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The Emacsification of Software

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Re: The Emacsification of Software

#71

Post by j2kun »

tptacek wrote: post #13
j2kun wrote: post #9

> You want a good Markdown viewer more than you think you do. > monospaced and thus fatiguing to read. Monospaced text is fine. I don't see how people who read code (and code comments) all day care that strongly about this. Plaintext is king

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.

Generally I just don't appreciate when someone jumps from "I care about this" to "everyone cares about this for obvious reasons." Focus on what something means to you, and being sincere about it. But that is just my advice for writing, take it or leave it.

Also, are browser text area inputs monospaced by default for everyone? Or did I configure that for myself long ago and forget? If it's not just me, maybe the "reasons" you're alluding to are not so obvious. Anyway, I have no trouble at all reading the long comments I type into text areas.

And more power to people for embracing agency :)

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#72

Post by jr_isidore »

skydhash wrote: post #68
tptacek wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of the article is that the whole gestalt of what you do on a computer is now one big programmable surface, and in that regard everything feels a lot more like Emacs. It's not "about" Emacs, it's more about the vibe of personalized software in 2026 to someone who does a lot of Emacs stuff.

Not really the same. Emacs focus a lot on compatibility and common modules (even if there may be some different takes on those common things). So you got big systems like helm, consul, ivy, company,… and the. everyone building on top. Another thing is configuration (which also ties to the previous statement). You have to be able to split the idea of the program (what it aims to do) and your personal preferences. Emac…

OP is trying to say Home Depot let normies do their own small repairs, and you're protesting saying "No, no, that's not how we pros do it."

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#73

Post by TacticalCoder »

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…

> I want my life to have as little maintenance as possible, and making my own software for everything isn't always compatible with that.

So LLMs are good enough to make personal software, but not good enough to maintain them?

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#74

Post by MrJohz »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #73
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…

> I want my life to have as little maintenance as possible, and making my own software for everything isn't always compatible with that. So LLMs are good enough to make personal software, but not good enough to maintain them?

It's usually easier to build something that maintain it for extended periods of time, particularly if that maintenance requires adding new features.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#75

Post by jrm4 »

noelwelsh wrote: post #52

Ok, not the article I thought it was going to be. In fact it's the complete opposite of what Emacs means to me. For me, the point of Emacs is that I use one program to do everything. Why would I want a special bit of software just to view Markdown? I can view it in Emacs, and then it works with everything else I do. Developing lots of custom applications, AI assisted or not, is not replacing how I use Emacs.

Same thing, actually, I think.

I think that "the number of programs" you're suggesting is arbitrary. It's kind of like calling an operating system one thing, when it's a lot of things. You can "count" the things different ways.

The bigger takeaway is "making your own programming things."

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#76

Post by jrm4 »

j2kun wrote: post #9

> You want a good Markdown viewer more than you think you do. > monospaced and thus fatiguing to read. Monospaced text is fine. I don't see how people who read code (and code comments) all day care that strongly about this. Plaintext is king

Nothing personal but I hate this take with a passion, and I literally think it's representative of the worst attitude in computing because it's the literal opposite of software SHOULD BE.

The whole entire point of computers in their best light is changeable software, the whole point should be "let people read how they want to."

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#77

Post by jr_isidore »

noctuid wrote: post #69

Terrible analogy. Emacs has always had comparably fewer major options for packages compared to other tools, there is often an obvious option based on your needs, and it has never been my experience that people decide to just roll their own versions of everything. The author has clearly never used neovim or now pi. NPM packages in general would have also been a way better example. Edit: Sure there is some small overla…

Are we reading the same article? OP is saying LLMs let normies tweak their personal workflows in the same way we emacs nerds had been doing for decades. Contrary to the old saw about it being an OS, Emacs is really just a shell but with lisp as its command language instead of unwieldy bash. Once Claude magicked an English to bash translator, raw shell has caught up to emacs in its ease of use.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#78

Post by d0mine »

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…

“Those who say they lack time to build tools are precisely the ones who cannot afford not to.”

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#79

Post by chickensong »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #40
SoftTalker wrote: post #7

"Personal Software" i.e. programs that one writes for oneself, was the original vision of home computing back in the 1960s. The PC wasn't really anticipated, but the thought was that everyone would have a computer terminal at home, and write programs to do whatever was needed. It was imagined that programming would become easy enough that anyone could learn to do it. We're not there yet but with LLMs we're getting cl…

> It was imagined that programming would become easy enough that anyone could learn to do it. Arguably LLMs take us further away from that than we've ever been. All they do is automate copying and pasting in shit from StackOverflow. We were closer to everyone being able to learn how to program computers in the mid-80s when everyone had one and they started up with a BASIC prompt.

Ah yes, the 80s, when everyone had a computer.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#80

Post by noctuid »

jr_isidore wrote: post #77
noctuid wrote: post #69

Terrible analogy. Emacs has always had comparably fewer major options for packages compared to other tools, there is often an obvious option based on your needs, and it has never been my experience that people decide to just roll their own versions of everything. The author has clearly never used neovim or now pi. NPM packages in general would have also been a way better example. Edit: Sure there is some small overla…

Are we reading the same article? OP is saying LLMs let normies tweak their personal workflows in the same way we emacs nerds had been doing for decades. Contrary to the old saw about it being an OS, Emacs is really just a shell but with lisp as its command language instead of unwieldy bash. Once Claude magicked an English to bash translator, raw shell has caught up to emacs in its ease of use.

The new thing where everyone just vibe codes their own versions of everything is not at all like personalizing Emacs.

Specifically the idea that people generally just ignore existing versions of packages and make their own has never been the case, especially compared to other editors (even VSCode).

> There are popular elisp packages lots of people use. But except for Magit, nerds are alarmingly apt to replace them with their own shinier versions (and then to show them off, transitioning to the spore-forming phase of the elisp lifecycle). Everything in Emacs is malleable.

> Until now, the Achilles heel of Emacs culture has been that, except for Magit, its packages tend to be wretched user experiences. Ugly, slow, and discoverable only after inflicting years of elisp cortical injuries on yourself.

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