GNU Emacs is one of the most powerful free / free and open source text editors available for multiple operating systems regardless of machine type such as GNU / Linux, BSD, macOS, Windows and Solaris.
Today, after a year of development, Nicolas Petton has released a new version 27.1 of the Emacs text editor. Obviously, it comes with a wide variety of new changes, ranging from installation, startup, and editing, to mode changes and specialty packages.
GNU Emacs 27.1: What's New
With Emacs 27.1, the Cairo drawing functionality ( --with-cairo configure the option) is no longer experimental. Now if you configure Cairo drawing using Cairo> = 1.16.0 with Emacs 27.1, you can even display multicolored fonts like Noto Color Emoji.
Subsequently, it also supports built-in printing when you build Emacs with GTK +. However, if you want to build Emacs with GTK 2 and GTK 3, you now need GTK 2.24 and GTK 3.10 respectively.
Another major change included in Emacs 27.1 is the removal of ImageMagick's default configuration. This means that Emacs no longer uses ImageMagick to display, resize and rotate images due to security and stability concerns.
However, if you still want ImageMagick, you can override the default using configure --with-imagemagick.
Speaking of the new mode, v27.1 added a new command tab-bar-mode, which activates the tab bar at the top of each frame. Not only that, you can also use a new global-tab-line-mode to activate the tab line above each window.
In image mode, it added new Exif library which can parse JPEG files and output data. Even "image mode" uses this library to automatically rotate images based on orientation in the Exif data.
The list of new improvements does not end there. Therefore, for more details, I suggest you read the abstract of Emacs 27.1. However, I list here some other key new features included in GNU Emacs 27.1:
- Using HarfBuzz as a text formatting engine
- Built-in support for integers of arbitrary size
- Use of a " portable dumper " instead of UNEXEC
- Support for XDG conventions for init files
- Additional Early Boot Initialization File
- Using default lexical linking
- Default dynamic module support
- New 'jsonrpc' library for writing JSONRPC applications
- Unicode standard version 13.0 support
- New package to analyze time, date, duration and ISO 8601 intervals
- Battery status support in all versions of Cygwin
Get GNU Emacs 27.1
Now if you want to download Emacs 27.1 go to the official website page. If you are already using Emacs, simply update the package using your system's default package manager.
