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The Emacsification of Software

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Re: The Emacsification of Software

#161

Post by iLemming »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #70
iLemming wrote: post #63

Ehmm, weird, I can't be the only one in the room. You guys didn't know about gfm and gfm-view Emacs modes?

> Ehmm, weird, I can't be the only one in the room. You guys didn't know about gfm and gfm-view Emacs modes? I'm using Emacs since last century and I've got 3 000+ lines of custom Elisp code I wrote (with maybe only a few hundred lines copy/pasta'ed from other configs). I'm always using a recent Emacs compiled from source and now with LSP, org-mode, Magit, tree-sitter, ivy/avy/counsel/swiper with ripgrep (thanks burn…

I know, right? You'd be like "using Emacs like a boss", going with your keyboard "frrrrrrrr" (well, no, that's not Emacs, Emacs would be like "C-c C-c C-c C-c C-x 8 and only then frrrr"), managing entire k8s clusters, building it from the source using most esoteric build options, --with-fries-n-ketchup, and all. And then some jerk comes out of nowhere and tells you about fancy-pangolin-mode that's been sitting quietly in core Emacs since the Prohibition and you're like: "goddammm... I've been using it wrong, my life is meaningless..." :) We're old people. I mean, an eleven-year-old who opens Emacs becomes old in an instant. We have invented doom-scrolling. We've been going through the M-x menu way before twitter and reddit made it a thing.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#162

Post by dharmatech »

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 agree that owning the data is ideal:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48129841

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#164

Post by userbinator »

tptacek wrote: post #13
j2kun wrote: post #9

> You want a good Markdown viewer more than you think you do. > monospaced and thus fatiguing to read. Monospaced text is fine. I don't see how people who read code (and code comments) all day care that strongly about this. Plaintext is king

There's a reason we're not reading monospaced here, and a reason we do read monospaced code. But the beauty of this moment is that if you want a really good SwiftUI monospaced Markdown reader, you can have it before dinner. This is exactly what I'm talking about. You have an idiosyncratic personal preference, and it's now reasonable to expect software to shrink-wrap around that preference.

There's a reason we're not reading monospaced here

You underestimate the number of HN users who are reading this site in their terminal. ;-)

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#165

Post by bandrami »

This anecdote may be the key to the productivity mystery of LLMs: the output is appearing in the form of software that wasn't ever economical to make before so kind of by definition won't appear in productivity metrics. Though at least in my professional life since we have a configuration control protocol I probably will continue not seeing any impact from AI (for better or worse).

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#166

Post by iLemming »

tptacek wrote: post #131
iLemming wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Whoah, whoah, whoah, you two, this is a happy post, not an angry post. Nothing to get wound up over! Part of the point is that you can both just go and do you!

We're not fighting, we're just "emotionally explaining things to one another". That's what my wife says to calm our dog, when he makes a concerned and scared face over a regular, non-confrontational conversation. Just to be clear, I'm not comparing you to our dog, I just thought it's a funny anecdote.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#167

Post by thunderbong »

ijidak wrote: post #147
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…

I'd add Email to the list. Email is right there waiting for disruption.

Can you elaborate?

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#168

Post by tombert »

I've done some similar stuff.

I wanted to reference some TLA+ community stuff. I was initially just copy-pasting the specs into mine, and that worked well enough, but it was a little tedious and I was kind of afraid I might accidentally forget to give attribution to someone if I used their spec.

So I got Claude to build a TLA+ package manager for me. It's just a basic thing in Rust that allows me to plop a deps.json file into my TLA+ folder, and put a git repo url and commit hash, and then I use tree-sitter-tlaplus [1] to rename the modules to have a basic namespace to avoid collisions. It took about 30 minutes of fighting with Claude, but then it worked fine.

As AI gets better and better and cheaper and cheaper, I suspect it will be easy to have tons of custom apps for everything. It's a brave new world.

[1] https://github.com/tlaplus-community/tree-sitter-tlaplus

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#169

Post by peacebeard »

iLemming wrote: post #143
peacebeard wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll re-quote it for you: > Thinking that you're a programmer that doesn't want to constantly build software for your own sake is a delusion - it's like a cook that hopes to turn on the stove only in the restaurant, but won't touch a knife at home. > Emacs is the cook's home kitchen. The two sentences are adjacent. I read them as connected. If you meant them to be unrelated, I hope that this sheds light on our disagr…

How often do you fish out a single word in a paragraph that has no semantic, emotional meaning to you personally and automatically flip the entire book, just because of one word? What I meant is that viewing Emacs merely as a means to achieve a singular goal and to extract specific value (e.g. "I've heard Magit is nice") is shortsighted - approaching it as a strategic, long-term investment yields far greater returns.…

Hmm, not quite an apology, but sort of a tacit acknowledgement that what you wrote wasn’t quite what you meant. Good enough for me.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#170

Post by tptacek »

userbinator wrote: post #164
tptacek wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a reason we're not reading monospaced here, and a reason we do read monospaced code. But the beauty of this moment is that if you want a really good SwiftUI monospaced Markdown reader, you can have it before dinner. This is exactly what I'm talking about. You have an idiosyncratic personal preference, and it's now reasonable to expect software to shrink-wrap around that preference.

There's a reason we're not reading monospaced here You underestimate the number of HN users who are reading this site in their terminal. ;-)

I'm genuinely surprised by the monospace cheering section!
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