There are lots of different types of Emacs users, of course, but two distinct classes are those, like me, who stay pretty much up-to-date and those who are stilling running old versions of Emacs and are not familiar with what the latest releases have to offer.
It’s easy to dismiss the latter class as a small, insignificant group of users but I’d guess that there are more of them than many of us suspect. Over at Lambda Land, Ashton Wiersdorf has an interesting post on what’s new in Emacs in the last decade.
Even if you stay up to date, it’s interesting to see how Emacs has progressed in the last decade. Wiersdorf’s lists several broad groups of improvement:
- Completions
- Eglot
- Projects
- Tree-sitter
- Dictionary lookup
- Flyspell
- Diictionary definition lookup
- Visual Line Mode
- Themes
- Package Manager
- Emacs Ecosystem
- Magit
- Vertico
- Consult
- Corfu
- Citar
Wiersdorf also has a starter kit, emacs-bedrock that provides some of these improvements for those who would like to move up. If you’d like to update your Emacs experience, take a look at Wiersdorf’s post.