Native compilation is now default, so elisp is much faster than it was out of the box.

Tree-sitter support is quite smooth now, with automatic grammar installation.

Apparently very good Android support.

Canvas support is in master, people are building all kinds of crazy stuff[0] with this

Lots of nice built-in packages like modus themes, eglot, which-key. Editable grep/xref/occur results is also built-in now. New context menu things.

Load the "newcomer-presets" theme to enable stuff that newcomers tend to want enabled (tab bar, fancy completion, lots of little things).

[0] e.g. https://monadicsheep.org/blog/an-introduction-to-canvas-in-e..., and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61-uNV9N154 / https://github.com/yibie/exc.el

Fantastic rundown, thank you!

Wow I missed canvas support completely. This is going to make some custom UI's way easier to make compared to the hacks I had to resort to in the past [0]

I do hope one day we'd get a new cross platform performant display engine that draws like Zed does for more UI capabilities in Emacs. Neomacs[1] promises this and has some of this but looks like its suffering from never ending scope creep and continuously moving back and forth between 80% there and 90% there due to unattended agents running wild.

[0] https://github.com/ozanvos/emacs-webkit-color-picker

[1] https://github.com/eval-exec/neomacs

It looks like exc.el is built on top of a reactive UI framework, which, well, would have been incomprehensible to the first users of GNU Emacs on PDP-11 UNIX…

https://github.com/emacs-taf