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The Emacsification of Software

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Re: The Emacsification of Software

#111

Post by dspillett »

ubermonkey wrote: post #101
e40 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have had the same emacs setup on linux, windows and macos for 15 years. Honestly, it's the best thing in my computing life.

Paralleling Linux and MacOS is pretty simple, but the last time I tried to make the same config work properly in Windows it was a nightmare b/c of the path issues.

In the past when I've seen someone extolling Windows/Linux compatibility for something as complex as a detailed Emacs setup, they were using WSL or one of the wrappers like Cygwin rather than native Windows compiles of the tooling.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#112

Post by melonpan7 »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #110
melonpan7 wrote: post #108

The barrier to entry for writing personalized software is lower, but you still need expertise for instruction and maintenance. I don’t think we’re at the point where any random stranger on the street can get Claude to make a perfect Electron app for their use case.

If you were building it for yourself would you ever chose Electron?

Merely an example but I would not, one of my gripes with LLMs is the training on general sentiment and trends, so they tend to recommend whatever is popular.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#113

Post by tptacek »

melonpan7 wrote: post #108

The barrier to entry for writing personalized software is lower, but you still need expertise for instruction and maintenance. I don’t think we’re at the point where any random stranger on the street can get Claude to make a perfect Electron app for their use case.

This is an article about nerds writing nerd software.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#114

Post by bo1024 »

tptacek wrote: post #105

Software that today is overwhelmingly prepackaged and usually professional, which I think at this point the nerds should reclaim: * Podcast apps * Music listening apps * Feed readers * Bluesky clients * Note-taking apps * Desktop bookmarking/read-later apps * Chat and instant messaging * Time trackers * Recipe managers These are all things that you can get better-than-replacement-grade results from Claude on --- not…

The common denominator: the data needs to be owned by you, or at least made accessible. Companies love to create walled gardens where they own the content and control how you access it, making this kind of personalized interface impossible. Hopefully we can push back more now.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#115

Post by tptacek »

bo1024 wrote: post #114
tptacek wrote: post #105

Software that today is overwhelmingly prepackaged and usually professional, which I think at this point the nerds should reclaim: * Podcast apps * Music listening apps * Feed readers * Bluesky clients * Note-taking apps * Desktop bookmarking/read-later apps * Chat and instant messaging * Time trackers * Recipe managers These are all things that you can get better-than-replacement-grade results from Claude on --- not…

The common denominator: the data needs to be owned by you, or at least made accessible. Companies love to create walled gardens where they own the content and control how you access it, making this kind of personalized interface impossible. Hopefully we can push back more now.

I mean, hold up, if that thought lights you up I'm happy, but I don't actually think that's the common denominator. I used Things.app to track projects for a long time and ultimately fell out of love with it. Things.app didn't own my data; it's a pure UI app.

But now it occurs to me: I know precisely how I work, I know what patterns are valuable to me, I know when and how I need to remind myself of things. I don't know why I haven't already started building my Things.app replacement. But I'd guess I have it to a place where I'm happy by this time Saturday.

Honestly, it's harder for me to think of daily-driver apps where this wouldn't be the case. I guess vector graphics editing? I'm not going to vibe up a vector editor. But I'll bet all the money in my pocket that 5 years from now, the real value in vector graphics tools will be their API/SDK, not the packaged application experience.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#116

Post by monk_grilla »

I can’t be the only one for whom `vim README.md` is perfectly good. I’ve never considered the monospaced font a limitation, I prefer it. Coloured rendering works great and is all the visual aid I need to parse quickly.

I can see a table of contents being useful though. Perhaps if `:Toc` doesn’t exist yet, it should.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#117

Post by ErroneousBosh »

chickensong wrote: post #87
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yeah. The home computer revolution. Literally everyone had a ZX Spectrum, or Commodore 64, or a BBC Micro if their parents were rich and thought that having the same as they had at school was a good idea.

If you change "literally everyone" to "a minority" we can agree.

Well, no, because it wasn't a minority.

They were cheap and ubiquitous, unless I suppose you were in one of "Iron Curtain" countries.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#118

Post by ErroneousBosh »

adampunk wrote: post #93
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yeah. The home computer revolution. Literally everyone had a ZX Spectrum, or Commodore 64, or a BBC Micro if their parents were rich and thought that having the same as they had at school was a good idea.

My house did not have a computer in it until 1992. I knew many people who did not have a computer in the house in the 1980s. Computers were expensive!

Even in the early 80s they were 100 quid, that was nothing.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#119

Post by ontouchstart »

dang wrote: post #55

This is so exactly right and I've been saying it to whoever will put up with me...(and now am embarrassed I have no link to show for it. oh well, shame is good for writing. envy too!) Software production is now so easy that everything is a .emacs file (pronounced "dot emacs" btw): meaning, each individual has their own entirely personal, endlessly customizable software cocoon. As tptacek says in the OP, it's "easier…

> Even more importantly, what happens to teamwork? If we are all a BBM now—or rather, if we all have personal armies of BBMs, permanently locked in a manic state, springloaded at all hours to generate things for us-and-only-us—how do we work together? How do cocoons communicate, interoperate? What does a team of ai solipsists look like? It sounds oxymoronic.

One example of teamwork is how the programmers and researchers worked together to build the UNIX SYSTEM (https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/reader.pdf). It is not a product but an environment optimized for building tools and solving practical problems with tools written in C (while BBMs were busy with Lisp in Boston .;-)

C++ is a totally different story and you need an IDE for that.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#120

Post by ngriffiths »

Wow, this really changes how I think about working with software and with LLMs. Sharing ideas and amateur remixing and setting up something weird for you and your friends is so much easier now. Things you had to have lots of time and expertise to do before are just widely accessible now.
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