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Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

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Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#141

Post by pjmlp »

vohk wrote: post #49
beemboy wrote: post #16

I'm not convinced that terminal orientedness of AI tooling itself will last. My hypothesis is that it was chosen by developers of the current generation building for developers of the current generation. I hypothesize that there is a future where command lines and terminals don't matter, and hence I feel the focus will shift to, as the author points out, to planning, reviewing and ideation tools none of which demands…

I'm not about to put any money down - I lack that degree of confidence in my prognosticating - but I doubt the terminal will ever really vanish, for much the same reason that 20 years of touch screens hasn't really put in a dent in a keyboard and mouse for serious work, and game controllers have barely changed despite multiple attempts at VR and other interfaces, and why the stylus is still going strong after more th…

I have switched to pen and handwriting reckognition in apps that support it.

While using AI, if I am alone on the room, I use voice to text, no way I am typing book sized text that would make any COBOL programmar laught.

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#142

Post by perrygeo »

amdivia wrote: post #140

I'm yet to find a satisfying vim AI integration. I want something that blends into my vim workflow, and does not require me to switch Windows and copy paste or reload my open buffers after AI agents edit my code. For instance I would love for it to seamlessly melt into a "highlight comments/pseudo code" -> some keybind, then AI would expand those to actual code for instance, or I don't know.. but something not like w…

Try CodeCompanion if you're using neovim. I have a keybind set up and takes the highlighted region, prepends some context which says roughly "if you see a TODO comment, do it, if you see a WTF comment, try to explain it", and presents you an inline diff to accept/reject edits. It's great for tactical LLM use on small sections of code.

For strategic use on any larger codebase though, it's more productive to use something like plan mode in Claude code.

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#143

Post by quectophoton »

amdivia wrote: post #140

I'm yet to find a satisfying vim AI integration. I want something that blends into my vim workflow, and does not require me to switch Windows and copy paste or reload my open buffers after AI agents edit my code. For instance I would love for it to seamlessly melt into a "highlight comments/pseudo code" -> some keybind, then AI would expand those to actual code for instance, or I don't know.. but something not like w…

If I had to use AI with neovim I'd probably use https://github.com/ThePrimeagen/99 or one with a similar workflow.

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#144

Post by nachojreilly »

xenodium wrote: post #62

I put off adopting popular agents for most of 2025 primarily because there was no agent-agnostic path to first-class Emacs integration. That changed with ACP ( https://agentclientprotocol.com ), thus I started working on agent-shell. I'm happy with how the integration is shaping up, enabling me to have my cake and eat it too (Emacs + AI agents). I wrote an agent-shell post recently with the latest changes https://xen…

I tried it and was underwhelmed. Without /resume or /rewind, it's unusable. After Opencode botched a simple yes/no (yesterday's top HN story), I'm convinced the frontier model companies will continue expanding the usability gap between their proprietary harnesses and the open-source ones.

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#145

Post by xenodium »

nachojreilly wrote: post #144
xenodium wrote: post #62

I put off adopting popular agents for most of 2025 primarily because there was no agent-agnostic path to first-class Emacs integration. That changed with ACP ( https://agentclientprotocol.com ), thus I started working on agent-shell. I'm happy with how the integration is shaping up, enabling me to have my cake and eat it too (Emacs + AI agents). I wrote an agent-shell post recently with the latest changes https://xen…

I tried it and was underwhelmed. Without /resume or /rewind, it's unusable. After Opencode botched a simple yes/no (yesterday's top HN story), I'm convinced the frontier model companies will continue expanding the usability gap between their proprietary harnesses and the open-source ones.

Resume is supported by agent-shell, but is dependent on agent's to implement the relevant ACP. Do you know if OpenCode's ACP implementation has listing and resuming session support?

Also, you'll need to enable resuming as per post (it's a new feature) https://xenodium.com/agent-shell-0-47-1-updates

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#147

Post by TheRoque »

specproc wrote: post #86

I'm a long time VS Code boy, but have recently started dabbling in Vim because I'm exhausted with AI. Every VS Code update these days feels like it's exclusively AI orientated. The Vim approach seems fundamentally opposed to an AI-driven development model, or at least says, like everything else, "sure, you can do that, but set it up yourself." I find the Vim philosophy appealing coming from a work environment that wa…

I don't know about you but I've found that I've been experiencing more bugs in VSCode recently. It has never been a huge complain of me but recently I really feel it.

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#149

Post by livetaub93 »

dsrtslnd23 wrote: post #44

I think a terminal is still the perfect UI for coding agents on desktop systems. But now that I have running agents in background that only sometimes require some extra input on the go - I hate the terminal use on the go: terminus or other mobile app + virtual keyboard is horrible to use. For that I envision a better interface.

ugh i totally get this. trying to wrangle a coding agent on a phone with a virtual keyboard is just... awful. i've been using this app called Tap To Type on my android, it makes my phone a proper bluetooth keyboard for my laptop. no extra software on the computer needed, just pairs up like any wireless keyboard, and it has a mode where you can type out a whole message before sending it all at once, which is great for longer inputs.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.taptotype

Re: Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

#150

Post by iLemming »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #103

Nice writeup! The list of Emacs packages to use LLMs is the roadmap for getting started with AI Emacs integrations and I also liked his list of AI dangers at the end. I have used Emacs for over 40 years but I found myself getting sucked into the black hole of VSCode as discussed in the article. When I bought a new MacBook a few months ago, I only installed Emacs, no VSCode, and so far that is working out for me. Also…

Reading comments I feel you guys (Emacs users) have NO idea. I made a tiny MCP in babashka (I could've done it in Go, Rust or literally any other language, but chose Clojure).

So what the MCP does it just evals Elisp in my active Emacs session via emacsclient.

Now, I can tell LLM to change practically any behavior of my editor, and because it's in the REPL-driven loop, it opens up some mind-blowing opportunities. The other day I developed a tiny package on the go, while at some point I asked Claude to run the profiler, find the bottlenecks and fix them - the whole thing was a jaw-dropping complete and utter bananas.

They say: "Well Cursor can understand your code contextually"... Dude! My LLM-infused editor understands not only some arbitrary code, it can touch and improve it's own code at the point where it's touching your arbitrary code. On the fucking go!

Using Emacs was fun before. Now it's gotten crazy awesome.

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