4 ms·

"Is anyone still using emacs?" Yes. I had to briefly visit the world of VSCode during a period of time when it had better AI integration than emacs did, but si

by jerf 4mo ago

"Is anyone still using emacs?" Yes. I had to briefly visit the world of VSCode during a period of time when it had better AI integration than emacs did, but since I got Claude working well inside of emacs I've returned to 100% emacs. There just isn't anything like the old editors, built in the 80x24 terminal era, for getting huge swathes of code on your screen at once. I run a standard widescreen monitor with three vertical windows for emacs, each of which I often will break into two frames, so I can have up to six contexts active at once. I rarely do, but I frequently have 2 and 3. That's my entire 4K screen, full of code, usefully full of code. I'm not an IDE hater but they do put an awful lot of stuff on the screen that on a proportional basis I'm just not using as much as I use the code editor. I had been getting somewhat nervous about emacs' long term prospects about 10 years ago. I would read the release notes for major versions and generally not be particularly excited about anything. Somewhere around treesitter something seems to have revitalized the project. It may well have been treesitter that revitalized it overall. You end up with a lot more wood behind fewer arrows when the project is able to put more work into generally-useful tools rather than every single language community maintaining their own separate mode for each language. Now I am more excited about the major releases; for instance term issues are an issue for me with the aforementioned Claude integration. Not enough to stop me, but annoying. At the risk of saying something inflammatory to emacs fans, I feel like emacs is catching up to everything else better now... but it is catching up. It's getting easier to recommend it again as something you may want to seriously consider as a power-tool editor and not just something I used because I had 15 years of finger-experience with it and no significant reason to change. AI has eaten a lot of the IDE tools for me and you can type into a text box in emacs as well as you can anything else. I still occasionally bring up VSCode now to use the debugger, I still don't feel like I have as nice an experience with that as I do with emacs, but my debugging habits have always been able to deal with doing something a little extra to do a debugging session. By its very nature, you're committing some time to the process just to do the debugging itself, no matter how slick the UI for it may be, so a bit of overhead isn't so bad.

hoppp 4mo ago
The two complaints I hear is: 1.Memorizing how to use it has a big learning curve. 2.Wrist pain from pressing button combinations all the time. Otherwise plenty of people still use it and it's great. Just hard to pick up for new users.
- xedrac 4mo ago
  I've only ever used emacs in vim mode (evil-mode). Its vim emulation is the best I've seen anywhere.
  - DonHopkins 4mo ago
    It's terribly inefficient for emacs vi emulation mode to actually quit emacs when you type ":q", because it takes much longer for emacs to start up than vi, and people use a long-running emacs a lot differently than they use disposable vi's. UniPress[1] Emacs's vi emulation mode would actually flip you over to an emacs shell buffer when you typed :q, and the shell would recognize when you typed "vi foo.c" and flip back over to a vi emulator buffer instead of actually running vi, but INSTANTLY, since changing buffers in a running emacs was much faster than actually starting up a new vi process. So die-hard vi users didn't have to re-learn their muscle memory, and could just stay in the same emacs all the time, while the same old emacs alternately flipped between pretending to be a shell, and pretending to be vi. [1] "Evil Software Hoarder Emacs": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26113192 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26113192
    - dieggsy 4mo ago
      I use emacs --daemon with emacsclient for this. I always have a running emacs instance, and connect with the client. Opening and quitting a client is near instant.
      - noufalibrahim 4mo ago
        Yup. I've aliased it to e and and it works just fine. Sort of "send file into Emacs". I've also added some elisp to say things like e something.c:43 so that it opens it up at line 43. I used have a ep which I could pipe something into and it would put it in Emacs buffer but that stopped working somewhere I never got around to fixing it.
      - blks 4mo ago
        I used emacs for about 16 years, but never properly gotten into client-daemon setup. What’s your setup? Does the daemon preserve open buffers and stuff, so when you connect you have all your openned stuff? Or each emacs sessions have separate set of buffers and windows?
baokaola 4mo ago
> Now I am more excited about the major releases; for instance term issues are an issue for me with the aforementioned Claude integration. Not enough to stop me, but annoying. Being a co-maintainer, I'm a bit biased, but I think you should try Ghostel (https://github.com/dakra/ghostel https://github.com/dakra/ghostel) if you aren't already. And if you are, you should report bugs so we can fix them :)
- bryanlarsen 4mo ago
  And Ghostel support recently landed in claude-code-ide.el!
  - joshuastuden 4mo ago
    I don't understand what this means. How does claude-code-ide support or need a terminal like ghostel?
    - rofrol 4mo ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48585950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48585950
    - bryanlarsen 4mo ago
      claude-code-ide.el works by running the claude tui inside a terminal inside emacs and then connecting to that claude via the model-context-protocol. cf agent-shell which uses the agent-connection-protocol and provides its own interface.
- DonHopkins 4mo ago
  Is it conservative in what it sends, and liberal in what it accepts?
  - baokaola 4mo ago
    Can you elaborate a bit on what you are asking about?
joshuastuden 4mo ago
Why not use agent-shell? It makes the whole experience great. Also claude-code-ide.el. try these
- ngai_aku 4mo ago
  agent-shell is awesome, but Anthropic banning subscription usage via ACP is a killer. I've liked claude-code-ide.el when I've used it, but its lack of concurrent sessions per project has prevented me from fully adopting it. I know, I should be using worktrees, but I still haven't figured out a nice way to get that to work with my docker-compose-based project (though I'm open to suggestions!)
  - joshuastuden 4mo ago
    Anthropic scrapped their sdk billing thing
- jerf 4mo ago
  I use claude-code. I've been trying to use agent-shell with OpenCode but the abstraction that agent-shell puts on top of it is too much. I can't figure out how to change the model. The command to do it doesn't do anything; I see the correct model list and seem to be able to select it, but then it doesn't change. If I just run "opencode" in the same directory it comes up configured the way I want. The Claude integration works with that workflow too. Opencode comes up with some baby CPU-only model that I've never heard of, and basically, it outputs syntactically correct English sentences but doesn't seem to do much more than that. Since I mostly use Claude I haven't fussed with agent-shell much yet.
  - joshuastuden 4mo ago
    When on the agent shell buffer, do C-c C-v with the latest agent-shell to change the model
  - joshuastuden 4mo ago
    C-c C-v to change the model or M-x agent-shell-set-session-model
ww520 4mo ago
"Is anyone still using emacs?" Of course. Emacs has been my stable editor over many years, handling many languages that came along, surviving many other IDEs that came and gone (the latest being the Cursor sold out). There're always new enhancements in Emacs, from multiple-cursor editing years ago, to LSP and tree sitter in recent years. Currently I just got into the vertico/marginalia/consult/embark combo packages. Embark with its context based actions seriously is an amazing underrated package.
musebox35 4mo ago
I also have been using emacs for almost anything for the past 20 years. I had to switch to VSCode for coding over a remote ssh connection to cloud VMs. The client/server split of vscode felt superior over the ssh connection and the emacs alternatives was not up to the same level of performance two years ago. Do you know any progress on that front? I would love to go back to emacs as my daily driver but I am sensitive to lags when I type / execute commands. Have you worked with ai assistants over a remote connection?
- dmolinac 4mo ago
  I suggest to see tramp-rpc https://github.com/ArthurHeymans/emacs-tramp-rpc https://github.com/ArthurHeymans/emacs-tramp-rpc, for me it improves my connections, making tramp more useful in my daily flow
  - musebox35 4mo ago
    Thanks it looks promising :)
anitil 4mo ago
> for getting huge swathes of code on your screen at once This is my major gripe at most IDEs. Every window, or view, or sub-view insists on shaving off a little bit of vertical and horizontal space for... I don't know, tabs or things? Or to tell me what program I'm running? I just want a dark screen with text (I run Vim, so I'll concede I allow a tiny bit of vertical space for line numbers and a little bit of horizontal space for the command space)

by jerf 4mo ago

hoppp 4mo ago

The two complaints I hear is: 1.Memorizing how to use it has a big learning curve. 2.Wrist pain from pressing button combinations all the time. Otherwise plenty of people still use it and it's great. Just hard to pick up for new users.

xedrac 4mo ago
I've only ever used emacs in vim mode (evil-mode). Its vim emulation is the best I've seen anywhere.
- DonHopkins 4mo ago
  It's terribly inefficient for emacs vi emulation mode to actually quit emacs when you type ":q", because it takes much longer for emacs to start up than vi, and people use a long-running emacs a lot differently than they use disposable vi's. UniPress[1] Emacs's vi emulation mode would actually flip you over to an emacs shell buffer when you typed :q, and the shell would recognize when you typed "vi foo.c" and flip back over to a vi emulator buffer instead of actually running vi, but INSTANTLY, since changing buffers in a running emacs was much faster than actually starting up a new vi process. So die-hard vi users didn't have to re-learn their muscle memory, and could just stay in the same emacs all the time, while the same old emacs alternately flipped between pretending to be a shell, and pretending to be vi. [1] "Evil Software Hoarder Emacs": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26113192 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26113192
  - dieggsy 4mo ago
    I use emacs --daemon with emacsclient for this. I always have a running emacs instance, and connect with the client. Opening and quitting a client is near instant.
    - noufalibrahim 4mo ago
      Yup. I've aliased it to e and and it works just fine. Sort of "send file into Emacs". I've also added some elisp to say things like e something.c:43 so that it opens it up at line 43. I used have a ep which I could pipe something into and it would put it in Emacs buffer but that stopped working somewhere I never got around to fixing it.
    - blks 4mo ago
      I used emacs for about 16 years, but never properly gotten into client-daemon setup. What’s your setup? Does the daemon preserve open buffers and stuff, so when you connect you have all your openned stuff? Or each emacs sessions have separate set of buffers and windows?

baokaola 4mo ago

> Now I am more excited about the major releases; for instance term issues are an issue for me with the aforementioned Claude integration. Not enough to stop me, but annoying. Being a co-maintainer, I'm a bit biased, but I think you should try Ghostel (https://github.com/dakra/ghostel https://github.com/dakra/ghostel) if you aren't already. And if you are, you should report bugs so we can fix them :)

bryanlarsen 4mo ago
And Ghostel support recently landed in claude-code-ide.el!
- joshuastuden 4mo ago
  I don't understand what this means. How does claude-code-ide support or need a terminal like ghostel?
  - rofrol 4mo ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48585950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48585950
  - bryanlarsen 4mo ago
    claude-code-ide.el works by running the claude tui inside a terminal inside emacs and then connecting to that claude via the model-context-protocol. cf agent-shell which uses the agent-connection-protocol and provides its own interface.
DonHopkins 4mo ago
Is it conservative in what it sends, and liberal in what it accepts?
- baokaola 4mo ago
  Can you elaborate a bit on what you are asking about?

joshuastuden 4mo ago

Why not use agent-shell? It makes the whole experience great. Also claude-code-ide.el. try these

ngai_aku 4mo ago
agent-shell is awesome, but Anthropic banning subscription usage via ACP is a killer. I've liked claude-code-ide.el when I've used it, but its lack of concurrent sessions per project has prevented me from fully adopting it. I know, I should be using worktrees, but I still haven't figured out a nice way to get that to work with my docker-compose-based project (though I'm open to suggestions!)
- joshuastuden 4mo ago
  Anthropic scrapped their sdk billing thing
jerf 4mo ago
I use claude-code. I've been trying to use agent-shell with OpenCode but the abstraction that agent-shell puts on top of it is too much. I can't figure out how to change the model. The command to do it doesn't do anything; I see the correct model list and seem to be able to select it, but then it doesn't change. If I just run "opencode" in the same directory it comes up configured the way I want. The Claude integration works with that workflow too. Opencode comes up with some baby CPU-only model that I've never heard of, and basically, it outputs syntactically correct English sentences but doesn't seem to do much more than that. Since I mostly use Claude I haven't fussed with agent-shell much yet.
- joshuastuden 4mo ago
  When on the agent shell buffer, do C-c C-v with the latest agent-shell to change the model
- joshuastuden 4mo ago
  C-c C-v to change the model or M-x agent-shell-set-session-model

ww520 4mo ago

"Is anyone still using emacs?" Of course. Emacs has been my stable editor over many years, handling many languages that came along, surviving many other IDEs that came and gone (the latest being the Cursor sold out). There're always new enhancements in Emacs, from multiple-cursor editing years ago, to LSP and tree sitter in recent years. Currently I just got into the vertico/marginalia/consult/embark combo packages. Embark with its context based actions seriously is an amazing underrated package.

musebox35 4mo ago

I also have been using emacs for almost anything for the past 20 years. I had to switch to VSCode for coding over a remote ssh connection to cloud VMs. The client/server split of vscode felt superior over the ssh connection and the emacs alternatives was not up to the same level of performance two years ago. Do you know any progress on that front? I would love to go back to emacs as my daily driver but I am sensitive to lags when I type / execute commands. Have you worked with ai assistants over a remote connection?

dmolinac 4mo ago
I suggest to see tramp-rpc https://github.com/ArthurHeymans/emacs-tramp-rpc https://github.com/ArthurHeymans/emacs-tramp-rpc, for me it improves my connections, making tramp more useful in my daily flow
- musebox35 4mo ago
  Thanks it looks promising :)

anitil 4mo ago

> for getting huge swathes of code on your screen at once This is my major gripe at most IDEs. Every window, or view, or sub-view insists on shaving off a little bit of vertical and horizontal space for... I don't know, tabs or things? Or to tell me what program I'm running? I just want a dark screen with text (I run Vim, so I'll concede I allow a tiny bit of vertical space for line numbers and a little bit of horizontal space for the command space)