6 ms·

Like LSP and tree-sitter, I think AI coding tools like Claude Code or Aider are very good news for niche editors like Emacs or Vim. Instead of struggling about

Like LSP and tree-sitter, I think AI coding tools like Claude Code or Aider are very good news for niche editors like Emacs or Vim. Instead of struggling about implementing advanced IDE-like features, they can integrate with these tools relatively easily, and focus on other editing related features that set them apart. In fact, IMO it makes these editors more competitive because they are highly customizable and easier to integrate with these tools.

mikece 1y ago
Is there a standard for integrating agentic coding tools into an editor similar to how an LSP allows the integration of language-specific features?
- benreesman 1y ago
  Its not at anything like the adoption of MCP or especially LSP, and it takes a more "foundational and composable library of primitives" approach than "wire protocol per se" approach, but `gptel` has quite the vibrant little ecosystem around it and its just god mode, wall hacks on the VSCode stuff, just blows it away. I'm under extreme time pressure at the moment, I cannot afford to fuck around on ideology right now I have to go for the jugular every day, and that means "fuck the cost" Opus 4 use in `gptel` (though Qwen and K2 are pushing it out of more and more stuff as I learn the quirks, Opus 4 TTFT under load is unusable and when it starts fighting you on clean merge boundaries because its personality vector has been set to "token stingy" its strictly worse). Its not that I dislike Cursor, its that I dont have time to put up with its compromises for non-extreme-power-user accessibility. I need an extreme power, cost indifferent, tuned for the margins stack. That's nothing with a VSCode base that I know about, and I've tried Cline and Roo and Continue and written a bunch MCP servers and I measure it all, not even close. I bet the neovim people have something just as good.
  - ljm 1y ago
    My 'beef' with Cursor is that the editor is part of the package and you don't really have the same kind of hooks into the agent that you do with Claude Code or similar, which really means you're at the mercy of the Cursor team to prioritise those things on their roadmap. That includes things like the limit of 40 MCP tools that you can only enable globally (and MCP proxies that try to do this dynamically are a bit flakey) - even just using the GitHub MCP blows through that limit because it's all or nothing. It's good for what it is but I don't love that I have to change to a whole-ass new editor to get access to the agentic additions, when alternatives that require an API key or a more flexible CLI tool can do a better job.
  - cvdub 1y ago
    Are you using gptel exclusively, or also things like aider/claude code? I’d love to hear more about your workflow if you have time to share!
    - benreesman 1y ago
      Sure. I'm experimenting like everyone else, but I mostly use gptel as the primary interaction surface and Claude Code for a range of refactorings and other "more than mechanical, less than creative" edits. Both of these are very (!!!) well complimented by magit, which is so good at AI supervision it seems designed for it, by a genius. For Claude Code I'm rapidly switching anything I want "vibe coded" into Hadkell for code, Dhall for config, and check-heavy Nix for deploy. Between that and some property tests that I seed and then have Opus elaborate on, you can put Claude Code so restrictive that it just hits the compiler in a loop until useful code comes out. Its trapped: I hoist CLAUDE.md in from the Nix store so it physically can't edit out the brutal prompts around mocks and lies, and -Wall -Werror in GHC gives it nowhere to hide, all it can do is burn tokens and desperately Web Search tool until it gets it perfect ish or I cut off its money because this requires a real LLM minimum and likely a real programmer. If there's a property test welded into the type system it can't even fail to use a parameter: that's an error Claude. I have a bunch of elisp in // hypermodern // emacs for things like OpenRouter integration and tool use, but frankly, stock gptel is so strong I always wonder if I'm getting my money's worth trying to tune it into the asymptote. Happy to answer any more questions.
      - AlexCoventry 1y ago
        Sounds cool. What sort of stuff do you develop, and who's paying for it?
        benreesman 1y ago
        I work for a medium-sized proprietary/discretionary fund. AFAIK the principles trade all kinds of stuff, macro stuff. My current job is tuning up the execution on the cryptocurrency adjacent desk, but not like blockchain stuff, it's somewhere in between OG crypto trading stuff and like Wall St. HFT circa 2006-2010 depending on how you measure, it's in the "kernel bypass matters but FPGAs are still exotic" sort of regime, some of it is legacy REST APIs still but FIX 4.2 SBE and other real finance protocols (and real banks and stuff) are starting to be a part of the ecosystem. I aspire to be a lot faster than this stuff (I've built faster stuff than this) but this is quite a good library (amazingly good by OSS standards, good stuff in this area is rarely OSS, props to the maintainers): https://github.com/crypto-chassis/ccapi https://github.com/crypto-chassis/ccapi, in particular this library does a really good job of being correct across a lot of surface area, it's serious people doing it, and there are forks of it that use DPDK floating around. If by who's paying for it you mean the big Anthropic bill? My boss's boss is pretty enlightened about the fact that learning how to use AI well is expensive, so when I'm on a tight schedule I get a pretty forgiving budget for the model fees. It's a pretty serious perk in the sense that it's really expensive to master using these things :)
  - sexyman48 1y ago
    cannot afford to fuck around, go for the jugular every day Slow your roll. Nothing you write will matter in six months.
    - szundi 1y ago
      [dead]
    - kabdib 1y ago
      the code that i am least proud of is the code that has lasted the longest :-)
    - benreesman 1y ago
      Can't speak for you friend, but I got my ass kicked through a combination of the hiring freezes and absorbing a bunch of famiku-wide expenses around a nasty bereavement like, right before that and got pretty much wiped out. Having been very well off (to put it mildly) from like, 2010-2023, I was pretty unclear on the fact that going broke is straight up existential now in a way that was not true ten or fifteen years ago. If you've been doing alright for a decade or so, I wouldn't blame you for not knowing that. But as a guy who is a known enemy of the Valley establishment to begin with rebuilding from all that? When I say I'm dead serious, I'm being earnest. If you don't have a family/community safety net and/or a plugged-in nepo golden age network? Stack cash on hand like your life depends on it, because it fucking does.
      - dingnuts 1y ago
        being broke was absolutely existential fifteen years ago. signed: someone who was broke fifteen years ago and has been stacking cash on hand ever since.
        benreesman 1y ago
        I believe you, my situation might have been different. I never had much growing up and never had good jobs until like my mid 20s, I remember it sucking to be broke but not being scary if that makes sense? You could usually find at least a shitty job and even a shitty job could get you some kind of apartment or room even with bad credit. Nice apartments had hard credit checks but there were independent landlords everywhere, so if you didn't mind the occasional drug deal on your block, it was like, workable. Now its all property management companies with what amounts to one computer system and if you don't like it? AirBnB is happy to absorb every last house, room, carboard box, and park bench. And a shitty job is no guarantee of a shitty room now, you see homeless people still in the Best Buy shirt they were wearing when they got laid off, and Best Buy is nowhere near the worst job. I thought working hard and being really good at computer stuff was basically some kind of bare minimum job guaranteed, that being free with my money might mean not retiring young. Didn't realize tech employment was war. Wrong. Won't make that mistake again.
- __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
  There's a fair bit of discussion about this here: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/discussions/4037 https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/discussions/4037 But the short answer is no. Not yet. I'm pretty happy just letting the standalone agent write to the file and then reloading it in my editor. Though I wish the agent CLI tools would use something like inotify to notice when I've made a manual change to a file that they've recently written and then do a better job of incorporating that change as feedback to inform future edits.
- lukaszkorecki 1y ago
  it's coming: https://github.com/editor-code-assistant/eca https://github.com/editor-code-assistant/eca
- didibus 1y ago
  There's this one: https://eca.dev/ https://eca.dev/
- godelski 1y ago
  I'm sure some other users can give you better answers, but I'm a bit curious what you mean by "standard". FWIW, Vim (and presumably emacs) can run terminals as well as do things like ssh and ftp. Though I'm pretty sure the easiest thing to do would just be to use the Ctrl-R pattern in vim and have it send curl requests in a different buffer. As far as I'm aware, all the major LLM platforms have APIs that can be accessed through curl (or any other way you want to to GET/PUT requests). Here's something I found with a quick Google search[0]. So I'm not sure there needs to be "a standard" so much as "can it do http requests?" which is yes. I mean with this I think you can also see it wouldn't be too hard to set up and connect to a LLM hosted on the LAN. Could do it all through ssh [0] https://arjunaravind.in/blog/using-vim-as-a-http-client/ https://arjunaravind.in/blog/using-vim-as-a-http-client/
- newtwilly 1y ago
  No the comment meant that aider and Claude code are CLI programs, so if you can run a terminal in your niche editor, then you are good to go
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
dismalaf 1y ago
It's always been that way. Emacs has had advanced IDE-like features for as long as I can remember. Vim too. LSP and TS just make it easier to standardize across editors and languages.
bunjeejmpr 1y ago
[flagged]
- wizhi 1y ago
  Man, if anything you sound like a pretty shit coworker.
  - bunjeejmpr 1y ago
    [flagged]
- chamomeal 1y ago
  I don’t see a lot of rage bait on HN. Is this bait or just super weird?
deadbabe 1y ago
[flagged]
peterjliu 1y ago
emacs and vim are not niche, lol
- mickael-kerjean 1y ago
  In 15 years of using nothing but emacs, I have never met another emacs user in any of the companies I worked for. plenty of vim but literally 0 emacs
  - iLemming 1y ago
    I have a similar but opposite experience. Since around 2015 I've mostly been working with people who primarily use Emacs. In 2014 I was the only weird one, then next team about 3-5, then a dozen, then there was a team of a few dozen where only two were using Vim. On my current team also most of the devs are Emacs users. However, a lot of people use Emacs with Evil-mode, so I guess they can be considered vimmers. Also, I don't remember the last time when I worked with anyone who writes code and uses Windows. Anecdotal experiences can lead to a warped understanding of reality; in mine, Windows and non-emacs users are niche.
  - reddit_clone 1y ago
    My experience aligns with this. I work for a bigco. Yet to meet a fellow Emacs user.
    - kelvie 1y ago
      Don't y'all have a #emacs slack channel or equivalent at your company? I work for a medium-sized tech company and we have a single digit amount of emacs users I feel like. The channel is mostly dead except for a few tips and tricks and the odd time people asking how we each install it on our macbooks. Anecdotally a lot of managers use Emacs, though that may be an age thing. (I use emacs for Real Work, unless that Real Work involves a JVM. Still do all the git stuff in emacs/magit, though)
      - reddit_clone 1y ago
throwaway4496 1y ago
You think VIM is a niche? neovim + vim is used by over 38% of developers according StackExchange survey. That is more than 1 out of 3 developer, closer to 2 out of 5. I am not sure what is going on with here recently, maybe I have overgrown the place, or maybe everyday a little by little this place is getting filled with people who shouldn't be talking about CS.
- sunng 1y ago
  According to StackExchange, Emacs is not even a code editor
  - __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
    It's an operating system
- blahgeek 1y ago
  As someone who have only used Emacs and Vim in the past 10 years, I wish you are right. But according to my observation, 90% of those 38% of developers only use Vim in when they are sshing to the server to update few config files or make simple edits to the scripts. When they do proper programming (like hundreds lines of coding in a project), they switch to other IDEs like VSCode. So yes I personally still consider Vim and Emacs “niche” editors.
  - nojs 1y ago
    Worth noting that a lot of people use those IDEs with vim keys
  - throwaway4496 1y ago
    Yeah, even if that is true, what part of a tool used by close to 40% of developers is niche? niche /niːʃ,nɪtʃ/ (adjective) denoting products, services, or interests that appeal to a small, specialized section of the population.
    - 1y ago

mikece 1y ago

Is there a standard for integrating agentic coding tools into an editor similar to how an LSP allows the integration of language-specific features?

benreesman 1y ago
Its not at anything like the adoption of MCP or especially LSP, and it takes a more "foundational and composable library of primitives" approach than "wire protocol per se" approach, but `gptel` has quite the vibrant little ecosystem around it and its just god mode, wall hacks on the VSCode stuff, just blows it away. I'm under extreme time pressure at the moment, I cannot afford to fuck around on ideology right now I have to go for the jugular every day, and that means "fuck the cost" Opus 4 use in `gptel` (though Qwen and K2 are pushing it out of more and more stuff as I learn the quirks, Opus 4 TTFT under load is unusable and when it starts fighting you on clean merge boundaries because its personality vector has been set to "token stingy" its strictly worse). Its not that I dislike Cursor, its that I dont have time to put up with its compromises for non-extreme-power-user accessibility. I need an extreme power, cost indifferent, tuned for the margins stack. That's nothing with a VSCode base that I know about, and I've tried Cline and Roo and Continue and written a bunch MCP servers and I measure it all, not even close. I bet the neovim people have something just as good.
- ljm 1y ago
  My 'beef' with Cursor is that the editor is part of the package and you don't really have the same kind of hooks into the agent that you do with Claude Code or similar, which really means you're at the mercy of the Cursor team to prioritise those things on their roadmap. That includes things like the limit of 40 MCP tools that you can only enable globally (and MCP proxies that try to do this dynamically are a bit flakey) - even just using the GitHub MCP blows through that limit because it's all or nothing. It's good for what it is but I don't love that I have to change to a whole-ass new editor to get access to the agentic additions, when alternatives that require an API key or a more flexible CLI tool can do a better job.
- cvdub 1y ago
  Are you using gptel exclusively, or also things like aider/claude code? I’d love to hear more about your workflow if you have time to share!
  - benreesman 1y ago
    Sure. I'm experimenting like everyone else, but I mostly use gptel as the primary interaction surface and Claude Code for a range of refactorings and other "more than mechanical, less than creative" edits. Both of these are very (!!!) well complimented by magit, which is so good at AI supervision it seems designed for it, by a genius. For Claude Code I'm rapidly switching anything I want "vibe coded" into Hadkell for code, Dhall for config, and check-heavy Nix for deploy. Between that and some property tests that I seed and then have Opus elaborate on, you can put Claude Code so restrictive that it just hits the compiler in a loop until useful code comes out. Its trapped: I hoist CLAUDE.md in from the Nix store so it physically can't edit out the brutal prompts around mocks and lies, and -Wall -Werror in GHC gives it nowhere to hide, all it can do is burn tokens and desperately Web Search tool until it gets it perfect ish or I cut off its money because this requires a real LLM minimum and likely a real programmer. If there's a property test welded into the type system it can't even fail to use a parameter: that's an error Claude. I have a bunch of elisp in // hypermodern // emacs for things like OpenRouter integration and tool use, but frankly, stock gptel is so strong I always wonder if I'm getting my money's worth trying to tune it into the asymptote. Happy to answer any more questions.
    - AlexCoventry 1y ago
      Sounds cool. What sort of stuff do you develop, and who's paying for it?
      - benreesman 1y ago
        I work for a medium-sized proprietary/discretionary fund. AFAIK the principles trade all kinds of stuff, macro stuff. My current job is tuning up the execution on the cryptocurrency adjacent desk, but not like blockchain stuff, it's somewhere in between OG crypto trading stuff and like Wall St. HFT circa 2006-2010 depending on how you measure, it's in the "kernel bypass matters but FPGAs are still exotic" sort of regime, some of it is legacy REST APIs still but FIX 4.2 SBE and other real finance protocols (and real banks and stuff) are starting to be a part of the ecosystem. I aspire to be a lot faster than this stuff (I've built faster stuff than this) but this is quite a good library (amazingly good by OSS standards, good stuff in this area is rarely OSS, props to the maintainers): https://github.com/crypto-chassis/ccapi https://github.com/crypto-chassis/ccapi, in particular this library does a really good job of being correct across a lot of surface area, it's serious people doing it, and there are forks of it that use DPDK floating around. If by who's paying for it you mean the big Anthropic bill? My boss's boss is pretty enlightened about the fact that learning how to use AI well is expensive, so when I'm on a tight schedule I get a pretty forgiving budget for the model fees. It's a pretty serious perk in the sense that it's really expensive to master using these things :)
- sexyman48 1y ago
  cannot afford to fuck around, go for the jugular every day Slow your roll. Nothing you write will matter in six months.
  - szundi 1y ago
    [dead]
  - kabdib 1y ago
    the code that i am least proud of is the code that has lasted the longest :-)
  - benreesman 1y ago
    Can't speak for you friend, but I got my ass kicked through a combination of the hiring freezes and absorbing a bunch of famiku-wide expenses around a nasty bereavement like, right before that and got pretty much wiped out. Having been very well off (to put it mildly) from like, 2010-2023, I was pretty unclear on the fact that going broke is straight up existential now in a way that was not true ten or fifteen years ago. If you've been doing alright for a decade or so, I wouldn't blame you for not knowing that. But as a guy who is a known enemy of the Valley establishment to begin with rebuilding from all that? When I say I'm dead serious, I'm being earnest. If you don't have a family/community safety net and/or a plugged-in nepo golden age network? Stack cash on hand like your life depends on it, because it fucking does.
    - dingnuts 1y ago
      being broke was absolutely existential fifteen years ago. signed: someone who was broke fifteen years ago and has been stacking cash on hand ever since.
      - benreesman 1y ago
        I believe you, my situation might have been different. I never had much growing up and never had good jobs until like my mid 20s, I remember it sucking to be broke but not being scary if that makes sense? You could usually find at least a shitty job and even a shitty job could get you some kind of apartment or room even with bad credit. Nice apartments had hard credit checks but there were independent landlords everywhere, so if you didn't mind the occasional drug deal on your block, it was like, workable. Now its all property management companies with what amounts to one computer system and if you don't like it? AirBnB is happy to absorb every last house, room, carboard box, and park bench. And a shitty job is no guarantee of a shitty room now, you see homeless people still in the Best Buy shirt they were wearing when they got laid off, and Best Buy is nowhere near the worst job. I thought working hard and being really good at computer stuff was basically some kind of bare minimum job guaranteed, that being free with my money might mean not retiring young. Didn't realize tech employment was war. Wrong. Won't make that mistake again.
__MatrixMan__ 1y ago
There's a fair bit of discussion about this here: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/discussions/4037 https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/discussions/4037 But the short answer is no. Not yet. I'm pretty happy just letting the standalone agent write to the file and then reloading it in my editor. Though I wish the agent CLI tools would use something like inotify to notice when I've made a manual change to a file that they've recently written and then do a better job of incorporating that change as feedback to inform future edits.
lukaszkorecki 1y ago
it's coming: https://github.com/editor-code-assistant/eca https://github.com/editor-code-assistant/eca
didibus 1y ago
There's this one: https://eca.dev/ https://eca.dev/
godelski 1y ago
I'm sure some other users can give you better answers, but I'm a bit curious what you mean by "standard". FWIW, Vim (and presumably emacs) can run terminals as well as do things like ssh and ftp. Though I'm pretty sure the easiest thing to do would just be to use the Ctrl-R pattern in vim and have it send curl requests in a different buffer. As far as I'm aware, all the major LLM platforms have APIs that can be accessed through curl (or any other way you want to to GET/PUT requests). Here's something I found with a quick Google search[0]. So I'm not sure there needs to be "a standard" so much as "can it do http requests?" which is yes. I mean with this I think you can also see it wouldn't be too hard to set up and connect to a LLM hosted on the LAN. Could do it all through ssh [0] https://arjunaravind.in/blog/using-vim-as-a-http-client/ https://arjunaravind.in/blog/using-vim-as-a-http-client/
newtwilly 1y ago
No the comment meant that aider and Claude code are CLI programs, so if you can run a terminal in your niche editor, then you are good to go

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

dismalaf 1y ago

It's always been that way. Emacs has had advanced IDE-like features for as long as I can remember. Vim too. LSP and TS just make it easier to standardize across editors and languages.

bunjeejmpr 1y ago

[flagged]

wizhi 1y ago
Man, if anything you sound like a pretty shit coworker.
- bunjeejmpr 1y ago
  [flagged]
chamomeal 1y ago
I don’t see a lot of rage bait on HN. Is this bait or just super weird?

deadbabe 1y ago

[flagged]

peterjliu 1y ago

emacs and vim are not niche, lol

mickael-kerjean 1y ago
In 15 years of using nothing but emacs, I have never met another emacs user in any of the companies I worked for. plenty of vim but literally 0 emacs
- iLemming 1y ago
  I have a similar but opposite experience. Since around 2015 I've mostly been working with people who primarily use Emacs. In 2014 I was the only weird one, then next team about 3-5, then a dozen, then there was a team of a few dozen where only two were using Vim. On my current team also most of the devs are Emacs users. However, a lot of people use Emacs with Evil-mode, so I guess they can be considered vimmers. Also, I don't remember the last time when I worked with anyone who writes code and uses Windows. Anecdotal experiences can lead to a warped understanding of reality; in mine, Windows and non-emacs users are niche.
- reddit_clone 1y ago
  My experience aligns with this. I work for a bigco. Yet to meet a fellow Emacs user.
  - kelvie 1y ago
    Don't y'all have a #emacs slack channel or equivalent at your company? I work for a medium-sized tech company and we have a single digit amount of emacs users I feel like. The channel is mostly dead except for a few tips and tricks and the odd time people asking how we each install it on our macbooks. Anecdotally a lot of managers use Emacs, though that may be an age thing. (I use emacs for Real Work, unless that Real Work involves a JVM. Still do all the git stuff in emacs/magit, though)
    - reddit_clone 1y ago

throwaway4496 1y ago

You think VIM is a niche? neovim + vim is used by over 38% of developers according StackExchange survey. That is more than 1 out of 3 developer, closer to 2 out of 5. I am not sure what is going on with here recently, maybe I have overgrown the place, or maybe everyday a little by little this place is getting filled with people who shouldn't be talking about CS.

sunng 1y ago
According to StackExchange, Emacs is not even a code editor
- __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
  It's an operating system
blahgeek 1y ago
As someone who have only used Emacs and Vim in the past 10 years, I wish you are right. But according to my observation, 90% of those 38% of developers only use Vim in when they are sshing to the server to update few config files or make simple edits to the scripts. When they do proper programming (like hundreds lines of coding in a project), they switch to other IDEs like VSCode. So yes I personally still consider Vim and Emacs “niche” editors.
- nojs 1y ago
  Worth noting that a lot of people use those IDEs with vim keys
- throwaway4496 1y ago
  Yeah, even if that is true, what part of a tool used by close to 40% of developers is niche? niche /niːʃ,nɪtʃ/ (adjective) denoting products, services, or interests that appeal to a small, specialized section of the population.
  - 1y ago