Emacs 24.1 is ready for download from the usual places. There’s all kinds of little improvements that we’ve talked about from time to time but the main features, as described by the release notice, are:
- The new packaging system. This was available in Emacs 23 as the ELPA add on but it’s now built in.
- Bidirectional text. Probably not a huge item for most users but if you write in Arabic or Hebrew, I’m sure this will be very welcome.
- Lexical scope in Emacs Lisp. I’ve written about this before.
- Improved Custom Themes system. Again, this was available as an add on in Emacs 23 but is now built in.
- Unified and improved completion system in many modes and packages.
- Support of GnuTLS, GTK+ 3, ImageMagicK, SELinux, and Libxml2.
Those of you using OS X who don’t want to build from source, can get the binary from Emacs For Mac OS X.