Comment by zkry

Comment by zkry 7 days ago

9 replies

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...

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.

  • imiric 7 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.

    • 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

      • throwanem 6 days ago

        Elnode should make this very easy, given the triviality of the MCP "protocol."

        I would take care. Emacs has no internal boundaries by design and it comes with the ability to access files and execute commands on remote systems using your configured SSH credentials. Handing the keys to an enthusiastically helpy and somewhat cracked robot might prove so bad an idea you barely even have time to put your feet up on the dash before you go sailing through the windshield.

      • sokoloff 6 days ago

        There are tens (maybe low hundreds?) of thousands of people who want that.

        Which is exactly why it hasn’t been commercially developed.

      • zaphar 6 days ago

        There are several neovim mcp providers that expose bash and neovim as a tool so you can already do that.

imiric 7 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.