I'm pretty sure the wide spacing, overuse of italics, and massive overconsumption of vertical space mean that an straight text version of the changes emacs would be more comfortable to read. At least it doesn't use ghetto antialiasing (low contrast fg/bg to reduce jaggies).

You can find the text file at: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/news/NEWS.24.4

What I'd really like, rather than the original article (for which your criticism is dead on) or the NEWS file, is a summary of the important changes.

> You can find the text file at: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/news/NEWS.24.4

This is org-mode syntax, so you can browse it with org-mode.

Thank you for your feedback.

I've been using a pre-release version of 24.4 for months, and I'm loving it.

Ruby-mode got a huge improvement in its indentation. I was able to delete all of the hacks out of my .emacs files, and it works exactly the way I want it to.

The new superword minor mode is really useful. It lets to treat snake cased words as a single word, which makes recording macros a lot simpler in Ruby, Python, etc.

I've also found that I didn't have to make a single change to my .emacs files. All of my plugins were compatible. It was completely painless.

Note this article was written last year and I'm guessing a lot of new stuff has been added since then.

Are you sure? The writing implies that it was written recently. (Does the emacs release team consider "any day now" == a year in "There’s a new Emacs minor release due out any day now,"?)

Either way, the article does not mention its publishing date anywhere, which is rather unfortunate for a medium like the internet, where text is forever.

This post is from December 29, 2013, according to /feed (using Digg Reader). If you've been using HEAD then you've had 24.4 for longer than that.

> I'm guessing a lot of new stuff has been added since then.

The article implies it shouldn't have been:

> At the time of this writing Emacs 24.4 is in feature freeze; no major changes will get in, but the list of changes you see below is not set in stone – but it almost never changes much.

I was about to say the same, should have the (2013) tag.

This blog has had a series of posts on some of the new features that I found useful: http://emacsredux.com/blog/categories/emacs24-dot-4/

From what I see on the extended support of C++ parsing, I doesn't look very promising for handling C++11 features (let alone C++14). Truly disappointing.

I know this is a "if you really need it, why don't you work on it yourself instead of complaining?". I've tried making sense of the cc-mode source, without any success at all.

You may want to take a look at irony-mode. Do not expect any rich semantic features from the stock c-mode.

It's not rich semantic features that are missing, but basic stuff such as C++11 keywords, handling of >>, etc. Those seem to be available in a cc-mode branch, but since cc-mode is maintained separately from Emacs, it takes more effort than it should to have an updated version of cc-mode in Emacs.

Nowadays using package.el is mandatory.

I use irony-mode, which is a minor mode under cc-mode. They do different things.

I really love that it takes 6 min from git to build the latest Emacs on a 2010 ThinkPad.

Using emacs in a terminal is for newbies? I don't want to launch another program just to do my job! I'm already IN tmux running in Terminal.app, for nearly everything else.

> Using emacs in a terminal is for newbies?

Yes, if they do it by mistake and don't know that there is an alternative.

Does this mean that It is released? I can only find info suggesting that 24.3 is the current stable version.

My understanding is that it's being officially released this upcoming Monday. Builds of it, however, are available for testing and bug reporting.

Release candidate is planned this Friday with subsequent release on Monday[1] unless there's something bad.

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2014-10/msg00...

as an emacs user for 25 (!) years, this is an inspiring release.