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I have officially retired from Emacs

nullprogram.com

81–90 of 221 posts

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Emacs has full system access with arbitrary execution so full emacs access -> full system access.

So? My terminal has the same full system access. If I didn't use Emacs, I'd be using Claude code in it. It's contained locally on my computer, I don't see any problem here. I use Emacs like my OS-layer. Why would I complain that my OS has access to something? It would be weird and annoying if it's the opposite.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#82
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I tried Elfeed2 immediately after the announcement, well, it's nowhere near the experience of elfeed in Emacs. Isn't that kinda expected with a new software release, that it doesn't have a 100% feature parity?

On the other hand, given there is prior art in Elfeed, why wouldn't it rapidly converge on feature parity?

Probably because it's closer to a reimplementation than anything else, and in Emacs you can use libraries with much less friction than in self-contained languages.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#83

I've been retired from emacs for several years now but I'm still looking for a magit replacement that is independent of my editor. Vscode's magit extension is really good but i split my time between IntelliJ and vscode. Anyone know of something like this?

>i split my time between IntelliJ and vscode The IntelliJ git client is my favorite by far, I am curious what do you not like about it?

Honestly, magit is just a masterclass in UI design. It makes most everything incredibly easy to do while still giving you the ability to tweak things if you need to.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#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 a rather Windowsy look and feel. Have those things changed?

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#85
post #79
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

One of the amusing things about AI bros is how naively over-enthusiastic they are about the technology and its inevitability.

You still don't get where I'm coming from. The AI takeover of programming is inevitable, and I hate it. But my feelings don't make the brutal economics go away. A skilled developer can now accomplish in days what used to take weeks or months with proper use of these tools. Period. I know this because of the absurd number of skilled developers here, on X, Mastodon, and elsewhere—including OP's author—saying "with AI I'm accomplishing in days what used to take me weeks or months". And if you have the opportunity to make use of the tools, you have to be stupid, or you're cutting off your nose to spite your face, not to.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#86
post #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 singl…

My vim muscle memory has paid off more for me than my emacs muscle memory. Emacs was the better editor, though. Anything that doesn't have Vimscript is an automatic winner IMO.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#87
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the future of software engineering in the age of LLMs?

To toss them because the level of damage they have done it's astounding. Tons of companies are still fixing the losses from vibe coding. What we need it's better code analizers, lexers and the like. And LLM's are practically the opposite because they can't never, ever give a concise answer by design. Worse, they rot over time. https://smsk.dev/2026/04/26/ai-cannot-self-improve-and-math-...

> Tons of companies are still fixing the losses from vibe coding.

Well, you have to separate "future of" from "ensuing damage". This is similar to the fishing industry. Fishermen in the past used spears, rods, small nets, nowadays annual national catch statistics are reported in kilotonnes. They are destroying the ocean floor, causing massive extinction of species, causing irreversible damage. Yet, you can't argue looking 100-150 years back that industrial fishing was not "the future of the fishing industry". That is also why programmers won't ever disappear because of AI progress. Just like we still need fishermen, we'd need programmers. The sad truth about this is that soon we truly may have no need for fishermen, because there's no fish left in the ocean.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#88
post #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 singl…

> I don’t see a particularly clear winner between them

Because deep down they are incomparable categorically. Separate the tools from the foundational ideas and you see the very different value. Vim-model of text navigation is fantastic, practical, brilliant idea. Once you grok it - you can take it anywhere. You can use it in your editor, browser, terminal, WM. Emacs is rooted in another, even more brilliant idea of practical notation for lambda calculus. These ideas have no overlap. But understanding the philosophy of each (ideally both) could open so many different possibilities.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Emacs has full system access with arbitrary execution so full emacs access -> full system access.

The RCE vulnerabilities especially with community flavors of Emacs that come with access control out of the box.

Re: I have officially retired from Emacs

#90
post #21

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…

Does anyone else not understand what people mean when they refer to the "friction" supposedly inherent to these power user tools? Almost none of the configs/scripts/etc I use for my heavily-customized and terminal-heavy setup get changed for years at a time.

Arguably NixOS is the most config heavy platform but it solves the pain point of having to reconfigure on different systems. Especially in the LLM era where I can configure Emacs and my OS decoratively.
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