Some things that come to mind: * --daemon with emacsclient was a big improvement in usability (ie. "instant startup" by keeping it running all the time) * As

Some things that come to mind: * --daemon with emacsclient was a big improvement in usability (ie. "instant startup" by keeping it running all the time) * As others have said, there's been a surge in elisp packages lately, thanks to package.el and friends * Changing color themes and fonts used to be a real hassle, but no more. * Unicode (and bidi) Just Works now, no magic incantations in ~/.emacs needed any more * org-mode! Ten years ago, org-mode was just started and not yet a part of Emacs. I think I first installed it as an addon around 2005, but at the time it was quite barebones compared to what it is now … (and of course installing it and keeping it up-to-date was a lot more work than doing the same for any third-party package now). ----- This question prompted me to look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Emacs#Release_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Emacs#Release_history – other things I enjoy from that list include: * good fullscreen support in X, * lexical binding (not something you need most of the time, but indispensible when you do need it), * docview (PROTIP: docview is better than most pdf viewers for copy-pasting text from pdf's), * nXML (awesome XML editor), * dbus bindings – can be handy, * tramp! ohmydog tramp didn't even exist ten years ago! And people were using c-mode to highlight CSS files … So yes, significant changes noticed :-)