7 ms·

Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI

201 points by psibi 7mo ago

gitaarik 7mo ago
With the idea of the recent HN article that files are the common media of communication between humans and LLM's, it's still useful to have direct file-skills; to be able to read raw files the LLM outputs, or give it input through files, and able to manipulate the files efficiently. You can use an LLM to prompt to search through the files and all that, but for such basic things it's worth learning it yourself, if you do it often.
rgoulter 7mo ago
May be splitting hairs, but I don't think it's the terminal-native part that's relevant, so much as that both LLMs and emacs/vim are text oriented in ways which e.g. VSCode isn't. (Or perhaps just the text-oriented nature is a result from initial constraint from being terminal-native). As the author points out, that Emacs is a highly extensible 'operating system' which makes it relatively easy to bring different tasks together. -- This ought to be a natural parallel to what the agentic tools are trying to do (use MCPs and skills etc. to bring different functionality to the LLM execution environment). That LLMs can help users extend emacs ought to lower the difficulty curve. Still. It's silly to wish that Emacs could be the LLM's best friend, rather than demonstrating how it is. RE: "what if in the future all coding skills are irrelevant". My experience has been that good results from LLMs come from putting good thought into its usage. They're quite far from a magic "push the button and get the result you want" where the skill doesn't matter.
- chamomeal 7mo ago
  Not totally related to your point BUT I’d like to tack on that lisps and generally repl-friendly languages are in an interesting spot in the LLM-enabled world. The calva-backseat-driver vscode extension runs an MCP that lets LLMs manipulate and eval clojure expressions in a REPL. It provides a tighter feedback loop and lets LLMs do much more complicated stuff with much more confidence. They can test functions as they go, read docs, check query outputs, write and eval tests. It’s actually crazy what Claude opus can do with REPL access. It might be insanity to let an LLM modify your emacs on the fly, but I’m sure people will have some crazy and interesting ideas in that vein!
  - FabianCarbonara 7mo ago
    This is super exciting. Emacs already treats UI as just more Elisp to eval. The AI could sculpt the entire editor to whatever you need in the moment. No plugin to install, no config to maintain. Just describe what you need and the editor becomes it.
  - minikomi 7mo ago
    I don't let it execute emacs lisp itself, but elisp generated in org mode babel blocks which is instantly executable is a fine way to have gptel improve itself. ( See "meta tooling" in https://poyo.co/note/20260202T150723/ https://poyo.co/note/20260202T150723/ )
4b11b4 7mo ago
learning and using and customizing emacs has never been better getting a bibliography and citation workflow up and running in org is incredibly easy. Use a model to read the first page of your PDFs dir and add bibtex entries... then you just build your static site around that please don't write with a model. We want your own prose
igor47 7mo ago
Agreed on the config. I just launch a Claude code in my vimrc directory now if I want to change anything about my setup or have any questions about how to do something. Also, I love running a tmux pane for vim, and then like 4 or 5 more -- a few Claude code instances, one for the dev environment, one for interacting with jj/git or other random commands. So easy to switch between tasks. My main annoyance with my setup is that my Bluetooth trackball times out after a period of inactivity, and when I eventually need to use the pointer again there's a lag while it reconnects...
lorenzohess 7mo ago
Agreed. We should also consider whether the rise of AI for any type of implementation task will reduce the number of new Emacs and Vim users, thereby limiting and ultimately killing the communities' growth. I came to Vim, and then Emacs, because I wanted a tool for coding that I could configure exactly how I liked. If AI does my coding for me, my need for a custom editor will decrease. More generally speaking, if AI can do any type of implementation task -- coding, task management, email, etc -- my need for software customized for those things will decrease. If people don't need custom software, many fewer people may seek out and find Emacs and Vim. Who will maintain them and evangelize once today's generation cannot?
- nine_k 7mo ago
  If implementation of anything is easy, far fewer people would be needed to keep the projects alive. AI is okay at doing simple things, but it needs to be overseen. Even before any viable AI, I used to read code more than to write. And Emacs is a good tool for that. Then, Emacs specifically has a killer app, Org mode. For me, it's about as important as good programming modes, if not more More importantly, Emacs is a platform (as is Neovim, and VS Code). It adjusts to the needs of the user and the moment.
lelanthran 7mo ago
Yeah, I use Slime in vim to drive programs (like psql) via their stdin/stdout, so an "agent" that does stdin/stdout only for UI is perfect. If I ever write my own agent, it will be in this fashion. ----------------- [1] I have a `scratchpad.sql` file filled with whatever sql snippets I am testing and have `psql mydbname` in a vertical split. Doing C-c C-c in the scratchpad sends the paragraph to the psql instance.
emporas 7mo ago
In my mind I had the opposite picture than the one the article portrays. Emacs was lagging behind common IDEs, like IntelliJ and VsCode, cause big companies put thousands of developers to combine many features into one integrated package and everything works together providing a very smooth experience compared to Emacs (and Vim probably). Now IDEs are useless. I personally haven't felt the need to goto_definition or autocomplete variable names for almost 2 years. Now programming becomes closer to plain text writing and editing and it levels the playing fields for all editors. Also Emacs can run Rust plugins, the user is not limited to Elisp. Not very convenient but possible.
- globular-toast 7mo ago
  > Now IDEs are useless. I personally haven't felt the need to goto_definition or autocomplete variable names for almost 2 years. So you are vibe coding? Some of us still check every line of code generated and an IDE definitely helps with that. Even more so when you need to take control.
codemac 7mo ago
emacsclient + codex has been a game changer. I probably add or change a feature in emacs once a day, or every other day. I've been using emacs for some insane amount of time, maybe 20 years? And still I had more customization to go. Emacs and programs with it's level of programmatic user customization will survive the AI period in my opinion. Anything static will falter.
imiric 7mo ago
> Part of the case for Emacs and Vim has always been that they make you faster at writing and editing code. That was a side-effect of using software that is deeply customizable, but not the main goal. It comes from being comfortable with your tools to the point of relying on muscle memory to use them. The main benefit to me has always been comfort. My favorite commands are a keystroke away, I know how the tool will react and what it's doing at any moment, I know all of its quirks, etc. None of that changes in the age of "AI". This new technology won't replace computing for me. My hurdle to adopting "agentic" workflows has nothing to do with my choice of tools, and everything with not trusting the companies and ecosystems around this new tech, especially during this insane hype cycle. I've been slowly adopting parts of the stack I'm comfortable with, because, again, my comfort trumps anything else. Besides, if anything, a deeply customizable platform like Emacs is ideal for building any type of workflow. There are already great packages for LLM integration, and I don't think Emacs users are missing out on anything. The fact "AI" companies decide to build their moats with custom tooling is not a problem I care about. Apple has been pushing their idea of what computing should look like for decades, and it has never appealed to me. I don't miss something I don't want. Anyway, confusing article. The author acknowledges all of these points, but also the alternative scenarios. Both cannot be true for the same person. There will always be people who enjoy using Emacs and Vim because of their customizability, not necessarily their features. And there will always be people who just want to use a supported and official product, without any tinkering. Emacs and Vim will outlast this hype cycle just fine. Thanks for all your work, batsov! I do hope you stick around these communities. :)
athrowaway3z 7mo ago
I have been an emacs user for almost a decade now. My laptop taskbar is: terminal, filebrowser, emacs, firefox. With emacsd running to make startup instance. This week I removed emacsd service and Emacs from my taskbar because I had more miss-clicks - accidentally opening it - than I had need for it in the past few months.
- layer8 7mo ago
  What’s interesting is that as an Emacs user and caring about instant startup, you use clicks to open things instead of keyboard shortcuts.
  - athrowaway3z 7mo ago
    Samsung 360 laptop with touch screen.
baokaola 7mo ago
I find Emacs better than ever in the age of AI. Install agent-shell to run Claude Code inside Emacs and give it a skill to run Emacs Lisp using emacsclient. Voila - now you have all the integration you could ever need if you are a little resourceful. Claude Code can now introspect the entire editor and it can manipulate everything. You can have it build whatever features are missing - it will even debug those features for you, live in the editor. I recently came back to Emacs from VSCode and ended up just letting Claude build me the features I was missing, mainly related to tabs and project management. I think Emacs has unique advantages in the age of LLMs, you can just mold it like clay.
- PantaloonFlames 7mo ago
  Can you give specifics on what Claude code built for you, in the way of missing features ?
beemboy 7mo ago
I'm not convinced that terminal orientedness of AI tooling itself will last. My hypothesis is that it was chosen by developers of the current generation building for developers of the current generation. I hypothesize that there is a future where command lines and terminals don't matter, and hence I feel the focus will shift to, as the author points out, to planning, reviewing and ideation tools none of which demands a command line. In fact I expect an entirely new class of tool to emerge that does these things well that is neither an IDE nor terminal based. I think Claude Code's core will live but it's interface will morph in the coming years to adapt to the builders of the next generation. The analogy I use is my kids and manual transmission cars -- they grow up with EVs and single gear drives with linear torque curves, and will have no nostalgia for a manual transmission, engine noises, or supercharger whines. If you never used a terminal, will you pine for it?
- myrak 7mo ago
  [dead]
- rekrsiv 7mo ago
  A terminal still offers a more composable interface than a GUI. Analog feedback is still a concern for high level pilots. You are confusing power tools with entry-level instruments.
  - simianwords 7mo ago
    interesting, what do you mean by composable?
    - hbogert 7mo ago
      Albeit it's the shell, I assume he means piping
      - simianwords 7mo ago
        That has less to do with terminal than unix commands no?
szopa 7mo ago
I have been a die hard emacs user for 20 years, and I have a very nice emacs setup (if a little bit idiosyncratic, but all emacs configs are idiosyncratic). However, recently I realized that I read code, but almost never write it. What is more, I spend a lot of time doing it in tmux, over mosh, from my phone. Emacs ergonomy is just not great if all you have is a horrible phone keyboard (and no swiping, because tmux redraws the screen if you swipe). And then I discovered helix. It has all the things I was jealous about vim, BUT it has sane defaults ootb. And truth be told, another thing I use a lot is bat, which is cat with syntax highlighting and an automatic pager.
- johanvts 7mo ago
  Emacs has multicursor, lsp and treesitter so from just reading the helix landing page idk what you gain? Bat sounds interesting, thanks.
  - skydhash 7mo ago
    What I like about Emacs (which has made me switch from Vim) is the sheer amount of tools you have by default. Vim can have something similar, but you have to do a lot of config or install plugins to get them.
- truncate 7mo ago
  >> recently I realized that I read code, but almost never write it. I think most engineers are reading code than writing it. I find it very hard to not use Emacs when reading large codebases. Interestingly, its mostly because of file navigation. I love using ido/ivy for file navigation, quickly filtering through buffers, magit. Emacs in terminal is not an ideal experience though. So I can imagine it being multi-fold worse with phone keyboard.
- locknitpicker 7mo ago
  > However, recently I realized that I read code, but almost never write it. This has been the norm for a few decades. Even software engineering courses emphasize the fact that code is read far more often than it is changed, which leads to all the basic software engineering principles around the importance of making code easier to read and to navigate through.
stephc_int13 7mo ago
How much of this article was AI written? I can sense the AI smell all over the place, also I found it way too long with little substance, but maybe that’s just me.
- operatingthetan 7mo ago
  At this point a lot of the articles on this site are just a 'prompt' for us to have a discussion about.
  - bozhidar 7mo ago
    Well put! To me - it always felt like this here. I have serious doubts that most people even read the articles linked to HN discussions.
- gbro3n 7mo ago
  I didn't get that feeling. But it is long, which is a bit of an AI smell. That said, I think use of AI in writing might not always be a negative. On a couple of documentation pieces I have used AI to provide better structure to writing that I've started and check for technical correctness parts of a document where I need to check my terminology. As long as the original idea is human and AI helps to make the signal clearer, I'm ok with it.
- acron0 7mo ago
  Bozhidar always writes like this. I can see why you would think it's AI style but I would vote that it isn't. Look at some of his pre-AI blogs, if you care to.
  - bozhidar 7mo ago
    Guilty as charged! :D Short essays are definitely not my forte. (and this one is definitely longer than I wanted it to be, but in my typical style I kept adding to it after I wrote the initial version, and I'll probably add even more content after I go over all the discussion here)
- 7mo ago
ywatanabe1989 7mo ago
In my view, Emacs is getting more powerful in the AI era. The cost of writing Elisp has dropped significantly — I've ended up with 15+ personal Elisp packages as a result. The freedom Emacs offers is still unmatched. For example, I heavily rely on sending automatic response (https://github.com/ywatanabe1989/emacs-claude-code https://github.com/ywatanabe1989/emacs-claude-code), monitoring repository, and targeted context building from dired.
- johanvts 7mo ago
  Fully agree, but it is also the buffer based navigation approach that is just fantastic. I wish other programs would adopt this. Most applications use dedicated areas for various functions, instead of letting me just hit a key to bring the function to where I am currently looking.
gbro3n 7mo ago
I'm a muggle when it comes to vim, but I've considered learning it again recently because of AI. I'm building more than I have in years because I love being able to try things out without investing 3 months to get something working before I can really test the idea. And so I am typing A LOT. Less code, but lots of markdown, prompts and config. My hands are hurting, I really wish I had a power tool for typing. Writing is always going to allow us to be more precise than speech, and is a tool for creative thought in its self. I can see how we might be bearish on our expectations around new adoptees, but I think there's pressure to get more out of our editors too. Two of my recent projects have been vscode extensions, because I'm needing more help from my editor, not less: https://www.appsoftware.com/blog/fixing-agent-llm-context-decay-in-vs-code-with-git-worktrees https://www.appsoftware.com/blog/fixing-agent-llm-context-de..., https://www.appsoftware.com/blog/as-notes-turn-vs-code-into-your-personal-knowledge-management-system-pkms https://www.appsoftware.com/blog/as-notes-turn-vs-code-into-...
- arcanemachiner 7mo ago
  Start using speech to text more. You likely have the hardware needed to run a Whisper model locally.
  - gbro3n 7mo ago
    I will give a go. But my rambling mumblings to Gemini on my phone sor far confirm that I write with more clarity than I speak
    - arcanemachiner 7mo ago
      I use SpeechNote with FasterWhisper and I've found it to be much better than any cloud dictation services I've tried (which, to be fair, is not a whole lot... they all suck so much that I give up fast).
lenkite 7mo ago
If AI companies don't break even and continue to remain in 2 digit billions and more growing debt, all these are nice cookies that can be taken away at any time with a 5-10x increase in price.
shevy-java 7mo ago
> The learning curve argument gets harder to justify too. “Spend six months learning Emacs and you’ll be 10x faster” is a tough sell when a junior developer with Cursor can scaffold an entire application in an afternoon. IF this is the case. But is it? I have some doubts because to me it seems as if domain knowledge is shifted onto an AI. Then you become dependent on the AI. Is AI really better than a skilled human though? After all, if AI is doing the work and the human providing the input to it as guide, it should be possible to cut away the human completely. So Skynet 3.0 does not need humans. But when it does, then something doesn't work in that explanation - AI must thus not be "smart enough".
globular-toast 7mo ago
Emacs is a true bicycle for the mind. It sets you free in many ways, always wanting to be the tool that simply allows you to do your job more efficiently and effectively. LLMs are like living with a depressed person who doesn't see the point in doing anything because it's all just been done before. Who cares if you do a good job? Just recycle some shit that others have done and it'll be passable. This isn't a bicycle for the mind, it's just going to drag you into depression with it.
jurschreuder 7mo ago
I'm not sure AI Agents can already beat the average VIM user. I use VIM and I get some inspiration from LLMs sometimes, but me and other developers always after some time give up and just quickly do it manually. AI Agents will just full the code with maaaassive swaths of texts it will just make a project unusable. We even get paid to turn client's AI LLM Claude sketches into real programs.
- keithnz 7mo ago
  This is not my experience at all, the AI agents are many many many times faster than what I can do. What anyone can do. It's crazy how quick I can create stuff these days.
  - bandrami 7mo ago
    You're forgetting to count the time you spend deleting the excess stuff
    - keithnz 7mo ago
      no... I'm not.
      - bandrami 7mo ago
        Then you're forgetting the time your sysadmin spends doing that
  - gdorsi 7mo ago
    It really depends on what kind and of job you do. If it's not something very common LLMs could end up generating random code. Also if you work on something performance critical, you can get inspiration from LLMs, but they often don't write fast code.
    - keithnz 7mo ago
      not my experience, they write fast code, and if you ask them to optimize, can pull all kinds of tricks out of the bag. Even with some of the niche stuff I work on, they seem really good.
pjmlp 7mo ago
I lived in XEmacs between 1995 and 2005, because in many UNIX variants having an IDE was a foreign word, not even something that could provide the affordances of a Turbo Pascal with Turbo Vision based IDE for MS-DOS. Between Emacs, the improved XEmacs, and vi, the answer was obvious at the time, I joined the Emacs faction with XEmacs. Mastered elisp good enough, had my configuration scripts, go to know enough vi to handle telneting (or sshing) into random UNIX servers without anything else installed. Both are still kind of stuck in time, going back to them in random UNIX distribution feels like I am back in that UNIX decade.
keithnz 7mo ago
vim (neovim these days) for me is my text editor I use to look at code when dealing with AI, more often than not I'm working on a bug list as I test things. I haven't opened my IDE (Jetbrains tools) for nearly 2 weeks now. Only thing I often want is to be able to run sql queries, I used datagrip for that... Now I'm writing my own tui sql tool that is lightning quick and has most of the features I like from data grip, plus a bunch of new things that make my life easier. I've made it work as a MCP server also so that I can get my agent to directly inject queries and I can browse the result sets easily. I feel like the terminal, because its text based and super great at manipulating text is such a perfect match for these AI agents. But, yes, the need for code editing itself is really limited.
komali2 7mo ago
> Imagine an AI assistant that can read your org-mode agenda, draft email replies in mu4e, help you write commit messages in Magit, and refactor code in your source buffers – all within the same environment, sharing context. No other editor architecture makes this kind of deep, cross-domain integration as natural as Emacs does. I've been a devout emacs amateur for 10 years, and recently learned nvim/lazy.vim because I was tired of web dev kinda sucking in emacs. Sure, you can get a setup with lint-on-save, inline TS errors, and all the other bells and whistles you get in vscode working on a react-tsx project, but then when you `helm-projectile-switch-project` to a vue project, suddenly you have to get a whole new config set up. And oops, for whatever reason, tab spacing isn't being pulled from the editor config for this directory... But like the author says, LLMs fixed that. I pointed Warp at my emacs config, said my problems, and said "fix plz," and it did. No more "oops," just "fix plz" whenever I'm editing rust, or svelte, or golang, or whatever else for the first time in emacs. I'm very excited for the possibility in the portion I quoted. I moved away from mu4e and org mode because managing it all was getting tedious: too much time procrastinating by tweaking org configs. Too many emails not rendered properly in mu4e or fat fingered by me and lost. But in world+llm, that's not really a problem anymore. I haven't migrated back to org mode yet but I did an experiment recently asking claude to set up org similar to my trilium set up, and it did a passable enough job that I was convinced it's possible. So, now I'm back in emacs, trying out the various LLM tools, doing poorly at getting anything other than copilot to work well, and waiting with patience and desperation for someone to make an LLM completion experience in emacs that has a multiline completion experience at least 50% as good as Cursor's.
gtsop 7mo ago
[dead]
dsrtslnd23 7mo ago
I think a terminal is still the perfect UI for coding agents on desktop systems. But now that I have running agents in background that only sometimes require some extra input on the go - I hate the terminal use on the go: terminus or other mobile app + virtual keyboard is horrible to use. For that I envision a better interface.
- livetaub93 7mo ago
  ugh i totally get this. trying to wrangle a coding agent on a phone with a virtual keyboard is just... awful. i've been using this app called Tap To Type on my android, it makes my phone a proper bluetooth keyboard for my laptop. no extra software on the computer needed, just pairs up like any wireless keyboard, and it has a mode where you can type out a whole message before sending it all at once, which is great for longer inputs. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.taptotype https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.taptotype
marwanet 7mo ago
I suspect terminals will stick around longer than people expect. Not because they’re ideal, but because they compose well with everything else.
genie3io 7mo ago
[dead]
jaypatelani 7mo ago
Hmm.. asistant i can't escape this screen what is it? A.i: this is vi text editor. Human: exit from it and open word processor. A.i: rm -rf / Human: good job exiting. Now where's my word processor? .... Hello? Where's my word processor? Brint it on screen. Can you hear me ?
xenodium 7mo ago
I put off adopting popular agents for most of 2025 primarily because there was no agent-agnostic path to first-class Emacs integration. That changed with ACP (https://agentclientprotocol.com https://agentclientprotocol.com), thus I started working on agent-shell. I'm happy with how the integration is shaping up, enabling me to have my cake and eat it too (Emacs + AI agents). I wrote an agent-shell post recently with the latest changes https://xenodium.com/agent-shell-0-47-1-updates https://xenodium.com/agent-shell-0-47-1-updates
- hbogert 7mo ago
  You have Every right to plug your agentshell here. I love it and I don't even care that much for agents (yet)
  - mark_l_watson 7mo ago
    I agree, agentshell is a nice way to chat with LLMs. Well worth setting up. Emacs eye candy.
  - xenodium 7mo ago
    That's nice to hear. Thank you!
- nachojreilly 7mo ago
  I tried it and was underwhelmed. Without /resume or /rewind, it's unusable. After Opencode botched a simple yes/no (yesterday's top HN story), I'm convinced the frontier model companies will continue expanding the usability gap between their proprietary harnesses and the open-source ones.
  - xenodium 7mo ago
    Resume is supported by agent-shell, but is dependent on agent's to implement the relevant ACP. Do you know if OpenCode's ACP implementation has listing and resuming session support? Also, you'll need to enable resuming as per post (it's a new feature) https://xenodium.com/agent-shell-0-47-1-updates https://xenodium.com/agent-shell-0-47-1-updates
dvrp 7mo ago
¿Por qué no los dos?
submeta 7mo ago
For me, AI increased my NeoVim usage. Claude Code and Codex made me go full cli. I run several sessions in multiple tabs in WezTerm, using Tmux, Tmuxinator, and excellent tui based file manager named Yazi in left pane, opening files in NeoVim, running Claude Code in right split. With this setup I work on several projects in parallel. Use lazygit as git client. Everything in cli, super fast. Initially I went with Cursor, but the terminal setup feels way faster, more natural.
jwr 7mo ago
My time spent in Emacs has *increased* with the increased use of AI. I have to read, edit, accept and reject all those code changes and Emacs+Magit is pretty much the best interface for that.
- mchaver 7mo ago
  I will have to checkout Magit, but, as an already heavy Emacs user, my time in Emacs has remained constant even with increased use of agentic coders.
- TYPE_FASTER 7mo ago
  Yeah, I’ve been using IntelliJ for a few years but recently tried the Claude-code package and magit and it’s a pretty great combo.
mvrckhckr 7mo ago
These were always personal preferences (I’ve used all types at different times and contexts), and I don’t think AI will have any major effect on their usage numbers.
specproc 7mo ago
I'm a long time VS Code boy, but have recently started dabbling in Vim because I'm exhausted with AI. Every VS Code update these days feels like it's exclusively AI orientated. The Vim approach seems fundamentally opposed to an AI-driven development model, or at least says, like everything else, "sure, you can do that, but set it up yourself." I find the Vim philosophy appealing coming from a work environment that wants to replace me with API calls to American companies.
- TheRoque 7mo ago
  I don't know about you but I've found that I've been experiencing more bugs in VSCode recently. It has never been a huge complain of me but recently I really feel it.
small_model 7mo ago
Not sure these and other editors have a future when the SOTA models can generate code better than 99% of the best devs in the world 100x faster, 10x cheaper and never get tired or want pesky time off. Maybe the use case it to view code while humans are still required in the loop (I think they just about still are) or to edit a commit msg.
danebalia 7mo ago
I gave up on emacs and vim. Its like fighting bad design. Im long time users of both, but no plugins sufficiently provide a quality integrated experience with AI, MCP and agents. Emacs and neovim AFAIK are not designed for streaming. And with what each of them do, you can just build an IDE yourself (Claude Code). I combined with Vim bindings, spacemacs interface and built an IDE from scratch in one week with Rust. Its my daily drivers. This is true customization.
AltruisticGapHN 7mo ago
You can have Vim bindings in vscode.
- worksonmine 7mo ago
  The keybindings are just the tip of the iceberg for most vim users.
dbacar 7mo ago
I dont know what the deal is with these editors that makes them on HN front page so frequently. In my opinion they are good text editors (used emacs for 4 years, and switched to vim nearly 10 years ago) but for coding I see them as a joke apart from some edge cases(clojure, lisp...). They are hard to setup as code editors, lots of customizations are needed and in my opinion it does not pay off.
alexpotato 7mo ago
> AI makes configuration and extension trivial I recently said to a co-worker: "Linux is free if your time has no value" is no longer true in the era of LLMs. Just about any wonky Linux issue can be fixed quickly with even just OpenCode and free models.
- maxhille 7mo ago
  In my experience that sentence never made much sense anyway. Of course over the ~25 years of Linux I had to setup/learn a lot of stuff, but usually it ended up being time well invested.
dude250711 7mo ago
Emacs and Vim in the Age of Slop
mark_l_watson 7mo ago
Nice writeup! The list of Emacs packages to use LLMs is the roadmap for getting started with AI Emacs integrations and I also liked his list of AI dangers at the end. I have used Emacs for over 40 years but I found myself getting sucked into the black hole of VSCode as discussed in the article. When I bought a new MacBook a few months ago, I only installed Emacs, no VSCode, and so far that is working out for me. Also, after many hours of experimenting with AI packages for Emacs, I have reverted to keeping Emacs mostly a pure human activity, and several times a week have sessions with gemini-cli and Claude Code when I want an AI coding assistant. This is just for me, not general advice, but I like to separate use of AI from my regular coding and writing workflows. I use AI for coding cumulatively about three or four hours a week.
- reddit_clone 7mo ago
  I am reduced to keeping Emacs and VSCode open on the same files/project :-) Use the LLM from VSCode and switch back to Emacs for regular editing! Currently trying out various Emacs packages. I got 'claude-code.el' actually working. But there is some flickering and also the interface is a bit wonky. I will try other packages mentioned in the article. For the life of me, I can't _edit_ with VSCode. My Emacs/Doom/Evil muscle memory is too ingrained.
  - iLemming 6mo ago
    Install ECA. Read my comment in the same thread. Once you hook up elisp evaluating MCP to your Emacs - it is game over for anything else. Nothing even comes close to the experience. I've been functioning in ADD mode - Annoyance-Driven-Development. I'd get annoyed by some small issue, and without missing a beat, I'd start typing. Well, sometimes I don't even type anymore - I'd just speak and let Whisper transcribe it and Emacs performs some crazy shit. It's not even funny how crazy it is.
    - karthink 6mo ago
      > Once you hook up elisp evaluating MCP to your Emacs gptel-agent ships with an elisp-eval tool out of the box, BTW.
himata4113 7mo ago
I swapped from jetbrains products to lazyvim/nvim and honestly without AI it would have not been possible. The speed I was able to configure it exactly how I wanted and support workflows jetbrains would never support is great. Escaping the god awful AI implementations in both vscode and jetbrains product is also a refresher. They don't know what the ** is going on, they don't know what users want, but I do and AI being able to extend my IDE in a way that helps me be more productive is very undervalued.
- hackerInnen 7mo ago
  > They don't know what the * is going on I'd assume that a good portion of people working on things like that know what is going on. My (very very subjective) feeling is that they just spit out WAY more tokens than needed, so that it hits the limit as fast as possible and people buy more. And the people responsible for that are probably the evil evil PM's
  - himata4113 7mo ago
    I don't know I never once felt that any AI integration in IDE's was actually worth using over a cli and that's a very low bar compared to a tui.
    - iLemming 6mo ago
      > I never once felt that any AI integration in IDE's was actually worth using over a cli That's right. I started with Claude in the CLI. But then I found a way to hook it up to my active, running instance of Emacs. And since Emacs is neither an editor, nor an IDE (in the typical sense) but rather a Lisp-REPL with embedded editor, I can now fully control virtually any aspect of my editor via LLM, running in the very same editor. I can't even describe the feeling - it's absolutely insane. I can for example give the LLM some incident ticket number, then ask it to search for all the relevant Slack conversations, PRs, and Splunk logs, build me some investigation audit log and dump it all into an Org-mode buffer with massive data and then reduce it into a sparse tree where the entire document is folded as much as possible, but the selected information is made visible. Then I can continue the investigation, while the LLM would be adding and removing data from that buffer dynamically (or adjusting the sparse tree), depending of how the investigation proceeds. It's crazy, because I can ask it to programmatically change virtually any behavior of my editor on the fly.
hackerInnen 7mo ago
I mainly use (neo)vim because it has a less distracting interface than any other full blown IDE. Not because of some fancy tooling. And because it is faster, but that might be a negligible reason by now. I purposely try to keep my extension count as low as possible. It's just too distracting for me personally. If I really want to use AI tools or something else, then I don't mind opening a full suite, but as of right now, I still spend most of my time in vim and use AI mainly in chat mode.
thenoblesunfish 7mo ago
I still use Vim a lot, even though for work I use a fork of VSCode, like most people. Why? Because it's something I feel I can understand - it's simple and runs everywhere. It's the world of shells and text files. The work setup is a huge GUI with dozens of extensions, and now a whole other layer of non deterministic AI stuff. Useful, but it's a different kind of tool, one which relies on constant support from a large system.
- dominotw 7mo ago
  i all use now is git diff in nvim. i even forgot all the other keybindings.
segmondy 7mo ago
I use llama.vim - https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.vim https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.vim I run my own models, you can have models for code suggestion/FIM in the middle and you can have another for chat mode. You can point it to your local model if that's your thing or to a cloud model.
lexicality 7mo ago
> Let’s revisit the doomsday scenario. Say programming is fully automated and nobody writes code anymore. Does Emacs die? Commercial programming will be fully automated. That will not stop people doing it by hand. For all intents and purposes clothing manufacturing is fully automated but some people still do it themselves. One example near to my heart is my mother. She collects her dog's shed winter coat in the spring, cards it, spins it and ultimately knits it into a coat she puts back on the dog the next autumn - all by hand. She could just buy a cheap dog coat from Amazon, but she thinks it's funny to see the dog wearing a coat made of its own fur so she bought the equipment and learned the functionally useless skills required to do it. No matter what level of automation is available, a small number of people will still do things the hard way as a hobby or out of perverseness. We might be living in the matrix in 100 years but I'm certain someone will still be trying to work out how to exit vim in their holopod
- keyle 7mo ago
  Kind of a rough outlook on the future but I also felt the same.
- reddit_clone 7mo ago
  >functionally useless skills The dog would disagree! :-) I admire your mother. She is a real hacker.
nunez 7mo ago
There's an unofficial Claude Code plugin for Vim. It only does plan mode afaik. I haven't used it, but I have considered it. That said, I've been using Vim as my editor for the last ten years. The last few companies I worked for had integrations with VSCode, so I use it sometimes so that I could show those off, but nothing about it makes me want to give up my awesome Vim setup with my weird color scheme (Dalek). It took me a few months to go fast with Vim, but once I did, nothing compares. (Yes, I have tried the Vim plugin for VSCode, though it's been a few years.) RIP Bram; thanks for giving the world this wonderful and timeless piece of software!
qiine 7mo ago
"VS Code has Microsoft. Cursor has venture capital." I would have framed this as a disadvantage ;p
- 0xcafefood 7mo ago
  Because it is. Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, etc. all aim to own software production capabilities. It's quite clear. Using free software and not giving away ones own abilities to create is as important now as it's ever been.
deleted 7mo ago
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amdivia 7mo ago
I'm yet to find a satisfying vim AI integration. I want something that blends into my vim workflow, and does not require me to switch Windows and copy paste or reload my open buffers after AI agents edit my code. For instance I would love for it to seamlessly melt into a "highlight comments/pseudo code" -> some keybind, then AI would expand those to actual code for instance, or I don't know.. but something not like what we have currently
- perrygeo 7mo ago
  Try CodeCompanion if you're using neovim. I have a keybind set up and takes the highlighted region, prepends some context which says roughly "if you see a TODO comment, do it, if you see a WTF comment, try to explain it", and presents you an inline diff to accept/reject edits. It's great for tactical LLM use on small sections of code. For strategic use on any larger codebase though, it's more productive to use something like plan mode in Claude code.
- quectophoton 7mo ago
  If I had to use AI with neovim I'd probably use https://github.com/ThePrimeagen/99 https://github.com/ThePrimeagen/99 or one with a similar workflow.
yuhmahp 7mo ago
> These aren’t adding AI to an existing editor as an afterthought – they’re building the entire experience around AI workflows Oh boy, am I instantly turned off
slantaclaus 7mo ago
Textmate is doing JUST FINE

201 points by psibi 7mo ago

With the idea of the recent HN article that files are the common media of communication between humans and LLM's, it's still useful to have direct file-skills; to be able to read raw files the LLM outputs, or give it input through files, and able to manipulate the files efficiently. You can use an LLM to prompt to search through the files and all that, but for such basic things it's worth learning it yourself, if you do it often.

rgoulter 7mo ago

May be splitting hairs, but I don't think it's the terminal-native part that's relevant, so much as that both LLMs and emacs/vim are text oriented in ways which e.g. VSCode isn't. (Or perhaps just the text-oriented nature is a result from initial constraint from being terminal-native). As the author points out, that Emacs is a highly extensible 'operating system' which makes it relatively easy to bring different tasks together. -- This ought to be a natural parallel to what the agentic tools are trying to do (use MCPs and skills etc. to bring different functionality to the LLM execution environment). That LLMs can help users extend emacs ought to lower the difficulty curve. Still. It's silly to wish that Emacs could be the LLM's best friend, rather than demonstrating how it is. RE: "what if in the future all coding skills are irrelevant". My experience has been that good results from LLMs come from putting good thought into its usage. They're quite far from a magic "push the button and get the result you want" where the skill doesn't matter.

chamomeal 7mo ago
Not totally related to your point BUT I’d like to tack on that lisps and generally repl-friendly languages are in an interesting spot in the LLM-enabled world. The calva-backseat-driver vscode extension runs an MCP that lets LLMs manipulate and eval clojure expressions in a REPL. It provides a tighter feedback loop and lets LLMs do much more complicated stuff with much more confidence. They can test functions as they go, read docs, check query outputs, write and eval tests. It’s actually crazy what Claude opus can do with REPL access. It might be insanity to let an LLM modify your emacs on the fly, but I’m sure people will have some crazy and interesting ideas in that vein!
- FabianCarbonara 7mo ago
  This is super exciting. Emacs already treats UI as just more Elisp to eval. The AI could sculpt the entire editor to whatever you need in the moment. No plugin to install, no config to maintain. Just describe what you need and the editor becomes it.
- minikomi 7mo ago
  I don't let it execute emacs lisp itself, but elisp generated in org mode babel blocks which is instantly executable is a fine way to have gptel improve itself. ( See "meta tooling" in https://poyo.co/note/20260202T150723/ https://poyo.co/note/20260202T150723/ )

4b11b4 7mo ago

learning and using and customizing emacs has never been better getting a bibliography and citation workflow up and running in org is incredibly easy. Use a model to read the first page of your PDFs dir and add bibtex entries... then you just build your static site around that please don't write with a model. We want your own prose

igor47 7mo ago

Agreed on the config. I just launch a Claude code in my vimrc directory now if I want to change anything about my setup or have any questions about how to do something. Also, I love running a tmux pane for vim, and then like 4 or 5 more -- a few Claude code instances, one for the dev environment, one for interacting with jj/git or other random commands. So easy to switch between tasks. My main annoyance with my setup is that my Bluetooth trackball times out after a period of inactivity, and when I eventually need to use the pointer again there's a lag while it reconnects...

lorenzohess 7mo ago

Agreed. We should also consider whether the rise of AI for any type of implementation task will reduce the number of new Emacs and Vim users, thereby limiting and ultimately killing the communities' growth. I came to Vim, and then Emacs, because I wanted a tool for coding that I could configure exactly how I liked. If AI does my coding for me, my need for a custom editor will decrease. More generally speaking, if AI can do any type of implementation task -- coding, task management, email, etc -- my need for software customized for those things will decrease. If people don't need custom software, many fewer people may seek out and find Emacs and Vim. Who will maintain them and evangelize once today's generation cannot?

nine_k 7mo ago
If implementation of anything is easy, far fewer people would be needed to keep the projects alive. AI is okay at doing simple things, but it needs to be overseen. Even before any viable AI, I used to read code more than to write. And Emacs is a good tool for that. Then, Emacs specifically has a killer app, Org mode. For me, it's about as important as good programming modes, if not more More importantly, Emacs is a platform (as is Neovim, and VS Code). It adjusts to the needs of the user and the moment.

lelanthran 7mo ago

Yeah, I use Slime in vim to drive programs (like psql) via their stdin/stdout, so an "agent" that does stdin/stdout only for UI is perfect. If I ever write my own agent, it will be in this fashion. ----------------- [1] I have a `scratchpad.sql` file filled with whatever sql snippets I am testing and have `psql mydbname` in a vertical split. Doing C-c C-c in the scratchpad sends the paragraph to the psql instance.

emporas 7mo ago

In my mind I had the opposite picture than the one the article portrays. Emacs was lagging behind common IDEs, like IntelliJ and VsCode, cause big companies put thousands of developers to combine many features into one integrated package and everything works together providing a very smooth experience compared to Emacs (and Vim probably). Now IDEs are useless. I personally haven't felt the need to goto_definition or autocomplete variable names for almost 2 years. Now programming becomes closer to plain text writing and editing and it levels the playing fields for all editors. Also Emacs can run Rust plugins, the user is not limited to Elisp. Not very convenient but possible.

globular-toast 7mo ago
> Now IDEs are useless. I personally haven't felt the need to goto_definition or autocomplete variable names for almost 2 years. So you are vibe coding? Some of us still check every line of code generated and an IDE definitely helps with that. Even more so when you need to take control.

codemac 7mo ago

emacsclient + codex has been a game changer. I probably add or change a feature in emacs once a day, or every other day. I've been using emacs for some insane amount of time, maybe 20 years? And still I had more customization to go. Emacs and programs with it's level of programmatic user customization will survive the AI period in my opinion. Anything static will falter.

imiric 7mo ago

> Part of the case for Emacs and Vim has always been that they make you faster at writing and editing code. That was a side-effect of using software that is deeply customizable, but not the main goal. It comes from being comfortable with your tools to the point of relying on muscle memory to use them. The main benefit to me has always been comfort. My favorite commands are a keystroke away, I know how the tool will react and what it's doing at any moment, I know all of its quirks, etc. None of that changes in the age of "AI". This new technology won't replace computing for me. My hurdle to adopting "agentic" workflows has nothing to do with my choice of tools, and everything with not trusting the companies and ecosystems around this new tech, especially during this insane hype cycle. I've been slowly adopting parts of the stack I'm comfortable with, because, again, my comfort trumps anything else. Besides, if anything, a deeply customizable platform like Emacs is ideal for building any type of workflow. There are already great packages for LLM integration, and I don't think Emacs users are missing out on anything. The fact "AI" companies decide to build their moats with custom tooling is not a problem I care about. Apple has been pushing their idea of what computing should look like for decades, and it has never appealed to me. I don't miss something I don't want. Anyway, confusing article. The author acknowledges all of these points, but also the alternative scenarios. Both cannot be true for the same person. There will always be people who enjoy using Emacs and Vim because of their customizability, not necessarily their features. And there will always be people who just want to use a supported and official product, without any tinkering. Emacs and Vim will outlast this hype cycle just fine. Thanks for all your work, batsov! I do hope you stick around these communities. :)

athrowaway3z 7mo ago

I have been an emacs user for almost a decade now. My laptop taskbar is: terminal, filebrowser, emacs, firefox. With emacsd running to make startup instance. This week I removed emacsd service and Emacs from my taskbar because I had more miss-clicks - accidentally opening it - than I had need for it in the past few months.

layer8 7mo ago
What’s interesting is that as an Emacs user and caring about instant startup, you use clicks to open things instead of keyboard shortcuts.
- athrowaway3z 7mo ago
  Samsung 360 laptop with touch screen.

baokaola 7mo ago

I find Emacs better than ever in the age of AI. Install agent-shell to run Claude Code inside Emacs and give it a skill to run Emacs Lisp using emacsclient. Voila - now you have all the integration you could ever need if you are a little resourceful. Claude Code can now introspect the entire editor and it can manipulate everything. You can have it build whatever features are missing - it will even debug those features for you, live in the editor. I recently came back to Emacs from VSCode and ended up just letting Claude build me the features I was missing, mainly related to tabs and project management. I think Emacs has unique advantages in the age of LLMs, you can just mold it like clay.

PantaloonFlames 7mo ago
Can you give specifics on what Claude code built for you, in the way of missing features ?

beemboy 7mo ago

I'm not convinced that terminal orientedness of AI tooling itself will last. My hypothesis is that it was chosen by developers of the current generation building for developers of the current generation. I hypothesize that there is a future where command lines and terminals don't matter, and hence I feel the focus will shift to, as the author points out, to planning, reviewing and ideation tools none of which demands a command line. In fact I expect an entirely new class of tool to emerge that does these things well that is neither an IDE nor terminal based. I think Claude Code's core will live but it's interface will morph in the coming years to adapt to the builders of the next generation. The analogy I use is my kids and manual transmission cars -- they grow up with EVs and single gear drives with linear torque curves, and will have no nostalgia for a manual transmission, engine noises, or supercharger whines. If you never used a terminal, will you pine for it?

myrak 7mo ago
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rekrsiv 7mo ago
A terminal still offers a more composable interface than a GUI. Analog feedback is still a concern for high level pilots. You are confusing power tools with entry-level instruments.
- simianwords 7mo ago
  interesting, what do you mean by composable?
  - hbogert 7mo ago
    Albeit it's the shell, I assume he means piping
    - simianwords 7mo ago
      That has less to do with terminal than unix commands no?

szopa 7mo ago

I have been a die hard emacs user for 20 years, and I have a very nice emacs setup (if a little bit idiosyncratic, but all emacs configs are idiosyncratic). However, recently I realized that I read code, but almost never write it. What is more, I spend a lot of time doing it in tmux, over mosh, from my phone. Emacs ergonomy is just not great if all you have is a horrible phone keyboard (and no swiping, because tmux redraws the screen if you swipe). And then I discovered helix. It has all the things I was jealous about vim, BUT it has sane defaults ootb. And truth be told, another thing I use a lot is bat, which is cat with syntax highlighting and an automatic pager.

johanvts 7mo ago
Emacs has multicursor, lsp and treesitter so from just reading the helix landing page idk what you gain? Bat sounds interesting, thanks.
- skydhash 7mo ago
  What I like about Emacs (which has made me switch from Vim) is the sheer amount of tools you have by default. Vim can have something similar, but you have to do a lot of config or install plugins to get them.
truncate 7mo ago
>> recently I realized that I read code, but almost never write it. I think most engineers are reading code than writing it. I find it very hard to not use Emacs when reading large codebases. Interestingly, its mostly because of file navigation. I love using ido/ivy for file navigation, quickly filtering through buffers, magit. Emacs in terminal is not an ideal experience though. So I can imagine it being multi-fold worse with phone keyboard.
locknitpicker 7mo ago
> However, recently I realized that I read code, but almost never write it. This has been the norm for a few decades. Even software engineering courses emphasize the fact that code is read far more often than it is changed, which leads to all the basic software engineering principles around the importance of making code easier to read and to navigate through.

stephc_int13 7mo ago

How much of this article was AI written? I can sense the AI smell all over the place, also I found it way too long with little substance, but maybe that’s just me.

operatingthetan 7mo ago
At this point a lot of the articles on this site are just a 'prompt' for us to have a discussion about.
- bozhidar 7mo ago
  Well put! To me - it always felt like this here. I have serious doubts that most people even read the articles linked to HN discussions.
gbro3n 7mo ago
I didn't get that feeling. But it is long, which is a bit of an AI smell. That said, I think use of AI in writing might not always be a negative. On a couple of documentation pieces I have used AI to provide better structure to writing that I've started and check for technical correctness parts of a document where I need to check my terminology. As long as the original idea is human and AI helps to make the signal clearer, I'm ok with it.
acron0 7mo ago
Bozhidar always writes like this. I can see why you would think it's AI style but I would vote that it isn't. Look at some of his pre-AI blogs, if you care to.
- bozhidar 7mo ago
  Guilty as charged! :D Short essays are definitely not my forte. (and this one is definitely longer than I wanted it to be, but in my typical style I kept adding to it after I wrote the initial version, and I'll probably add even more content after I go over all the discussion here)
7mo ago

ywatanabe1989 7mo ago

In my view, Emacs is getting more powerful in the AI era. The cost of writing Elisp has dropped significantly — I've ended up with 15+ personal Elisp packages as a result. The freedom Emacs offers is still unmatched. For example, I heavily rely on sending automatic response (https://github.com/ywatanabe1989/emacs-claude-code https://github.com/ywatanabe1989/emacs-claude-code), monitoring repository, and targeted context building from dired.

johanvts 7mo ago
Fully agree, but it is also the buffer based navigation approach that is just fantastic. I wish other programs would adopt this. Most applications use dedicated areas for various functions, instead of letting me just hit a key to bring the function to where I am currently looking.

gbro3n 7mo ago

I'm a muggle when it comes to vim, but I've considered learning it again recently because of AI. I'm building more than I have in years because I love being able to try things out without investing 3 months to get something working before I can really test the idea. And so I am typing A LOT. Less code, but lots of markdown, prompts and config. My hands are hurting, I really wish I had a power tool for typing. Writing is always going to allow us to be more precise than speech, and is a tool for creative thought in its self. I can see how we might be bearish on our expectations around new adoptees, but I think there's pressure to get more out of our editors too. Two of my recent projects have been vscode extensions, because I'm needing more help from my editor, not less: https://www.appsoftware.com/blog/fixing-agent-llm-context-decay-in-vs-code-with-git-worktrees https://www.appsoftware.com/blog/fixing-agent-llm-context-de..., https://www.appsoftware.com/blog/as-notes-turn-vs-code-into-your-personal-knowledge-management-system-pkms https://www.appsoftware.com/blog/as-notes-turn-vs-code-into-...

arcanemachiner 7mo ago
Start using speech to text more. You likely have the hardware needed to run a Whisper model locally.
- gbro3n 7mo ago
  I will give a go. But my rambling mumblings to Gemini on my phone sor far confirm that I write with more clarity than I speak
  - arcanemachiner 7mo ago
    I use SpeechNote with FasterWhisper and I've found it to be much better than any cloud dictation services I've tried (which, to be fair, is not a whole lot... they all suck so much that I give up fast).

lenkite 7mo ago

If AI companies don't break even and continue to remain in 2 digit billions and more growing debt, all these are nice cookies that can be taken away at any time with a 5-10x increase in price.

shevy-java 7mo ago

> The learning curve argument gets harder to justify too. “Spend six months learning Emacs and you’ll be 10x faster” is a tough sell when a junior developer with Cursor can scaffold an entire application in an afternoon. IF this is the case. But is it? I have some doubts because to me it seems as if domain knowledge is shifted onto an AI. Then you become dependent on the AI. Is AI really better than a skilled human though? After all, if AI is doing the work and the human providing the input to it as guide, it should be possible to cut away the human completely. So Skynet 3.0 does not need humans. But when it does, then something doesn't work in that explanation - AI must thus not be "smart enough".

globular-toast 7mo ago

Emacs is a true bicycle for the mind. It sets you free in many ways, always wanting to be the tool that simply allows you to do your job more efficiently and effectively. LLMs are like living with a depressed person who doesn't see the point in doing anything because it's all just been done before. Who cares if you do a good job? Just recycle some shit that others have done and it'll be passable. This isn't a bicycle for the mind, it's just going to drag you into depression with it.

jurschreuder 7mo ago

I'm not sure AI Agents can already beat the average VIM user. I use VIM and I get some inspiration from LLMs sometimes, but me and other developers always after some time give up and just quickly do it manually. AI Agents will just full the code with maaaassive swaths of texts it will just make a project unusable. We even get paid to turn client's AI LLM Claude sketches into real programs.

keithnz 7mo ago
This is not my experience at all, the AI agents are many many many times faster than what I can do. What anyone can do. It's crazy how quick I can create stuff these days.
- bandrami 7mo ago
  You're forgetting to count the time you spend deleting the excess stuff
  - keithnz 7mo ago
    no... I'm not.
    - bandrami 7mo ago
      Then you're forgetting the time your sysadmin spends doing that
- gdorsi 7mo ago
  It really depends on what kind and of job you do. If it's not something very common LLMs could end up generating random code. Also if you work on something performance critical, you can get inspiration from LLMs, but they often don't write fast code.
  - keithnz 7mo ago
    not my experience, they write fast code, and if you ask them to optimize, can pull all kinds of tricks out of the bag. Even with some of the niche stuff I work on, they seem really good.

pjmlp 7mo ago

I lived in XEmacs between 1995 and 2005, because in many UNIX variants having an IDE was a foreign word, not even something that could provide the affordances of a Turbo Pascal with Turbo Vision based IDE for MS-DOS. Between Emacs, the improved XEmacs, and vi, the answer was obvious at the time, I joined the Emacs faction with XEmacs. Mastered elisp good enough, had my configuration scripts, go to know enough vi to handle telneting (or sshing) into random UNIX servers without anything else installed. Both are still kind of stuck in time, going back to them in random UNIX distribution feels like I am back in that UNIX decade.

keithnz 7mo ago

vim (neovim these days) for me is my text editor I use to look at code when dealing with AI, more often than not I'm working on a bug list as I test things. I haven't opened my IDE (Jetbrains tools) for nearly 2 weeks now. Only thing I often want is to be able to run sql queries, I used datagrip for that... Now I'm writing my own tui sql tool that is lightning quick and has most of the features I like from data grip, plus a bunch of new things that make my life easier. I've made it work as a MCP server also so that I can get my agent to directly inject queries and I can browse the result sets easily. I feel like the terminal, because its text based and super great at manipulating text is such a perfect match for these AI agents. But, yes, the need for code editing itself is really limited.

komali2 7mo ago

> Imagine an AI assistant that can read your org-mode agenda, draft email replies in mu4e, help you write commit messages in Magit, and refactor code in your source buffers – all within the same environment, sharing context. No other editor architecture makes this kind of deep, cross-domain integration as natural as Emacs does. I've been a devout emacs amateur for 10 years, and recently learned nvim/lazy.vim because I was tired of web dev kinda sucking in emacs. Sure, you can get a setup with lint-on-save, inline TS errors, and all the other bells and whistles you get in vscode working on a react-tsx project, but then when you `helm-projectile-switch-project` to a vue project, suddenly you have to get a whole new config set up. And oops, for whatever reason, tab spacing isn't being pulled from the editor config for this directory... But like the author says, LLMs fixed that. I pointed Warp at my emacs config, said my problems, and said "fix plz," and it did. No more "oops," just "fix plz" whenever I'm editing rust, or svelte, or golang, or whatever else for the first time in emacs. I'm very excited for the possibility in the portion I quoted. I moved away from mu4e and org mode because managing it all was getting tedious: too much time procrastinating by tweaking org configs. Too many emails not rendered properly in mu4e or fat fingered by me and lost. But in world+llm, that's not really a problem anymore. I haven't migrated back to org mode yet but I did an experiment recently asking claude to set up org similar to my trilium set up, and it did a passable enough job that I was convinced it's possible. So, now I'm back in emacs, trying out the various LLM tools, doing poorly at getting anything other than copilot to work well, and waiting with patience and desperation for someone to make an LLM completion experience in emacs that has a multiline completion experience at least 50% as good as Cursor's.

gtsop 7mo ago

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dsrtslnd23 7mo ago

I think a terminal is still the perfect UI for coding agents on desktop systems. But now that I have running agents in background that only sometimes require some extra input on the go - I hate the terminal use on the go: terminus or other mobile app + virtual keyboard is horrible to use. For that I envision a better interface.

livetaub93 7mo ago
ugh i totally get this. trying to wrangle a coding agent on a phone with a virtual keyboard is just... awful. i've been using this app called Tap To Type on my android, it makes my phone a proper bluetooth keyboard for my laptop. no extra software on the computer needed, just pairs up like any wireless keyboard, and it has a mode where you can type out a whole message before sending it all at once, which is great for longer inputs. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.taptotype https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.taptotype

marwanet 7mo ago

I suspect terminals will stick around longer than people expect. Not because they’re ideal, but because they compose well with everything else.

genie3io 7mo ago

[dead]

jaypatelani 7mo ago

Hmm.. asistant i can't escape this screen what is it? A.i: this is vi text editor. Human: exit from it and open word processor. A.i: rm -rf / Human: good job exiting. Now where's my word processor? .... Hello? Where's my word processor? Brint it on screen. Can you hear me ?

xenodium 7mo ago

I put off adopting popular agents for most of 2025 primarily because there was no agent-agnostic path to first-class Emacs integration. That changed with ACP (https://agentclientprotocol.com https://agentclientprotocol.com), thus I started working on agent-shell. I'm happy with how the integration is shaping up, enabling me to have my cake and eat it too (Emacs + AI agents). I wrote an agent-shell post recently with the latest changes https://xenodium.com/agent-shell-0-47-1-updates https://xenodium.com/agent-shell-0-47-1-updates

hbogert 7mo ago
You have Every right to plug your agentshell here. I love it and I don't even care that much for agents (yet)
- mark_l_watson 7mo ago
  I agree, agentshell is a nice way to chat with LLMs. Well worth setting up. Emacs eye candy.
- xenodium 7mo ago
  That's nice to hear. Thank you!
nachojreilly 7mo ago
I tried it and was underwhelmed. Without /resume or /rewind, it's unusable. After Opencode botched a simple yes/no (yesterday's top HN story), I'm convinced the frontier model companies will continue expanding the usability gap between their proprietary harnesses and the open-source ones.
- xenodium 7mo ago
  Resume is supported by agent-shell, but is dependent on agent's to implement the relevant ACP. Do you know if OpenCode's ACP implementation has listing and resuming session support? Also, you'll need to enable resuming as per post (it's a new feature) https://xenodium.com/agent-shell-0-47-1-updates https://xenodium.com/agent-shell-0-47-1-updates

dvrp 7mo ago

¿Por qué no los dos?

submeta 7mo ago

For me, AI increased my NeoVim usage. Claude Code and Codex made me go full cli. I run several sessions in multiple tabs in WezTerm, using Tmux, Tmuxinator, and excellent tui based file manager named Yazi in left pane, opening files in NeoVim, running Claude Code in right split. With this setup I work on several projects in parallel. Use lazygit as git client. Everything in cli, super fast. Initially I went with Cursor, but the terminal setup feels way faster, more natural.

jwr 7mo ago

My time spent in Emacs has *increased* with the increased use of AI. I have to read, edit, accept and reject all those code changes and Emacs+Magit is pretty much the best interface for that.

mchaver 7mo ago
I will have to checkout Magit, but, as an already heavy Emacs user, my time in Emacs has remained constant even with increased use of agentic coders.
TYPE_FASTER 7mo ago
Yeah, I’ve been using IntelliJ for a few years but recently tried the Claude-code package and magit and it’s a pretty great combo.

mvrckhckr 7mo ago

These were always personal preferences (I’ve used all types at different times and contexts), and I don’t think AI will have any major effect on their usage numbers.

specproc 7mo ago

I'm a long time VS Code boy, but have recently started dabbling in Vim because I'm exhausted with AI. Every VS Code update these days feels like it's exclusively AI orientated. The Vim approach seems fundamentally opposed to an AI-driven development model, or at least says, like everything else, "sure, you can do that, but set it up yourself." I find the Vim philosophy appealing coming from a work environment that wants to replace me with API calls to American companies.

TheRoque 7mo ago
I don't know about you but I've found that I've been experiencing more bugs in VSCode recently. It has never been a huge complain of me but recently I really feel it.

small_model 7mo ago

Not sure these and other editors have a future when the SOTA models can generate code better than 99% of the best devs in the world 100x faster, 10x cheaper and never get tired or want pesky time off. Maybe the use case it to view code while humans are still required in the loop (I think they just about still are) or to edit a commit msg.

danebalia 7mo ago

I gave up on emacs and vim. Its like fighting bad design. Im long time users of both, but no plugins sufficiently provide a quality integrated experience with AI, MCP and agents. Emacs and neovim AFAIK are not designed for streaming. And with what each of them do, you can just build an IDE yourself (Claude Code). I combined with Vim bindings, spacemacs interface and built an IDE from scratch in one week with Rust. Its my daily drivers. This is true customization.

AltruisticGapHN 7mo ago

You can have Vim bindings in vscode.

worksonmine 7mo ago
The keybindings are just the tip of the iceberg for most vim users.

dbacar 7mo ago

I dont know what the deal is with these editors that makes them on HN front page so frequently. In my opinion they are good text editors (used emacs for 4 years, and switched to vim nearly 10 years ago) but for coding I see them as a joke apart from some edge cases(clojure, lisp...). They are hard to setup as code editors, lots of customizations are needed and in my opinion it does not pay off.

alexpotato 7mo ago

> AI makes configuration and extension trivial I recently said to a co-worker: "Linux is free if your time has no value" is no longer true in the era of LLMs. Just about any wonky Linux issue can be fixed quickly with even just OpenCode and free models.

maxhille 7mo ago
In my experience that sentence never made much sense anyway. Of course over the ~25 years of Linux I had to setup/learn a lot of stuff, but usually it ended up being time well invested.

dude250711 7mo ago

Emacs and Vim in the Age of Slop

mark_l_watson 7mo ago

Nice writeup! The list of Emacs packages to use LLMs is the roadmap for getting started with AI Emacs integrations and I also liked his list of AI dangers at the end. I have used Emacs for over 40 years but I found myself getting sucked into the black hole of VSCode as discussed in the article. When I bought a new MacBook a few months ago, I only installed Emacs, no VSCode, and so far that is working out for me. Also, after many hours of experimenting with AI packages for Emacs, I have reverted to keeping Emacs mostly a pure human activity, and several times a week have sessions with gemini-cli and Claude Code when I want an AI coding assistant. This is just for me, not general advice, but I like to separate use of AI from my regular coding and writing workflows. I use AI for coding cumulatively about three or four hours a week.

reddit_clone 7mo ago
I am reduced to keeping Emacs and VSCode open on the same files/project :-) Use the LLM from VSCode and switch back to Emacs for regular editing! Currently trying out various Emacs packages. I got 'claude-code.el' actually working. But there is some flickering and also the interface is a bit wonky. I will try other packages mentioned in the article. For the life of me, I can't _edit_ with VSCode. My Emacs/Doom/Evil muscle memory is too ingrained.
- iLemming 6mo ago
  Install ECA. Read my comment in the same thread. Once you hook up elisp evaluating MCP to your Emacs - it is game over for anything else. Nothing even comes close to the experience. I've been functioning in ADD mode - Annoyance-Driven-Development. I'd get annoyed by some small issue, and without missing a beat, I'd start typing. Well, sometimes I don't even type anymore - I'd just speak and let Whisper transcribe it and Emacs performs some crazy shit. It's not even funny how crazy it is.
  - karthink 6mo ago
    > Once you hook up elisp evaluating MCP to your Emacs gptel-agent ships with an elisp-eval tool out of the box, BTW.

himata4113 7mo ago

I swapped from jetbrains products to lazyvim/nvim and honestly without AI it would have not been possible. The speed I was able to configure it exactly how I wanted and support workflows jetbrains would never support is great. Escaping the god awful AI implementations in both vscode and jetbrains product is also a refresher. They don't know what the ** is going on, they don't know what users want, but I do and AI being able to extend my IDE in a way that helps me be more productive is very undervalued.

hackerInnen 7mo ago
> They don't know what the * is going on I'd assume that a good portion of people working on things like that know what is going on. My (very very subjective) feeling is that they just spit out WAY more tokens than needed, so that it hits the limit as fast as possible and people buy more. And the people responsible for that are probably the evil evil PM's
- himata4113 7mo ago
  I don't know I never once felt that any AI integration in IDE's was actually worth using over a cli and that's a very low bar compared to a tui.
  - iLemming 6mo ago
    > I never once felt that any AI integration in IDE's was actually worth using over a cli That's right. I started with Claude in the CLI. But then I found a way to hook it up to my active, running instance of Emacs. And since Emacs is neither an editor, nor an IDE (in the typical sense) but rather a Lisp-REPL with embedded editor, I can now fully control virtually any aspect of my editor via LLM, running in the very same editor. I can't even describe the feeling - it's absolutely insane. I can for example give the LLM some incident ticket number, then ask it to search for all the relevant Slack conversations, PRs, and Splunk logs, build me some investigation audit log and dump it all into an Org-mode buffer with massive data and then reduce it into a sparse tree where the entire document is folded as much as possible, but the selected information is made visible. Then I can continue the investigation, while the LLM would be adding and removing data from that buffer dynamically (or adjusting the sparse tree), depending of how the investigation proceeds. It's crazy, because I can ask it to programmatically change virtually any behavior of my editor on the fly.

hackerInnen 7mo ago

I mainly use (neo)vim because it has a less distracting interface than any other full blown IDE. Not because of some fancy tooling. And because it is faster, but that might be a negligible reason by now. I purposely try to keep my extension count as low as possible. It's just too distracting for me personally. If I really want to use AI tools or something else, then I don't mind opening a full suite, but as of right now, I still spend most of my time in vim and use AI mainly in chat mode.

thenoblesunfish 7mo ago

I still use Vim a lot, even though for work I use a fork of VSCode, like most people. Why? Because it's something I feel I can understand - it's simple and runs everywhere. It's the world of shells and text files. The work setup is a huge GUI with dozens of extensions, and now a whole other layer of non deterministic AI stuff. Useful, but it's a different kind of tool, one which relies on constant support from a large system.

dominotw 7mo ago
i all use now is git diff in nvim. i even forgot all the other keybindings.

segmondy 7mo ago

I use llama.vim - https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.vim https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.vim I run my own models, you can have models for code suggestion/FIM in the middle and you can have another for chat mode. You can point it to your local model if that's your thing or to a cloud model.

lexicality 7mo ago

> Let’s revisit the doomsday scenario. Say programming is fully automated and nobody writes code anymore. Does Emacs die? Commercial programming will be fully automated. That will not stop people doing it by hand. For all intents and purposes clothing manufacturing is fully automated but some people still do it themselves. One example near to my heart is my mother. She collects her dog's shed winter coat in the spring, cards it, spins it and ultimately knits it into a coat she puts back on the dog the next autumn - all by hand. She could just buy a cheap dog coat from Amazon, but she thinks it's funny to see the dog wearing a coat made of its own fur so she bought the equipment and learned the functionally useless skills required to do it. No matter what level of automation is available, a small number of people will still do things the hard way as a hobby or out of perverseness. We might be living in the matrix in 100 years but I'm certain someone will still be trying to work out how to exit vim in their holopod

keyle 7mo ago
Kind of a rough outlook on the future but I also felt the same.
reddit_clone 7mo ago
>functionally useless skills The dog would disagree! :-) I admire your mother. She is a real hacker.

nunez 7mo ago

There's an unofficial Claude Code plugin for Vim. It only does plan mode afaik. I haven't used it, but I have considered it. That said, I've been using Vim as my editor for the last ten years. The last few companies I worked for had integrations with VSCode, so I use it sometimes so that I could show those off, but nothing about it makes me want to give up my awesome Vim setup with my weird color scheme (Dalek). It took me a few months to go fast with Vim, but once I did, nothing compares. (Yes, I have tried the Vim plugin for VSCode, though it's been a few years.) RIP Bram; thanks for giving the world this wonderful and timeless piece of software!

qiine 7mo ago

"VS Code has Microsoft. Cursor has venture capital." I would have framed this as a disadvantage ;p

0xcafefood 7mo ago
Because it is. Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, etc. all aim to own software production capabilities. It's quite clear. Using free software and not giving away ones own abilities to create is as important now as it's ever been.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

amdivia 7mo ago

I'm yet to find a satisfying vim AI integration. I want something that blends into my vim workflow, and does not require me to switch Windows and copy paste or reload my open buffers after AI agents edit my code. For instance I would love for it to seamlessly melt into a "highlight comments/pseudo code" -> some keybind, then AI would expand those to actual code for instance, or I don't know.. but something not like what we have currently

perrygeo 7mo ago
Try CodeCompanion if you're using neovim. I have a keybind set up and takes the highlighted region, prepends some context which says roughly "if you see a TODO comment, do it, if you see a WTF comment, try to explain it", and presents you an inline diff to accept/reject edits. It's great for tactical LLM use on small sections of code. For strategic use on any larger codebase though, it's more productive to use something like plan mode in Claude code.
quectophoton 7mo ago
If I had to use AI with neovim I'd probably use https://github.com/ThePrimeagen/99 https://github.com/ThePrimeagen/99 or one with a similar workflow.

yuhmahp 7mo ago

> These aren’t adding AI to an existing editor as an afterthought – they’re building the entire experience around AI workflows Oh boy, am I instantly turned off

slantaclaus 7mo ago

Textmate is doing JUST FINE