[reinitctxoffset]

This is outstanding, if I have time I'll be switching over today.

This is the kind of thing that could drive a truly free fork of emacs forward, it's enough better on realistic desktop displays to rally around and as the parent discovered "Free Software" at this point has very little to do with the freedom to do what I want on my computer in a low friction way: an ideological position on "GPUs" as a category is bizarre even by Late Soviet FSF standards. By all means cite a vendor and a policy, but even NVIDIA is in tree now, it's got the same software freedom as ext4 and I don't hear anyone talking about chains on that.

In the age of machine assist emacs could get a modern fast/cachable build, clean under all the sanitizers, io_uring on Linux, deterministic clang formatting, compat break with zero-use junk from the 80s, WASM compilation for polyglot extension (I like lisp but I understand why some people don't), modern networking, modern chrome, 100% vscode compatible LSP, modern theming that defaults to something that doesn't drive users away. I would love to have a ten line init.el instead of 4k of workarounds.

Maybe this can be the nvim moment.

I love emacs but the nvim people have so many nice things and FSF emacs has a shelf life. If someone out of their own time and resources did a cross platform, mechanically verified, dramatically accelerated at HiDPI patch to basically anything else they'd be greeted like a hero.

Keep up the good work legend.

[joshjob42]

I think a stronger basis for that is probably the Neomacs project aiming to rewrite the elisp layer and all C code in Rust, incorporating GPU rendering etc along the way, see https://github.com/eval-exec/neomacs

[wasting_time]

Just to clarify: the NVIDIA driver is not in-tree, and probably never will be.

Intel and AMD are, but require proprietary firmware to work, so the freedom aspect is disputed.

[reinitctxoffset]

Pardon my shorthand. I meant open source and licensed under both MIT and GPLv2 such that distros build it alongside every other `.ko`.

One imagines if anyone has an issue it's with the RISC-V blob in GSP. Now while I myself wouldn't brave the wrath of NVIDIA's lawyers by like, calling Ghidra on it or anything, one imagines it doesn't have a lot of secrets from the motivated tinkerer!

[arikrahman]

I agree. Nvim already takes notes out of emacs with major contributors using Funnel to use Lisp as a workaround for working with Lua. This would be a step in the right direction for the continued pioneer emacs proves to be.

[skydhash]

> In the age of machine assist emacs could get a modern fast/cachable build, clean under all the sanitizers, io_uring on Linux, deterministic clang formatting, compat break with zero-use junk from the 80s, WASM compilation for polyglot extension (I like lisp but I understand why some people don't), modern networking, modern chrome, 100% vscode compatible LSP, modern theming that defaults to something that doesn't drive users away. I would love to have a ten line init.el instead of 4k of workarounds.

A lot of wishes, but no concrete solutions (unlike TFA). A good design doc with factual arguments would be better.

[reinitctxoffset]

In fairness I only saw this like, an hour ago, so it'll probably be at least until after work before I start messing around with it.

[stackghost]

>an ideological position on "GPUs" as a category is bizarre even by Late Soviet FSF standards.

The FSF and the GNU project are both paralyzed by their inability to move on from Stallman. He may have been a visionary 40 years ago but now he's an obsolete dinosaur who hasn't written a line of code in decades and has absolutely no idea how modern computers work.

He can't update his own website. He evidently doesn't seem to know how GPUs work. He does his computing in a very unorthodox and anachronistic manner, and that's great for him, but irrelevant to most people who would benefit from more free software.

[salutis]

Please do not spread lies.

"obsolete dinosaur who hasn't written a line of code in decades"

The most recent code change in Emacs by RMS was on 2026-04-22 (0fb9d096e38), so ~3 months ago. He can write complex code (without AI), such as the `cond*` macro (707 LOC, all macro code), authored and pushed to Emacs on 2024-08-02 (18491f48d97).

[stackghost]

I stand corrected on the "writing lines of code in decades" portion but not on the rest.

I think RMS does far more harm to the movement than he does good, and this ignorant, luddite take on GPUs is a poignant example.

[andros]

Thank you! A small correction on framing though: the goal is not a fork but a patch upstream. The backend is structured precisely to minimize the diff against Emacs mainline. The "nvim moment" comparison is flattering but I would rather this be the patch that makes the FSF argument easier to win than the one that splits the community. That said, your list of modernization items is a fair read of the backlog.