Comment by imiric

Comment by imiric 7 days ago

This is the way.

All this IDE churn makes me glad to have settled on Emacs a decade ago. I have adopted LLMs into my workflow via the excellent gptel, which stays out of my way but is there when I need it. I couldn't imagine switching to another editor because of some fancy LLM integration I have no control over. I have tried Cursor and VS Codium with extensions, and wasn't impressed. I'd rather use an "inferior" editor that's going to continue to work exactly how I want 50 years from now.

Emacs and Vim are editors for a lifetime. Very few software projects have that longevity and reliability. If a tool is instrumental to the work that you do, those features should be your highest priority. Not whether it works well with the latest tech trends.

zkry 7 days ago

Ironically LLMs have made Emacs even more relevant. The model LLMs use (text) happens to match up with how Emacs represents everything (text in buffers). This opens up Emacs to becoming the agentic editor par excellence. Just imagine, some macro magic acound a defcommand and voila, the agent can do exactly what a user can. If only such a project could have the funding like Cursor does...

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throwanem 7 days ago

Nothing could be worse for the modern Emacs ecosystem than for the tech industry finance vampires ("VCs," "LPs") to decide there's blood enough there to suck.
Fortunately, alien space magic seems immune, so far at least. I assume they do not like the taste, and no wonder.

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- imiric 6 days ago
  
  Why should the Emacs community care whether someone decides to build a custom editor with AI features? If anything this would bring more interest and development into the ecosystem, which everyone would benefit from. Anyone not interested can simply ignore it, as we do for any other feature someone implements into their workflow.
  
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  tough 6 days ago
  
  what i find interesting is why is nobody building llms trained on using the shell and PTY at its full
  right now its dumb unix piping only
  I want an AI that can use emacs or vim with me
  
  Reply View | 5 replies
imiric 6 days ago

I'm not sure why you were downvoted. You're right that buffers and everything being programmable makes Emacs an ideal choice for building an AI-first editor. Whether that's something that a typical Emacs user wants is a separate issue, but someone could certainly build a polished experience if they had the resources and motivation. Essentially every Emacs setup is someone's custom editor, and AI features are not different from any other customization.

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bandoti 6 days ago

Emacs diff tools alone is a reason to use the editor. I switch between macOS, Linux, and Windows frequently so settled on Emacs and happy with that choice as well.

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drob518 6 days ago

I’ve been using Aidermacs to access Aider in Emacs and it works quite well and makes lots of LLMs available. Claude Sonnet 3.7 has been reasonable for code generation, though there are certainly tasks that it seems to struggle on.

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