Marie K. Ekeberg has a holiday gift for Emacs users: a list of 24 Emacs packages that you can try during the holidays. The list is interesting in that it doesn’t really have a theme other than that they’re packages that Ekeberg finds useful or interesting. Some of them are builtin, some of them are in MELPA / Gnu Elpa, and some of them aren’t in any ELPA repository.
Some like Org-mode, Windmove, Magit, EXWM, Multiple cursors, and vterm will be familiar to most Emacs users but some may be new—at least they are to me. The first on the list is Try. Mike Zamansky often used it in his Emacs videos to try out a package without actually installing it. If you want to sample some of the offerings from the list, installing Try first is a good idea because it lets you experiment with a package without having to commit to it.
Another very useful package is undo-tree. It’s a little hard to get used to but it really will improve those times when you have to undo some text. It also rationalizes “redo”. That alone is worth installing it for.
One package that I haven’t tried but that looks interesting is focus. The idea is that text outside some configurable region get grayed out. I’m not sure it would work for me but it does look interesting. It provides a perfect example of why you should install Try: you can experiment with it and if you don’t like what you see, it will disappear the next time you start Emacs.
The list is worth taking a look at You may find something that will fit in with your workflow.