In another of the videos from Emacs Conference 2019, John Wiegley talks about what’s coming in Emacs 27. Wiegley is still the official maintainer but Eli Zaretskii stepped up to do the heavy lifting when Wiegley’s job intervened. Wiegley says that Zaretskii is now the de facto maintainer but that he was not available to give the talk so Wiegley made the presentation.

There are several interesting changes coming. Lispers will be happy to learn that Elisp will finally be getting BIGINT support. It still doesn’t have a full numerical tower but BIGINT support is probably the most important missing piece.

On the display side, Emacs 27 is getting support for Harfbuzz, Cairo, and better ligature support. Another display-like feature is support for tabs. This is not just tabs in the browser sense—because who needs that in Emacs—but a mechanism for maintaining window configurations and switching between them.

Some other interesting enhancements are the portable dumper (a long time coming but we’re finally free of depending on glibc hacks to build our core image), initial support for the XDG directory configuration standard, so-long-mode to help deal with very long lines slowing down Emacs, and gettext integration to support internationalization of error messages and the like.

You can get more details by watching Wiegley’s talk but, unfortunately, the audio dropped out several times during his presentation. Still, every serious Emacser will want to watch the video to see what’s coming in Emacs 27.