In my continued atonement for failing to produce a year end Emacs review, here’s an offering from Bozhidar Batsov. Batsov has done a lot of interesting work—including Prelude, CIDER, and Projectile—so his take on things is worth noting.
Oddly, he finds most of the changes introduced by Emacs 26.1 don’t affect him at all. He’s excited by the advances in concurrency but, of course, it’s still early days. He expects that it will become more important as package writers start taking advantage of the capability.
He makes two further points that I agree with. First, he says that MELPA has become the only repository that matters. Sure, there’s a couple of packages in GNU elpa that we all need and, of course, there’s the Org repository but, really, MELPA is the place to go.
The other point involves GNU elpa. He says that he’d like to see more of the packages that are built in to Emacs core—Org, for example—moved to GNU elpa and the core be dedicated to providing the best possible editing experience. That would have the advantage that the packages could be updated more regularly and, of course, make Emacs more configurable.
Batsov’s post is interesting and worth a read.