GNU Emacs 24

The most recent version is GNU Emacs 24.5, released on April 10, 2015.

Where to get

• For debian user, an Emacs snapshot can be found from emacs.naquadah.org.
• Precompiled Binaries of Emacs for Windows

Major Changes

Package Management

Emacs now ship with a Package Management package, An official package repository is also setup by GNU, you can also add more repository.

Lexical scope in Emacs Lisp

Emacs can now eval code in lexical scope, user has to explicit choose bewteen Lexical scope or Dynamic scope by set variable lexical-binding, Dynamic scope is still the default.

Custom color themes

Emacs now has a native Theme customization support.

RTL language support

Emacs now handles RTL languages like Hebrew, Arabic.

Unicode support

Emacs now shows the hex code for non-displaying glyphs instead of the empty block.

Further reading

• GNU Emacs News, accessed by [C-h n] (or M-x view-emacs-news) in Emacs.

Reference

• what is new in emacs 24 part 1
• what is new in emacs 24 part 2
• a peek at emacs24

See also

Versioning of Emacs