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I have officially retired from Emacs

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Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#141

Post by kqr »

parasti wrote: post #86
jb1991 wrote: post #68

I used emacs full-time for many many years. Then I switched to Vim or other editors with Vim modes, also for many years. I have to be honest, I don’t see a particularly clear winner between them. Model editing is a bit unusual in many ways. There are some things that it certainly makes easier, but I personally found that the overall process of editing and writing code in real time for me was more efficient in a singl…

My vim muscle memory has paid off more for me than my emacs muscle memory. Emacs was the better editor, though. Anything that doesn't have Vimscript is an automatic winner IMO.

Evil is a tried-and-true Vim implementation that doesn't use Vimscript!

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#142

Post by kqr »

orsenthil wrote: post #114

On the topic of Emacs. I have long struggled to learn emacs and use it effectively. Just for the fun it, If I were to use claude as I my teacher, how can I ask it to teach me to use Emacs? I don't like to ask questions and go back to try it. I want it to be a drive that will assist me with the usage. Has anyone tried such an approach to learn emacs?

My advice is to use a base, vanilla Emacs for a little while to learn where its boundaries go, before installing a bunch of modes. That makes it easier to troubleshoot problems later.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#143

Post by iLemming »

orsenthil wrote: post #114

On the topic of Emacs. I have long struggled to learn emacs and use it effectively. Just for the fun it, If I were to use claude as I my teacher, how can I ask it to teach me to use Emacs? I don't like to ask questions and go back to try it. I want it to be a drive that will assist me with the usage. Has anyone tried such an approach to learn emacs?

Don't try to "learn Emacs". Grok the foundational layer - Lisp. Emacs is not an editor - it's first and foremost Lisp interpreter with a built-in editor. You need to get two things: REPL (evaluating Lisp expressions in-place) and structural editing (moving, expanding, transposing expressions).

You can start with vanilla Emacs with zero config and Claude/Copilot/Codex/etc, running separately. Your first goal is to have the LLM running inside Emacs - ask the LLM how. It probably will recommend gptel - as one of the most popular and robust choices, go with it.

Once you get LLM tools to modify Emacs state from within, you can just go crazy. You can tell it to change colors, fonts, ask any stupid questions, whatever. It will do it without losing a beat - no restarts, no waiting, no copy pasting - just flow.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#144

Post by kqr »

fingerlocks wrote: post #99
wwarner wrote: post #70

My usage of emacs is so vim-like that I’ve tried switching a few times. Vim is definitely faster, and overlays and cursor placement is much simpler and more intuitive. But there were still feature gaps and configuration issues that prevented full adoption.

can you elaborate? Heavy vim user here, have considered using emacs in vim mode to quell a decades long nagging curiosity. Just need a compelling nudge.

Emacs is primarily a platform for developing Lisp applications. Lisp applications are immensely hackable, meaning an Emacs configuration can be tailored in detail to specific desires.

There is also an ecosystem of applications for Emacs that are really good. They don't require you to use Emacs as your editor (you can run, say, Magit as a standalone instance) but if you do, they integrate really well with each other.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#145

Post by iLemming »

habinero wrote: post #138
iLemming wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah come on, guys, let's talk pragmatically. "Malleable editor as an OS layer" has benefits beyond subjective reasoning. Emacs has had M-x shell-command and arbitrary elisp eval forever. A metacircular MCP isn't some new capability class. Even if I didn't use Emacs - my shell, my editor, my browser extensions, my npm install, my VSCode plugins, my curl | bash from yesterday - they all have the same access. Singling ou…

It's your computer and you can do whatever yolo nonsense you want, my dude, but put those goalposts back where they were. "Don't run that shit on a credentialed box with data you care about" is addressing real threats, not some goofy nation state thing or abstract security research. If you let the footgun machine constantly generate new code and run it on your computer, you're just asking for data loss and bad shit t…

> If you let the footgun machine constantly generate new code

Are you talking about autonomous LLM projects that automatically write code? Yeah, no shit, I wouldn't run anything like that directly on any machine without sandboxing. My typical LLM use inside my editor is never in self-driving mode, there's not even cruise-control - I tell it exactly when to write, where to write and how to do it. Automated scripts never get run by LLM and don't get to run at all without prior precise and meticulous inspection. I'm not moving goalposts - at worst we're in disagreement on the level of pragmatics vs. paranoia, that's all.

I don't even get why people are so crazy about LLMs generating code - on both sides. LLMs for me personally are such a great tool for investigating things, for finding things, for bridging the gaps - the stuff that happens 10K feet above code writing. By the time I'm done gathering the details, code generation becomes an almost insignificant touch of the whole endeavor.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#146

Post by 1313ed01 »

fastaguy88 wrote: post #105
jeffrallen wrote: post #62

Dude only made it 20 years with Emacs. Weak. I've been using it since 1994. Whoa, shit, I'm old.

Lugaru (??) emacs (epsilon) on CP/M in the early 1980’s

https://lugaru.com/ They are still around. Most recent epsilon update was last month (but no real release since 2020?).

It was my first experience with emacs as well, but in MS-DOS, ca 1990. Did not know there was a CP/M version.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#147

Post by iLemming »

kqr wrote: post #140
iLemming wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t see a particularly clear winner between them Because deep down they are incomparable categorically. Separate the tools from the foundational ideas and you see the very different value. Vim-model of text navigation is fantastic, practical, brilliant idea. Once you grok it - you can take it anywhere. You can use it in your editor, browser, terminal, WM. Emacs is rooted in another, even more brilliant idea of…

Why not both? Evil is a reimplementation of Vim in Emacs and it is great.

Evil is not just great. It's the only "true" vim layer outside of vim/nvim worth commending. Gary Bernhardt once said: "there's no such thing as vim mode", in the sense that every single attempt to emulate vim outside of vim/nvim is a bleak imitation. None of them - not a single VSCode vim plugin, not Sublime's, not IdeaVim in IntelliJ, no browser extensions are without some glaring omissions. While Evil+evil plugins in Emacs are not just 'close' - they are better than the source of inspiration. Gary just probably didn't know that.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#149

Post by stevekemp »

farfatched wrote: post #116
bovine3dom wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what friction/maintenance he found with Tridactyl For me the friction always comes when I try to use the internet without it

I'm not the author, but I recently gave up on Firefox, sadly. Since I needed to keep around a Chromium anyway, and I already am forced to use one for work, it became simpler to just use solely use a Chromium. In the process I dropped some extensions. It's been great.

To be honest I find the use of a separate browser at work a good way of forcing separation - all "work stuff" is done in one browser, and all "personal stuff" is done in a different one.

This time around I'm using Chromium for personal stuff, and Firefox for work-stuff. I do more work-related browsing, so having the vertical tabs in firefox meant that was the better browser to use for official stuff.

(In my previous job I used safari for work, and firefox for personal.)

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#150

Post by teo_zero »

rirze wrote: post #16
lowsong wrote: post #5

> With my newly-acquired superpowers I could knock out the last two pieces in a few days’ work From the linked post:[0] > I left an employer that is years behind adopting AI to one actively supporting and encouraging it. As of March, in my professional capacity I no longer write code myself. My current situation was unimaginable to me only a year ago. Like it or not, this is the future of software engineering. Turns…

It's not AI psychosis, you're interpreting what he said to the extreme. Anyone who has actual corporate team lead or management experience understand AI as effectively a junior dev who doesn't have great persistent memory. These devs using AI are reviewing, guiding, and validating the work given to them by AI just as they would from a junior dev. The inverse of your statement is more apt; it's distressing to see peop…

> There are going to be skilless vibecoders and then there are going to be experienced devs (like OP) who figured out their AI workflow to multiply their productivity 2-5x.

Are you sure OP belongs in the second group? He explicitly said he doesn't read all the code generated by his AI:

> I have not read most of the code, and instead focused on results, so you might say this was “vibe-coded.”

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