Emacs 31.1 Ships With Unexec Dumper Removed, Terminal Mouse Support On by Default, and a New User Lisp Directory

Overview

GNU Emacs 31.1 is out. Sean Whitton announced the release on the info-gnu-emacs mailing list, writing that “Version 31.1 of Emacs, the extensible text editor, should now be available from your nearest GNU mirror,” according to the GNU mailing list announcement. LWN.net picked up the announcement the same day, describing “a long list of changes including the removal of the Emacs dumper, a new user Lisp directory feature, a ‘Send to…’ menu item in context-menu-mode, and many other changes.” Mickey Petersen’s Mastering Emacs blog also covered the release, writing that it “adds a slew of quality-of-life features,” according to Mastering Emacs.

What We Know

• The old unexec dumper is gone. The project’s official NEWS file states that “the traditional unexec dumper, deprecated since Emacs 27, has been removed,” and that “the portable dumper now works on m68k a.out targets,” according to the Emacs NEWS file. Mastering Emacs framed the change as the “retirement of the quirky unexec dumper,” according to Mastering Emacs.
• Bundled ctags is retired. “Emacs’s old ‘ctags’ program is no longer built or installed,” with the project recommending Universal Ctags as a replacement and offering etags --ctags as a stand-in, according to the Emacs NEWS file.
• Terminal mouse support is on by default. “In compatible terminals, ‘xterm-mouse-mode’ is turned on by default,” the NEWS file states, for terminals that support Emacs setting and getting clipboard data and mouse events; users who prefer the old behavior “can keep the old behavior by customizing ‘xterm-mouse-mode’ to nil,” according to the Emacs NEWS file.
• Init-file load order changed. “site-start.el is now loaded before the user’s early init file,” reversing the prior order so site administrators can customize settings “that can normally only be done from early-init.el,” according to the Emacs NEWS file.
• A new user-lisp directory feature. The NEWS file describes it: “If you have a subdirectory ‘user-lisp/’ in your Emacs configuration directory, then Lisp files in it and any subdirectories are now recursively byte-compiled, scraped for autoload cookies and added to ‘load-path,’” with a new prepare-user-lisp command to trigger the process on demand, according to the Emacs NEWS file. LWN highlighted this as one of the release’s headline additions, according to LWN.net.
• Daemon startup warnings are now visible. “The first client frame now shows warnings from daemon startup,” so starting Emacs as a daemon with a command like emacsclient -a "" -c will surface the *Warnings* buffer the way a plain invocation of emacs already does, according to the Emacs NEWS file.
• A new context-menu “Send to…” item. “‘context-menu-mode’ now includes a ‘Send to…’ menu item,” which “enables sending current file(s) or region text to external (non-Emacs) applications or services,” according to the Emacs NEWS file; LWN independently noted the same “Send to…” addition in its summary, according to LWN.net.
• Tree-sitter gets new configuration options. The release adds a “new user option ‘treesit-enabled-modes’” that can enable all available tree-sitter-based modes or a selected list, and states that “‘treesit-extra-load-path’ is now a customizable user option,” whose first directory becomes the default install location for language grammars, according to the Emacs NEWS file.

What We Don’t Know

The official announcement points to the full NEWS file and per-file ChangeLogs for the complete list of changes, describing the items above as only part of a longer set, according to the GNU mailing list announcement and LWN.net. It is not yet clear when major Linux distributions will package 31.1 in their stable repositories, and neither the announcement nor the NEWS file gives a timeline for when work on the next release, tracked in the file as Emacs 31.2, will produce further changes.