Emacs Bedrock 2.0 Requires Emacs 31, Trades Add-ons for Built-ins

Bedrock, a minimal Emacs starter kit that ships as nothing more than an early-init.el and init.el you copy into ~/.emacs.d/ and then edit directly, has reached version 2.0. Its guiding idea is the opposite of heavyweight configuration frameworks: rather than layering an abstraction you never fully understand, Bedrock hands you a set of sane defaults with just enough inline comments to learn from, and expects you to own your config outright. The base setup uses no third-party packages, with optional configs for popular community packages kept in a separate extras/ folder.

The major version bump reflects a hard break with Emacs 29 (last released in 2024); 2.0 now targets Emacs 31, released in August 2026. The changes lean heavily on maturing built-in functionality: wgrep is dropped for the native grep-change-to-grep-edit-mode, which-key gives way to Embark’s auto prefix help when Embark is loaded, and tree-sitter and isearch configurations are reworked. All .el files now carry the lexical-binding cookie, use-package auto-installs missing packages by default, the Completions buffer auto-updates, and repeat-mode is on out of the box, alongside theme-color and startup-message fixes.

The author frames this as an incremental refinement rather than a rewrite, and notes there is deliberately no automatic upgrade path—upgrading means diffing your cloned commit against main and cherry-picking, consistent with the project’s philosophy of getting users to own their entire configuration quickly. In keeping with that ethos, Bedrock collects no telemetry, so adoption numbers remain unknown by design.