alt Hacker News> 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.
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Don't get me wrong, I totally agree with you re: text manipulation. That's exactly why I find it so frustrating that it's basically frowned upon in my current job. I do use it still, but must do so pretty much secretly at work.
At home, it's a different story.
I believe, Emacs is considered unprofessional in a lot of places?!
And with llm-buddy [1] everything I type in emacs gets sent to an LLM, which makes it even more valuable to do more things in emacs.
Good point that navigating, searching and reading text is perhaps even more important than editing in the age of LLMs.