7 ms·

A big loss for the Emacs community! emacs-aio is great! I see the author is spring cleaning: > I've turned over a new leaf (no more Openbox, Tridactyl, Xorg,

A big loss for the Emacs community! emacs-aio is great! I see the author is spring cleaning: > I've turned over a new leaf (no more Openbox, Tridactyl, Xorg, xterm), and so some of these things I no longer use. On Linux I now use KDE on Wayland with a minimally-configured browser. I miss the power user features, but I do not miss the friction and constant maintenance. https://github.com/skeeto/dotfiles/commit/df275005769b65461811fa9b9903ed0976088bbf https://github.com/skeeto/dotfiles/commit/df275005769b654618... > I am no longer using Mutt nor running my own mail server. In general less terminal stuff for me. https://github.com/skeeto/dotfiles/commit/e331e367c75f66aaa9d544f51a4e28df15b49f1c https://github.com/skeeto/dotfiles/commit/e331e367c75f66aaa9... LLMs have inspired a similar change in me: with a big change in how I work, I feel I can and should be more flexible with adopting new tech, which involving freeing myself of previous choices.

bovine3dom 6mo ago
I wonder what friction/maintenance he found with Tridactyl For me the friction always comes when I try to use the internet without it
- blourvim 6mo ago
  cool to see you in the wild, for me, it does work out of the box however, some sites will break or have too complex of a navigation, especially with iframes. and will have to swap to a mouse which is a bummer, which I understand is an inherent limitation of the tech, since web is not built today to do that. solid extension, big fan
- krautsauer 5mo ago
  We're talking about https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tridactyl-vim/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tridactyl-vim...? One example: it disables the default Ctrl-F search function but its own search function is subpar (no match counts/hlsearch, e.g.) and often clashes with website's built-in search (on Github, e.g.). It doesn't work on the default newtab either, and changing the default newtab somehow makes opening a new tab slower (that's FF's fault, I guess)…
  - kqr 5mo ago
    You can type /phrase and then press ctrl-F for the full search bar. A more annoying problem is that some websites capture / presses, making it harder to initiate a page search. Then you have to shift-esc ctrl-f to search.
    - chistev 5mo ago
      I shot you an email.
    - i_think_so 5mo ago
      THANK YOU! I never knew those little quality of life hacks. I am going to beat them into my brain so I never forget them, and I suspect each time I use them I will remember the nice strange from HN who made it possible. <3
- farfatched 5mo ago
  I'm not the author, but I recently gave up on Firefox, sadly. Since I needed to keep around a Chromium anyway, and I already am forced to use one for work, it became simpler to just use solely use a Chromium. In the process I dropped some extensions. It's been great.
  - stevekemp 5mo ago
    To be honest I find the use of a separate browser at work a good way of forcing separation - all "work stuff" is done in one browser, and all "personal stuff" is done in a different one. This time around I'm using Chromium for personal stuff, and Firefox for work-stuff. I do more work-related browsing, so having the vertical tabs in firefox meant that was the better browser to use for official stuff. (In my previous job I used safari for work, and firefox for personal.)
  - BuckRogers 5mo ago
    I used Firefox for 20 years, loved it, defended it. But they just kept removing features that I was used to, and I ran into some bugs with popular websites and decided to hang it up. Currently on Brave and fully convinced it's the new Firefox.
iLemming 6mo ago
> LLMs have inspired a similar change in me FWIW, the age of LLMs made me build a deeper, more intimate relationship with Emacs, because it's a Lisp REPL loop with a built-in editor, not the other way around. When you give an LLM a closed loop system where it can evaluate code in a live REPL and observe the results, it stops guessing and starts reasoning empirically. LLM that I run inside Emacs can fully control the active Emacs instance. I can make it change virtually any aspect of it. To load-test things, I even made it play Tetris in Emacs. And not just simply run it, but to actually play it without losing. It was insane. Also, Emacs is all about plain text - you can easily extract text from anything - from the browser, terminal, CLI apps, Slack, Jira, etc., and you can do that on your own terms - context can appear in a buffer, in your clipboard, become a file or series of API requests. That is really hard to beat.
- mimischi 5mo ago
  Can you describe your setup on how you use LLMs within Emacs?
  - iLemming 5mo ago
    Of course. I've tried different AI packages and currently gptel and ECA remain the main ingredients. This is a quickly changing landscape, and things may change, but for now it feels very good. I like gptel because it's enormously extendable and exploitable - it allows me to send LLM requests from just about anywhere - I could be typing a message (like this very one) and suddenly in need of ideas for how to phrase something better, or explain simply, or fact-check my assumptions, whatever. Quick & dirty interaction that gets discarded in the same buffer. For longer investigations and research I would use a dedicated gptel buffer. Those get automatically saved. I don't use gptel as a coding assistant, even though you can do that, it's not really optimized for that kind of work. I use ECA. It works much better for me than every other alternative I tried, and I tried more than a few. What's crazy that I sometimes would type a prompt in ECA, then ask gptel (with a different model) to make it more "AI-friendly" changing the prompt in-place and then send it. All my MCPs are coded in Clojure (mostly babashka)¹ - because (like I said) giving an AI a Lisp REPL makes much more sense (maybe even more than using a statically typed language). I had to employ a few tricks so all the tools, skills and instructions can be shared between gptel, eca-emacs, ECA Desktop, Claude Code CLI, Claude Desktop App, and Copilot CLI. Even though I mostly use gptel and ECA, it's good to keep other options around, just in case. All the AI-related Emacs settings are in my config². Is this helpful, or you want some more concrete examples? — ¹ https://github.com/agzam/death-contraptions https://github.com/agzam/death-contraptions ² https://github.com/agzam/.doom.d/tree/main/modules/custom/ai https://github.com/agzam/.doom.d/tree/main/modules/custom/ai
SuperNinKenDo 5mo ago
[flagged]
- bitwize 5mo ago
  Our lives are much more than our computing environments. By surrendering a bit of control of our computing environments we free up our brains to devote to other things in life: loved ones, pets, gardening, home maintenance, other hobbies and sports... Millions of happy Apple users can't be wrong on this.
  - enthdegree 5mo ago
    They're coming for that stuff next
  - skydhash 5mo ago
    Maybe, but for some of us, the peace of mind comes from stability and minimal friction with our tools. Whenever I touch my config is because I get frustrated with one operation and tries to see if it can be done faster. If you use your computer like a toaster, then you wouldn’t care that much about power usage. But for me it’s a creative lab and I don’t want a generic cubicle.
  - guelo 5mo ago
    What if computing environments is our job?
  - anthk 5mo ago
    Millions of Apple users can't even have grabable corners. Enjoy.
- otabdeveloper4 5mo ago
  Especially ridiculous because old-school bash CLI scripts is the only usable protocol for interacting with LLM agents.
- monooso 5mo ago
  How on earth did you get that from the segment of text that you chose to quote?
squigz 5mo ago
Does anyone else not understand what people mean when they refer to the "friction" supposedly inherent to these power user tools? Almost none of the configs/scripts/etc I use for my heavily-customized and terminal-heavy setup get changed for years at a time.
- viksit 5mo ago
  > heavily-customized and terminal-heavy setup this exactly. most people can’t set it up that well.
- pavon 5mo ago
  If you are frequently having to use other computers, a heavily customized setup has much more friction either to setup the machine like you want, or remember how to do things without all the customization (if you can't customize or it isn't worth the time). When I graduated college I used Dvorak and Emacs on Linux. Six months of having to use shared Windows lab computers extensively beat me down to surrender all of those points - my brain just couldn't handle switching, so I conformed my desktop to match. Then later I switched jobs to a group that was all Unix, but of many varieties most of which only had vi, not Emacs. And so I learned vi. Sometimes minimizing friction means going with the flow.
- arikrahman 5mo ago
  Arguably NixOS is the most config heavy platform but it solves the pain point of having to reconfigure on different systems. Especially in the LLM era where I can configure Emacs and my OS decoratively.
  - kqr 5mo ago
    How do you nixify your Emacs configuration? I've looked into it but at the time the advice was to specify dependencies both in Nix and in .emacs.d, which seemed redundant to me. Is there something like callCabal2Nix for Emacs? Edit: Or do you mean "declaratively" in the sense of using something like straight.el?
    - 5mo ago
keybored 5mo ago
LLM discourse inspires me to do a cleaning of my browser tabs every hour.
godzillabrennus 5mo ago
I am running Ubuntu as my desktop operating system. I would never do this without an LLM to do the work of keeping it functional for me. Today, Rise of Nations wouldn't launch. Never had that problem before. Seems the driver for 32-bit games and my Nvidia GPU weren't getting along after an update. Codex was called in and solved the problem for me in about 5 minutes. I just copied and pasted the Steam log and let it tell me what to do. Tadah. I'm actually excited about the potential for a future where local agents help improve the operating system experience as I go by making changes based on my use case. All local, of course. I do not want to trust a cloud provider with my use cases/behavior on my computer so they can sell me more ads...

bovine3dom 6mo ago

I wonder what friction/maintenance he found with Tridactyl For me the friction always comes when I try to use the internet without it

blourvim 6mo ago
cool to see you in the wild, for me, it does work out of the box however, some sites will break or have too complex of a navigation, especially with iframes. and will have to swap to a mouse which is a bummer, which I understand is an inherent limitation of the tech, since web is not built today to do that. solid extension, big fan
krautsauer 5mo ago
We're talking about https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tridactyl-vim/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tridactyl-vim...? One example: it disables the default Ctrl-F search function but its own search function is subpar (no match counts/hlsearch, e.g.) and often clashes with website's built-in search (on Github, e.g.). It doesn't work on the default newtab either, and changing the default newtab somehow makes opening a new tab slower (that's FF's fault, I guess)…
- kqr 5mo ago
  You can type /phrase and then press ctrl-F for the full search bar. A more annoying problem is that some websites capture / presses, making it harder to initiate a page search. Then you have to shift-esc ctrl-f to search.
  - chistev 5mo ago
    I shot you an email.
  - i_think_so 5mo ago
    THANK YOU! I never knew those little quality of life hacks. I am going to beat them into my brain so I never forget them, and I suspect each time I use them I will remember the nice strange from HN who made it possible. <3
farfatched 5mo ago
I'm not the author, but I recently gave up on Firefox, sadly. Since I needed to keep around a Chromium anyway, and I already am forced to use one for work, it became simpler to just use solely use a Chromium. In the process I dropped some extensions. It's been great.
- stevekemp 5mo ago
  To be honest I find the use of a separate browser at work a good way of forcing separation - all "work stuff" is done in one browser, and all "personal stuff" is done in a different one. This time around I'm using Chromium for personal stuff, and Firefox for work-stuff. I do more work-related browsing, so having the vertical tabs in firefox meant that was the better browser to use for official stuff. (In my previous job I used safari for work, and firefox for personal.)
- BuckRogers 5mo ago
  I used Firefox for 20 years, loved it, defended it. But they just kept removing features that I was used to, and I ran into some bugs with popular websites and decided to hang it up. Currently on Brave and fully convinced it's the new Firefox.

iLemming 6mo ago

> LLMs have inspired a similar change in me FWIW, the age of LLMs made me build a deeper, more intimate relationship with Emacs, because it's a Lisp REPL loop with a built-in editor, not the other way around. When you give an LLM a closed loop system where it can evaluate code in a live REPL and observe the results, it stops guessing and starts reasoning empirically. LLM that I run inside Emacs can fully control the active Emacs instance. I can make it change virtually any aspect of it. To load-test things, I even made it play Tetris in Emacs. And not just simply run it, but to actually play it without losing. It was insane. Also, Emacs is all about plain text - you can easily extract text from anything - from the browser, terminal, CLI apps, Slack, Jira, etc., and you can do that on your own terms - context can appear in a buffer, in your clipboard, become a file or series of API requests. That is really hard to beat.

mimischi 5mo ago
Can you describe your setup on how you use LLMs within Emacs?
- iLemming 5mo ago
  Of course. I've tried different AI packages and currently gptel and ECA remain the main ingredients. This is a quickly changing landscape, and things may change, but for now it feels very good. I like gptel because it's enormously extendable and exploitable - it allows me to send LLM requests from just about anywhere - I could be typing a message (like this very one) and suddenly in need of ideas for how to phrase something better, or explain simply, or fact-check my assumptions, whatever. Quick & dirty interaction that gets discarded in the same buffer. For longer investigations and research I would use a dedicated gptel buffer. Those get automatically saved. I don't use gptel as a coding assistant, even though you can do that, it's not really optimized for that kind of work. I use ECA. It works much better for me than every other alternative I tried, and I tried more than a few. What's crazy that I sometimes would type a prompt in ECA, then ask gptel (with a different model) to make it more "AI-friendly" changing the prompt in-place and then send it. All my MCPs are coded in Clojure (mostly babashka)¹ - because (like I said) giving an AI a Lisp REPL makes much more sense (maybe even more than using a statically typed language). I had to employ a few tricks so all the tools, skills and instructions can be shared between gptel, eca-emacs, ECA Desktop, Claude Code CLI, Claude Desktop App, and Copilot CLI. Even though I mostly use gptel and ECA, it's good to keep other options around, just in case. All the AI-related Emacs settings are in my config². Is this helpful, or you want some more concrete examples? — ¹ https://github.com/agzam/death-contraptions https://github.com/agzam/death-contraptions ² https://github.com/agzam/.doom.d/tree/main/modules/custom/ai https://github.com/agzam/.doom.d/tree/main/modules/custom/ai

SuperNinKenDo 5mo ago

[flagged]

bitwize 5mo ago
Our lives are much more than our computing environments. By surrendering a bit of control of our computing environments we free up our brains to devote to other things in life: loved ones, pets, gardening, home maintenance, other hobbies and sports... Millions of happy Apple users can't be wrong on this.
- enthdegree 5mo ago
  They're coming for that stuff next
- skydhash 5mo ago
  Maybe, but for some of us, the peace of mind comes from stability and minimal friction with our tools. Whenever I touch my config is because I get frustrated with one operation and tries to see if it can be done faster. If you use your computer like a toaster, then you wouldn’t care that much about power usage. But for me it’s a creative lab and I don’t want a generic cubicle.
- guelo 5mo ago
  What if computing environments is our job?
- anthk 5mo ago
  Millions of Apple users can't even have grabable corners. Enjoy.
otabdeveloper4 5mo ago
Especially ridiculous because old-school bash CLI scripts is the only usable protocol for interacting with LLM agents.
monooso 5mo ago
How on earth did you get that from the segment of text that you chose to quote?

squigz 5mo ago

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

viksit 5mo ago
> heavily-customized and terminal-heavy setup this exactly. most people can’t set it up that well.
pavon 5mo ago
If you are frequently having to use other computers, a heavily customized setup has much more friction either to setup the machine like you want, or remember how to do things without all the customization (if you can't customize or it isn't worth the time). When I graduated college I used Dvorak and Emacs on Linux. Six months of having to use shared Windows lab computers extensively beat me down to surrender all of those points - my brain just couldn't handle switching, so I conformed my desktop to match. Then later I switched jobs to a group that was all Unix, but of many varieties most of which only had vi, not Emacs. And so I learned vi. Sometimes minimizing friction means going with the flow.
arikrahman 5mo ago
Arguably NixOS is the most config heavy platform but it solves the pain point of having to reconfigure on different systems. Especially in the LLM era where I can configure Emacs and my OS decoratively.
- kqr 5mo ago
  How do you nixify your Emacs configuration? I've looked into it but at the time the advice was to specify dependencies both in Nix and in .emacs.d, which seemed redundant to me. Is there something like callCabal2Nix for Emacs? Edit: Or do you mean "declaratively" in the sense of using something like straight.el?
  - 5mo ago

keybored 5mo ago

LLM discourse inspires me to do a cleaning of my browser tabs every hour.

godzillabrennus 5mo ago

I am running Ubuntu as my desktop operating system. I would never do this without an LLM to do the work of keeping it functional for me. Today, Rise of Nations wouldn't launch. Never had that problem before. Seems the driver for 32-bit games and my Nvidia GPU weren't getting along after an update. Codex was called in and solved the problem for me in about 5 minutes. I just copied and pasted the Steam log and let it tell me what to do. Tadah. I'm actually excited about the potential for a future where local agents help improve the operating system experience as I go by making changes based on my use case. All local, of course. I do not want to trust a cloud provider with my use cases/behavior on my computer so they can sell me more ads...