Emacs 31.1 will release on 8/24

I have been using Emacs for 32 years now. It had its ups and downs: there was a period of very slow development, which led to the XEmacs fork, which I used for many years.

These days I see a renaissance of sorts. First, the development progress is excellent. Second, Emacs turned out to be the ultimate material for AI. I no longer write my own Emacs functions. I tell AI to modify the Emacs behavior the way I want. I now have a development environment that I fully control. Windows open where I want them. Keystrokes do what I want them to do. I have tools for annotating Claude Code plans in Emacs and plenty of other functionality. Without AI, I would never be able to implement all these tiny fixes and improvements. It would cost me too much time. And in other IDEs, I would have to "ask for permission", because not every behavior is exposed and modifiable. In Emacs, almost everything is, and you can change the behavior of other packages, too.

It feels great to have a development environment that I am in control of and that won't disappear tomorrow, like so many other IDEs did.

For those who use Emacs on macOS, I highly recommend upgrading to 31.1 ASAP since several memory leaks have been fixed by Przemysław Alexander Kamiński [1] et al.

[1]: Author of "Emacs: The macOS Bug" (<https://xlii.space/eng/emacs-the-macos-bug/>), which surfaced on HN some time ago.

It's hard to explain my relationship with Emacs, but starting it is the first thing I do when I turn on my computer.

I don't use it much for development these days, but I always have a bunch of buffers open and I do a lot of residual work on it.

If I install Linux on my computer, the first thing I always do is install Emacs, it's like a kind of default environment for doing everything text related, and it feels incredibly unfamiliar not to have it open all the time.

Related cool thing: Emacs may be getting a new GC in 32, https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/feature/igc3/READ...