Emacs 30.1 has been released with a compilation preview mode, full support for Emacs on Android, security fixes, and native compilation enabled by default.

Emacs is the GNU project’s text editor. It can be extended and customized, and comes with an interpreter for Emacs Lisp. GNU Emacs was created  in the 1980s by Richard Stallman as a free software alternative to the proprietary Gosling Emacs. It is based around a Lisp interpreter and has been under constant development for over 30 years.

The improvements to the new release start with the porting of Emacs to Android. The developers say that this requires Emacs to be compiled on another computer. The AndroidNDK, SDK, and a suitable Java compiler must also be installed.

A second improvement means that native compilation is now enabled by default. Configure will now enable the Emacs Lisp native compiler, so long aslibgccjit is present and functional on the system. This feature compiles Emacs Lisp functions to native code, resulting in performance gains of between two and five times compared to the byte-compiled counterpart.

Native JSON support is now always available, meaning that  libjansson is no longer used and no external library is required. JSON parsing performance in Emacs is also significantly improved, with up to eight times better performance. 

This release also adds a new completion-preview-mode that provides a combination for company mode and corfu (Completion in Region Function). Corfu relies on the Emacs completion facilities and concentrates on providing a polished completion UI. The new completion-preview mode combines the buffer and window system and adds predictive typing. The new mode provides access to Emacs’s expansive set of minibuffer completion styles and orders.

One other improvement of note is the addition of use-package version control support, meaning you can now install packages directly from version-controlled repositories. 

Emacs 30.1 is available now. 

More Information

Whats New In Emacs 30.1

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