Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

Emacs was lagging behind common IDEs, like IntelliJ and VsCode, cause big companies put thousands of developers to combine many features into one integrated package and everything works together providing a very smooth experience compared to Emacs (and Vim probably).

Now IDEs are useless. I personally haven't felt the need to goto_definition or autocomplete variable names for almost 2 years.

Now programming becomes closer to plain text writing and editing and it levels the playing fields for all editors.

Also Emacs can run Rust plugins, the user is not limited to Elisp. Not very convenient but possible.

That was a side-effect of using software that is deeply customizable, but not the main goal. It comes from being comfortable with your tools to the point of relying on muscle memory to use them. The main benefit to me has always been comfort. My favorite commands are a keystroke away, I know how the tool will react and what it's doing at any moment, I know all of its quirks, etc.

None of that changes in the age of "AI". This new technology won't replace computing for me. My hurdle to adopting "agentic" workflows has nothing to do with my choice of tools, and everything with not trusting the companies and ecosystems around this new tech, especially during this insane hype cycle. I've been slowly adopting parts of the stack I'm comfortable with, because, again, my comfort trumps anything else.

Besides, if anything, a deeply customizable platform like Emacs is ideal for building any type of workflow. There are already great packages for LLM integration, and I don't think Emacs users are missing out on anything. The fact "AI" companies decide to build their moats with custom tooling is not a problem I care about. Apple has been pushing their idea of what computing should look like for decades, and it has never appealed to me. I don't miss something I don't want.

Anyway, confusing article. The author acknowledges all of these points, but also the alternative scenarios. Both cannot be true for the same person. There will always be people who enjoy using Emacs and Vim because of their customizability, not necessarily their features. And there will always be people who just want to use a supported and official product, without any tinkering. Emacs and Vim will outlast this hype cycle just fine.

Thanks for all your work, batsov! I do hope you stick around these communities. :)

Claude Code can now introspect the entire editor and it can manipulate everything. You can have it build whatever features are missing - it will even debug those features for you, live in the editor.

I recently came back to Emacs from VSCode and ended up just letting Claude build me the features I was missing, mainly related to tabs and project management.

I think Emacs has unique advantages in the age of LLMs, you can just mold it like clay.