alt Hacker News50 years old and feels more modern than any of the crap folks try to sell you "as the editor of the future". Emacs is the true editor of the past, present and distant future.
Modal editing was supposed to pull users away - Evil mode made vimming better. LSPs were supposed to kill it - only made it better. Electron-based crap was supposed to make terminal-native editors look ancient with a built-in terminal, extensions, and a polished UI. Emacs got vterm, eat, and ghostel. GitKraken-like GUIs were supposed to make the git CLI unnecessary. Magit is widely considered better than any git client that exists, GUI or not. Tree-sitter was supposed to require a "real" language server architecture to get accurate parsing. Emacs 29 absorbed it natively, and font-lock, indentation, and structural navigation across major modes got noticeably better. Obsidian and Notion keep trying to overcome it - Org-mode just keeps getting better. AI was supposed to make it outdated - only enhanced it.
For half a century, humanity has been searching for an Emacs-killer. All the while, Emacs has been a killer app all along.
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Yes, Emacs was designed almost perfectly 50 years ago to integrate with modern LLMs.
Agreed with all of this! To date, agent-shell.el is my favorite AI coding experience.
I will say in regards to the electron editors, wrangling emacs frames and windows can range from a chore to painful. That is one area we can still improve on!
According to `git blame` the oldest surviving code in GNU emacs is:
being unchanged since 1986-09-12.(It is said the Stallman maybe have kept some of Gosling's older code but I haven't gone back that far.)