Emacs GPU
@emacs-gpu

What is Emacs GPU?

emacs-gpu is GNU Emacs with a GPU-accelerated display backend. The drawing logic is platform-neutral, with one native driver per platform:

• macOS: Apple Metal, feature-complete. Text goes through a GPU glyph atlas, images and inline video are textures, and the output is pixel-accurate against the stock Cocoa backend.
• GNU/Linux (X11): OpenGL ES / EGL, beta. Pixel-accurate against the stock GTK/cairo backend.

Beyond raw rendering, it enables things the stock backend cannot do: video playback inside buffers, GPU cursor effects and buffer cross-fades. Code, demos and benchmarks: https://github.com/tanrax/emacs-gpu

What your donation pays for

The project ships ready-to-use packages with every release, and that is exactly what this money funds:

• Apple code signing and notarization: the Apple Developer Program costs 99 USD/year and is what lets the macOS app open with a double click, no warnings.
• Per-release maintenance: every new version means rebuilding, re-signing and re-notarizing the self-contained Emacs.app (native compilation and tree-sitter included).
• Homebrew: keeping the cask up to date (brew install --cask tanrax/tap/emacs-gpu).
• Debian/Ubuntu packages: building and testing the .deb files for each release (Debian 12 and Ubuntu 24.04).

Promise

Everything is and will remain free software, GPL v3 or later, same as GNU Emacs. Donations add no paywalls and unlock no features: they keep the signed, packaged releases coming.