I've been maintaining Emacs Solo for a while now, and I think it's time to talk about what happened in this latest cycle as the project reaches its two-year mark.
For those who haven't seen it before, Emacs Solo is my daily-driver Emacs configuration with one strict rule: no external packages. Everything is either built into Emacs or written from scratch by me in the lisp/ directory. No package-install , no straight.el , no use-package :ensure t pointing at ELPA or MELPA. Just Emacs and Elisp. I'm keeping this post text only, but if you'd like to check how Emacs Solo looks and feels, the repository has screenshots and more details.
Why? Partly because I wanted to understand what Emacs actually gives you out of the box. Partly because I wanted my config to survive without breakage across Emacs releases. Partly because I was tired of dealing with package repositories, mirrors going down in the middle of the workday, native compilation hiccups, and the inevitable downtime when something changed somewhere upstream and my job suddenly became debugging my very long (at the time) config instead of doing actual work. And partly, honestly, because it's a lot of fun!
This post covers the recent refactor, walks through every section of the core config, introduces all 35 self-contained extra modules I've written, and shares some thoughts on what I've learned.
Now, I'll be the first to admit: this config is long. But there's a principle behind it. I only add features when they are not already in Emacs core, and when I do, I try to build them myself. That means the code is sketchy sometimes, sure, but it's in my control. I wrote it, I understand it, and when it breaks, I know exactly where to look. The refactor I'm about to describe makes this distinction crystal clear: what is "Emacs core being tweaked" versus what is "a really hacky outsider I built in because I didn't want to live without it".
The Refactor: Core vs. Extras
The single biggest change in this cycle was architectural. Emacs Solo used to be one big init.el with everything crammed together. That worked, but it had problems:
— It was hard to navigate (even with outline-mode )
— If someone wanted just one piece, say my Eshell config or my VC extensions, they had to dig through thousands of lines
— It was difficult to tell where "configuring built-in Emacs" ended and "my own hacky reimplementations" began
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