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I have officially retired from Emacs

nullprogram.com

161–170 of 221 posts

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#161
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I use ^a to go to the beginning of a line and ^e to go to the end nearly everywhere. Many Emacs keystrokes are so pervasive that they're not often thought of as Emacs keystrokes.

Aren't they actually readline keystrokes, and emacs is "readline-aware"?

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#162

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.

I used Firefox for 20 years, loved it, defended it. But they just kept removing features that I was used to, and I ran into some bugs with popular websites and decided to hang it up. Currently on Brave and fully convinced it's the new Firefox.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much this. Lisp can do things other languages have a hard time with. I think a resurgence is in order.

Can't agree more. Lisp was discovered/invented for the purpose of AI research. Of course, modern neural nets and transformers is a big departure from McCarthy's vision of AI - logical, interpretable, symbolic. However, if the current wave of AI hits a wall - and many serious researchers think it will, or already has at the margins - there's growing interest in neurosymbolic approaches that combine neural nets with sy…

Clojure? Forget it, SBCL would be better for that task. Just look what could be done with Coalton.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#164
post #3

The author is the developer of the RSS reader Elfeed, which a lot of Emacs users use several times a day. Though the article talks about a vibe-coded wxWidgets-based GUI application called Elfeed2 that he wrote as a replacement, Emacs afficionados would be loath to leave their Emacs environment and switch to that. Hopefully Emacs elfeed finds a new maintainer.

Yeah, I'm not gonna use anything vibe-coded, all those apps are total trash.

Good. People here it's blind with the CADT model. They aren't even aware than with Elfeed for instance you can automatically set a hook on a feed that it calls lingva.el functions to translate, for instance, feeds written in Spanish or German to your native language in the spot.

Try doing that with Elfeed2.

Vi/Nvi2 users can almost do the same with Unix pipes and apertium/translate-shell/some lingva CLI translating tools for the whole document/regex selection/lines, a la Emacs. So can sfeed users, where depending on the feed they can pipe the plumbers' output (or just hack the scripts) to any other translating tool:

git://codemadness.org/sfeed

Heck, a few years ago I could reuse Telega.el's (Telegram client) translating functions for non-Telega buffers translating some text guide in the spot. So, did the blogger actually win something?

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#165
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…

Also from that post:

> Models you can run yourself are toys.

Now I may be old, but whenever we put a lot of faith in unaccountable megacorps it sure seems to have backfired a lot (remember when Amazon removed 1984 from people's libraries?). As long as a model running locally on a regular laptop bought from the supermarket isn't good enough I'm gonna remain sceptical about current AI.

There's also ethical and environmental considerations, but let's see if we can walk before we try to run.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use ^a to go to the beginning of a line and ^e to go to the end nearly everywhere. Many Emacs keystrokes are so pervasive that they're not often thought of as Emacs keystrokes.

Aren't they actually readline keystrokes, and emacs is "readline-aware"?

I'm pretty sure the navigation shortcuts date back to when Emacs was literally just a set of TECO macros, and GNU Readline adopted them

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#167
post #85
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the amusing things about AI bros is how naively over-enthusiastic they are about the technology and its inevitability.

You still don't get where I'm coming from. The AI takeover of programming is inevitable, and I hate it. But my feelings don't make the brutal economics go away. A skilled developer can now accomplish in days what used to take weeks or months with proper use of these tools. Period. I know this because of the absurd number of skilled developers here, on X, Mastodon, and elsewhere—including OP's author—saying "with AI I…

Contrary to you I've been playing with the AI Howto stuff from TLDP forever from Markov chain based chatbots to genetic algos and neural networks and I know the limits on LLM's and how the rot on retroalimentation by reusing their own data. They can't extrapolate. Period. In every cycle they get dumber by design unless there's new human curated content. Go try to explain that to corporations having their copyrighted code being stolen away, be GPL or propietary.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So? My terminal has the same full system access. If I didn't use Emacs, I'd be using Claude code in it. It's contained locally on my computer, I don't see any problem here. I use Emacs like my OS-layer. Why would I complain that my OS has access to something? It would be weird and annoying if it's the opposite.

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…

There are many better sandboxing options than docker (in terms of security and/or ease of use), and it sounded like you weren't doing sandboxing.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#169
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…

> 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…

You can take modal editing anywhere, but that doesn't mean you should.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#170

I've been retired from emacs for several years now but I'm still looking for a magit replacement that is independent of my editor. Vscode's magit extension is really good but i split my time between IntelliJ and vscode. Anyone know of something like this?

I've never found a decent magit replacement since leaving emacs over to vim. There is a Vim attempt at a magit clone, but it is buggy as hell.
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