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points by iLemming 1 day ago | 0 comments

> IDEs and now Claude have taken over

100% completely opposite experience. Emacs is hands down the king of any kind of text-manipulation. And not only on the composition side. Most editors and IDEs are focused on the composition side of things - making text, adjusting text, amending text. And code btw, is nothing but structured text.

Emacs opens gates for text consumption - I'm reading this entire HN thread in Emacs, just like I consume Jira, Slack, Telegram, Reddit; control YT vids, my browser tabs and history, etc. I search through Splunk and Datadog logs, Wiktionary entries and just general googling - all done in Emacs. I browse million-line codebases on GH without ever having to clone them. If there's a piece of any kind of text in the computational vicinity to my active Emacs instance - this laptop and all connectable devices, I can easily make use of it.

And this gets incredibly important in the age of LLMs. I can read, manipulate, navigate, search through, diff, sort, group, slice, dice, salt and pepper any kind of text. Give me just about any other editor instead and I immediately will feel handicapped.

IDEs that are not malleable (by design) are at an exact disadvantage. I can change any aspect of my editor in the middle of typing this very comment without ever losing the state, the context, or my mental focus. No IDE even hypothetically capable of doing any of that.

[–] amitp 1 day ago

And with llm-buddy [1] everything I type in emacs gets sent to an LLM, which makes it even more valuable to do more things in emacs.

[1] https://github.com/ahyatt/llm-buddy

[–] iLemming 1 day ago

Well, there's over 35 (and counting) different Emacs packages for LLM integration. And that's just the ones that were published.

https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1uwm3c0/the_state_of...

[–] kleiba2 1 day ago

Don't get me wrong, I totally agree with you re: text manipulation. That's exactly why I find it so frustrating that it's basically frowned upon in my current job. I do use it still, but must do so pretty much secretly at work.

At home, it's a different story.

I believe, Emacs is considered unprofessional in a lot of places?!

[–] jimbokun 1 day ago

Emacs is considered unprofessional in unprofessional work places.

Dictating specific tools without a very strong technical justification is a strong signal that your management doesn’t trust you to make any important decisions.

[–] Jtsummers 1 day ago

> I believe, Emacs is considered unprofessional in a lot of places?!

Why would it be "unprofessional"? It's an editor. I've used it in every job since I left college 20+ years ago.

[–] kleiba2 1 day ago

You should have seen the expression on the faces when I mentioned "Emacs" during my job interview...

[–] Jtsummers 1 day ago

The only expression I have gotten was something like "Why not vim?" and my response was "Because emacs is better, and I can always use evil-mode if I want the vim bindings". Then it gets installed (by me or an admin) and I use it. I can't imagine anyone actually caring, that's pretty petty of them, or lazy based on your other comment about it being too much work for sysadmins.

[–] kleiba2 21 hours ago

Lucky you!

But I've also worked at a different place in the past where - when I asked if I could have Emacs installed on my machine - the sysadmin asked me "What's Emacs?"

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[–] iLemming 1 day ago

> Emacs is considered unprofessional in a lot of places

What? Why? Who the hell would ever forbid anyone from using a tool that literally makes them more productive? I mean, as the Russians say: "If drinking vodka at work interferes with your job, quit drinking vodka... at that job"

[–] kleiba2 1 day ago

The main argument is that having the same setup on all work stations makes maintenance easier for the sysadmins and you don't run into inconsistencies between developers that only come about as a result of different setups.

[–] iLemming 1 day ago

> makes maintenance easier for the sysadmins

Develop hacker's mindset. Don't anyone tell you how to use your computer. Especially don't let your computer to dictate you the rules. Always remain in charge.

When I started at my current job, they gave me a laptop that came installed with crap called ABR - Admin By Request. Basically, for anything that required sudo, they'd force me to run it, then click a prompt: "yes, I need the [fucking] access," then another little prompt comes up, asking for "reasons," and you're supposed to type it, to which everyone on my team types some random number of letters (because there's a minimum), then press Ok to get three-hour access.

I dealt with it for exactly three days. After that I just wrote a script that periodically checks if I have the admin rights, and then waits for me to get idle (so no sudden focus stealing), then runs the sucker, sends the request, etc. I don't even see it anymore - just happens. I'm not playing their stupid games, their "security theater", I have a job to do.

[–] kleiba2 21 hours ago

> Develop hacker's mindset. Don't anyone tell you how to use your computer. Especially don't let your computer to dictate you the rules. Always remain in charge.

That would be nice in theory. I've worked in many different places throughout my career and in almost all of them, the sysadmins had the final say in what software was okay to install on your machine and which one wasn't.... because "security".

[–] iLemming 12 hours ago

> That would be nice in theory.

I just gave you an actual, practical example, not a theoretical one.

Here's another one. I wanted to try eca-emacs, the documentation website sits at https://eca.dev, Cisco Umbrella, for whatever stupid reason, blocks the entire .dev domain, and every corporate laptop comes pre-installed with Cisco Secure Client that you can't remove. I submitted a ticket, and then wasted my time on a ridiculous exchange with the "big security guy," who decided to take a power trip and refused to have the website whitelisted. Despite it being absolutely harmless. I don't know where the fuck he's purchased that condescending tone and posture. In the end, I said: "thank you for your time," and hoped to never ever have to talk to him. Then I set up a SOCKS tunnel through my local Linux box, installed the FoxyProxy extension, and voila - I'm never ever going to have to complain about a blocked website.

> sysadmins had the final say

And you can always find workarounds. Those who want to do something look for a way, not excuses. You're a goddamn computer programmer. Maybe act like one.

[–] jimbokun 1 day ago

Good point that navigating, searching and reading text is perhaps even more important than editing in the age of LLMs.

[–] iLemming 1 day ago

It absolutely is. Consider this. I'm reading this thread in Emacs. Why? Am I obsessed with it? What's the point? Well, I can easily read not just the thread but also the article posted while ignoring all the fluff - graphics, banners, ads, etc. - to extract a piece of plain text.

I can also just ignore every conversation - sometimes, posted urls are more valuable than what people blabber and fight about. Imagine having to extract all the urls on the page. Some might say: "Hey, there's a browser extension for that", but...

a) the extension has its own keybindings, dissimilar UI, etc.

b) it won't ignore HN's internal URLs, so you still need to grab the list of URLs and then remove the ones you don't need in... your editor. So why not just use that, to begin with?

In Elisp, it's a one-liner. You can bind it to a key. I can also utilize sparse tree search, e.g., to collapse everything while leaving every reply that contains a keyword. With imenu, I can jump to any thread. With indirect buffers, I can compare two parts sitting on opposite ends of the discussion. I can narrow to any point, add some text, and then send a request to an LLM.

And guess what? All these things are still the same for a Reddit discussion. So when I use it in Emacs, I can still use the same ways of manipulating and extracting value.