Neomacs is a hard fork that reimplements Emacs’s C core in Rust and moves the display engine onto the GPU, arguing that a modern, memory-safe rewrite can fix decades-old limitations while preserving everything users rely on: init.el, packages, and muscle memory. The project replaces large swathes of xdisp.c with a wgpu-based renderer and uses GNU Emacs as a test oracle to verify compatibility; the design targets true multi-threaded Elisp, JIT and inline caching, a concurrent zero-pause GC, and much higher performance. The repository is substantial and explicitly labelled work in progress, with the team tracking compatibility and feature status against emacs-31.1.
Functionally, Neomacs delivers GPU-rendered cursor/scroll/buffer animations, inline 4K video and images with DMA-BUF zero-copy, an embedded WPE WebKit browser and an Alacritty-backed terminal, and exposes GPU shader and render effects to Elisp so the frontend becomes hackable down to pixels. The core Elisp evaluator, bytecode VM, GC and dump format are implemented in Rust. Releases and platform packages exist for Linux and macOS (Windows experimental), build instructions and containerized packages are provided, and the project is GPL-3.0 licensed and seeking sponsors.
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