A new major version of Emacs was released last week.

What are some new and cool features available in the this new version?

* Improved UnicodeEncoding support (the internal character representation is
now based on UTF-8).

* Font rendering with Fontconfig and Xft, see XftGnuEmacs.

* Support for using X displays and text terminals in one session,
  and for running as a daemon.  See MultiTTYSupport and EmacsAsDaemon.

* Per-buffer text scaling.

* ShiftSelectMode, TransientMarkMode and PartialCompletionMode are on by default.

* Emacs now supports the XEmbed specification.  You can embed Emacs in another application on X11.  See EmacsXembed.

* Directory-local variables.  See ProjectSettings.

* Emacs now supports the SVG image format through librsvg2.  See EmacsSvg.

* New !NeXTSTEP-based port provides support for GNUstep (via the GNUstep libraries) and Mac OS X (via the Cocoa libraries).  Currently, the Nextstep port is not as stable as the other existing ports; but will be improved in future releases.  See EmacsApp.

* Mac OS X is no longer supported via Carbon.

* The ReferenceCards are now shipped as PDF files.

* The manuals are now licensed under the GnuFreeDocumentationLicense version 1.3, or any later version.

* Emacs 23 comes with a new set of default EmacsIcons.

* New packages for:
** viewing PDF and postscript files with DocViewMode
** connecting to processes via DbusSupport
** using the GNU Privacy Guard with EasyPG
** displaying line numbers in the fringe with LinumMode
** editing XML documents with on-the-fly validation with NxmlMode
** editing Ruby programs with RubyMode
** display-based word wrapping with VisualLineMode
** ZeroConf offers service discovery and service publishing interfaces
by communicating with Avahi, a zeroconf implementation, via D-Bus
messages on systems which have installed this software.
** [[JSON]]
** ProcedMode
** [[reStructuredText]]
** RememberMode

The easiest way to find new stuff is to read the NEWS file (`C-h n') or

* http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/NEWS.23.1

See the [http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu-emacs/2009-07/msg00000.html Emacs 23.1 release announcement].