After two years of maintaining Emacs Solo, the project has reached a major milestone with a complete architectural refactor. Emacs Solo is a daily-driver Emacs configuration built on a single principle: no external packages. Everything runs on built-in Emacs features or custom Elisp written from scratch in the lisp/ directory. No package-install, no MELPA dependencies, just pure Emacs.

This latest cycle introduced a clean separation between core configuration and custom modules. The refactor splits Emacs Solo into two layers: init.el for built-in Emacs customization and lisp/ for 35 self-contained extra modules. This architecture makes the configuration dramatically easier to navigate, share, and maintain. Users can now pick and choose individual modules without digging through thousands of lines of code.

The core init.el configures everything from window management and completion systems to version control and Eshell with shared history across buffers. The refactor makes it crystal clear what's built-in Emacs being tweaked versus what's custom functionality. With Emacs 31 bringing new features like enhanced window layouts and improved icomplete rendering, the separation becomes even more valuable as some polyfill code will eventually become unnecessary.