In a followup to his recent post on Modern Emacs, Bozhidar Batsov has a short offering that talks a little about Commercial Emacs. It’s a fork of GNU Emacs but it’s not the first one. There have been several others, most famously XEmacs, which was a reaction to the slowness in getting changes accepted into GNU Emacs. This latest fork was, as far as I can tell, made for the same reason.
The list of things the Commercial Emacs developers say they’ve fixed includes several long standing problems such as (finally) doing something about the long lines problem and integrating tree-sitter to replace the slow and brittle regex-based font locking code. There are other changes, as well. You can see the whole list in either Batsov’s post or the README at the Commercial Emacs GitHub site.
I’m a little surprised by the fork because as far as I can tell, Emacs development is relatively speedy and there have been regular releases so the situation is different from what it was when XEmacs was forked off. On the other hand, there are a lot of FSF politics to negotiate when you want to make a change. Sometimes changes are rejected for political—as opposed to engineering—reasons.
Whatever the reasons, I’m sure that both distributions will benefit from new the blood and ideas.