[flagged]
The Emacsification of Software
171–180 of 304 posts
Re: The Emacsification of Software
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You keep doubling down on your own perverted reality you composed out of thin air and somehow I have to apologize? Can you be I dunno, less emotional and more substantive? There's no controversy in what I wrote - it is pretty simple and straightforward:
Programmers write programs. That's the definition of the job. Any personal tweaks - scripts, snippets, extensions, packages, configs (for VSCode, IntelliJ, Vim and yes Emacs too) are also programs. Saying: "I don't want to maintain my programs" sounds to me like saying: "I don't want to be a programmer". It doesn't matter what I use - Emacs, Sublime or Macromedia Dreamweaver - configuring and maintaining it is not "kind of a job", "part of my job", or "someone else's job". That is my job as a programmer. Period. End of discussion.
Why the fuck you keep pouring your own made up shit from one pitcher into another, thinking it's about to turn into gold, is beyond me. And somehow I'm the dude that should "relax". Well, sure, let me then apologize for my inability to explain to you something that a six year old would get off the bat.
Re: The Emacsification of Software
#173This is so exactly right and I've been saying it to whoever will put up with me...(and now am embarrassed I have no link to show for it. oh well, shame is good for writing. envy too!) Software production is now so easy that everything is a .emacs file (pronounced "dot emacs" btw): meaning, each individual has their own entirely personal, endlessly customizable software cocoon. As tptacek says in the OP, it's "easier…
Maybe it’s just another cocoon but I’ve been working on a framework for modular CLIs which allow different humans or agents to spin different features simultaneously but with some enforcement of shared dictionary, aliases, help, logging, formatting, semantic parsing, a few other things.
It works, it’s powerful, and certainly one way to answer the question you pose. I would argue it’s the optimal answer, it’s an answer to RPC, REST, and MCP at the same time, but it’s definitely an example of an answer and approach. In any case it is a good question and something I’ve given a lot of thought to.
Unfortunately in the age we’re in now there’s something lackluster in sharing any solution or design you have. Though the architecture and design of what I’m describing came 0% from AI everything is assumed to be and therefore unimportant? But it is the direct answer to your question so if anyone’s curious lmk.
Re: The Emacsification of Software
#174[deleted]
Re: The Emacsification of Software
#175This is so exactly right and I've been saying it to whoever will put up with me...(and now am embarrassed I have no link to show for it. oh well, shame is good for writing. envy too!) Software production is now so easy that everything is a .emacs file (pronounced "dot emacs" btw): meaning, each individual has their own entirely personal, endlessly customizable software cocoon. As tptacek says in the OP, it's "easier…
So cool to see a dang comment comment. Rather than moderating comment.
Re: The Emacsification of Software
#176> For the kinds of software I’m talking about, you want the prompts more than you want the source code.
Please do not do this.
Per OurWorldInData, >50% of the world lives below $10/day in 2026.
A $200/mth AI subscription costs ~66% of that.
Generation costs still exceed distribution costs by a wide margin.
Uploading costs you nothing, and it can help the poor.
Re: The Emacsification of Software
#177Any good md viewer and open to customize some formatting to pdf?
Re: The Emacsification of Software
#178Earlier 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 get 429s all the time trying to read this site in lynx or any non-mainstream browser (w/o JS).
Re: The Emacsification of Software
#179This is so exactly right and I've been saying it to whoever will put up with me...(and now am embarrassed I have no link to show for it. oh well, shame is good for writing. envy too!) Software production is now so easy that everything is a .emacs file (pronounced "dot emacs" btw): meaning, each individual has their own entirely personal, endlessly customizable software cocoon. As tptacek says in the OP, it's "easier…
I highly agree with the pro-Lisp sentiment. The main article that comes to mind while reading this was also posted a little while back on this forum: https://isene.org/2026/05/Audience-of-One.html
Re: The Emacsification of Software
#180Software 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 just made a one-shot Android music player because I need a very simple one to listen to tracks to practice drums, and I need to go back from the beginning a lot of time, reduce speed, open them from Whatsapp when my teacher sends them to me and access easily the last 4-5 played.
There was nothing in F-Droid that ticked all the box so I just made my APK.