Emacs 29.1 arrives with Wayland support, improvements and more

The GNU Project has announced, through an announcement, the release of the new version of its popular text editor "GNU Emacs 29.1", a version that is considered stable and in which many of the experimental features that were polished since the previous release, improvements and more.

For those who are unfamiliar with this popular text editor, they should know that GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable, free and open text editor created by the founder of the GNU Project, Richard Stallman. This is the most popular of the Emacs family of text editors.

This text editor is available for GNU / Linux, Windows and macOS, It is written in C and provides Emacs Lisp as an extension language. Also implemented in C, Emacs Lisp is a "dialect" of the Lisp programming language used by Emacs as a scripting language.

Emacs 29.1 Key New Features

In this new version of Emacs 29.1 that is presented, one of its main novelties is the added support for compiling in "GTK" mode pure» (PGTK, '--with-pgtk'), which uses GTK 3 to display the interface. Unlike previously available build modes, the new build mode allows to use GDK (GIMP Drawing Kit) to work in Wayland based environments no need to use the XWayland cape.

Another of the changes that stands out in this new release is the support for the WebP image format (prepared since launch from the 29.x series, since this 29.0 branch was used as development release) including animated images, the '--without-webp' is provided to disable compilation with the libwebp library and the ':type webp' command has been added to specify the WebP image type.

In addition to this, we can also find that the optional ability to compile with the Cairo backend for the XCB library ('--with-cairo-xcb'), which allows for faster performance when using connections to high-latency X servers, but has unresolved stability issues (for example, crashing on constantly opening and closing a connection to the terminal).

Added support for compiling with the tree-sitter library and use the provided parsers to parse code in different programming languages, also added new syntax highlighting modes based on the use of parsers.

We can also find in Emacs 29.1 that the built-in ability to access databaseIt's based on the SQLite library, as well as an option to disable compilation with sqlite3.

Of the other changes that stand out:

• The XInput 2 (XI2) extension is used to handle input events in X11-based environments.
• Added the ability to enable precompilation support for Lisp files at the Emacs compile stage ('--with-native-compilation=aot' in configure).
• Added build support for Haiku OS.
• Added Eglot, a new LSP (Language Server Protocol) client that can be used to connect to external services for analysis, error detection, and code completion.
• Implemented support for the use-package macro for the declarative definition of the package configuration, allowing you to isolate the package configuration in a separate startup file.
• A new 'wallpaper' package has been added with the implementation of the 'wallpaper-set' command to set the wallpaper for the desktop.
• Added a new dark theme 'leuven-dark'.
• Improved support for drag and drop manipulation on X11 systems.
• Support for the XDS (X Direct Save) protocol is provided for moving files and images from other programs.

If you want to know more about it about the announcement of the new version, you can consult it by going to the following link

How to install GNU Emacs on Linux?

For those who are interested in being able to install this editor on their systems, they should know that most GNU / Linux distributions provide GNU Emacs in their repositories, with which they can simply find and install the package from their software center or with the help of their package manager.

For example, who are they Ubuntu, Debian or any derivative users of these, they can install the editor by opening a terminal and typing the following command in it:

sudo apt install emacs

Although for Ubuntu and derivatives there is a developer who compiles the editor code and provides them within a repository, which can be added with the following command:

To install GNU Emacs on Ubuntu, as well as derivatives of it, we will only have to open a terminal (We can do this with the key combination Ctrl + Al + T) and copy the following commands into it:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kelleyk/emacs -y

Here it is a matter of monitoring the prompt availability to install the package of the new version.

In the case of those that are Arch Linux, Manjaro, Arco Linux users or any other derivative, the installation can be done by executing the following command in a terminal:

sudo pacman -S emacs

While for those who prefer to use Snap packages, they can install the editor with the following command:

sudo snap install emacs --classic

Finally for those who are interested in installing the new version nowAt the moment the only way is by downloading the source code of the editor to compile it within your system.

The new version of Emacs can be obtained from its official website in its download section. The link is this.