I am an Emacs user of several years, but only recently discovered some features that I find incredibly convenient. I am somewhat embarrassed by my ignorance (and for that reason write this post anonymously), but suspect that others might not be familiar with these features, and so hope that sharing them here might be of use. Note that for most of this post, I'll write assuming you know the basics of Emacs -- if you don't, some of the following may be mysterious to you.

Magit

The feature I've found most useful, but is most widely-discussed, is Magit. Magit is an interface to git inside Emacs. Why do you need Magit when you already know how to use git on the command line?

It's nice not to have to switch to the terminal to commit/pull/push.
Magit commands are shorter than git commands (in the right context, you can just press "c c" to commit, rather than typing "git commit").
Magit nicely shows you the state of your repository: Which changes have been staged, which staged changes have not yet been committed, the state of the remote branch, etc.
Magit also nicely displays which things you can do with it. For instance, the first time you press "c" to commit, you are shown a window of options for your commit -- for example, would you like to override the author? To allow an empty commit? To disable running hooks? By default you can immediately press "c" again to do none of these things, but if you want to do something unusual, Magit shows you how.

In general, it is a much nicer experience than using git on the command line, and I strongly recommend it to Emacs users who regularly interface with git.

Tramp

A situation I am regularly in is that I want to edit files on a remote machine. Previously, to do this, I would SSH into the remote machine, open Emacs in the terminal, and edit that way. This was functional, but meant that I had to set up Emacs on every machine I wanted to work on, which was sometimes impractical. It turns out that there is a better way: when you open a new file in Emacs with C-x C-f, you can type in a path like /ssh:my_remote_machine:/home/my_name/my_dir/my_file.txt, and make edits to the file via ssh. This does not require installing anything, it's a built-in feature of Emacs called "Tramp", and it just works: for instance, when editing a file on a remote machine, you can use Magit to take actions in that machine's copy of the repository.

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