First, some short comments on the obituary.

longlines.el; use visual-line-mode.

This is sad, but don’t weep yet. I have a feeling a dead will rise from this grave on Emacs 25 (stay tuned).

iswitchb.el; use icomplete-mode.

This news flowed around the Emacsphere some months ago. Between icomplete-mode and ido-mode, iswitchb was no longer necessary.

terminal.el; use term.el instead.

They were redundant, and now they’re identical.

meese.el.

sup-mouse.el.

the old version of todo-mode.el (renamed to otodo-mode.el).

xesam.el (owing to the cancellation of the XESAM project).

yow.el; use fortune.el or cookie1.el instead.

Five packages I’ve never ever ever heard of. But I’m sure somebody will miss them.

Now, the interesting part.

New package eww.el provides a built-in web browser. This requires Emacs to have been compiled with libxml2 support.

I remember a lot of talk on eww’s speed and visual accuracy. It’s not always that I salute a package whose role is already filled by several others, but this one looks promising.

New package nadvice.el offers lighter-weight advice facilities. It is layered as:
add-function and remove-function, which can be used to add/remove code on any function-carrying place, such as process filters or <foo>-function hooks.
advice-add and advice-remove to add/remove a piece of advice on a named function, much like defadvice does.

Perhaps the advice interface needed a light-weight alternative. I never really noticed, and this package (while nice) feels rather underwhelming. Here’s a usage example.

(defvar x 1)
(defun test ()
  "Description"
  (interactive)
  (message "%s" x))

(advice-add 
 'test :around
 (lambda (fun) 
   (let ((x 2))
     (funcall fun))))

New package frameset.el provides a set of operations to save a frameset (the state of all or a subset of the existing frames and windows, somewhat similar to a frame configuration), both in-session and persistently, and restore it at some point in the future.

Now we’re talking! Can you believe Emacs had no way of saving window/frame configurations between sessions? I ran into this problem before, and so did this user at Emacs.SO. Before, all you could do was save it within a single session. Thanks to frameset.el, not only can you save configurations manually, but desktop-save-mode hooks into that automatically!

New package filenotify.el provides an interface for file system notifications. It requires that Emacs be compiled with one of the low-level libraries gfilenotify.c, inotify.c or w32notify.c.

I can imagine some nice uses for this, but we’ll have to see what comes of it. For what it’s worth, auto-revert-mode already makes use of this interface when it’s available, making it much less demanding.

New minor mode superword-mode, which overrides the default word motion commands to treat "symbol_words" as a single word, similar to what subword-mode does.

Bozhidar has more to say on this than I do. I’m a subword-mode worshipper, so I won’t be using this mode.

New minor modes prettify-symbols-mode and global-prettify-symbols-mode display specified symbols as composed characters. E.g., in Emacs Lisp mode, this replaces the string "lambda" with the Greek lambda character.

And we go off with a bang! By default, in emacs-lisp-mode, this will only turn lambda into λ, but that’s enough reason to turn it on.

(global-prettify-symbols-mode 1)