GNU Emacs, the powerful text editor, released new 31.1 version a few days ago.
The new version was launched nearly a year after the previous release. It features much better completion, more powerful window/frame management, unicode 17, and many other changes.
The new 31.1 removed the old unexec dumper, that’s deprecated since Emacs 27, and now uses the portable dumper.
The old ctags program is no longer built or installed, while, user may use etags --ctags instead.
It also added a new configure option to specify where the user unit file for systemd. And, it now defaults to -mfpmath=sse or fallback to -fno-tree-sra on 32-bit x86 ssytem with GCC 4 or later.
Compatible terminals now have mouse support enabled by default. And, it can now automatically process a user-lisp/ directory in your configuration, byte-compiling files and adding them to load-path.
The completions can now appear immediately when the minibuffer opens. The results can update as you type. The flex completion algorithm was rewritten. And, it now has better navigation for vertical/horizontal completion layouts.
Emacs 31.1 also added many tools for manipulating its layouts, including new commands to combine/uncombine windows, split and merge frames, and rotate, flip, and transpose entire window layouts.
Frames now have unique numeric IDs, allowing scripts/configurations to reliably identify them. And, new functions added for finding the most-recently-used frame.
For editing, it features new unfill-paragraph command reverses fill-paragraph, new commands for Unix-style word deletion, new center-line-mode, and new commands for semantic linefeeds.
The line-spacing can now control spacing both above and below a line. C-w can optionally delete the previous word when no region is active. And, Electric Pair can handle multiple pairs and multi-character delimiters such as /* ... */.
Other changes include:
- New input methods/language environments for several languages.
- New tree-sitter modes such as
mhtml-ts-modeandgo-work-ts-mode. - Network Security Manager now warns about TLS 1.1, DHE and static RSA key exchange at default security level.
- New
icalendar-modefor editing iCalendar data. - New
delete-trailing-whitespace-mode. - New
.npmrcediting mode. - Include
lua-mode. - New
system-taskbar-modeintegrates Emacs with desktop taskbars/docks. - New
system-sleeppackage can prevent the system from sleeping and handle sleep/wake events.
There are also a large amount of other changes. See the NEWS page for details.
Get GNU Emacs 31.1
The source tarball for the new version is available to download in GNU website via the link below:
Besides building from source, Arch Linux and Fedora (v45 and Rawhide) have built the new version into their own repositories. While, Debian user may keep an eye on this page for the package status.
There are also community maintained snap package (in Beta channel so far) that’s available in Ubuntu App Center, and, Flatpak package (though not updated at the moment) that run in sandbox.
