5 ms·

NEO Emacs – GPU-Accelerated Emacs Powered by Rust

49 points by giancarlostoro 18d ago

tommica 18d ago
Oh that looks so pretty! I've wanted an excuse to try out emacs in the first place, and this could be it!
- bigfishrunning 18d ago
  Please just try out traditional Emacs, I'm not sure this will paint a fair picture.
- bch 18d ago
  > I've wanted an excuse to try out emacs in the first place[...] This isn't the excuse - just try Emacs! I've gone through periods where I really wanted to level-up my $EDITOR-fu, and just jumping in is what I did. Compared to so many other decisions, this is such a low-barrier, low-cost decision, there's no reason to not just do it. If it's stalling your development speed, jump back to vi or VSCode, or whatever. Don't want to stick with Emacs? Uninstall and forget it was ever there. For my editor explorations (vi, emacs, ex), I was strict with myself and used $EDITOR exclusively for 4 or 8 weeks (I forget which) - which sometimes just turned into years. I'm not deep into Emacs culture these days, but I'm hard-pressed to understand why one wouldn't just go canonical GNU Emacs rather than some fresh "revolutionary" Emacs - you'll have your mind blown regardless, without the potential bugs and lack-of-history/community which come with some new-hotness interpretation of a standard that is already fit-for-purpose.
  - jrootabega 17d ago
    I disagree somewhat. It helps to have some kind of exciting, exotic, whimsical, or challenging context to try it out in. Like how they say you learn a technology best with a project. "Just" trying it out can be a flavorless and easily dropped experience. But I agree with the other poster that this is not a great project for learning Emacs as it currently exists.
- evalexec 16d ago
  neomacs is not ready。 If you want to learn emacs now, try gnu/emacs please。 After continuous iterations of development，when neomacs is mature, I'll invite you to try neomacs.
nine_k 18d ago
> Aiming for modern design, multi-threaded Elisp, 10x performance and 100% Emacs compatibility. I'm afraid that 100% compatibility may be very often at odds with multi-threaded elisp. So much in Emacs depends on global state :-/
- thih9 18d ago
  Current status of the compatibility is[1]: > ~95%, closing the last gaps If coding with LLMs taught me anything, it’s that this last 5% can be “load-bearing”. [1]: https://github.com/eval-exec/neomacs#status https://github.com/eval-exec/neomacs#status
  - grim_io 18d ago
    That's where all the smoking guns are buried.
    - nickpeterson 18d ago
      That's why I use a belt and suspenders to pick them up.
- dan-robertson 18d ago
  Most state is buffer-local rather than global. Note also that there is already some amount of multi-threading in elisp. One thing you could imagine is doing some kind of mvcc system so that if two tasks don’t interfere with each other, they can execute in parallel (and if not, abort one and rerun it sequentially). But maybe that still doesn’t work because all the things that should be run concurrently are using the same buffer and doing manipulations of it. You could imagine trying to make save-excursion introduce an opportunity for parallelism: split into a separate thread for the body as that thread is no longer modifying global cursor state (in some sense). Don’t let two threads write to the same buffer for concurrent tasks that should appear sequential, but do allow them to read in parallel (surely most things are merely reading). However I’m not sure you actually need all that cleverness. I think you could have some combination of: - tools to make multithreaded elisp more viable - manual attention to improve major sources of slowness by introducing parallelism (eg font-lock, rendering, autocomplete, indentation). A stupid thing could be precomputing (in the background) what would happen in the user pressed RET (or TAB) and then being able to execute it sooner if they press that key.
whois 18d ago
Interesting interesting. I'm huge into Emacs and have felt like Emacs has needed a Neovim sort of moment for a while now. A lot of the modern features you'd expect out of an IDE are bad and slow in Emacs rn due to threading and pretty core issues to Emacs (so I cope and say I don't need autocomplete). But also suspicious of anything this AI generated which touts rust like this.
- jmclnx 18d ago
  >I'm huge into Emacs and have felt like Emacs has needed a Neovim sort of moment That happened before with Xemacs. I saw somewhere Xemacs development has been restarted.
- deleted 17d ago
  [deleted]
veqq 18d ago
Why not... Lem?
- dismalaf 18d ago
  Lem's focus seems to be on being an "emacs" in and for Common Lisp. Lem throws away any attempts at compatibility with GNU Emacs. This is trying to be compatible with GNU Emacs.
  - cmrdporcupine 18d ago
    > Lem throws away any attempts at compatibility with GNU Emacs. That depends on what you mean by compatibility. Keybindings and conventions and the like are basically the same. I'm not actually convinced at this point on the value of a lot of the extant elisp out there.
    - dismalaf 18d ago
      > That depends on what you mean by compatibility. Emacs Lisp... > I'm not actually convinced at this point on the value of a lot of the extant elisp out there. I agree but lots of people probably don't.
      - cmrdporcupine 17d ago
        In a way sad to say it but these days if I'm missing some functionality I just ask a clanker to write it and it's done in a few minutes.
- oliverchan2024 17d ago
  Too hard to use.
- iLemming 11d ago
  Wake me up when all the 40-years of Emacs package development all migrated to Lem. Do you even use Org-mode? Anyone who tried it beyond just basic outline features knows very well - Org-mode needs Emacs to run. There's no such thing as "the clone of Org" that runs in anything else. We'd fly humans to Mars sooner.
smy20011 18d ago
Seems fully vibe coded :(
- pkghost 18d ago
  "Emacs, rewritten in Rust — unleashed on the GPU, fixing what 40 years of C never could."
  - bitwize 18d ago
    "Now I see the whole picture. The Emacs Lisp interpreter lock bungs no cake. The buffer-pruning-time crenellation is a glaze which conflicts with the cthulhu fhtagn peripatetic saxophone layer; the result is not cromulent. Three pounds of VAX. This has now been fixed."
- convolvatron 18d ago
  general issues aside, for me one of the issues with emacs is that for historical reasons there is a cut between elisp and C that's really high up and pretty ragged. ideally a large composable lisp project like emacs would have a very accessible continuum between the surface and the underpinnings. so I don't think one can achieve that by maintaining 100% compatibility. a much smaller base system build with better semantics that was notionally compatible would be something I would be really excited to contribute to.
  - cmrdporcupine 18d ago
    Yeah, that's "lem" really. Though in that case it's Lisp all the way down apart from the native bits of the rendering layers.
    - stackghost 18d ago
      It’s a better lisp, too. Elisp really sucks and is my least favourite part of emacs, which I use daily.
      - 16d ago
vatsachak 18d ago
Watch demo button on the website doesn't work. I mean gnu-emacs is already quite snappy in Wayland mode.
- bigfishrunning 18d ago
  the "performance" link at the top also doesn't lead anywhere...
- evalexec 16d ago
  Thank you for the feedback，I have updated the "watch demo" link to redirect to my youtube website page.
royal__ 18d ago
It's hard to take this seriously when it has wonky Claude website design. Rewriting emacs in Rust also feels like a nonsensical task.
- vatsachak 18d ago
  It's not nonsensical, but if you were writing emacs in rust, you hopefully would use a typed language instead of elisp
  - dismalaf 18d ago
    Why? There's no point having a typed config/scripting language...
    - vatsachak 18d ago
      You're assuming that the scripts are small. e-lisp code is massive!
      - kazinator 17d ago
        Where is the fire? Is the Emacs ecosystem collapsing because of type errors undiagnosed when .el files are scanned?
        vatsachak 17d ago
        I mean emacs has way more bugs than modern editors. Types would help you fix that and let you optimize code more since they help with "proving" that your code is correct. I feel like emacs could be way better if e-lisp was typed but I write Rust for a living and Haskell/Lean for fun so maybe I'm biased
        iLemming 11d ago
        > has way more bugs than modern editors That's just factually untrue. Emacs core is not obviously buggier than, let's say, VSCode, which has tens of thousands of open issues and is written in Typescript. What differs is visibility. Emacs throws a backtrace in your face; VSCode swallows extension errors into a log nobody reads. And every Emacs user runs a unique build with like 350 packages nobody tested together; try to even start VSCode with half that number of plugins. The bugs that actually hurt in Emacs are state bugs, not type bugs. Two packages advise the same function. A buffer-local variable is set in one mode and read in another. Dynamic binding leaks. None of that is a type error in the Haskell sense. The dynamism is the product, not an accident. Redefining any function at runtime, advising anything, inspecting live state - that is why people use Emacs instead of an editor with a plugin API. Strong static types plus separate compilation cut against late binding everywhere. You're not "biased", you just seem to be unfamiliar with the type dynamism in Lisp systems. Dynamic types are not equally bad everywhere; don't take what you know about Python and apply it the same way to things built in, e.g., Clojure.
puszczyk 18d ago
the webpage fills vibecoded in the worst way tbh; i don't think that's attractive to the current gen of emacs users maybe it targets net new users?
- nosioptar 18d ago
  I'm interested in a multi threaded emacs. This landing page made sure I lost interest in this attempt. JFC, who wants animations in their editor? Also, I set prefers reduced motion on my browser. Pages that are filled with useless animations in spite of my preference tells me the dev is either incompetent as they cannot handle basic accessibility or an asshole because they just don't care.
- DonHopkins 18d ago
  It's ironic that a community that uses a program originally developed at the MIT AI Lab, extensible in the traditional programming language of AI, would hate AI. Richard Stallman prefers to call AI "Pretend Intelligence". https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/PRETEND-INTELLIGENCE.md https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/PRETEN... Richard Stallman proposes the term Pretend Intelligence (PI) for what the industry calls “AI”: systems that pretend to be intelligent and are marketed as worthy of trust. He uses it to push back on hype that asks people to trust these systems with their lives and control. From his January 2026 talk at Georgia Tech: https://youtu.be/YDxPJs1EPS4?t=641 https://youtu.be/YDxPJs1EPS4?t=641 "So I've come up with the term Pretend Intelligence. We could call it PI. And if we start saying this more often, we might help overcome this marketing hype campaign that wants people to trust those systems, and trust their lives and all their activities to the control of those systems and the big companies that develop and control them." — Richard Stallman, Georgia Tech, 2026-01-23. Source: YouTube (full talk) — "Dr. Richard Stallman @ Georgia Tech - 01-23-2026," Alex Jenkins, CC BY-ND 4.0; transcript in video description.
  - neutronicus 17d ago
    RMS aside, there are a fair number of AI enjoyers among the emacs community.
- 16d ago
Svoka 18d ago
Does the "Watch Demo" button do anything?
chrysoprace 18d ago
With neovim's cult following I figured it was only a matter of time before somebody made a similar rewrite for Emacs, even if it does smell of vibe-coding based on the README. I don't see any notes in the README about alternative scripting engines, elisp was always the main thing that turned me off from emacs. Does anybody know if they plan to add something like Lua?
- bitwize 18d ago
  Emacs-ng embeds JavaScript or TypeScript or something and a web engine for UI. But then I really don't see the point. You're just about halfway to Visual Studio Code, so why not just use that?
- robert-zaremba 17d ago
  what's wrong with elisp? The runtime is really well integrated in Emacs! Note: AI is good at writing all lips dialects!
  - chrysoprace 17d ago
    Oh I'm just not a lisp fan, and with it being a bespoke language for Emacs it has the same issue as VimScript: you have to learn a language just for configuring your editor. With something like Lua, it's simple to learn and I can use that knowledge for things other than just configuring my editor.
jchw 18d ago
I've gone from being blown away by what LLMs could do with web design (I mean, it's impressive, especially what it does purely without vision...) to wishing it couldn't. Everything has become "same"y in a way that is hard to describe, kinda like AI generated images. Panda riding a unicorn? Impressive the first time. 1000 uncanny piss filter Pixar images later, you are begging for mediocrity to come back. Not that the README is any better. It's just a long string of Claudisms. Fuck. "Don't you ever get bored of pointing out that everything is AI slop?" Yes. I am very bored of pointing this out. I'll let you know when getting bored of it fixes the problem. I'm sorry if you think slop that will likely be unmaintained in a month and can be done even better by next month's model releases anyways is worth taking up a massive chunk of the HN frontpage forever, but I just don't agree.
- MichaelDickens 18d ago
  I feel like we need some version of "increase the temperature" that works at a macro scale instead of on individual tokens.
  - efskap 18d ago
    There's an interesting prompting technique for this that asks the model to start with a random string that is then manipulated into the answer: https://pub.sakana.ai/ssot/ https://pub.sakana.ai/ssot/
- snmx999 18d ago
  The README is actually much better. Before AI it was three sentences or a placeholder template and you were complaining how nobody writes decent documentation. Now that the README actually describes what the project is all about you don't read it because "it's AI slop".
  - jchw 17d ago
    > you were complaining how nobody writes decent documentation They still don't. > Now that the README actually describes what the project is all about you don't read it because "it's AI slop". Going from no documentation to very bad documentation is closer to a lateral move. I do think repos with only AI slop docs should probably just delete them. They are absolutely worse than nothing in most cases.
jmclnx 18d ago
Emacs written in rust.
ranguna 18d ago
The watch demo button doesn't work for me
- deleted 17d ago
  [deleted]
- evalexec 16d ago
  Thank you for the feedback, I'm busy on the development of neomacs, so I didn't well polish the neomacs's landing page. I have updated the watch demo button link, redirect it to my youtube website link。
yunfei 18d ago
Lost me with broken "Watch Demo" button
- dismalaf 18d ago
  Sponsor button works though ;-)
- evalexec 16d ago
  Thank you for the feedback, I'm busy on the development of neomacs, so I didn't well polish the neomacs's landing page. I have updated the neomacs's landing page, make the "work in progress" indicator more prominent.
robert-zaremba 17d ago
In my 20 years living inside Emacs, the running joke has always been that it's a great operating system lacking only a good text editor. With Neomacs bringing a GPU-accelerated display engine, and WebKit to the table... it looks like our operating system finally got a modern compositor. On top of that multithreading! (so some cache ops won't pause the editor!) Jokes aside, this is exactly the kind of mad-science evolution Emacs needs, rather than being hard-blocked by 1980s terminal-era C code. I'm curious how much of this project is done by AI? PS: kudos for doing it, I will definitely support it!
eastwd 17d ago
Interesting. I'm pretty jaded these days, so I decided to compile this and give it a go. I am actually a little surprised. So far, all of my configuration and packages have just worked out of the box. Eglot (LSP), Treesitter, evil, themes configuration and all my custom elisp and just kind of work. Brownie ponits there. Unfortunately, the developer has chosen to; for lack of a better phrase; gone batshit insane with cursor and window animations. The homepage looks nothing like what's OOTB either, so quite misleading to be honest. Otherwise, pretty decent job, feels smooth and will check in another year.
stschaef 17d ago
Do you have any evidence that neoemacs witnesses any speedup? It's a neat idea but I don't quite get why I'd want this without seeing some evidence I've also considered the possibility of a Rust rewrite of emacs, but after doing some more digging it seems like it may not be worth the effort. The remacs project seems to have been abandoned. I think they hit diminishing returns Moreover, this ready like AI slop
neutronicus 17d ago
Does it run Spacemacs?
- evalexec 16d ago
  I didn't tested neomacs for spacemacs. But my friends test launch doomemacs for neomacs on Linux, it can works, but still have some incomplete places。
robert-zaremba 17d ago
[flagged]

Oh that looks so pretty! I've wanted an excuse to try out emacs in the first place, and this could be it!

bigfishrunning 18d ago
Please just try out traditional Emacs, I'm not sure this will paint a fair picture.
bch 18d ago
> I've wanted an excuse to try out emacs in the first place[...] This isn't the excuse - just try Emacs! I've gone through periods where I really wanted to level-up my $EDITOR-fu, and just jumping in is what I did. Compared to so many other decisions, this is such a low-barrier, low-cost decision, there's no reason to not just do it. If it's stalling your development speed, jump back to vi or VSCode, or whatever. Don't want to stick with Emacs? Uninstall and forget it was ever there. For my editor explorations (vi, emacs, ex), I was strict with myself and used $EDITOR exclusively for 4 or 8 weeks (I forget which) - which sometimes just turned into years. I'm not deep into Emacs culture these days, but I'm hard-pressed to understand why one wouldn't just go canonical GNU Emacs rather than some fresh "revolutionary" Emacs - you'll have your mind blown regardless, without the potential bugs and lack-of-history/community which come with some new-hotness interpretation of a standard that is already fit-for-purpose.
- jrootabega 17d ago
  I disagree somewhat. It helps to have some kind of exciting, exotic, whimsical, or challenging context to try it out in. Like how they say you learn a technology best with a project. "Just" trying it out can be a flavorless and easily dropped experience. But I agree with the other poster that this is not a great project for learning Emacs as it currently exists.
evalexec 16d ago
neomacs is not ready。 If you want to learn emacs now, try gnu/emacs please。 After continuous iterations of development，when neomacs is mature, I'll invite you to try neomacs.

> Aiming for modern design, multi-threaded Elisp, 10x performance and 100% Emacs compatibility. I'm afraid that 100% compatibility may be very often at odds with multi-threaded elisp. So much in Emacs depends on global state :-/

thih9 18d ago
Current status of the compatibility is[1]: > ~95%, closing the last gaps If coding with LLMs taught me anything, it’s that this last 5% can be “load-bearing”. [1]: https://github.com/eval-exec/neomacs#status https://github.com/eval-exec/neomacs#status
- grim_io 18d ago
  That's where all the smoking guns are buried.
  - nickpeterson 18d ago
    That's why I use a belt and suspenders to pick them up.
dan-robertson 18d ago
Most state is buffer-local rather than global. Note also that there is already some amount of multi-threading in elisp. One thing you could imagine is doing some kind of mvcc system so that if two tasks don’t interfere with each other, they can execute in parallel (and if not, abort one and rerun it sequentially). But maybe that still doesn’t work because all the things that should be run concurrently are using the same buffer and doing manipulations of it. You could imagine trying to make save-excursion introduce an opportunity for parallelism: split into a separate thread for the body as that thread is no longer modifying global cursor state (in some sense). Don’t let two threads write to the same buffer for concurrent tasks that should appear sequential, but do allow them to read in parallel (surely most things are merely reading). However I’m not sure you actually need all that cleverness. I think you could have some combination of: - tools to make multithreaded elisp more viable - manual attention to improve major sources of slowness by introducing parallelism (eg font-lock, rendering, autocomplete, indentation). A stupid thing could be precomputing (in the background) what would happen in the user pressed RET (or TAB) and then being able to execute it sooner if they press that key.

whois 18d ago

Interesting interesting. I'm huge into Emacs and have felt like Emacs has needed a Neovim sort of moment for a while now. A lot of the modern features you'd expect out of an IDE are bad and slow in Emacs rn due to threading and pretty core issues to Emacs (so I cope and say I don't need autocomplete). But also suspicious of anything this AI generated which touts rust like this.

jmclnx 18d ago
>I'm huge into Emacs and have felt like Emacs has needed a Neovim sort of moment That happened before with Xemacs. I saw somewhere Xemacs development has been restarted.
deleted 17d ago
[deleted]

veqq 18d ago

Why not... Lem?

dismalaf 18d ago
Lem's focus seems to be on being an "emacs" in and for Common Lisp. Lem throws away any attempts at compatibility with GNU Emacs. This is trying to be compatible with GNU Emacs.
- cmrdporcupine 18d ago
  > Lem throws away any attempts at compatibility with GNU Emacs. That depends on what you mean by compatibility. Keybindings and conventions and the like are basically the same. I'm not actually convinced at this point on the value of a lot of the extant elisp out there.
  - dismalaf 18d ago
    > That depends on what you mean by compatibility. Emacs Lisp... > I'm not actually convinced at this point on the value of a lot of the extant elisp out there. I agree but lots of people probably don't.
    - cmrdporcupine 17d ago
      In a way sad to say it but these days if I'm missing some functionality I just ask a clanker to write it and it's done in a few minutes.
oliverchan2024 17d ago
Too hard to use.
iLemming 11d ago
Wake me up when all the 40-years of Emacs package development all migrated to Lem. Do you even use Org-mode? Anyone who tried it beyond just basic outline features knows very well - Org-mode needs Emacs to run. There's no such thing as "the clone of Org" that runs in anything else. We'd fly humans to Mars sooner.

smy20011 18d ago

Seems fully vibe coded :(

pkghost 18d ago
"Emacs, rewritten in Rust — unleashed on the GPU, fixing what 40 years of C never could."
- bitwize 18d ago
  "Now I see the whole picture. The Emacs Lisp interpreter lock bungs no cake. The buffer-pruning-time crenellation is a glaze which conflicts with the cthulhu fhtagn peripatetic saxophone layer; the result is not cromulent. Three pounds of VAX. This has now been fixed."
convolvatron 18d ago
general issues aside, for me one of the issues with emacs is that for historical reasons there is a cut between elisp and C that's really high up and pretty ragged. ideally a large composable lisp project like emacs would have a very accessible continuum between the surface and the underpinnings. so I don't think one can achieve that by maintaining 100% compatibility. a much smaller base system build with better semantics that was notionally compatible would be something I would be really excited to contribute to.
- cmrdporcupine 18d ago
  Yeah, that's "lem" really. Though in that case it's Lisp all the way down apart from the native bits of the rendering layers.
  - stackghost 18d ago
    It’s a better lisp, too. Elisp really sucks and is my least favourite part of emacs, which I use daily.
    - 16d ago

vatsachak 18d ago

Watch demo button on the website doesn't work. I mean gnu-emacs is already quite snappy in Wayland mode.

bigfishrunning 18d ago
the "performance" link at the top also doesn't lead anywhere...
evalexec 16d ago
Thank you for the feedback，I have updated the "watch demo" link to redirect to my youtube website page.

royal__ 18d ago

It's hard to take this seriously when it has wonky Claude website design. Rewriting emacs in Rust also feels like a nonsensical task.

vatsachak 18d ago
It's not nonsensical, but if you were writing emacs in rust, you hopefully would use a typed language instead of elisp
- dismalaf 18d ago
  Why? There's no point having a typed config/scripting language...
  - vatsachak 18d ago
    You're assuming that the scripts are small. e-lisp code is massive!
    - kazinator 17d ago
      Where is the fire? Is the Emacs ecosystem collapsing because of type errors undiagnosed when .el files are scanned?
      - vatsachak 17d ago
        I mean emacs has way more bugs than modern editors. Types would help you fix that and let you optimize code more since they help with "proving" that your code is correct. I feel like emacs could be way better if e-lisp was typed but I write Rust for a living and Haskell/Lean for fun so maybe I'm biased
        iLemming 11d ago
        > has way more bugs than modern editors That's just factually untrue. Emacs core is not obviously buggier than, let's say, VSCode, which has tens of thousands of open issues and is written in Typescript. What differs is visibility. Emacs throws a backtrace in your face; VSCode swallows extension errors into a log nobody reads. And every Emacs user runs a unique build with like 350 packages nobody tested together; try to even start VSCode with half that number of plugins. The bugs that actually hurt in Emacs are state bugs, not type bugs. Two packages advise the same function. A buffer-local variable is set in one mode and read in another. Dynamic binding leaks. None of that is a type error in the Haskell sense. The dynamism is the product, not an accident. Redefining any function at runtime, advising anything, inspecting live state - that is why people use Emacs instead of an editor with a plugin API. Strong static types plus separate compilation cut against late binding everywhere. You're not "biased", you just seem to be unfamiliar with the type dynamism in Lisp systems. Dynamic types are not equally bad everywhere; don't take what you know about Python and apply it the same way to things built in, e.g., Clojure.

puszczyk 18d ago

the webpage fills vibecoded in the worst way tbh; i don't think that's attractive to the current gen of emacs users maybe it targets net new users?

nosioptar 18d ago
I'm interested in a multi threaded emacs. This landing page made sure I lost interest in this attempt. JFC, who wants animations in their editor? Also, I set prefers reduced motion on my browser. Pages that are filled with useless animations in spite of my preference tells me the dev is either incompetent as they cannot handle basic accessibility or an asshole because they just don't care.
DonHopkins 18d ago
It's ironic that a community that uses a program originally developed at the MIT AI Lab, extensible in the traditional programming language of AI, would hate AI. Richard Stallman prefers to call AI "Pretend Intelligence". https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/PRETEND-INTELLIGENCE.md https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/PRETEN... Richard Stallman proposes the term Pretend Intelligence (PI) for what the industry calls “AI”: systems that pretend to be intelligent and are marketed as worthy of trust. He uses it to push back on hype that asks people to trust these systems with their lives and control. From his January 2026 talk at Georgia Tech: https://youtu.be/YDxPJs1EPS4?t=641 https://youtu.be/YDxPJs1EPS4?t=641 "So I've come up with the term Pretend Intelligence. We could call it PI. And if we start saying this more often, we might help overcome this marketing hype campaign that wants people to trust those systems, and trust their lives and all their activities to the control of those systems and the big companies that develop and control them." — Richard Stallman, Georgia Tech, 2026-01-23. Source: YouTube (full talk) — "Dr. Richard Stallman @ Georgia Tech - 01-23-2026," Alex Jenkins, CC BY-ND 4.0; transcript in video description.
- neutronicus 17d ago
  RMS aside, there are a fair number of AI enjoyers among the emacs community.
16d ago

Svoka 18d ago

Does the "Watch Demo" button do anything?

chrysoprace 18d ago

With neovim's cult following I figured it was only a matter of time before somebody made a similar rewrite for Emacs, even if it does smell of vibe-coding based on the README. I don't see any notes in the README about alternative scripting engines, elisp was always the main thing that turned me off from emacs. Does anybody know if they plan to add something like Lua?

bitwize 18d ago
Emacs-ng embeds JavaScript or TypeScript or something and a web engine for UI. But then I really don't see the point. You're just about halfway to Visual Studio Code, so why not just use that?
robert-zaremba 17d ago
what's wrong with elisp? The runtime is really well integrated in Emacs! Note: AI is good at writing all lips dialects!
- chrysoprace 17d ago
  Oh I'm just not a lisp fan, and with it being a bespoke language for Emacs it has the same issue as VimScript: you have to learn a language just for configuring your editor. With something like Lua, it's simple to learn and I can use that knowledge for things other than just configuring my editor.

jchw 18d ago

I've gone from being blown away by what LLMs could do with web design (I mean, it's impressive, especially what it does purely without vision...) to wishing it couldn't. Everything has become "same"y in a way that is hard to describe, kinda like AI generated images. Panda riding a unicorn? Impressive the first time. 1000 uncanny piss filter Pixar images later, you are begging for mediocrity to come back. Not that the README is any better. It's just a long string of Claudisms. Fuck. "Don't you ever get bored of pointing out that everything is AI slop?" Yes. I am very bored of pointing this out. I'll let you know when getting bored of it fixes the problem. I'm sorry if you think slop that will likely be unmaintained in a month and can be done even better by next month's model releases anyways is worth taking up a massive chunk of the HN frontpage forever, but I just don't agree.

MichaelDickens 18d ago
I feel like we need some version of "increase the temperature" that works at a macro scale instead of on individual tokens.
- efskap 18d ago
  There's an interesting prompting technique for this that asks the model to start with a random string that is then manipulated into the answer: https://pub.sakana.ai/ssot/ https://pub.sakana.ai/ssot/
snmx999 18d ago
The README is actually much better. Before AI it was three sentences or a placeholder template and you were complaining how nobody writes decent documentation. Now that the README actually describes what the project is all about you don't read it because "it's AI slop".
- jchw 17d ago
  > you were complaining how nobody writes decent documentation They still don't. > Now that the README actually describes what the project is all about you don't read it because "it's AI slop". Going from no documentation to very bad documentation is closer to a lateral move. I do think repos with only AI slop docs should probably just delete them. They are absolutely worse than nothing in most cases.

jmclnx 18d ago

Emacs written in rust.

ranguna 18d ago

The watch demo button doesn't work for me

deleted 17d ago
[deleted]
evalexec 16d ago
Thank you for the feedback, I'm busy on the development of neomacs, so I didn't well polish the neomacs's landing page. I have updated the watch demo button link, redirect it to my youtube website link。

yunfei 18d ago

Lost me with broken "Watch Demo" button

dismalaf 18d ago
Sponsor button works though ;-)
evalexec 16d ago
Thank you for the feedback, I'm busy on the development of neomacs, so I didn't well polish the neomacs's landing page. I have updated the neomacs's landing page, make the "work in progress" indicator more prominent.

robert-zaremba 17d ago

In my 20 years living inside Emacs, the running joke has always been that it's a great operating system lacking only a good text editor. With Neomacs bringing a GPU-accelerated display engine, and WebKit to the table... it looks like our operating system finally got a modern compositor. On top of that multithreading! (so some cache ops won't pause the editor!) Jokes aside, this is exactly the kind of mad-science evolution Emacs needs, rather than being hard-blocked by 1980s terminal-era C code. I'm curious how much of this project is done by AI? PS: kudos for doing it, I will definitely support it!

eastwd 17d ago

Interesting. I'm pretty jaded these days, so I decided to compile this and give it a go. I am actually a little surprised. So far, all of my configuration and packages have just worked out of the box. Eglot (LSP), Treesitter, evil, themes configuration and all my custom elisp and just kind of work. Brownie ponits there. Unfortunately, the developer has chosen to; for lack of a better phrase; gone batshit insane with cursor and window animations. The homepage looks nothing like what's OOTB either, so quite misleading to be honest. Otherwise, pretty decent job, feels smooth and will check in another year.

stschaef 17d ago

Do you have any evidence that neoemacs witnesses any speedup? It's a neat idea but I don't quite get why I'd want this without seeing some evidence I've also considered the possibility of a Rust rewrite of emacs, but after doing some more digging it seems like it may not be worth the effort. The remacs project seems to have been abandoned. I think they hit diminishing returns Moreover, this ready like AI slop

neutronicus 17d ago

Does it run Spacemacs?

evalexec 16d ago
I didn't tested neomacs for spacemacs. But my friends test launch doomemacs for neomacs on Linux, it can works, but still have some incomplete places。

robert-zaremba 17d ago

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