I have officially retired from Emacs

Huh. So what do you think "modality" is? Emacs is inherently a modal editor. Transients, isearch, chords (when it expects another key after C-c or C-x) - that's all modality. VSCode has tons of modal features built-in - multi-cursor/selection state; snippet tab stops, rename symbol, breadcrumb nav - all that modality. Submlime has a genuine first-class modality built into its core.

The idea of vim navigation simply offers some structure and mnemonics - why should I learn hundreds of different ways to deal with text in every app, if there exists an established, well tested, popular way that can simplify it all?

> LLM-s will stop writing human-readable code, as this is additional obstacle, they will work directly with binaries

LLMs already internally operate on embeddings - dense floating-point vectors in high-dimensional space - they don't need "intermediary language" - there's no discrete symbolic reasoning - it's continuous numerical computation all the way through.

If you made an LLM to generate bytecode, you'd need it to "read" bytecode tokens as context for predicting the next bytecode token. The model would need to have learned the statistical patterns of bytecode sequences, which are far less structured and too arbitrary than (human readable) source code. Bytecode is optimized for machine execution, not for having patterns for a next-token predictor.

So Lisp actually is the sweet spot in the direction you're gesturing at, but you got the direction backwards. You don't want to go lower (toward bytecode), you want to go toward representations that have: fewer syntactic rules, structural, and high in local predictability. That is basically Lisp. The AST is the syntax. There's no parsing ambiguity, minimal syntactic variation, and the structure is self-describing. The model spends fewer tokens on syntactic ceremony and more on semantic content. That is why LLMs are surprisingly great at generating Elisp and Clojure code.

> it sounded like

That exactly what it is. People's reaction is a default pattern-matching on "AI executes code on your machine." - Ay the horrors!. They have no idea of my cybersec posture, my network perimeter - vpn, firewall, malware protection, etc.

It's not like I'm giving the LLM root shell. It's as if I said: "I learned how to juggle three chainsaws - so fun...", and people reacted as if I suggested doing that in a school bus full of children going 140kmh down the highway.

It's culturally fitting for HN - signaling caution is always socially safe. Nobody ever got criticized for saying "that sounds risky". But "I evaluated the risks and accepted the tradeoffs for my situation" is the actual, pragmatic engineering. Security is risk management, not risk elimination.

I'm a die-hard vimmer. I use vim motions in my editors, my IDEs, my browsers, my WMs, my terminals. I use vim-like navigation system-wide - e.g. for the volume control I switch to "media" mode and press "j/k".

Neovim is great, I use it almost every day. But it just can't replace Emacs. That is the most annoying part of Emacs - there's simply no alternative to it. If you accept it with all its quirks and weirdness and embrace the malleability, stick with it for a while - at some point you may discover some enormous feeling of empowered liberation from years of bullcrap you had to deal with without even realizing.

Here's a comment I posted on /r/emacs couple of weeks ago:

So yes, Neovim is snappier, and so what? I'm genuinely curious, I consider myself a die-hard, hardcore vimmer. Yes, I use Emacs today, but I'm still a vimmer. I sometimes use Neovim too - having vim skills comes handy with pure terminal workflows.

So, honest question - why should it appeal to me - the idea of ditching Emacs and moving to Neovim (or whatever) full-time?

- I have a few thousand notes in my Org-Roam note taking system. My notes can contain anki-cards - my spaced-repetition content is just my notes; my pdf annotations - they are just my notes; my health records - are just my notes; I don't need to use Postman - my API investigations - are just my notes.

- I don't need to use Ansible, Chef or Nix to maintain my dotfiles - they are tangled from an .org file - I just need Emacs to bootstrap the whole system.

- I read Reddit and Hackernews in Emacs.

- I manage my email in Emacs.

- My Telegram is in Emacs.

- I search Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, DuckDuckGo, and more without leaving Emacs.

- I write everything in Emacs (even this very comment), because I have thesaurus, spellchecking, definition and etymology lookup, translation, dictionaries, LLM integration - I can ask AI at the point of typing text (in just about any buffer).

- My AI coding assistant is in Emacs.

- My PR reviews happen in Emacs. Everything git related happens in Emacs. I go through my GitHub notifications in Emacs.

- I watch videos with Emacs - it allows me to control them directly - I can speed up, mute, pause the video, extract transcript - all while taking some notes.

- I do my Jira in Emacs.

- I open and search through Slack threads in Emacs.

- I learn programming languages through exercism.io in Emacs.

- My file manager is in Emacs - I have tried so many different ones - mc, yazi, ranger - nothing beats Dired in customizability and capabilities.

- I access my browser history and even browse and switch tabs of my browser - in Emacs.

- I even OCR text out of screenshots with Emacs.

So now tell me, why should I care that there is something, anything, whatever - snappier, prettier, shinier, more popular? Why should I ever feel FOMO, if it can never do even the small subset of what my current system is capable of doing today?

Ah, that's on Mac, but I forgot to tell you about the Linux. On Linux, I ran my modal-keyboard-toolkit controlled through babashka (clojure) with an exposed nREPL endpoint. That means I can query and control windows - their placement, change brightness and color temp. - all interactively, directly from my editor. I can write some conditional event loop, e.g., time-based color temp changes. Because I have a Lisp REPL - I can test out all the colors, squeezing the entire day into a minute - simulate, eval and preview the results - no saving, no reloading, no recompilation. Once satisfied - I can put the time markers accordingly - so colors change depending on the time of day.