For a while now I’ve been wanting to use the latest and greatest Emacs packages tracking Melpa as closely as possible.

This has been hard while using Nix to maintain my Emacs configurations since Nixpkgs is often lagging behind (for good reason).

After about a month of getting the required changes into Nixpkgs I’m announcing the semi-official Emacs overlay!

GitHub nix-community/emacs-overlay Bleeding edge emacs overlay [maintainer=@adisbladis] - nix-community/emacs-overlay

This is based on work by a number of people, notably https://github.com/ttuegel/ who created emacs2nix and https://github.com/bendlas who wrote the new emacs-lisp based Melpa updater and https://github.com/etu who worked together on the initial overlay that resulted in this.

It’s currently updated multiple times daily from all supported package repositories, see the README for more detailed information.

A side-announcement is that we now have a dedicated irc-channel on freenode called #nixos-emacs