Two-thousand lines into the NEWS file, things took a turn into what's changed about the Lisp that forms the core of Emacs and I realized I wasn't going to be keeping up. What's clear, though, is that Emacs has made an interesting move from a program that integrated into X only uneasily into one that provides some added functionality and features to make it a more comfortable fit. Given another week, a whole other slew of new features will likely present themselves for review, but it's clear that even with the small survey offered here, Emacs has evolved dramatically this time around.

Many will, of course, grab this newest version when it's widely available and argue that the added graphical glitz is so much more bloat and that Emacs was fine without it. Others will decide to approach it because it seems less menacing with a more modern-looking toolkit and the cartoonish GNOME icons that packagers may choose to use with it, and then promptly back away because while, even with the new skin, learning it isn't the hardest thing in the world, getting used to it, especially for those coming from the world of 'edit' and 'wordpad' in Windows-land, can be daunting. Making it do what you want is an exercise in getting to know Google and visiting a lot of idiosyncratic web pages written by Emacs enthusiasts.

In other words, Emacs is still Emacs. It's just gotten better.

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