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I have officially retired from Emacs

nullprogram.com

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Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#181
post #84

If the author is on, I'm curious why he chose wxWidgets instead of Qt; I'd be surprised if it is that much lighter weight than Qt. (I even wrote my own cross-platform toolkit with "more lightweight" as one of the reasons, and if you use all the features, it weighs in about the same size as Qt, I think.) Also, the last time I used wxWidgets, many years ago, it had a clunky MFC style to it, limited feature, along with…

did you publish it?

i'd use wxWidgets because it is the only cross platform toolkit i am aware of. if you can share your alternative then maybe this could help some people.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#183
post #7

A big loss for the Emacs community! emacs-aio is great! I see the author is spring cleaning: > I've turned over a new leaf (no more Openbox, Tridactyl, Xorg, xterm), and so some of these things I no longer use. On Linux I now use KDE on Wayland with a minimally-configured browser. I miss the power user features, but I do not miss the friction and constant maintenance. https://github.com/skeeto/dotfiles/commit/df27500…

> LLMs have inspired a similar change in me FWIW, the age of LLMs made me build a deeper, more intimate relationship with Emacs, because it's a Lisp REPL loop with a built-in editor, not the other way around. When you give an LLM a closed loop system where it can evaluate code in a live REPL and observe the results, it stops guessing and starts reasoning empirically. LLM that I run inside Emacs can fully control the…

[deleted]

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you describe your setup on how you use LLMs within Emacs?

Of course. I've tried different AI packages and currently gptel and ECA remain the main ingredients. This is a quickly changing landscape, and things may change, but for now it feels very good. I like gptel because it's enormously extendable and exploitable - it allows me to send LLM requests from just about anywhere - I could be typing a message (like this very one) and suddenly in need of ideas for how to phrase so…

I’d like a concrete example on how you’re actually controlling emacs with LLMs. Is ECA the part that does that?

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#185
post #137

The previous post alludes to Evil being the long term plan. That seems sensible: it ought to be easier to use an implementation of Vim in Emacs rather than port much of Emacs to independent applications. Yet the author ended up doing the latter and it's not really made clear why. Why?

Absolutely baffled too. I was expecting that they preferred the vim philosophy of small tools that do one thing well, but no. So you like modal editing, well you’ve got it right there in emacs. Why that of all the potential gripes you might have with emacs?

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#186

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 hav…

How do you have the “modify LLM state from within” working? I can have it modify my config but I don’t know how to get it to eval and improve arbitrary elisp.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#187
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asolutely. It doesn't have to be an either-or. I use gptel and org mode when I was to be really hands on driving the development. It's a very different mode of interacting with models, and the way newer models are trained to play nice with harnesses makes them very obedient. https://poyo.co/note/20260202T150723/

Is this your site? I cannot find an RSS feed for it. I'd like to subscribe.

Cheers mate I added one at https://poyo.co/feed.xml

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://github.com/altsem/gitu

It doesn't have the (any?) diffing capabilities of magit, so it's not usable for me yet.

FWIW the lem editor (basically emacs in common lisp) has its own version of magit, called legit.

https://github.com/lem-project/lem/blob/main/extensions/legi...

But I guess if you're leaving GNU emacs, you're probably not eager to jump into another emacsen.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#189
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're talking about https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tridactyl-vim... ? One example: it disables the default Ctrl-F search function but its own search function is subpar (no match counts/hlsearch, e.g.) and often clashes with website's built-in search (on Github, e.g.). It doesn't work on the default newtab either, and changing the default newtab somehow makes opening a new tab slower (that's FF's fault…

You can type /phrase and then press ctrl-F for the full search bar. A more annoying problem is that some websites capture / presses, making it harder to initiate a page search. Then you have to shift-esc ctrl-f to search.

I shot you an email.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#190
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

How do you have the “modify LLM state from within” working? I can have it modify my config but I don’t know how to get it to eval and improve arbitrary elisp.

gptel has the built-in tool to eval elisp, prompt the LLM to make changes in the active Emacs session and watch it do it.
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