14 DAY TRIAL // Nicolas Petton had the great pleasure of announcing this past weekend the release and immediate availability for download of the GNU Emacs 25.1 open-source text editor software.
GNU Emacs 25.1 is a major update that introduces a great number of new features and improvements since the previous stable release, and among the best new ones, we can mention the ability to load dynamic and shared libraries/modules, initial support for Cairo-based drawing, as well as character folding support in the isearch.el component.
There's also a new minor mode called "electric-quote-mode," which can be used for adding curved quotes as you type, better support when handling Unicode characters into your text, various network security enhancements offering SSL and TLS certificate validation, and Xwidgets support to let you embed native widgets inside Emacs buffers.
Emacs no longer works on IRIX
There are numerous other new features and changes implemented in GNU Emacs 25.1, but it would be impractical for us to list them here. The entire list of improvements can be viewed in the ChangeLog and NEWS files inside the source archive you can download right now. However, you should know that Emacs no longer works on IRIX.
"We expect that Emacs users are not affected by this, as SGI stopped supporting IRIX in December 2013. If you are affected, please send a bug report. You should be able to work around the problem either by porting the Emacs undumping code to GCC under IRIX, or by configuring --with-wide-int, or by sticking with Emacs 24.4," said the devs.
If you want to update your personal computer to the GNU Emacs 25.1, you can do so by first checking the main software repositories of your GNU/Linux operating system for the updated version. If it's there, install it and enjoy all the new features incorporated in the new release. More details can be found in the official announcement.