I'm a muggle when it comes to vim, but I've considered learning it again recently because of AI. I'm building more than I have in years because I love being able to try things out without investing 3 months to get something working before I can really test the idea. And so I am typing A LOT. Less code, but lots of markdown, prompts and config. My hands are hurting, I really wish I had a power tool for typing. Writing is always going to allow us to be more precise than speech, and is a tool for creative thought in its self. I can see how we might be bearish on our expectations around new adoptees, but I think there's pressure to get more out of our editors too. Two of my recent projects have been vscode extensions, because I'm needing more help from my editor, not less: https://www.appsoftware.com/blog/fixing-agent-llm-context-de..., https://www.appsoftware.com/blog/as-notes-turn-vs-code-into-...
Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI
21–30 of 155 posts
Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI
#22If AI companies don't break even and continue to remain in 2 digit billions and more growing debt, all these are nice cookies that can be taken away at any time with a 5-10x increase in price.
Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI
#23> The learning curve argument gets harder to justify too. “Spend six months learning Emacs and you’ll be 10x faster” is a tough sell when a junior developer with Cursor can scaffold an entire application in an afternoon.
IF this is the case. But is it?
I have some doubts because to me it seems as if domain knowledge is shifted onto an AI. Then you become dependent on the AI. Is AI really better than a skilled human though? After all, if AI is doing the work and the human providing the input to it as guide, it should be possible to cut away the human completely. So Skynet 3.0 does not need humans. But when it does, then something doesn't work in that explanation - AI must thus not be "smart enough".
Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI
#24I have been a die hard emacs user for 20 years, and I have a very nice emacs setup (if a little bit idiosyncratic, but all emacs configs are idiosyncratic). However, recently I realized that I read code, but almost never write it. What is more, I spend a lot of time doing it in tmux, over mosh, from my phone. Emacs ergonomy is just not great if all you have is a horrible phone keyboard (and no swiping, because tmux r…
Emacs has multicursor, lsp and treesitter so from just reading the helix landing page idk what you gain? Bat sounds interesting, thanks.
Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI
#25I have been a die hard emacs user for 20 years, and I have a very nice emacs setup (if a little bit idiosyncratic, but all emacs configs are idiosyncratic). However, recently I realized that I read code, but almost never write it. What is more, I spend a lot of time doing it in tmux, over mosh, from my phone. Emacs ergonomy is just not great if all you have is a horrible phone keyboard (and no swiping, because tmux r…
>> recently I realized that I read code, but almost never write it.
I think most engineers are reading code than writing it. I find it very hard to not use Emacs when reading large codebases. Interestingly, its mostly because of file navigation. I love using ido/ivy for file navigation, quickly filtering through buffers, magit.
Emacs in terminal is not an ideal experience though. So I can imagine it being multi-fold worse with phone keyboard.
Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI
#26How much of this article was AI written? I can sense the AI smell all over the place, also I found it way too long with little substance, but maybe that’s just me.
I didn't get that feeling. But it is long, which is a bit of an AI smell. That said, I think use of AI in writing might not always be a negative. On a couple of documentation pieces I have used AI to provide better structure to writing that I've started and check for technical correctness parts of a document where I need to check my terminology. As long as the original idea is human and AI helps to make the signal clearer, I'm ok with it.
Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI
#27How much of this article was AI written? I can sense the AI smell all over the place, also I found it way too long with little substance, but maybe that’s just me.
Bozhidar always writes like this. I can see why you would think it's AI style but I would vote that it isn't. Look at some of his pre-AI blogs, if you care to.
Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI
#28In my mind I had the opposite picture than the one the article portrays. 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…
> Now IDEs are useless. I personally haven't felt the need to goto_definition or autocomplete variable names for almost 2 years.
So you are vibe coding? Some of us still check every line of code generated and an IDE definitely helps with that. Even more so when you need to take control.
Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI
#29I'm a muggle when it comes to vim, but I've considered learning it again recently because of AI. I'm building more than I have in years because I love being able to try things out without investing 3 months to get something working before I can really test the idea. And so I am typing A LOT. Less code, but lots of markdown, prompts and config. My hands are hurting, I really wish I had a power tool for typing. Writing…
Start using speech to text more. You likely have the hardware needed to run a Whisper model locally.
Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI
#30In my view, Emacs is getting more powerful in the AI era. The cost of writing Elisp has dropped significantly — I've ended up with 15+ personal Elisp packages as a result. The freedom Emacs offers is still unmatched. For example, I heavily rely on sending automatic response ( https://github.com/ywatanabe1989/emacs-claude-code ), monitoring repository, and targeted context building from dired.
Fully agree, but it is also the buffer based navigation approach that is just fantastic. I wish other programs would adopt this. Most applications use dedicated areas for various functions, instead of letting me just hit a key to bring the function to where I am currently looking.