As part of the Emacs-24.4 release, emacs-devel is conducting a survey to find out which vanilla GnuEmacs packages/modes people enable by default. The responses are in one big plain-text alphabetical list which isn’t really conducive to browsing.

I’ve gone through the most frequently enabled ones to see what they do. I figured others might be interested, so I’ve put the top ones in order of popularity, along with brief descriptions and links to the related pages if one exists. Enjoy!