I do wonder if running the server (via sysvinit in mx) does cause some lag, as I've felt the system have little hiccups (not when using emacs actively, the client not even open. I did try to adjust the GC settings I found as a tip to reduce lag and do more GC when not heavily used).

Finally does anyone know where to ge […]

Between treesitter and eglot (read: LSP), there’s not much from other editors I miss when using Emacs. I’ve been on a Zed kick for a while but I hear the call of the GNU. This may be the week I declare .emacs bankruptcy and start again with a clean setup, seeing how much of my old third-party config I can replace with builtins.

How unfortunate that glibc has removed support for unexec. Although it wasn't a very widely used feature, it seems like the kind of orthogonal powerful feature that distinguishes one platform from another, like Unix's fork(), or I/O redirection, or strace, or not needing different system calls to write text and binary files. In an alternate universe, you could imagine unexec support being generalized to support broader classes of applications for purposes such as process migration, high-availability failover, and bug reproduction (as with rr), instead of being removed.

Bit of a tangent but does anyone have good learning materials on doing things with Emacs Lisp beyond just staring at the source of packages?

I have the Mastering Emacs book and read through most of it, which gives me a good idea for some stuff... but I really would like to have good ideas for the right kind of design patterns for common things.

I went from `vi` to `vim` to `neovim` to a spiritual successor `helix`, and here's Emacs at release 31 still the dominant fork of the emacs family of editors. Impressive.

Is there a better way to get started with Emacs than the built in tutorial? I've tried a couple times (due to increasing annoyance with VS Code), but have struggled to get to a point where I feel productive enough.

> As always, my book, Mastering Emacs is 31% off for the next week to celebrate the release also.

Eventually, Mastering Emacs will be free!