Emacs 24.4 has been released earlier today, and it ships with several new features and improved functionality, one of the most notable being the presence of an integrated web browser.

Emacs is the powerful integrated development environment developed by the GNU project, with support for countless features and tools. You can program with it, read mail, browse files, and even play the built-in games, and version 24.4 extends its functionality with a web browser as well.

The list of changes that went into Emacs 24.4 is rather large, so here are the main new improvements.

The web browser is accessible via the M-x eww keyboard shortcut. Once you type it, you can enter a web address to navigate to it. Although it handles images as well, the web browser doesn’t seem to support CSS or JavaScript, but it’s a very handy and quick tool for those who spend a lot of time developing with Emacs.

The integrated web browser supports cookies, bookmarks and even images:

Improvements have been made to the multi-monitor and fullscreen support as well, and the state of frames and windows can now be saved and restored.

Support for menus has been added in text terminals and the “electric” indentation mode is now enabled by default. Also, a new rectangular mark mode, accessible via the C-x Space shortcut, found its way in this release.

Install Emacs 24.4 in Ubuntu 14.04

Currently there doesn’t seem to be a PPA with the latest Emacs, but installing from source should be pretty easy.

First install the dependencies:

Download the source tarball from here (direct link here), save it somewhere on the hard drive and then uncompress it:

Now change the directory to emacs-24.4 and issue the following commands:

./configure
make
sudo make install

Alternatively, you can specify a prefix and install it as a normal user (just make sure to add the path to the binary to your $PATH variable):

./configure --prefix=$HOME/usr
make
make install

In which case Emacs should be installed as $HOME/usr/bin/emacs.

You can also install the latest Emacs release in Ubuntu using UbuTricks.