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Posted by rdslw 1 day ago

The Emacsification of Software(sockpuppet.org)
319 points | 207 commentspage 3
theletterf 4 hours ago|
Had somewhat related thoughts on this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48035796 (Most vibe-coded tools are not for you)
tuo-lei 17 hours ago||
i've made maybe 20 personal LLM tools this year. 3 survived past the first week. not because the rest weren't useful, just wasn't willing to debug them when something broke.
alex_smart 17 hours ago||
Which is where the "emacsification" analogy breaks for me.

The reason people who like emacs write their one-off program in emacs is that it is an extraordinarily introspectable and debuggable programming environment. There is no "code, compile, run" loop - you just write code against the live running environment. Devoid of that fast feedback loop, writing code just isn't as much fun.

jr_isidore 16 hours ago||
Well taken, but for MANY years, I copied and pasted elisp snippets off stackoverflow without understanding any of it. And to this day, there as many xkcd-style "space heaters" as there are emacs users. OP's point stands that LLMs make possible a new generation of quicker, dirtier hacks destined for the cruft heap.
tptacek 17 hours ago|||
What were the three?
ctrl4 17 hours ago||
Not OP: - One shotted script that I schedule through cron that sends me a message when a new one piece manga chapter releases. - Also a simple script that moves my cursor one pixel every 30 seconds. Cannot disclose why I need this.
rmnull 3 hours ago||
>> Also a simple script that moves my cursor one pixel every 30 seconds. Cannot disclose why I need this.

Hehe. Definitely not to avoid the company micro time tracking their employees.

alexzhaosheng 3 hours ago||
[dead]
lxgr 5 hours ago||
Markdown syntax highlighting is nice, but at this point I’d be very happy if software could just consistently open .md files as plain text.

I have my Obsidian vault synced to Google Drive, and it’s completely impossible to just look at the files in it via the web interface. iOS support is also more than lacking.

nemoniac 15 hours ago||
Interesting article.

When my Emacs opens a markdown file it immediately converts it into OrgMode format. I find that more readable, more navigable and more editable.

Now I'll have to go and meditate about Emacsification.

frumiousirc 1 hour ago||
> When my Emacs opens a markdown file it immediately converts it into OrgMode format.

I want that. Can you give some details?

A search finds modeverv/markdown-to-org which looks 80% there but activates based on a yank or converting an already loaded markdown buffer. Perhaps it can be made to apply on opening a .md file.

iLemming 14 hours ago||
I know, right? Org-mode is soooo much more practical. imenu works great, sparse-trees are awesome, you can edit pretty much any part¹ in an indirect buffer and all. These days I try to consume anything that can be fit into an outline, in org-mode - hackernews², reddit³, slack⁴, jira boards and tickets⁵, wiktionary entries⁶, etc.

Fun anecdote - I once needed to sort some nested items in a big yaml file. After spending three minutes trying to understand sort-regexp-fields (or some other function), I cheated - I ran org-mode, and then org-sort and then went back to yaml-mode. So stupid, yet so brilliant. Why the heck would I ever want to use "first-class IDE" or "intuitive, plebeian editor" if Emacs has anything I could possibly imagine? Right at my fingertips.

___

¹ https://github.com/agzam/org-edit-indirect.el

² https://github.com/thanhvg/emacs-hnreader/

³ https://github.com/thanhvg/emacs-reddigg

⁴ https://github.com/agzam/slacko.el

⁵ https://github.com/agzam/go-jira.el

⁶ https://github.com/agzam/wiktionary-bro.el

codazoda 14 hours ago||
Lots of interesting takes that I think I disagree with here, although I mostly write Markdown rather than read it:

> they’re hamstrung by the terminal itself, which is almost always monospaced and thus fatiguing to read.

I recently re-built Blue, a minimalist text editor inspired by the Turbo Pascal and Turbo Basic editors of the late 1990's. It uses a fixed width font, because I prefer it.

https://github.com/codazoda/blue

noosphr 11 hours ago||
It is rather funny that the article talks about markdown when everyone who uses Emacs uses org mode instead.

My .emacs file is init.el which is actually init.org, which isn't an Emacs file but a literate program that's half a guix installation script and half a regular .emacs file.

Also kill all markdown. Replace it with xml or better yet SXML.

tom_ 11 hours ago|
I've always found it easier to collaborate using markdown. It's much more popular than org-mode! And you can get org to export text as markdown, so interop isn't necessarily even all that difficult.

And as per the general theme of the post anyway: whatever. Because you can just work around it, whatever it is, by cobbling together some code, one way or another.

ngriffiths 12 hours ago||
Wow, this really changes how I think about working with software and with LLMs. Sharing ideas and amateur remixing and setting up something weird for you and your friends is so much easier now. Things you had to have lots of time and expertise to do before are just widely accessible now.
monk_grilla 12 hours ago||
I can’t be the only one for whom `vim README.md` is perfectly good. I’ve never considered the monospaced font a limitation, I prefer it. Coloured rendering works great and is all the visual aid I need to parse quickly.

I can see a table of contents being useful though. Perhaps if `:Toc` doesn’t exist yet, it should.

QuercusMax 11 hours ago|
markdown tables are the only thing that's really rough to read, IMO
rgoulter 11 hours ago||
> What matters are the ideas, the observation that “yeah, you can do that, and it’ll work well”. > > For the kinds of software I’m talking about, you want the prompts more than you want the source code.

Right.

In a broad sense, programming is about managing complexity/information. Constructing interfaces/abstractions in order to choose which details are useful for an interface (& which can be ignored).

The 'magical' parts of LLMs is being able to get useful output from unstructured/messy inputs.

It's kindof surprising that this has an impact on programming: it changes a lot ("write me an app that does this" becomes feasible for 'small' things), but in some sense, the fundamental problems remain.

killerstorm 14 hours ago|
Unfortunately ~all software stacks in use now lack stability. They are all optimized for commercial software shops where weekly update of dependencies is just the routine.
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