Emacs 24.4 is finally with us. You can go to the GNU Emacs site to get a copy. When I downloaded it, the mirrors had not yet been updated so I just went to the primary FTP server to get my copy.
It compiled without problem. You can just follow the INSTALL file instructions, perhaps going to the INSTALL file for your particular platform but the TL;DR for the Mac is
./configure --with-ns make sudo make install
Then (for the Mac) you have to drag Emacs.app in the nextstep directory to /Applications. It almost takes less time to do it than it does to describe the process.
When I brought the new Emacs up, I had two problems (at least so far). First, it wasn’t loading ace-window because it couldn’t find the file, even though it was there. I deleted it from ELPA and then readded it and it worked again.
Second, I have Emacs configured to split the frame horizontally so that I have two side by side windows when I start. The frame split during initialization but then killed one of the windows so that I had a single wide window. I solved that by setting disabling desktop-save-mode:
(desktop-save-mode nil)
It still remembers my open buffers across invocations so it’s just like it was before. This is no doubt because of the new session-saving features: I’ll have to investigate it more later.
This is my second post written in Emacs 24.4 and as you can see it’s working just fine. I doubt any Irreal Emacsers need the reminder but you should definitely upgrade. It’s really easy, even if you compile from source.
UPDATE: If you want to use eww, there’s an extra step you need to do on OS X. I wrote about it here.