Over at Emacs Redux, Bozhidar Batsov is promising a peek at some of the Emacs 24.4 features. Because he contributed code to the release, he’s followed the development carefully and has been using it exclusively for the last six months so he’s in a good position to give us some insights into the new release.
His first post, on a smarter show-paren-mode, is already up. It’s got an animated gif that shows the new mode in action. The mode now matches a number of delimiters including language specific ones such as do/end.
Both posts are well worth your time. Of course, that’s true of all the posts at Emacs Redux.
Last-Minute Update
As I was getting ready to publish this, I noticed that Batsov has published his second post on rectangular selection. As in the show-paren-mode post, he demonstrates the new functionality with an animated gif. It’s a little hard—at least on my MacBook Pro—to see the highlighting so look carefully.