Even more batteries included with Emacs • Hacker News Board

Re: Even more batteries included with Emacs

#121

Post by mrhottakes » Mon, Jun 15, 2026, 7:10 PM UTC

rgoulter wrote: post #97

glimshe wrote: post #63

Prediction: Emacs will reach super intelligence before Claude.

I do wish that Emacs was more popular with LLM technologies. LLMs are powerful at dealing with text. And Emacs is highly extensible and typically text-oriented. Already I see people say that LLMs much Emacs much easier to use (since you can ask an LLM to come up with the elisp for you), but I reckon what Emacs provides ought to be useful the other way. With Emacs, it's common to see people favour bringing various par…

I thought this as well, so I spent a few days working with Claude in emacs. Claude managed to totally break my install by suggesting a bunch of "fixes" that were actually not fixes at all. Very poor performance, just hallucinating things left and right.

I don't need Anthropic to break my emacs, I can do that all by myself.

Re: Even more batteries included with Emacs

#122

Post by mrhottakes » Mon, Jun 15, 2026, 7:15 PM UTC

tapete1 wrote: post #61

Paradigma11 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are a godsend in fixing emacs problems.

I have asked LLMs several Emacs-related questions and _never_ got a reply that works. And at generating elisp code they are especially awful.

Agreed, Claude didn't seem capable of doing anything but hallucinating "fixes" and breaking my config.

Re: Even more batteries included with Emacs

#123

Post by royal__ » Mon, Jun 15, 2026, 8:27 PM UTC

iLemming wrote: post #98

royal__ wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain more what's wrong with the Neovim ecosystem? I just switched from Doom Emacs to Neovim and my impression of Neovim has been much better. (I get that Emacs has a much more powerful backbone, I just realized that I didn't really need that power; I just want a good text editor)

> what's wrong with the Neovim ecosystem Nothing's wrong with it. It's just incomparable categorically. Just like you can't really equate a photo-editor and the web-browser. Sure, there's a way to do photo editing in the browser, still will be weird to compare them. > Neovim has been much better In what sense? Emacs is a Lisp interpreter with a text editor embedded in it - one can fully emulate Neovim features in it,…

That all makes sense. I wasn't trying to attack Emacs or defend Neovim, for the record. I liked Emacs and didn't have any problems with it (except some window jankiness). I was mostly just curious about the ecosystem.

The big reason I switched is because a lot of the big features of Emacs (org mode, magit, "living" in Emacs, advanced text manipulation, the extreme extensibility of the software) were things that sound really amazing on paper, but in practice I just don't really need/use/care about, and that's just my preferences. But once again, Emacs is cool and I totally respect what it can do.

Re: Even more batteries included with Emacs

#124

Post by agumonkey » Mon, Jun 15, 2026, 9:21 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #2

I have been using Emacs since 1994 (Lucid!) and I still don't understand Dired.

it's bare but i'm surprised people would get confused by it, it kinda follows the usual shortcuts over bare unix util output: mark/select, delete, rename, compress, encrypt

then maybe you dislike the low-discoverability of shortcuts, i think someone added a transient layer (aka a visible shortcut summary with some state management for options)

Re: Even more batteries included with Emacs

#125

Post by sinker » Mon, Jun 15, 2026, 9:52 PM UTC

rgoulter wrote: post #97

glimshe wrote: post #63

Prediction: Emacs will reach super intelligence before Claude.

I do wish that Emacs was more popular with LLM technologies. LLMs are powerful at dealing with text. And Emacs is highly extensible and typically text-oriented. Already I see people say that LLMs much Emacs much easier to use (since you can ask an LLM to come up with the elisp for you), but I reckon what Emacs provides ought to be useful the other way. With Emacs, it's common to see people favour bringing various par…

I've started experimenting with claude to run end-to-end tests for an emacs package I'm developing. It's incredible.

The way it works:

1. You start emacs in daemon (server) mode.

2. You prompt claude to instantiate an emacs client and write/run tests.

That's it.

Claude will then "pilot" an emacs instance where you can visibly see it running tests. Since almost everything is a first-class function in emacs, and emacs enables almost complete introspection, claude can debug the code in the execution environment. You can also just look at the piloted emacs instance and prompt the agent on what's wrong in the running application state.

This is much more thorough then just having claude write unit tests because many of the issues you might encounter are visual/gui things - which, again, because emacs allows so much introspection, can be examined by looking at the current application state.

This is a good example of "completing the loop."

Re: Even more batteries included with Emacs

#126

Post by Steeeve » Mon, Jun 15, 2026, 9:55 PM UTC

Back when I was on usenet, it was a common joke that all real programmers used emacs - and at the time I was a vi guy. It took me so long to get the muscle memory to do what I needed in vi that I thought I'd never change. But sure enough, I'm a nerd, and just like when I tried to learn the Dvorak keyboard layout, I decided to spend two weeks learning emacs. Absolutely frustrating for a few days. But I've been on emacs ever since. Some years I didn't update my emacs config or install any updates at all. Some years, that's MOST of what I did.

No shade at all to VIM or any other community of evangelists who have taken the time to get all the power they can out of their toolset. What works for you works.

But between org-mode and the 70 other features that I've come to know and love (like projectile, flycheck, ivy, m-x butterfly, yasnippet, etc.), I'm never looking back. I will occasionally use another tool for a specific purpose, and sometimes those tools have features and niceness that is hard to beat, but most of what I do professionally is just plain typing and I'm way more productive in emacs than any other typing tool.

Pretty cool that after all these years I can see an article like this and learn a thing or two as well. Thanks OP!

Re: Even more batteries included with Emacs

#127

Post by mplanchard » Mon, Jun 15, 2026, 11:43 PM UTC

rgoulter wrote: post #97

glimshe wrote: post #63

Prediction: Emacs will reach super intelligence before Claude.

I do wish that Emacs was more popular with LLM technologies. LLMs are powerful at dealing with text. And Emacs is highly extensible and typically text-oriented. Already I see people say that LLMs much Emacs much easier to use (since you can ask an LLM to come up with the elisp for you), but I reckon what Emacs provides ought to be useful the other way. With Emacs, it's common to see people favour bringing various par…

agent-shell is a great package. I’m not an AI booster by a long shot, but it makes integrating LLMs into your standard emacs flows ezpz

Re: Even more batteries included with Emacs

#128

Post by mplanchard » Mon, Jun 15, 2026, 11:50 PM UTC

iLemming wrote: post #106

buzzwords wrote: post #4

I saw orgmode once and I really loved it. Used Doomed and spacemacs. But dear Lord, does everything break on updates and need fixing. I had to give up as I just don't think it's feasible for me to fix my emacs when I want to get some work done.

> does everything break on updates and need fixing Emacs is a kitchen and emacs-packages are recipes - they come with the exact instructions (source code). If you try to cook fifty different meals all at once, your kitchen inevitably would be a mess. You need to know what you're trying to cook and how to work the recipes, and that comes with experience. No starter kit gives you a structure to un-mess your kitchen mag…

TBF to the parent, I also started in spacemacs, then doom, before rolling my own config some years ago, and my early experiences also felt like upgrades were really hard to deal with and often breaking.

I think most of that was because I didn’t understand emacs itself very well, and doom or whatever is an entire extra layer of code and idioms on top of that. Start adding in any custom packages you’ve installed and things get well outside of the realm where a beginner can comprehend them.

Like you, I also now have a pretty large number of packages, and rarely run into issues on update, with any issues that do occur being easy enough to fix. However, I think a lot of that comes from at this point having built my own emacs from the ground up, so I understand what all the components are doing, mostly…

Re: Even more batteries included with Emacs

#129

Post by mplanchard » Mon, Jun 15, 2026, 11:52 PM UTC

neutronicus wrote: post #109

noelwelsh wrote: post #31

The biggest problem Emacs has will not be solved by blog posts like this. For most people the editor is a means to an end. They are invested in their end goal, not in hunting down blog posts telling them how to make better use of their tools. If Emacs wants wider adoption is needs a better out-of-the-box experience, which is something that distros like Doom Emacs and Spacemacs offer. That's the only way to make a den…

FWIW Spacemacs has been breaking on update for me with depressing regularity the past couple years. I'm afraid to do it

I have rolled my own config now, but I started in spacemacs, and then moved to doom a while later. FWIW I found doom much easier to grok and generally stabler.

Re: Even more batteries included with Emacs

#130

Post by scoops_ » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 12:23 AM UTC

SoftTalker wrote: post #117

yxhuvud wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has a million features I don't use. But some features are really, really nice, like C-q for editing file names (C-x-s to persist changes once done). Rectangle editing is so, so nice to have when renaming multiple files.

C-q just tells me the buffer is read-only. How does that work?

They probably mean ‘C-x C-Q’, which toggles a buffer with its read-only state. In this case it lets you edit the contents of the dired buffer (i.e directory or file names) to changing the buffer to wdired-mode, and then ‘C-x C-s’ to save the contents of the buffer, which changes the names and places the buffer back into read-only (dired-mode)