Mysteriously growing into Emacs 27.1

I made the big upgrade to Emacs 27.1, giving myself a full day to work out the kinks. First off, it’s great; I like the early-init, I’m thrilled by the new in-box orgmode, and as things settle I love the new fonts and customizations. There is some strangeness on this journey, though (made worse by the fact that I am an exwm user, so emacs failures are system failures).

1. Everything died. I had to painstakingly go through my settings fixing packages whose syntax is no longer compatible.
2. Everything was ugly. Fonts were messed up, my all-the-icons used icons incompatible with the new Pango-based font rendering which doesn’t support bitmap fonts, and window drawing had some issues.
3. It all just sort of healed. Painstakingly upgrading packages a handful at a time, fixing faces and org code syntax, restarting lots to make sure my early-init.el was working properly, and gradually it all came together. Note it wasn’t fully a matter of fixing one sticky hinge at a time – things just started working, and I’m not sure if I did anything here. Probably the single biggest thing I did was (after fixing the emacs-crashing code irregularities) was upgrading all my emacs packages. I had to do it piece by piece since upgrading all of them was failing for reasons I still don’t know, but when all was done, everything seemed to have settled to a working state.

Some small things still aren’t working, but such is the life of an early adopter.

Ah, the life of a power-user. The non-technical dream of how much less frustration they’d have if they knew computers so well; really, it’s just an increased pain threshold to match our masochism.