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The Emacsification of Software

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Re: The Emacsification of Software

#251

Post by BigTTYGothGF »

iLemming wrote: post #181
peacebeard wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Now allow me to explain to you kindly, why you're fucking wrong here. You probably have no idea how difficult it is to write anything meaningful in English. Especially these days. For someone for whom English is not a second or even a third language, it can be an enormously hellacious ordeal. I take pride in my English. I think it's quite possible I would never write so colorfully in any other of the three languages…

> Seriously, I am a solo father with two kids, it's fucking 1:30AM and I'm having to deal with this shit

How old are your kids? I ask because unless they're teens or older they need a well-rested dad.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#252

Post by flossly »

I used Claude last week to build a tool for builds/deploys/etc. I had done this before with a bunch of scripts (sed+awk+ducktape+aws-cli+terraform+jq+gosh...). But now it is a Kotlin-written, GraalVM-to-native, super fast running, proper software project.

Took me 2 days to complete, did not even spend the whole day on it (more like a bit here'n'there while doing other work. Claude's a game changer for these small greenfield projects (probably for more types of prjects, but this is a really sweet spot).

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#253

Post by palata »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #232
palata wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, I think it is true that AI will help nerds (like me) implement their own clients. Without AI, I will think that "I could make my own client", I will spend some evenings and weekends proving that I can solve the problem, and then I will never spend the time I would need to actually make it usable. And I would love it if more services had an Open API and allowed people to write their own clients. I like the…

I think the "nerds (like me)" part of your observation is something that a lot of AI-enthusiast nerds seriously underestimate. For as long as there's been personal computing, there's been a narrative that everyone would be a programmer if we just made it easier for everyone to program, and we've seen attempt after attempt after attempt to introduce new technologies that will surely, surely, be the key to unlocking th…

100%.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#254

Post by palata »

jcynix wrote: post #235
palata wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, I think it is true that AI will help nerds (like me) implement their own clients. Without AI, I will think that "I could make my own client", I will spend some evenings and weekends proving that I can solve the problem, and then I will never spend the time I would need to actually make it usable. And I would love it if more services had an Open API and allowed people to write their own clients. I like the…

> But I find it a little extreme to say "it's faster to build your own than to install an existing alternative". Installing an existing alternative might be easy ... once you found the one which best (i.e. mostly) matches your requirements. The time consuming task IMO is the time needed to find and then choose between half a dozen (or so) alternatives which all might do the job ... until you installed them, tested th…

Right. But if you decide to make your own, won't you spend some time "researching" and "designing" it first? I personally will :-).

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#255

Post by palata »

toraway wrote: post #249
palata wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, I think it is true that AI will help nerds (like me) implement their own clients. Without AI, I will think that "I could make my own client", I will spend some evenings and weekends proving that I can solve the problem, and then I will never spend the time I would need to actually make it usable. And I would love it if more services had an Open API and allowed people to write their own clients. I like the…

Also, as someone who has developed an ever growing suite of bespoke tools for my personal workflows using Codex/Gemini CLI over the last year, something I don’t see mentioned as often is the “mental overhead” of self-designed apps. Even if the coding process itself is “effortless” and the agent just churns away to implement whatever I ask for on a dime, it can become exhausting thinking through all my needs/wants, tr…

Yeah I agree with the feeling. And actually more than "building your own" because "it's faster than installing", "Emacsification" probably also works for "using an open source project and quickly patching it just for your needs".

> could have been directed to an OSS project

My feeling is that it is not exactly a risk. People who are keen on contributing to open source will do it even with AI, and people who are not wouldn't do it anyway.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#256

Post by sinker »

e40 wrote: post #86
shaokind wrote: post #6

I've absolutely engaged in making personal software [0] thanks to the age of LLMs. But to be honest, my time using Emacs didn't teach me to "build personal software". My Emacs set up was extremely brittle, and it was a nightmare when I tried to use it across Windows & macOS. My university project was written using an unholy combination of org-mode & some workflow to create a beautiful LaTeX file, and I couldn't tell…

Have had the same emacs setup on linux, windows and macos for 15 years. Honestly, it's the best thing in my computing life.

Same here - with minor changes (mostly rebinding shortcuts), my extensively customized config works in terminal also.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#257

Post by tptacek »

maximilianburke wrote: post #236
tptacek wrote: post #105

Software 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…

What would be amazing now would be a way to deploy my own Claude-built utility applications to my phone without having to go through the effort of securing a Mac developer account and going through that whole rigamarole.

Have you tried?

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#258

Post by tptacek »

palata wrote: post #208
dang wrote: post #55

This 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…

> As tptacek says in the OP, it's "easier to build your own solution than to install an existing one" - or to learn an existing one. I can install WhatsApp in a few tens of seconds. You most definitely spent more time than that writing this comment. Would you mind sharing a video of you building a custom WhatsApp in less time? Not even starting to think about getting other people to talk to you on your instantly-buil…

Just to point out that this whole subthread wildly misses the point. We get that you can quickly install an app from the app store. The culture we're talking about is Emacs. You can quickly package-install something from Emacs, too, but the odds that you'll have it working the way you want it to be working within an hour are... not the same as that of the app store.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#259

Post by iLemming »

noelwelsh wrote: post #209
rmnull wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wild!! Would love to look at your .emacs.d configs

mpvi [1] is the video control part. I have only used it a little bit but it is incredibly good. Control the playback completely from Emacs and quickly make timestamped org notes. I don't know what the other parts are. Curious to learn! [1]: https://github.com/lorniu/mpvi

> what the other parts are

Of course I can't explain in detail in a single comment everything I listed, besides, that's just a subset of things I do through Emacs.

Sometimes I want to kick off a process in the external terminal - long-lived processes are better handled that way. Kitty has remote protocol. I needed bidirectionally - being able to pipe into and from an arbitrary Emacs buffer to and from the terminal, so I wrote the Piper¹. This kind of stuff should be built into Emacs, maybe someone gets bored and sends patches, if I get to it, perhaps I'd myself do it one day.

I gravitate towards CLIs and tools with built-in IPC layers, Emacs is terrific with inter-process communication. That's how I manage my WM on Mac, where I use Hammerspoon. Wondrous piece on its own, it is Lua-enabled, which means I can use Fennel, which means I can have Lispy-REPL, which means I can connect to it directly from Emacs and manipulate all my windows among a bunch of other things.

In Linux, I have build a similar modal toolkit² (experimental) that is written in Babashka (Clojure), that means I can expose nrepl port and use it with the Lispy-REPL. If you don't know what's such a big deal about it being a Lisp REPL, here's my comment from the other day³.

MPV is amazingly hackable and has an IPC, you can nearly fully control it without touching it. I have built some customizations on top on mpv.el.

To access the browser, I use OSA (open scripting architecture) with some JXA snippets. Unfortunately, there's nothing similar for Linux - the only thing one can do is to run the browser with the RDP port exposed. Although, you still can access the browser history - every major browser keeps it in a sqlite db⁴.

OCRing any text is a straightforward piece of Elisp⁵ - it just checks if there's a graphic content in the clipboard and if it is - it saves it into a temp file and feeds it to tesseract cli. It's not as accurate as most modern OCRs, but it beats everything else in speed. For my purpose (typically grabbing a piece of Zoom screen share) - it works.

Hope this helps.

___

¹ http://github.com/agzam/mxp

² https://github.com/agzam/tecla

³ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48113368

⁴ https://github.com/agzam/browser-hist.el

⁵ https://github.com/agzam/.doom.d/blob/main/modules/custom/wr...

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#260

Post by zahlman »

dharmatech wrote: post #124
tptacek wrote: post #105

Software 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…

Our social media should be decentralized and local first, allowing for bespoke clients on any OS. This is an experiment towards that: https://github.com/dharmatech/9social The first client is written for plan9. This keeps the design honest. (If it can run on plan9/rc/acme...) Video demo: https://youtu.be/q6qVnlCjcAI The current implementation is less than 3000 lines of code. And speaking of Emacs... 9social was heavi…

> decentralized local-first social network that is based on git and plain text files.

Nice! This sounds just like what I'd been thinking the system should be like.

But how do you manage identity/authentication , or discovery of other users?

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