Emacs 29.1 released

I agree, that matches my experience as well. After an upgrade, my old config spews errors that I have no idea how fix. I do not remember any *single* upgrade that did not report such errors.

The problem when the config is a programming language based on functions, is that you cannot get useful hints such as "this keyword is now deprecated in favor of XXX, please adjust your config". No, instead you get stuff like "unknown function" or "no such variable" and whatnot. For a user this is extremely frustrating because you just want to be able to do your work as you did before the upgrade and you end up having to waste 4 hours scanning the net looking for others facing similar errors, and blindly copy-pasting there random stuff you don't understand until you recover a barely tolerable behavior that allows you to try to restart your work where you left it without wasting more time.

And I'm really not using anything fancy. My emacs is just an editor, mostly for C (with tags), sometimes for plain text files and occasionally for bash scripts. It doesn't do any of the eye-candy stuff I'm seeing others configure such as auto-completion, make, git integration, mail reader, browser etc. And once in a while I open a remote file, when google manages to remind me the syntax for what looks like a URL but is not. It's just an editor that I find comfortable when it works because it supports multiple files, multiple windows, including with the same file in several windows and copy-paste between multiple processes. I'm sure emacs developers would be extremely disappointed by seeing my simple level of usage and that I probably totally ignore most of the features they work on on a daily basis, and whose presence justifies breaking my usage from time to time.

I got used to its key bindings but I could probably switch to a much lighter reimplementation that supports the same bindings, multi-window/ediff, and syntax highlighting. Before X was a regular thing on Linux, I used to use "joe" which was quite good and light by then. But xemacs then emacs made it more comfortable to work on multiple files.