Emacs Kick 0.3.0: Floating Docs, Snappy Completion, and Corfu Goodness

The 0.3.0 release of Emacs Kick lands today, bringing quiet but quality-of-life improvements while paving the way for future support in Emacs 31.

Gone is the company-mode UI. Enter: corfu, floating tooltips, rich font support, and more predictable behavior. Whether you use Emacs in GUI or terminal, the UX feels tighter, more modern, and (if you're on Emacs 31) frankly beautiful.

Let’s walk through what changed, and why this matters.

✨ What's New in 0.3.0

This release is focused on simplifying and modernizing the core experience—particularly completion and inline documentation.

🧠 Corfu replaces Company

company-mode has served us well, but it’s showing its age. In 0.3.0, it’s replaced with corfu.

This:

➖ Easily supports Nerd Fonts icons on TUI.

➖ Provides info about completion candidate on TUI (Emacs >31).

➖ Feels native and snappy.

➖ Integrates beautifully with cape, vertico, orderless, the modern minibuffer stack.

➖ Plays nice with LSP and non-LSP backends alike.

Corfu stays out of your way until you need it. Completion is now manual by default, triggered via TAB. No more random popups mid-thought.

You can re-enable auto-completion if you prefer, but the default now gives you back control.

💡 Floating Eldoc (with eldoc-box) on Emacs 31

If you're running the bleeding-edge Emacs 31, you now get floating documentation (via child-frame) out of the box using eldoc-box.

That means pressing K (uppercase!) shows a clean, floating doc tooltip right next to your point.

No more jumping to temporary buffers to read type signatures or docstrings. It feels like a native IDE. And if you’re still on Emacs 30? No problem, the fallback is still the eldoc buffer.

✨ Smaller Tweaks That Matter

True to the Emacs spirit, small details make a big difference. This release includes several subtle but impactful visual and behavioral changes:

➖ Company Mode Removed: All company-mode related packages have been fully removed for a cleaner, Corfu-native experience.

➖ Consistent TAB Behavior: TAB is now exclusively for completion, removing the ambiguity where it might trigger indentation instead.

➖ Quicker Dired: <leader> e d now opens dired on current working directory. This complements <leader> e e which opens the side explorer.

➖ Cleaner Diffs: The markers used by diff-hl in the margin have been updated to clearer box-drawing characters (┃, ┆), making it easier to see new, modified, and saved changes.

➖ Iconic Magit: When you have Nerd Fonts enabled, your Magit status buffer now includes file-type icons, giving it a richer, modern feel.

➖ Less Noise: The automatic highlighting of the current line (global-hl-line-mode) is now off by default to reduce visual distraction.

🚀 What This Means for You

Remember this:

Emacs-Kick isn’t a full-fledged distribution
but rather a starting point for building your
own Emacs configuration. It’s designed to be
especially accessible for Vim/Neovim users,
letting you explore the power of Emacs without
committing to its entire ecosystem.

This release doubles down on that. It gets out of your way. It gives you just enough: snappy completions, modern visuals, but no monolithic frameworks.

📦 How to Upgrade

Check install instructions on the official Github Repository: https://github.com/LionyxML/emacs-kick

💬 Final Thoughts

This release makes Emacs Kick feel... well, kick-ass. It’s smoother, quieter, and more intentional. If you value clean defaults, fast completion, and less cognitive noise. You’ll feel the difference.

Let me know what you think, what broke, and what could improve. PRs and issues welcome as always.

Happy hacking! ⚡️