Posted by internet_points 10 hours ago
For LLM stuff I’ve been using eca, or claude code in a vterm or ghostel. I’m still experimenting with this stuff but I don’t think emacs is getting in my way. Not sure if I’d recommend to everyone, though.
I regret ever using X/Emacs for 5 years with two reasons.
The biggest reason is, I have arthritis on my left pinky thanks to Emacs. Now I need to use an expensive ergo keyboards (thumb for ctrls)
The second reason being, vi is what I am forced to use for many linux default editors. I never learned it, and always look up google for commands.
(optionally, extending Emacs is pain as I never understood the point of lisp).
And I used Emacs (on Linux) this morning.
Let me know if you remember the DEC20 and the dreaded “not running” message that happened to everyone in the room when it went down.
Also interested if you remember Gosling Emacs, the first rewrite for Unix. James Gosling of Java fame.
The most important software missing from the new Encore UNIX (Umax) was MM- the TOPS-20 integrated mail and bulletin board program. A friend of mine wrote "bboard" a campus messaging system as a replacement (this was soon replaced with USENET). It had a bad integrated editor, so I wrote my own editor as its replacement, this became the editor JOE. Even so, Emacs was always there as the counter-example. In those days, Emacs was large and slow and had a limited file size, and it was easy to do better if you weren't focused on extensibility.
I don't remember "not running", but I certainly do remember those annoying "garbage collecting... done." messages in C Emacs. The eventual solution from the mid 90s was kind of awesome: improve the garbage collector? No: Just stop showing the message.
I remember getting a DOS port of Gosling Emacs on floppy disk at a computer show (there was always somebody selling "shareware" at those). I lost that disk, and for a long time had no access to the Gosmacs source code, but eventually someone sent it to me. Sadly, we can not share it- James Gosling closed it. Some other Emacsen: MicroEmacs, Epsilon, JOVE and JED.
Is JOE still your own daily driver, or do you use something else now?
Emacs is still my main editor over ssh, so I happen to use it on a regular basis, and the commands are all imprinted on my fingers' muscle memory, so that's quite the comfort zone.
Happy Emacs anniversary to everyone!
And we've also seen how legacy systems refuse to die :(
When I first started using Emacs, my dad gave me his config. (Yes, I actually experienced https://xkcd.com/297/ irl.) A few years ago a friend of mine asked for some help getting a simpler Emacs setup—they wanted to move off of Doom Emacs. I made Bedrock as a bare-bones starting point that focuses on built-in customization and understandability. Even if you're comfortable in your own setup, you might find something useful in the files there. :)
Same in both places. Bliss