Discovery of Emacs Features

• This post is my third Emacs carnival entry, this time for Nov 2026. If you're new to this site, FYI I also go by Zororg in emacs chat/universe.

I'm happy that this topic erupted after I poked around in mastodon, maybe some day I'd like to hoist as well.

Before I write up on topic, I'm sure many emacs users might remember that there was a podcast channel called "Discovering Emacs", there was a Youtube channel (rip), mastodon presence in emacs.ch (rip) and everywhere in podcast apps. It was very promising and a professional ambience to hear someone speak of dear emacs. Thankfully git repo exists, and you see the notes and how good it was, wish it had continued or someone brings similar stuff to our small church of emacs. Obviously we are ever so thankful for sacha, protesilaos and emacs-devel people for their good faith and holding up emacs for what it is today even after 50 years.

We need more community users to hold the torch, contribute, volunteer and not be behind the shiny tool-era that is making us lazy and degenerate. Me included!

Back to topic, I usually discovered emacs features based on "good to have" or "cool to have" notion and kept on exploring or adding, sooner came to realize that I've not even grossed the emacs builtins batteries. Nowadays I only discover features based on need, if not it'd be a aha/TIL moment as always.

Emacs is one best example of a perfect software for humans, and by humans. Each object or data is so well connected, that by just using emacs you keep discovering new features every now and then. The docs are the greatest feat of any software that, docs exist for humans and code exists as docs for humans too. History of emacs itself is very funny, thanks for the archives gnu mailing list has and some code has many funny comments, this all brings a smile to users at some point when they again "discover" the legacy of emacs.

Thanks to Alternate Intelligence these days that many people don't recognize the charm of emacs anymore, and thanks to the every busy world that shiny tools keep popping up to be eye candy for all. But for those who recognize or stay, surely emacs got us treat for lifetime. Emacs was almost like Second brain to many users, but now their first brain has been almost replaced by Lazy Learner’s Machine (LLM) and emacs is out of equation now.

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1. How often do you discover an Emacs feature?

   Nowadays rarely, even r/emacs has no human posts, and mastodon #emacs seems to be quite. So for now I'm just getting things done using emacs for my needs. Hopefully could find gems via mailing lists now.

2. What was the most recent feature that you adopted?

   A consult function to change buffer font by preview. Which is very cool, just like color theme playing with different font is fun to read as per mood. Discovered via r/emacs and hackernews.

   Except for this I've been using ezemstov's fork of emacs which builds pure wayland backend using Skia GPU renderer, without GTK or cairo toolkit. Its snappier and 3-5x snappier than PGTK… read more Its even available in nix emacs-overlay (go try it out with nix shell)

3. Are you a “Set it and forget it” type of user?

   Most config were that way, but later on trimmed them out and only keep essential ones now. Thats the reason I prefer using builtins now unless necessary. Config is now at 2K LOC.

4. Do you read Emacs-centric social media trolling for new things to try?

   I wonder where is emacs trolling happening, but I glance actively over r/emacs and #emacs in mastodon, and obviously planet Emacs for all golden nuggets.

5. What’s the next feature that you’d like to try?

   Canvas patch, IGC, and more than all Gnus upgrade to be async and snappier.

6. If you’re a Feature Creator, tell us about that!

   Nope, but I've a public config that might be of interest. Also since I was missing two package needs, I tried building those (ofc with help of second brain).

   • nnflux: A Gnus backend reader for Miniflux feeds. It works like a charm with all features for RSS reading beauty.
   • denden: A ox-publish based helper tool to act as typical SSG for emacs, my site that you reading is built using that and I made it just for this purpose to replace hugo.