Emacs

Rahul Juliato's rundown of the Emacs 31 features he's daily-driving topped HN: auto-installing tree-sitter grammars, editable xref result buffers, window-layout transposition, and speedbar as a real side window. The author showed up in the thread to answer questions.

The feature that landed hardest was the boring one. 'Tree-sitter that just works' lets one longtime user delete a multi-line, OS-branching dotfile script he'd carried for years to make syntax highlighting behave.

The author, who also wrote the popular gptel package, frames Emacs as having a discoverability problem he's chipping at 'one demo at a time.' The built-ins are genuinely useful and genuinely buried.

The top reply reframes the whole premise: the issue was never finding features, it's keeping a large config stable across package updates. The fix people actually want is a good out-of-the-box experience, not another blog post.