Live data from Hacker News

I have officially retired from Emacs

nullprogram.com

61–70 of 221 posts

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#61
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.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#63
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> LLM that I run inside Emacs can fully control the active Emacs instance ... > you can easily extract text from anything This is what gives me the most pause.

Care to explain? Why is it? You think it's dangerous or some other reasons?

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#64
I was wondering how people feel about this trend. LLM allow you to free yourself from foundations (frameworks, programmable programs) to just generate any support layer you want from old or new libs. This is all very understandable.. yet I find it a loss, in the lisp world, having a core model and semantics shared by all the upper layers means ease of reuse (for instance people leverage emacs calc classes in other places), llm allows for easier fragmentation..

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#65
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…

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/

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#66
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 something better, or explain simply, or fact-check my assumptions, whatever. Quick & dirty interaction that gets discarded in the same buffer. For longer investigations and research I would use a dedicated gptel buffer. Those get automatically saved.

I don't use gptel as a coding assistant, even though you can do that, it's not really optimized for that kind of work. I use ECA. It works much better for me than every other alternative I tried, and I tried more than a few. What's crazy that I sometimes would type a prompt in ECA, then ask gptel (with a different model) to make it more "AI-friendly" changing the prompt in-place and then send it.

All my MCPs are coded in Clojure (mostly babashka)¹ - because (like I said) giving an AI a Lisp REPL makes much more sense (maybe even more than using a statically typed language). I had to employ a few tricks so all the tools, skills and instructions can be shared between gptel, eca-emacs, ECA Desktop, Claude Code CLI, Claude Desktop App, and Copilot CLI. Even though I mostly use gptel and ECA, it's good to keep other options around, just in case. All the AI-related Emacs settings are in my config².

Is this helpful, or you want some more concrete examples?

¹ https://github.com/agzam/death-contraptions

² https://github.com/agzam/.doom.d/tree/main/modules/custom/ai

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#67
post #59
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://smsk.dev/2026/04/26/ai-cannot-self-improve-and-math-... >You are not using the tools correctly. Stop being deluded, man. When this crap collapses into itself you will be in tears back asking for the knowledge you failed to get without the fancy Clippys. Now, stop that fancy Megahal chatbot and learn to do things by hand.

I know how to do things by hand, man. But the writing is on the wall: that skill is going the way of writing programs on punchcards. And there's little we can do about it because the economics in favor of LLMs are like laws of physics. Yes, model collapse is gonna suck. But LLMs are not just left to self-train, they are guided by human researchers who are going to find ways to groom and direct the models to avoid col…

This is not terminals vs punchcards. This is like Windows ME over Windows 98. Or, maybe, the 286 over a 8086 when a 386 it's the proper path.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#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 single mode emacs.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#69
post #64

I was wondering how people feel about this trend. LLM allow you to free yourself from foundations (frameworks, programmable programs) to just generate any support layer you want from old or new libs. This is all very understandable.. yet I find it a loss, in the lisp world, having a core model and semantics shared by all the upper layers means ease of reuse (for instance people leverage emacs calc classes in other pl…

> llm allows for easier fragmentation..

I also suspect it allows easier consolidation. Moving from a deprecated lib to a new (and better) one for example.

Implementations will likely homogenize a bit as well, but on the other hand boy am I glad not to see an increasing amount of bizarre naïve hand-rolled implementations for some things.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#70
My usage of emacs is so vim-like that I’ve tried switching a few times. Vim is definitely faster, and overlays and cursor placement is much simpler and more intuitive. But there were still feature gaps and configuration issues that prevented full adoption.
Post reply on HN