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The Emacsification of Software

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Re: The Emacsification of Software

#121

Post by komali2 »

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…

Many of them have been reclaimed. Check out the "awesome self hosting" GitHub repo.

Podcasts: audiobookshelf

Music: 500 different subsonic clients, many of which are good. Or some fun tuis

Feed readers: lol, more than there are grains of sand in Torvalds' flippers

Note taking: again innumerable, also, just use nvim or emacs of course

Chat: tons of very good self hosted options that can save orgs thousands a month.

Rather than build your own from scratch, rediscovering already solved issues, why not contribute to or fork a FOSS project? LLMs make it easy easier to get up to speed on large projects

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#123

Post by tptacek »

komali2 wrote: post #121
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…

Many of them have been reclaimed. Check out the "awesome self hosting" GitHub repo. Podcasts: audiobookshelf Music: 500 different subsonic clients, many of which are good. Or some fun tuis Feed readers: lol, more than there are grains of sand in Torvalds' flippers Note taking: again innumerable, also, just use nvim or emacs of course Chat: tons of very good self hosted options that can save orgs thousands a month. Ra…

Audiobookshelf is a web app! Like, if you had a good TUI music player, I don't think you'd be rebutting my thesis here. I don't doubt anybody's ability to build TUIs.

The point of the post is the emacsification of the native macOS (and Windows, I assume) environment. Totally reasonable not to care that it's occurring, that's not really responsive to the post, is it?

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#124

Post by dharmatech »

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…

Our social media should be decentralized and local first, allowing for bespoke clients on any OS.

This is an experiment towards that:

https://github.com/dharmatech/9social

The first client is written for plan9. This keeps the design honest. (If it can run on plan9/rc/acme...)

Video demo:

https://youtu.be/q6qVnlCjcAI

The current implementation is less than 3000 lines of code.

And speaking of Emacs... 9social was heavily inspired by an Emacs project called Org Social:

https://github.com/tanrax/org-social

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#125

Post by komali2 »

tptacek wrote: post #123
komali2 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of them have been reclaimed. Check out the "awesome self hosting" GitHub repo. Podcasts: audiobookshelf Music: 500 different subsonic clients, many of which are good. Or some fun tuis Feed readers: lol, more than there are grains of sand in Torvalds' flippers Note taking: again innumerable, also, just use nvim or emacs of course Chat: tons of very good self hosted options that can save orgs thousands a month. Ra…

Audiobookshelf is a web app! Like, if you had a good TUI music player, I don't think you'd be rebutting my thesis here. I don't doubt anybody's ability to build TUIs. The point of the post is the emacsification of the native macOS (and Windows, I assume) environment. Totally reasonable not to care that it's occurring, that's not really responsive to the post, is it?

I was responding to your comment that nerds should reclaim software that's overwhelmingly professional and pre packaged by sharing that there already is FOSS software for the categories you listed, which imo represents nerd reclamation.

Audiobookshelf has a native android app, not sure about desktop, I only use it on Android.

Anyone can build a TUI sure but why try to rebuild the whole mpd client/server stack that lets anyone on your network play music from the several TB collection of FLACs on your NAS? Same for subsonic, why reinvent the client server protocol there when it's already solved? And for subsonic clients, why reimplement streaming, offline downloads with de-duping, stream bitrate, album / artist handling... If there's something a subsonic client doesn't have that you want, fork it, point claude at it, done! That probably falls within the emacsification thing, right?

https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#126

Post by noosphr »

It is rather funny that the article talks about markdown when everyone who uses Emacs uses org mode instead.

My .emacs file is init.el which is actually init.org, which isn't an Emacs file but a literate program that's half a guix installation script and half a regular .emacs file.

Also kill all markdown. Replace it with xml or better yet SXML.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#127

Post by rgoulter »

> What matters are the ideas, the observation that “yeah, you can do that, and it’ll work well”. > > For the kinds of software I’m talking about, you want the prompts more than you want the source code.

Right.

In a broad sense, programming is about managing complexity/information. Constructing interfaces/abstractions in order to choose which details are useful for an interface (& which can be ignored).

The 'magical' parts of LLMs is being able to get useful output from unstructured/messy inputs.

It's kindof surprising that this has an impact on programming: it changes a lot ("write me an app that does this" becomes feasible for 'small' things), but in some sense, the fundamental problems remain.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#128

Post by iLemming »

peacebeard wrote: post #107
iLemming wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I want my life to have as little maintenance as possible I honestly can't even relate to what that even means. I'm a programmer - my everyday job is all about changing the behavior of computer systems - local, remote, cloud, embedded, etc. Requirements change, scope fluctuates, problem space evolves - grows and shrinks, accretion is unavoidable. I need to routinely move between language stacks, different data types…

To summarize: your claim is that choosing to spend your energy on anything other than your emacs setup is a catastrophic failure in terms of ROI, a delusion, and a sort of dereliction of identity as a programmer. My rebuttal: dude, relax.

Are you even reading what I wrote? What's with the childish tone, someone dropped your keyboard rate when you're a kid or something? Emacs is a tool, not a religion. There are plenty of talented, accomplished programmers who can relate to what I said, and never even used Emacs. There's no "Emacs setup" for me, just like there's no "ricing my browser" - I do expect my web browser to work exactly the way I want (or at least as much I can get out of it) - that requires managing extensions, keybindings, extension settings, security options, disabling some annoying features, etc. It's an instrument, and requires the same type of "maintenance" and tweaking. Sure, it might not be as constant as for Emacs, but after all - web-browser is a targeted tool, Emacs is a universal one.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#129

Post by rgoulter »

tptacek wrote: post #30
dogleash wrote: post #25

> Suddenly, I realized: a good Markdown viewer was a dumb thing to waste time looking for. It’s 2026. I can just have one extruded for me. If this is the starting thought, I don't know how you wrap back around to publishing and advertising the generated code. Either you create the best possible mac markdown viewer and should share it as that, orthogonal to any statement of AI use. Or you're just adding to the noise o…

The post talks about this.

The post talks about it as a good thing.

"With LLMs you can just make your own".

I read dogleash's comment as emphasising the bad parts of that. If everyone's just sharing their half-baked slop, it becomes harder for people to discover the good programs which are worth using, and harder for those quality programs to get social proof (or good direction).

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#130

Post by bo1024 »

tptacek wrote: post #115
bo1024 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 kn…

I'm not following your reasoning about the common denominator, not sure we're on the same wavelength about what I meant. I'm claiming that in order for an application to be "reclaimable", you have to be able to access and manipulate the data under the app. Some applications currently work that way now, lots of them don't.

For example, we can "reclaim" non-DRM ebook readers, audiobooks, and music players that play local files or use an open API. But a company-specific walled garden streaming DRM'd ecosystem will be almost impossible to build around.

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