alt Hacker NewsI lived in Emacs for most of my professional live, but IDEs and now Claude have taken over. Sad, but perhaps justified? Back in my academia days, there was much less pressure to use a uniform tech setup across staff, so people were happily using Emacs, or vim, or whatever -- and frankly, there was never any issue because of that.
But I can see there is a value (mostly for the admins, but also for debugging if you work collaboratively in a team) in enforcing the same setup for everyone. Sigh. Strangely, I could never convince my coworkers to ditch their IDEs for Emacs.
Replies
sporedro • today at 3:25 PM
With Claude it feels like you don’t need IDE’s anymore though. emacs/vim are more relevant than ever imo.
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csheaff • today at 5:07 PM
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> IDEs and now Claude have taken over
100% completely opposite experience. Emacs is hands down the king of any kind of text-manipulation. And not only on the composition side. Most editors and IDEs are focused on the composition side of things - making text, adjusting text, amending text. And code btw, is nothing but structured text.
Emacs opens gates for text consumption - I'm reading this entire HN thread in Emacs, just like I consume Jira, Slack, Telegram, Reddit; control YT vids, my browser tabs and history, etc. I search through Splunk and Datadog logs, Wiktionary entries and just general googling - all done in Emacs. I browse million-line codebases on GH without ever having to clone them. If there's a piece of any kind of text in the computational vicinity to my active Emacs instance - this laptop and all connectable devices, I can easily make use of it.
And this gets incredibly important in the age of LLMs. I can read, manipulate, navigate, search through, diff, sort, group, slice, dice, salt and pepper any kind of text. Give me just about any other editor instead and I immediately will feel handicapped.
IDEs that are not malleable (by design) are at an exact disadvantage. I can change any aspect of my editor in the middle of typing this very comment without ever losing the state, the context, or my mental focus. No IDE even hypothetically capable of doing any of that.