Emacs 24.1 was released yesterday.

Being the first release version of Emacs 24, I'd suggest trying it out. I've been using Emacs 24 since the pretest version started coming out, and even the recent pretests have been stable for me.

Some New Features

My favorite feature of Emacs 24 is the elisp package manager. I find its an extremely convenient way to manage the packages you want your ~/.emacs.d to utilize. It's available via M-x list-packages. The canonical package manager is known as the ELPA, but there are other package managers, such as marmalade because the ELPA doesn't include everything.

Getting the package manager setup is easy. Here's the minimal code needed:

Another new feature is the built-in color-theme facility. Prior to Emacs 24 color themes could be created through the color-theme package. Instead you can now use customize-create-theme to create color-themes.

There's too much to cover in a blogpost, but here's the entire NEWS file, which you can also view inside emacs with M-x view-emacs-news.