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macs is a libre text editor that’s widely popular. It comes with more than 2,000 built-in commands and lets the users combine them with macros to automate work. GNU Emacs is the most popular Emacs variant that’s being extensively developed and improved.

Emacs 25.1 has now arrived with a long list of new features and changes. For those who don’t know, Emacs major releases start at X.1. So, Emacs 25.1 is a major release. As the last major version Emacs 24.1 was released in June 2012, this release represents the development work of more than 4 years.

Among the highlights of Emacs 25.1 release is Xwidgets, which lets one embed GTK+ widgets inside Emacs buffers. One such awesome widget is WebKitGTK+. It’s a full-featured WebKit port that can allow you to browse the internet and watch YouTube inside Emacs. You can visit this Reddit thread to find some useful information about Xwidgets in Emacs.

Other major new features in Emacs 25.1:

Now Emacs can load the shared/dynamic modules. Wondering what is a dynamic Emacs module? It’s a shared library that provides extra functionality that one can find use in Emacs Lisp programs. Character folding support too has been added in isearch.el.

Emacs 25.1 also brings along experimental support for Cairo drawing. Working on the security front, the developers have enhanced the network security by adding the new Network Security Manager (NSM).

Other major additions/changes in Emacs 25.1 include a new minor mode ‘electric-quote-mode’ for using curved quotes as you type. A new option ‘switch-to-buffer-in-dedicated-window’ is added to give you more control over how ‘switch-to-buffer’ proceeds.

For the detailed set of changes, find the Emacs 25.1 change log. For grabbing the latest mirror, visit the main GNU FTP server.

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Also Read: How To Install Bash 4.4 On Linux Distributions

