Claude Code IDE integration for Emacs

https://github.com/manzaltu/claude-code-ide.el

by kgwgk • 12 months ago

782 259 12 months ago

cristea• 12 months ago

Pretty cool! I love that these battle proven editors (emacs and (n)vim) seem to follow along with new technology, even though one might think overwise given their age.

I hope this comes to vim as well!

helsinki2• 12 months ago

It’s more common that they lead technological advancements in IDEs, not follow. Neovim in particular.

benreesman19• 12 months ago

Neovim and to an extent emacs are where corporate IDE vendors go for ideas.

From ergonomics of the UX, performance, portability, design sense (!!) and theming?

It's like Sun and GNU in the 90s. Those UI/UX folks getting pissed their perfect HSL wheel and black balance got dicked with by some PM which is why the GitHub theme is great not legendary?

They go home and rice Arch or NixOS and just shit on the dayjob stuff.

These people are artists, and hacks follow.

edit: My black balance is calculated on a per-display basis with an HSL-space transform from a hero color by the same NixOS module tree that builds the background from it's own source code as SVG and renders it before downsampling it for the specific display it's on. Of like two people helping beta it, both said roughly "using another desktop is like using the screen at the ATM". DHH is doing something similar with Arch, he's not quite as far along but this is the future.

https://cdn.some.pics/b7r6/68936c070fa56.png

https://cdn.some.pics/b7r6/68936d79c607c.png

bevr13372• 12 months ago

You must understand that a screenshot of your black balance cannot translate to another screen?

chaoskanzlerin• 12 months ago

stellarwind

That sure is a choice of name for your project!

komali27• 12 months ago

I don't really understand what you're talking about but it sounds cool. Naive question: what's wrong with just #000000 as black? I often change blacks to that in "dark mode" themes that are actually just dark grey. I want BLACK!

L0Wigh• 12 months ago

What's that font ?

anonymid2• 12 months ago

magenta nvim implements a really nice integration of coding agents.

brotherjerky• 12 months ago

Anyone have good results with something similar for Neovim?

greymalik• 12 months ago

https://github.com/greggh/claude-code.nvim https://github.com/coder/claudecode.nvim

bikeshaving• 12 months ago

I tried these, and they seem to mainly be opening Claude Code in a pane in Vim, along with commands to open the pane. It’s missing the features added to the Emacs version like open file awareness, access to text selection, and integrated diff for changes.

It would be really interesting to see a version which exposes Vim as an MCP. I would love to see Claude Code work on the active file, reading from open buffers, typing Vim motions, and taking advantage of Vim features like find/replace and macros. It would be closer to the real pair programming experience, whereas the read and write experience is slow and disjointed from editing.

softwaredoug3• 12 months ago

I just like having a neovim terminal open with claude code open

helsinki2• 12 months ago

I think that’s a decent approach, but doesn’t the performance of a Neovim terminal bother you? It simply does not feel as good as a native terminal pane. It’s not as bad as VSCode’s terminal pane, but it still leaves something to be desired.

apwell235• 12 months ago

they how do you say. look at these lines of code to claude?

adregan2• 12 months ago

Out of curiosity, do you have a good flow for having a file buffer automatically update in response to claude's changes? I'm perpetually needing to remember to `:e!<CR>` to read the updated file.

qwertycrackers• 12 months ago

I have tried the CodeCompanion plugin and had good results. I don't use it super extensively but it's nice when I decide to try it.

levl289• 12 months ago

Avante - https://github.com/yetone/avante.nvim. Admittedly I haven't had time to keep up with it's changes and as a result have gone back to VS Code + Copilot, but it's very well integrated last I did use it.

fourseventy• 12 months ago

I gave Avante a fair try for about a week and my opinion is that it's not really ready for big time yet. Lots of bugs, slow, and cumbersome. Now I just use Claude Code in a separate tmux pane and its great.

anonymid2• 12 months ago

magenta nvim

rurban• 12 months ago

Looks better than my current Claude Sonnet integration via copilot.

pjm331• 12 months ago

love the ability to add tools to the mcp server - would expect nothing less from emacs :)

as a long time emacs user i've only recently started really writing my own elisp tools, but claude is pretty good at writing elisp so i've been doing more there (sometimes it loses track of parentheses and you need to fix that, but overall pretty good)

I'll def be trying this out alongside steve yegge's efrit which kicks the emacs up to 11 by letting the agent just write and evaluate arbitrary elisp expressions https://github.com/steveyegge/efrit

benreesman19• 12 months ago

I'm a long time Yegge fan and follower and while I think he's still in the vibe code honeymoon phase and hasn't had the vibe code hangover yet, his bona fides on emacs are up there with anyones.

It was my observation around 12-18 momths ago that LLMs are weirdly good at elisp (which kicked off all the // hypermodern stuff I'm doing.

I think he's onto something with efrit, I havent gotten it dialed yet but its reaaallyy promising.

vemv• 12 months ago

I'm happily using https://github.com/stevemolitor/claude-code.el which is a mere terminal wrapper (including a nifty Transient menu). But just by virtue of running inside Emacs you get a lot of power - it didn't take me a lot of effort to create an efficient, customized workflow that felt much more streamlined than my older iTerm usage.

I'll keep an eye on this new offering though.

There's also https://github.com/editor-code-assistant/eca-emacs which comes from the author of clojure-lsp, a very popular package within the Clojure community. I'd also been wanting to try it.

For both of the more advanced offerings, I tend to be a little cautious when adopting tools I'm trusting my productivity to. Most ambitious projects need to iron out misc stuff during their 'big bang' phase.

mijoharas2• 12 months ago

I tried that for a bit, and bounced back to just using claude code in a terminal. It was a little bit janky in emacs, and didn't have any features that justified not just running a separate terminal window (for me, at the time I checked it out).

I'm wondering if this project will work. It does feel a shame that it doesn't work with the existing mcp.el package[0], but I never got around to setting that up anyways. I wonder if it's a limitation of the package? or not wanting another dependency?

(in addition I've only really played around with claude code a little because I haven't gotten it to a place where I can make it write code I'd consider acceptable for my day job.)

[0] https://github.com/lizqwerscott/mcp.el

yogsototh• 12 months ago

I personally have great success with gptel + mcp + claude (via copilot due to corporate restrictions)

I wrote a short article about how I configured it there: https://her.esy.fun/posts/0029-ai-assistants-in-doom-emacs-3...

One thing I really appreciate with gptel is that it is very easy to switch from Claude to something else like a local llm (via ollama or gpt4all for example). And the interface will be similar.

blahgeek2• 12 months ago

Like LSP and tree-sitter, I think AI coding tools like Claude Code or Aider are very good news for niche editors like Emacs or Vim. Instead of struggling about implementing advanced IDE-like features, they can integrate with these tools relatively easily, and focus on other editing related features that set them apart. In fact, IMO it makes these editors more competitive because they are highly customizable and easier to integrate with these tools.

mikece3• 12 months ago

Is there a standard for integrating agentic coding tools into an editor similar to how an LSP allows the integration of language-specific features?

benreesman19• 12 months ago

Its not at anything like the adoption of MCP or especially LSP, and it takes a more "foundational and composable library of primitives" approach than "wire protocol per se" approach, but `gptel` has quite the vibrant little ecosystem around it and its just god mode, wall hacks on the VSCode stuff, just blows it away. I'm under extreme time pressure at the moment, I cannot afford to fuck around on ideology right now I have to go for the jugular every day, and that means "fuck the cost" Opus 4 use in `gptel` (though Qwen and K2 are pushing it out of more and more stuff as I learn the quirks, Opus 4 TTFT under load is unusable and when it starts fighting you on clean merge boundaries because its personality vector has been set to "token stingy" its strictly worse).

Its not that I dislike Cursor, its that I dont have time to put up with its compromises for non-extreme-power-user accessibility. I need an extreme power, cost indifferent, tuned for the margins stack.

That's nothing with a VSCode base that I know about, and I've tried Cline and Roo and Continue and written a bunch MCP servers and I measure it all, not even close.

I bet the neovim people have something just as good.

__MatrixMan__3• 12 months ago

There's a fair bit of discussion about this here: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/discussions/4037

But the short answer is no. Not yet.

I'm pretty happy just letting the standalone agent write to the file and then reloading it in my editor.

Though I wish the agent CLI tools would use something like inotify to notice when I've made a manual change to a file that they've recently written and then do a better job of incorporating that change as feedback to inform future edits.

lukaszkorecki• 12 months ago

it's coming: https://github.com/editor-code-assistant/eca

didibus• 12 months ago

There's this one: https://eca.dev/

godelski• 12 months ago

I'm sure some other users can give you better answers, but I'm a bit curious what you mean by "standard".

FWIW, Vim (and presumably emacs) can run terminals as well as do things like ssh and ftp. Though I'm pretty sure the easiest thing to do would just be to use the Ctrl-R pattern in vim and have it send curl requests in a different buffer. As far as I'm aware, all the major LLM platforms have APIs that can be accessed through curl (or any other way you want to to GET/PUT requests). Here's something I found with a quick Google search[0].

So I'm not sure there needs to be "a standard" so much as "can it do http requests?" which is yes. I mean with this I think you can also see it wouldn't be too hard to set up and connect to a LLM hosted on the LAN. Could do it all through ssh

[0] https://arjunaravind.in/blog/using-vim-as-a-http-client/

newtwilly• 12 months ago

No the comment meant that aider and Claude code are CLI programs, so if you can run a terminal in your niche editor, then you are good to go

dismalaf• 12 months ago

It's always been that way. Emacs has had advanced IDE-like features for as long as I can remember. Vim too.

LSP and TS just make it easier to standardize across editors and languages.

peterjliu• 12 months ago

emacs and vim are not niche, lol

mickael-kerjean• 12 months ago

In 15 years of using nothing but emacs, I have never met another emacs user in any of the companies I worked for. plenty of vim but literally 0 emacs

throwaway44963• 12 months ago

You think VIM is a niche? neovim + vim is used by over 38% of developers according StackExchange survey. That is more than 1 out of 3 developer, closer to 2 out of 5.

I am not sure what is going on with here recently, maybe I have overgrown the place, or maybe everyday a little by little this place is getting filled with people who shouldn't be talking about CS.

sunng• 12 months ago

According to StackExchange, Emacs is not even a code editor

blahgeek2• 12 months ago

As someone who have only used Emacs and Vim in the past 10 years, I wish you are right. But according to my observation, 90% of those 38% of developers only use Vim in when they are sshing to the server to update few config files or make simple edits to the scripts. When they do proper programming (like hundreds lines of coding in a project), they switch to other IDEs like VSCode. So yes I personally still consider Vim and Emacs “niche” editors.

OtherwiseBenign• 12 months ago

Well, in a survey, I‘d say that I’m using it - but mainly for quick configuration file edits on servers where nothing else is installed.

siva7• 12 months ago

I believe rather my own eyes over a long career than these surveys. It's certainly well below 10% if you don't count being just used for the lack of any alternative (aka sshing)

xmhsez• 12 months ago

I've been using vim for 10+ years. The only commands I know are for saving, quitting, enabling line numbers and syntax. I'm sure 90% of the people in your statistics are like me.

elAhmo• 12 months ago

Of course it is niche, that survey is quite skewed, and "using" doesn't mean doing development work there, rather than occasionally having to use it when using remote terminals.

I know only one person from my dozens of developer friends and colleagues who is using neovim.

LoFiSamurai• 12 months ago

with people who shouldn't be talking about CS

Your argument is that calling Vim niche should exclude someone from being able to talk about CS. Please rethink your stance and your tone and consider if you’re helping the discussion.

qwertywert_• 12 months ago

Most "regular" developers don't actively engage with StackExchange.. I would not believe that statistic at all. And I'm a 7+ years vim user.

never_inline• 12 months ago

people who shouldn't be talking about CS.

Dijkstra said computer science is about computers as much as astronomy is about telescopes.

I am not sure I agree with that, but it's definitely not about text editor choice.

I have a .vimrc file with LSPs and whatnot. But it was from 3 years back. These days I use VSCode and IntelliJ (depending on language) because they do so many things out of the box. I would say the choice of editor is the least consequential thing in one's understanding of "CS" and programming methodologies. On the other hand, using debuggers, profilers, monitoring tooling can have a real impact on how you solve some problems.

wraptile3• 12 months ago

Not only that but many new editors straigh up ship vim mode now like Zed, Obsidian etc. The main vscode neovim plugin¹ is very big too with over 500k unique installs. Clearly VIM is still widely popular and not going away anytime soon.

1 - https://github.com/vscode-neovim/vscode-neovim

neutronicus2• 12 months ago

I've tried out a similar project (claude-code.el).

I use Spacemacs in evil-mode and I found it very frustrating to try and type into the Claude Code text box (often my cursor would be somewhere weird, the terminal emulator just really did not seem to "understand" that I was not in Insert Mode). I wound up deciding that I'd rather just use Claude Code in the terminal. The Claude Code text box is ALSO annoying there, so I often just write out instructions in some file (in emacs) and tell then tell CC to read it.

Does this project have any facilities for authoring prompts in a temporary buffer or something?

cmrdporcupine2• 12 months ago

I tried it and it has similar problems. Claude Code is not a good "citizen" embedded elsewhere as it wants to control the terminal completely.

I use default emacs keybindings, which are a bit friendlier with this since they're similar to the bash/readline keybindings it uses... but it's still jarring.

celeritascelery3• 12 months ago

I have also been using Claude-code.el and agree that the terminal emulators can struggle to integrate well with my regular workflow. What I have been doing is typing my prompt in the scratch buffer or minibuffer and then sending it to Claude with Claude-code-send-command (bound to s in the transient menu). I don’t even need to switch to the Claude code buffer to send it.

mijoharas2• 12 months ago

I think I basically had the same experience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44813189

komali27• 12 months ago

I also had the spacemacs golden handcuffs on before I switched to nvim. I worry that while using spacemacs was great for getting me up to speed in a productive emacs environment, it hamstrung my long term understanding and usage of emacs. I'd often have issues like you describe with no idea how to solve it. My white whale was getting all my web dev major modes to respect a .editorconfig.

mikece3• 12 months ago

I apologize for my ignorance in asking this question but is Emacs considered an IDE? I thought that was a term reserved for large, graphical editors like IntelliJ, Eclipse, or Visual Studio.

mosburger• 12 months ago

Queue the old adage ... "Emacs is a great operating system, what it needs is a good editor."

I'm not sure there is a rigid enough definition of IDE to say whether Emacs qualifies or not. I think it does by virtue of its extensibility, but I could definitely see a legit argument that it's merely an editor because it doesn't have a lot of the tooling of something more modern. I think what you consider to be an IDE (IntelliJ, VS, etc) is something that didn't exist until modern GUIs. Prior to that, terminal based things like Emacs (or LSE on VMS) were the closest analog.

gjvc• 12 months ago

"Cue"

mikece3• 12 months ago

I realize my definition is purely subjective in that I deal with Visual Studio and VS Code almost exclusively and that the VS Code team is instant that they make an editor and not IDE. For me an IDE has graphical tools for building UIs and other workflow items as well as language-specific compilers and tools built in. Like I said, subjective based on my experience (and my experience doesn't include Emacs).

iLemming23• 12 months ago

Emacs doesn't have a lot of the tooling of something more modern

Define "more modern"? Language servers, Git integration, refactoring tools, debugging? Emacs has all of those. Sure, VSCode and IntelliJ give you this stuff out of the box, but they can't match Emacs features like editing the same file in multiple ways at once (indirect buffers), instantly checking what any key does, or changing any behavior on the spot. What looks "outdated" about Emacs is actually its openness - while other IDEs hide everything behind pretty buttons, Emacs lets you see and change how everything works. You actually own your tools instead of just using them. In that way, Emacs isn't just modern - it's timeless.

reedlaw• 12 months ago

Emacs is practically an operating system (the vim joke being that it lacks a good editor). With git integration through magit, LSP server for language integration, and Projectile for project management, it very much acts like an IDE.

greenavocado• 12 months ago

Emacs as PID 1

Emacs standing alone on a Linux Kernel

https://web.archive.org/web/20200110131523/http://www.inform...

spauldo5• 12 months ago

It has a great editor - evil-mode!

iLemming23• 12 months ago

the vim joke being that it lacks a good editor

That joke was dumb from the beginning and has fallen into complete irrelevance years ago - Emacs actually can and does vim better than Vim, GVim, and Neovim, or any vim plugins for other IDEs. I'm saying this with a confidence of a die-hard, experienced vimmer.

oropolo• 12 months ago

It's not an IDE: it's a religion.

iLemming23• 12 months ago

What? Emacs is in fact a digital anarchism - complete opposite of religion. It's Kropotkin¹ with parentheses - mutual aid through package sharing, no central authority (even RMS can't dictate your config), and every user autonomously creating their own means of production. The 'religion' rhetoric is just subversive humor disguising a radical experiment in computational self-governance.

Where IDEs impose hierarchical workflows, Emacs says 'no gods, no masters, only defun' It's not a cathedral or a bazaar - it's an infinite commune where every buffer is a consensus decision you make with yourself.

——

¹ - Peter Kropotkin was a Russian aristocrat who said "fuck nobility" and became one of anarchism's main theorists.

apwell235• 12 months ago

I think its just using claude code terminology of "IDE integration" . not implying that emacs is an IDE.

globular-toast2• 12 months ago

It is if you want it to be. I believe Emacs had one of the first GUIs for gdb (GNU Debugger) so it's always been possible. But it's as much or as little as you want it to be really.

Barrin92• 12 months ago

an IDE is just what the name says, an integrated development environment. Emacs has robust support for managing projects, compilation, you can debug programs from Emacs including graphically, Magit is exceptional for version control, it's got built-in LSP support now with Eglot, and so on.

So if you want it to be, yes and with a lot of support out of the box these days.

aquariusDue3• 12 months ago

Well, I'd rather call it a PDE (Personal Development Environment)[0]. A term coined in the Neovim community that is pretty apt for Emacs too. Emacs can be pretty minimalist or maximalist depending on your preference, and it can be configured to have IDE-like features, though presented in a different way sometimes.

Honestly, the big barrier to entry for Emacs is finding the time to configure it to your liking. The best way is to use it along with your IDE and existing tooling, slowly integrating Emacs into your workflow piece by piece and tinkering with it when you have a bit of time but always with a goal in mind i.e. window (pane in modern vernacular) management, showing symbol documentation in a hoverbox, adding spell checking to comments or inline git blame.

And sure, there are lots of bits that you need to get used to at first, how copy and paste works out of the box without CUA-mode for one, but they're that big of a deal after a short while as some people make them out to be.

I'll say this though, Emacs is like tiling window management, you either love it and extol its virtues everywhere or you look at its proponents like aliens from another galaxy.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMVIJhC9Veg

lordgrenville• 12 months ago

Well it is already a "graphical" editor. And I would say out of the box it isn't an IDE, but with a couple of common packages added (say a file tree, terminal, code completion, LSP) it looks pretty much identical to any commercial IDE.

umanwizard• 12 months ago

Emacs is large and graphical. I'm not sure why the myth persists that Emacs is the same category of thing as vim; it's really not.

iLemming23• 12 months ago

Well similarly opposite "myth" persists that Emacs (unlike Vim) is a non-modal editor. It really is a modal one.

cmrdporcupine2• 12 months ago

Emacs is an IDE construction kit.

(Among other things)

By which I mean you can make your IDE with it, but it's not an out of the box thing, and it'll be bespoke and unique for you.

With LSP and treemacs and company mode, it's a pretty decent IDE. It just requires you to get all the pieces set up the way you want.

iLemming23• 12 months ago

Emacs arguably is the only one of the true meaning of "Integrated Development Environment" perhaps more thoroughly than any other editor. When we break down what IDE really means - integrated, development, and environment - Emacs excels in each dimension: it deeply integrates every tool and workflow through its unified Elisp ecosystem rather than merely bundling separate applications;

I can start extending it on every possible dimension without even having to write any code into a file - I can open a scratch buffer, write some Elisp and evaluate it in-place.

What else can provide a complete environment where one can code, debug, manage version control, read documentation, run terminals, manage projects (I search through Jira in Emacs), and even handle email or browse the web without ever leaving the editor? I'm reading this thread and typing this comment in Emacs, btw.

While modern "IDE"s like IntelliJ or VS Code offer polished, pre-configured experiences for specific languages, Emacs takes integration to a philosophical level where everything shares the same keybindings, configuration language, and conceptual model, making it less of an application that integrates other tools and more of a platform where all tools become native citizens of a unified computing environment.

jact• 12 months ago

This is profaning the temple of St iGNUcius

apwell235• 12 months ago

claude team unfortunately didn't make it easy for anyone to build their own. Take a look at this if you are hoping to build your own ide integration

https://github.com/coder/claudecode.nvim/blob/main/PROTOCOL....

https://github.com/coder/claudecode.nvim/blob/main/ARCHITECT...

cml123• 12 months ago

Lately I've been seeing a lot of derision from the Emacs community of the consideration for integrating these kinds of tools with Emacs, but I truly think that's much more hurtful than helpful. Although the current development and usage of AI in software development may not closely resemble the techniques used at the time, it seems to me that Emacs' history is inextricably linked to the MIT AI Lab. It feels weird then that people today would shun the inclusion of AI integration into a tool that was produced from such a working group.

paddy_m4• 12 months ago

This is due to Richard Stalllman. He thinks that integrating "non-free" alternatives when free alternatives don't yet exist slows down free software development. Not just free as in freedom alternatives, not just free as in GPL licensed, but free as in FSF controlled projects. He did the same thing with linking extensions to GCC, LLVM debugger integration into emacs (fuzzy on that one), possibly treesitter into emacs, bzr vs git for emacs code source control, and a CI build farm for emacs. In each one of those cases, he eventually relented and the core project, eventually integrated the non-free alternative years later.

In the meantime this delaying didn't stop the non-free alternatives, but it did slow down adoption of the core project. This is attrocious project management that is driving people to non-free software. In the most egregious cases (bzr and CI build farm), it was done only because of his ego and wanting the FSF to matter.

qiine• 12 months ago

this is just sad

benreesman19• 12 months ago

A lot of us are grateful in some abstract way for all the foundational work RMS did both technically and organizationally to preserve what remaining software freedoms we still have, but got off the bus a long time ago. He got really weird and it was on some "no fly zone" shit.

There's an `emacs` community that recognizes the history without being involved in any contemporary sense.

skydhash2• 12 months ago

Where would they integrate it. Emacs is a small core of C code. Almost everything is Elisp and in the same standing as third party packages. I’m not seeing what being in emacs core brings to an AI package?

Guthur• 12 months ago

You clearly misunderstood the problem.

The entities he is so adamant against are not benign or passive, they actively try to capture your freedom for rent seeking behaviour.

Microsoft, Apple, Amazon etc, have not got to where they are without this behaviour and they are so powerful that they have in many cases captured even public money from large governments for decades and are exceptionally sticky once allowed in.

LLM provide an exceptional opportunity for us to free ourselves from these captor interests, but we need to looking to develop them.

RMS has been proven correct on so many things from standard Microsoft behaviour, and planned obsolete to the licensing rug pulls of so called open source projects.

The question is not about stopping non free, that's a ridiculous objective, but if you don't have any principles you are going to have nothing solid to stand on in response to their nefarious and extractive behaviour.

uludag• 12 months ago

The beauty of Emacs though is that it puts the user in full control. There is nothing in the world stopping anyone from modifying anything in Emacs (at least on the Elisp layer), hence packages like this.

VS Code on the other hand is designed to fracture [1]. MS can and has given proprietary API access to their blessed tools, forcing others to go through their much less capable extension API, hence the plethora of vscode forks. Even if you had the most motivated, excited group of people wanting to work on the latest and greatest LLM interactions with VS code, they would most likely be forced to fork. On the other hand, it just takes one motivated Elisp dev to implement whatever they want and make any external package they want integrate with it.

Also, I think the derision from the Emacs community may be a bit overblown. I'm constantly seeing AI/LLM related plugins appearing for Emacs and they tend to get decent traction (e.g. https://github.com/karthink/gptel).

[1] https://ghuntley.com/fracture/

bowsamic3• 12 months ago

I didn’t know MIT AI lab was involved in the modern AI boom, that’s interesting

benreesman19• 12 months ago

Asionometry has a great video on it: https://youtu.be/sV7C6Ezl35A

The Levy book Hackers has a ehole third of the book about it.

spauldo5• 12 months ago

The Emacs community is incredibly diverse. You'll find derision for just about everything if you look for it.

I'm guessing there's a lot of grumbling on the mailing list about non-free AI services. That's fine, you can ignore that. 3rd party modules will provide, and there's nothing core can do about it.

hit8run• 12 months ago

I want something like this for helix!

yoyohello132• 12 months ago

I’ve always thought emacs is the ultimate editor for AI agents. The agent has so much access to the state of the editor itself and can even easily change editor behavior with elisp. I feel like editors which expose the level of customization like vim and emacs could potentially have a huge advantage.

iLemming23• 12 months ago

vim and emacs could potentially have a huge advantage.

They always have had. It just depends on what people perceive to be advantageous. For me, VSCode's and IntelliJ's closed model for extensibility is a huge downside.

By "closed" I mean - restrictive plugin APIs, sandboxed execution environment, corporate gatekeeping, opaque core, etc.

I don't even try to "shop for more features" anymore, learning Emacs allows me to remain "goal-oriented", and more often than not, it enables me to get the shit done in a far more satisfactory manner. Meanwhile, almost every time I switch to IDEs, I hit some limitations. It's not even "skill-issue" or unfamiliarity, I do remember my days of using IntelliJ, of which I was a devoted user for almost a decade. The way how I solve problems with Emacs, is just not even close.

smaudet• 12 months ago

I went (10 years ago) JetBrains because of emacs. Back then, they were the Kool Kid in town that made emacs-style functionality more accessible.

More and more they've become just another IDE with too-much-to-do. Still one of (the?) best, but as soon as your editor becomes impractical to use to edit a text file... (because it really just likes to work on projects...).

But yeah, emacs remains functional in a way that JetBrains...probably won't. I'm already more than several years behind on their releases because they stopped putting a decent product...

ethan_smith• 12 months ago

Emacs' advantage comes from its Lisp interpreter core - AI agents can introspect and modify the entire editor state at runtime through the same evaluation mechanisms that users employ, unlike most editors with rigid plugin APIs.

finaard• 12 months ago

This is true - and a reason I'm not sure about this package. I'll still try it, but I don't think it's the right way forward.

Pretty much the only advantage is that you get access to logic available in the claude code CLI - which in large parts probably already exists in emacs or extensions. On the downside it'll bind you to claude code.

I'm generally using a generic LLM wrapper - emacs has two good ones, gptel and llm. I have both configured, as both are required by some of the extensions I'm using, but currently prefer gptel: It seems to be more advanced, especially when it comes to tool use.

Advantage of that approach is that when you're hitting a wall with one LLM being stupid with one specific issue you can just switch to a different one. Or you can use the same environment with locally hosted LLMs.

Disadvantage is that the IDE/project functionality is not tied up that nicely yet - there are a few attempts (like minuet or evedel), but nothing I really got into.

Currently I'm mostly doing a chat buffer, and the LLM has tools available to inspect and to some extend alter the current state, published here: https://github.com/aard-fi/gptel-tool-library - that works pretty well on a per file basis, and to some extend it can figure out project details, but overall it lacks project info - in part that's a context limitation thing, where that info should be provided as additional context for each instruction (which I assume the CLI is doing).

What this approach also nicely enables is fun experimentations:

- https://github.com/aard-fi/buffer-turtle implements simple turtle graphics in an emacs buffer, and has bindings for the LLM to control the turtle - https://github.com/aard-fi/arch-installer has the glue to have the LLM interact with a serial port, and some glue (like basic ANSI escape parsing) to make the result look somewhat reasonable in an emacs buffer. That allows it to do stuff like trying to install Arch linux in a VM

Both repos have links to youtube videos with some runs.

eulers_secret• 12 months ago

I wonder if this can work with OpenCode (Claude Code fork which allows for other model providers: https://github.com/sst/opencode)?

I really don't like being tied to a particular provider or model, switching models has been really helpful to get past blocks and save money (especially with Deepseek!).

And, of course, I need to use Github Copilot's Open AI-compatile API at work...

bbsss• 12 months ago

Note that there are several projects on GitHub that let you proxy an openai compatible server and set it as ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL

Got some good success with GLM-4.5-Air running locally recently. Still mainly using claude code max though.

pxc5• 12 months ago

OpenCode isn't a fork of Claude Code. It's descended from an independent open-source project that was called "TermAI": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44483338

wyuenho3• 12 months ago

While I'm happy that simultaneously there are at least 5 known Emacs/Claude Code integration packages, with seemingly 2 or 3 battling it out on Reddit and elsewhere, I feel like the best implemented one is the quiet one that no one has ever talked about.

https://github.com/yuya373/claude-code-emacs <- it literally implements every feature that every other ones have.

celeritascelery3• 12 months ago

It doesn’t look like that had the /ide integration that Claude-code-ide has

wyuenho3• 12 months ago

It absolutely does. Give it a try.

kgwgk• 12 months ago

I don't know how popular it is but it may be the easiest one to install:

https://melpa.org/#/claude-code

r_murphey• 12 months ago

This is the way.

qalmakka• 12 months ago

my biggest issue with agents in neovim or emacs is that I also use emacs and neovim to open or edit sensitive data (like ssh keys, etc) that I don't want to upload to a random LLM.

A quick solution I devised is to use bubblewrap to get a fully separate instance of nvim. Something along the lines of

  alias lvim "bwrap --bind / / --bind $HOME/.config/{lazy,n}vim --bind $HOME/.local/share/{lazy,n}vim --proc /proc --dev /dev nvim"

works great (note: fish alias)

bicx• 12 months ago

I believe many of these agents will not operate on files included in a gitignored file, which helps with sensitive assets like .env files. Definitely worth confirming. Either way, don’t open such a file and ask the agent questions about it. It’ll likely process it either way.

Keyframe• 12 months ago

gemini CLI won't, but will if you ask it to.. so what are the guaranteed one of it's internal thinking steps doesn't do the same?

ericdallo• 12 months ago

Give it a try to https://github.com/editor-code-assistant/eca, I'm focusing on make the best tool for ai pair programming in Emacs

riskassessment• 12 months ago

Gptel has been working great for me. I'd be interested in checking this out but I only have so much time to set up and test new tools. What features would make it worthwhile to switch from gptel?

iLemming23• 12 months ago

You don't "switch" from gptel as this package solves a problem of a different dimension. Gptel is still great for tons of other things, even though it's not suitable for "project context-wise" LLM workflows.

azkae• 12 months ago

I am using macher for small edits on a codebase with gptel: https://github.com/kmontag/macher

The package define a list of tools that gptel can use to inspect and edit a project. The tools are packaged as a preset so all you have to do is add "@macher" to your prompt to include the tools & update the system directive.

Karrot_Kream6• 12 months ago

I'm really glad that emacs is integrating modern tooling like LSP and tree-sitter, now Claude Code, but this approach is showing its age. I'm an emacs user of 20 years and honestly it's getting hard to configure everything these days. Claude Code before the IDE integration was actually the easiest thing to get working (since it just worked and then auto-revert-mode keeps my buffers in sync.)

I'm on a new MacOS install for $WORK trying to get lsp and ts work with a Typescript/Go repo and after some $PATH wonkiness (my default shell is not the same shell as the one that emacs launches in) got typescript-ls working but gopls is still having issues being downloaded. I haven't spent the hour or two it would probably take to figure out why the in-built downloader can't put gopls in the right place.

I'm curious what emacs users are doing these days. I'm using Zed right now and really enjoying it but it's really hard to give up 20 years of emacs and I do love how emacs can scale from small one-off config file editing to huge projects and I love how configurable it is.

Is neovim better in this space? Should I be learning how to debug elisp better to understand how the commands interact with my environment? I've been using emacs keybindings (in Dvorak at that) for so long I don't know if I'd enjoy the neovim editing experience.

antipaul• 12 months ago

In macOS, I use the GUI Emacs from https://emacsformacosx.com/

Perhaps if you solve shell issues there once, they will stick.

Karrot_Kream6• 12 months ago

I'm running Homebrew's GUI Emacs which inherits from its opening shell. If I run GUI emacs from my shell then it inherits the environment of the shell so that seems to be doing okay.

I'm quite busy outside of work right now so I'll probably take a crack at this in a few weeks, but it's also dismaying how annoying it is to manage all the ts and lsp dependencies to make my projects work, let alone pointing the lsp to use the right package.json or go path or other things. I have no doubt that, in time, I can whack-a-mole the issues down. It does reduce my confidence in changing my environment because of how brittle the stack is. That's what makes me curious about the rest of the ecosystem.

Zed mostly works though I have had to configure it to use project-specific linter configs using somewhat underdocumented settings files. I'm curious if neovim is easier to get working because it's a smaller beast so easier to debug, but I also just don't know if I'd enjoy a switch to few-key modal editing from the chorded emacs style I love.

frumplestlatz• 12 months ago

For your particular shell issue:

https://github.com/purcell/exec-path-from-shell

It can extract PATH and other environment variables from your login shell configuration.

pxc5• 12 months ago

!! This seems really nice for macOS users! Less clunky than the "envfile" option Doom Emacs provides for sure.

I also recognize the author's name because I use their direnv integration package all the time! That one is great, too.

lelele• 12 months ago

> I'm curious what emacs users are doing these days.

Still using it because of the massive amount of customizations accumulated in a time span close to yours. I'm often tempted to switch, but if I look back, what other editor would have served me for ~20 years, mostly unchanged? I remember writing lots of macros for Visual Studio 6 and then Microsoft revamped the object system of their IDE with .NET. My understanding is that Visual Studio plugins may not work from an IDE version to the next. Yes, customizing Emacs requires time, but so does relearning a new environment every few years.

I do use other editors, however, for things that would require too much time to configure in Emacs, or for which I prefer a GUI interface. For example, at the moment I'm working on a C++ project in Emacs, yet for debugging and a Git GUI I have VSCode open.

> Is neovim better in this space?

Maybe, because of the bigger use base of NeoVim/Vim.

> Should I be learning how to debug elisp better to understand how the commands interact with my environment?

Definitely.

> I've been using emacs keybindings (in Dvorak at that)

Hi, mate! (^_^)

> for so long I don't know if I'd enjoy the neovim editing experience.

What? No [Neo]Vim user has ever ported Emacs keybinding to Insert Mode? O_o

Karrot_Kream6• 12 months ago

What? No [Neo]Vim user has ever ported Emacs keybinding to Insert Mode? O_o

I'm curious how fluid that is. My experience with Emacs keybindings has been, well, variable to say the least. Maybe the vim-alike folks can make better experiences. Readline's emacs bindings are a bit lacking but still fairly good for day-to-day usage.

iLemming23• 12 months ago

Should I be learning how to debug elisp better to understand how the commands interact with my environment?

Hell yeah, you should. I just don't understand how the heck people would claim to be using Emacs for decades and still not knowing how to use the built-in profiler, edebug, apropos, macro expansion, advising system, indirect buffers, etc.

They would complain how "fickle" Emacs is, without even realizing that they are literally operating a living, breathing, dynamic and malleable system. If there's a car that allows you to assemble some parts onto it and turn it into a submarine while you're still driving it, of course it would require you at least the knowledge of basic troubleshooting and the acceptance that shit may break at any point.

You have no idea how liberating the feeling is when you can pinpoint a problem, launch a gptel buffer and then ask Emacs to write some elisp for a hook or an advising function, you can even try the snippet in-place, without ever moving it anywhere.

These days I don't even try to strive for a "clean" config - it's modular enough and I can relatively easily navigate through it. Whenever I face a problem, I just add some elisp. When something breaks (usually due to upstream changes), I don't even get annoyed. Identifying a problem and finding a workaround doesn't take too long - typically minutes - and it doesn't even happen very often.

macintux2• 12 months ago

I just don't understand how the heck people would claim to be using Emacs for decades and still not knowing how to use the built-in profiler, edebug, apropos, macro expansion, advising system, indirect buffers, etc.

The second half of your message is interesting. The first half is needlessly condescending.

Karrot_Kream6• 12 months ago

Hell yeah, you should. I just don't understand how the heck people would claim to be using Emacs for decades and still not knowing how to use the built-in profiler, edebug, apropos, macro expansion, advising system, indirect buffers, etc.

Yes I'm familiar with apropos, macros/extensions, advising, indirect buffers, and a lot of stuff. I've just never debugged elisp mostly because I haven't had a hard time just iterating on elisp to make it work and have never bothered debugging packages I've installed. I've put off learning edebug because for the most part I've used the "Lisp debugging" part of my brain on SBCL and Common Lisp. It's just one of those "do I really need to shave this yak?" kind of things and until now it's been no.

Sounds like edebug is the next elisp frontier for me, thanks.

(Btw your comment is a bit condescending sounding but I actually love reading your emacs comments on HN because your enthusiasm for emacs is great.)

You have no idea how liberating the feeling is when you can pinpoint a problem, launch a gptel buffer and then ask Emacs to write some elisp for a hook or an advising function, you can even try the snippet in-place, without ever moving it anywhere.

Yes absolutely this though. I've been having a lot of fun with gptel and in general I have all sorts of fun bindings that do exactly what I want to do. There's a reason I don't want to give up emacs and it's this ability to write elisp and wrangle text.

When something breaks (usually due to upstream changes), I don't even get annoyed. Identifying a problem and finding a workaround doesn't take too long - typically minutes - and it doesn't even happen very often.

I'll be honest, my interest in dealing with this kind of thing greatly varies based on what's going on in my life at the time. Sometimes I'll be locked in and go on a deep binge to optimize my environments. Other times I find it very painful. Maintaining an emacs config has always been quite annoying but I put up with it because the power and customizability of the whole thing is unparalleled.

(The fact that an editor like Cursor is a proprietary fork of an open codebase that restricts you to the team's vision is, uh, honestly pretty silly to me. Like why? I can write code can't I? Guess that means I need to maintain configuration but I'd rather do that than use Cursor any day.)

nextaccountic• 12 months ago

Note, Zed now has integration with Claude Code too[0], as an alternative to its own native agent (which funds Zed itself)

[0] https://github.com/jiahaoxiang2000/claude-code-zed

alwillis• 12 months ago

Neovim editing has come a long way; you go from barebones (no plugins) to full-blown IDE and everything in between.

There are lots of pre-configured Neovim distributions if you don't want to roll your own, such as LazyVim [1].

There are lots of AI plugins for Neovim [2].

[1] https://www.lazyvim.org/

[2] https://github.com/rockerBOO/awesome-neovim?tab=readme-ov-fi...

monooso• 12 months ago

I have no idea why you're being downvoted.

donaldihunter• 12 months ago

I'm curious what emacs users are doing these days.

Using Emacs for pretty much everything. Org (w/ babel) for most of my notes, blogs, presentations and todo lists. Magit for everything git. Gnus for keeping up with the linux kernel mailing list firehose. LSPs for C, Python, Go, Rust. Tide for typescript. I use aider and aidermacs for my AI pair programming. Haven't tried Claude Code yet but it's on my todo list because everyone raves about it. I even use mastodon.el, and Circe for IRC.

I use macOS native emacs built from source, currently 31.0.50. The largest project I work with is the Linux kernel which I edit remotely using Magit and LSP over TRAMP.

pxc5• 12 months ago

I'm curious what emacs users are doing these days.

Integrating with a new language ecosystem is a significant amount of work for me because it involves making choices about what packages to configure and how, and which external dependencies to go with (e.g., which LSP server to use). I try to make those choices carefully, and for a lot of projects I touch in only a dabbler in those languages. It takes time to figure out.

But for actually managing external dependencies (LSP servers, linters, static analyzers, etc.), I use Nix (in particular devenv.sh) and direnv so that Emacs doesn't have to download them; it just finds them on the path. I also sometimes configure those tools via Devenv as well, creating an in-repo RC file for them and pointing to it with an appropriate environment variable. Then my configuration lives in source control and the rest of my team can use the same tools regardless of editor choice.

Karrot_Kream6• 12 months ago

Yes Nix is also something I've been thinking of diving into with emacs to solve this issue. What's your experience been running Nix on non-Linux targets? I mostly use MacOS and FreeBSD outside of Linux, primarily MacOS.

wwarner2• 12 months ago

I run emacs in docker to manage these issues https://github.com/wwarner/emacs-native-dockerfiles

komali27• 12 months ago

I'm curious what emacs users are doing these days.

8 years user here so still an emacs noobie, but I switched to nvim two months ago and haven't opened emacs in a month. Just slapped on lazy.vim and have been toggling the different AI tools in LazyExtras.

I do find the ecosystem a lot better in nvim and it seems the community around nvim is more publicly engaged with new AI tooling - check out ThePrimeagen for example.

iLemming23• 12 months ago

8 years user here so still an emacs noobie, but I switched to nvim

I don't know man, whenever I see comments like this, I just don't get it - there's just no "switching" for me personally to anything, like ever, I just don't even see the possibility for it.

The question that always gets me is like: "were you just using it like ... I don't know to edit text? That's all you've done with it?..."

I have no idea how would I be able to do my things in anything else, whatever that is - Nvim, Sublime, Helix, etc.

- How would I control video playback from my editor while taking notes?

- How would I annotate PDFs?

- Or, create and manage Anki cards - my flashcards are just my notes, they don't require a different medium to exist.

- Or how would I test APIs - I don't need to use stuff like Postman - all my endpoint investigations are in my notes. Documented and perfectly reproducible.

- How would I manage my dotfiles? I use Org-babel for it and it makes my entire system immutable - is it better than Nix? I dunno, it just works and it's simple.

- What would I use for file management? I just wrote a wrapper that uses rsync to move large files around, how would I ever do anything like this in other than Emacs? How would I mark all the files that are over 1GB, older than three months and match a given regexp?

- In Emacs, I can move my cursor to a piece of plain text like "RFC 959", "SAC-28410", or "my-org/some-service#182" and immediately start reading shit - it intelligently recognizes that the first one is an RFC document, another is a Jira ticket and the third one is a Pull-request on GitHub.

- I can type a single query and simultaneously search for it on Wikipedia, Google, YouTube, GitHub, Hacker News or my own browser history, and I wouldn't even know how to do that in something that's not Emacs.

- In Emacs I can type a shell command and pipe results into a buffer, or pipe the content of a buffer to a shell command.

- In Emacs, my color theme changes depending on time of the day, because Emacs has built-in lunar and solar calendars.

- How would I read and manage my email in Helix?

- How would I track time? Clock in/out of tasks, generate time reports, do pomodoros?

- How would I search, browse and read Hacker News and Reddit?

- How would I create presentations?

- How would I test database queries?

- How would I manage Docker containers?

- How would I read man pages?

- How do I translate text?

- And how would I interact with LLMs?

...

Nope, there's no "switching" for me. It's just not possible. My entire life is woven into this text-based operating system. My thoughts, my work, my communications, my entertainment - they all exist as interconnected plain text that I can grep, link, transform, and version control. Every keystroke I've memorized, every workflow I've perfected, every piece of data that references another - it would take years to rebuild this in whatever there might be, and I'd still be left with a pale imitation. Emacs isn't just where I edit text; it's where I live.

__MatrixMan__3• 12 months ago

The path pain sounds to me like a job for nix. If a dependency is not ready at hand, the fix should be a single code change in the project, not separate environment fixes for each dev.

_flux• 12 months ago

Btw, LLMs are actually quite helpful for configuring Emacs, in particular for creating custom functionality..

But yeah, I broke my home Emacs setup somehow so that rust-mode no longer works in some situations. I have my config in git, though, so maybe I'll figure it out!

At least I've started migrating to use use-package for configuration, to bring some structure to the configuration.

Zed does seem rather interesting, but I don't ever see it being as configurable/extensible at runtime as Emacs. I suppose one could always just implement such features into the Zed itself; I presume its code is not too indimidating, given it's a modern code base and not likely to break in unexpected ways.

fergie• 12 months ago

Typescript

If Typescript is a big part of what you need to deal with on a daily basis, then at some point it makes sense just to use VSCode. And BTW, thats totally by design and a part of Microsoft's developer aquisition strategy.

b5n• 12 months ago

`use-package` has pretty much simplified everything:

  ;; c
  (use-package c-mode
    :ensure nil
    :defer t
    :mode "\\.cu?\\'"
    :config (setq c-default-style "gnu"
                  c-basic-offset 2)
    :hook ((c-mode . lsp)
           (c-mode . bmacs-ide)))

globular-toast2• 12 months ago

Use-package can even install third party packages automatically. Definitely worth learning. I converted my .emacs a few years ago. I'm using borg[0] to install stuff though because I like git.

[0] https://github.com/emacscollective/borg

megaloblasto3• 12 months ago

This is awesome. I love emacs and I love integrating AI into my coding work flow.

What I really want is to be able to run something like this locally for, say, less than $2000 in computer hardware. Is this feasible now or any time soon. Anyone out there using agents with local models for coding?

iLemming23• 12 months ago

gptel supports all sorts of models, including localized ones.

calebkaiser• 12 months ago

There's a lot of great work both around supporting memory efficient inference (like on a closer-to-consumer machine), as well as on open source code-focused models.

A lot of people are excited about the Qwen3-Coder family of models: https://huggingface.co/collections/Qwen/qwen3-coder-687fc861...

For running locally, there are tools like Ollama and LM Studio. Your hardware needs will fluctuate depending on what size/quantization of model you try to run, but 2k in hardware cost is reasonable for running a lot of models. Some people have good experiences using the M-series Macs, which is probably a good bang-for-buck if you're exclusively interested in inference.

I'd recommend checking out the LocalLlamas subreddit for more: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/

Getting results on par with big labs isn't feasible, but if you prefer to run everything locally, it is a fun and doable project.

megaloblasto3• 12 months ago

Awesome. Great info, thanks

Is this just a fun project for now, or could I actually benefit from it in terms of software production like I do with tools like claude code?

I am interested in carefully tailoring it to specific projects, integrating curated personal notes, external documentation, scientific papers, etc via RAG (this part I've already written), and carefully chosing the tools available to the agent. If I hand tailor the AI agents to each project, can I expect to get something perhaps similar to the performance boost of Claude code for $2000 (USD)?

If not $2000, then how much would I need? I'm pretty sure for something like $75000 I could do this with a large deep seek model locally, and certainly get something very close to claude code, right?

oblio2• 12 months ago

1. MacMini.

or:

2. https://frame.work/es/en/desktop

3. https://marketplace.nvidia.com/en-us/developer/dgx-spark/ => https://marketplace.nvidia.com/en-us/reservations/ (cheapest is 3k)

komali27• 12 months ago

At Computex here they had a demo running some local model on a cluster of 4 framework desktops. It certainly generated text! Just about one character of it a second.

wwarner2• 12 months ago

This is great, and I need it and will use it, but what I need even more is some kind of integration with org mode (or just note taking generally). I found out the hard way that github/copilot deletes conversations after 30 days! So much for building a knowledge base with an AI assistant! I really need something a bit like Goog's `notebookllm` for capturing research, except I'd like to control it locally.

radarsat1• 12 months ago

There is ob-aider, maybe interesting for you to try.

https://github.com/emacsmirror/ob-aider

banjomonster• 12 months ago

Try gptel-mode - your chats are in org buffers, and you can save/restore sessions easily. Also plays nicely with mcp.el for more tooling access.

JohnKemeny• 12 months ago

gptel-mode (I have it at C-c L) is great!

epistasis• 12 months ago

See also this other integration of Claude Code for emacs:

https://github.com/cpoile/claudemacs

crat3r• 12 months ago

I feel like I still have yet to see any decent answers to this question; Are professional SDE paying for Claude on their own dime, and then logging into their personal account and somehow integrating Claude Code (or other LLMs) into their work repos that way?

The startup I work for has chosen their flavor of AI subscription and its frankly not developer focused. Instead they chose Google because of the productivity tools in the Google App suite.

I want to try Claude Code but the reality is that I don't want to be the martyr that tells my team lead that I want to see if AI can do (parts of) my job for me. It feels pretty sketchy or maybe even completely wrong to use something like this on a company repo I don't own without permissions, so I haven't done it. I suppose I will just have to continue to wonder if the agentic coding services are smoke and mirrors because I somehow don't know anyone who has used them extensively either and I have no clue when I will be able to use one with the strings attached of it being on a free-tier...

ceuk• 12 months ago

Yes I pay for the most expensive Claude sub with my own money and use it at work.

I also have to use it via a proxy server I set up to get around the corporate firewall which explicitly blocks it. The company like the results but wouldn't like how I get them..

More corporate ridiculousness

komali27• 12 months ago

Our company set up some kind of Wise debit card thing where we each get our own number, and they told us "try out any AI tool you want."

So I subscribe to a new one every month to try out while still shoveling like 150$/mo at Claude cause it's consistently been the best and the one I use the most. Cursor as well has been good for their completion model which surpasses anything else I've tried for inline/multiline/jump completions.

But I've also tried supermaven, codeium/windsurf, copilot, zed. I guess from the company's perspective, a couple hundred bucks a month is well worth the time of keeping us all up to date with ai tooling.

xvfLJfx9• 12 months ago

I hope one day we can have the same thing for the helix editor.

asawfofor• 12 months ago

Might SWE agents converge on an inclusive set of APIs that Editors and IDEa could adapt to?

eschaton• 12 months ago

Unfortunate to see more of this horseshit.

submeta• 12 months ago

I love(d) Emacs a lot a few years ago. Until my job and obligations didn’t leave me much room for tinkering. There is an inverse relationship between tinkering and getting things done. Although LLMs changed the game: These days I leave the tinkering to Claude Code. And can change every aspect of my tools within seconds. No waste of time, max output. But I still moved away. why? Because I believe the Emacs way is wrong. And here’s why: If I‘d do all my computing in Emacs, I‘d miss out on MailMate as a mail app, on Ghostty as my terminal, on Nvim as an editor, Python as my automation language (instead of Elisp where buffer is the data type used most?) and so much more. I like the Unix way: Do one thing, and do it really good: fzf, ripgrep, yazi, lazygit, absolutely awesome apps for the console. And all can communicate with each other via pipes! So I moved away, and never was happier.

efitz• 12 months ago

Why?

I’m trying to imagine the Venn diagram of “developers adopting agentic coding” and “developers who use emacs as their IDE”.

Of course I’m going to get swarmed with anecdotes, but my intuition is that there’s just not a lot of overlap.

scripper1• 12 months ago

Haha. Yeah I feel they’re exact opposites. Emacs is so DIY/wanting to control your experience and create the perfect tool for you.

aylons• 12 months ago

I've been using gemini for writing my init.el So many ideas so little time, I'm glad I have the chance

sakesun• 12 months ago

Yes. Emacs with AI coding will be a dream come true to me.

elif• 12 months ago

Yes, the singularity will happen in emacs.

7e3• 12 months ago

It's interesting that AI fulfilled for the common user—through vibe coding—the mission which GNU/FSF could not: the freedom to create any software you want at any time. And it's ironic that of all of the software used to create AIs (like PyTorch and NVIDIA's CUDA stack), none of it was licensed GPL, though plenty of it is OSS. GNU is no longer relevant and, compared to MIT and BSD licenses, really never was. RIP FSF.

anonzzzies• 12 months ago

Emacs mcp with Claude code driving it? Or is this different as that is what it should be: CC just sending elisp to the mcp and nothing else. Imho that is. Emacs is perfect for it.

cryptos• 12 months ago

If Windows has Copilot built in, then it is obvious that the Emacs operating system needs something similar! ;-)

mshanu• 12 months ago

i suppose if llm is doing most of the coding going forward, IDEs become less relevant i suppose

zastai0day• 12 months ago

What's its monetization?

horns4lyfe• 12 months ago

I don’t really see the point, but it’s certainly interesting

dangoodmanUT• 12 months ago

A hn post getting more upvotes than it got stars on github speaks volumes about upvote intent

Claude Code IDE integration for Emacs

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