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On one hand, AI boosts Emacs development. On the other hand, as an Emacs user of 30 years, I have always felt that the number of people who deeply grasp Emacs Lisp and Emacs' internals is really small against the population of people merely using Emacs and lightly hacking their own setup, and I worry AI is not going to encourage any growth in that small elite that seems kinda important for Emacs' long-term future.

It is is unreal how I can ask claude, from within emacs, to implement an extension for me on the fly, inject it into the running process, have it observe the results, and quickly iterate to a working solution.

Claude, the ultimate REPL.

35 years in my case, thanks to Jean-Jacques Lévy of INRIA. But Emacs was started by James Gosling, not Stallman.

I've been getting into emacs somewhat recently and really enjoying it so far, though I do worry a bit about how much it can do and whether it will lead to any sort of "oops, you opened a project that had a thing that autoexecs or exploits a parser and now you're pwned". I know that's not a unique problem to emacs, but it feels like the enormous amount of things emacs can do gives it a bigger attack surface for that (and I don't know my way around it well enough yet to be confident that I've looked at all the places that might happen)

Maybe the solution is that I should just be running the entire thing in a sandbox in any case.

I am too young to be in the 30 year club but Emacs has served me well for more than a decade. I don't use it as a daily driver anymore but it holds a special place in my heart.

Using magit made me believe again that really good software can exist and that there are really great designers still among us.

Also super agree that Stallman's original ideas are only ever more increasingly valid. I will generously say that Stallman has been an imperfect messenger but the core message has always been solid. I have not regretted my FSF membership over the years.

I like it infinitely more than anything, but it also still feels like a comparably slow, crufty pos that will probably die because of how anti-AI half the core community is. Regardless of how good magit is, it's slow.

I also can't understand how people like eca and agent-shell so much unless they've never actually used any decent harness. Neither seems to really fit with emacs. Acp is the exact opposite of extensible, and eca isn't really extensible either.

According to `git blame` the oldest surviving code in GNU emacs is:

    lisp/play/studly.el

(It is said the Stallman maybe have kept some of Gosling's older code but I haven't gone back that far.)

Agreed with all of this! To date, agent-shell.el is my favorite AI coding experience.

Yes, Emacs was designed almost perfectly 50 years ago to integrate with modern LLMs.

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!

Kinda, I don't mind having quite a few packages but they are mostly self-contained in their use-package blocks. This way even if things go wrong it's usually just one package I gotta remove and not something that's intertwined with the whole config.

Using emacs for 4-5 years now and it's been a fantastic experience so far.

I've been using emacs for ~15 years. I don't now what is considered lean. My init is 343 lines. Probably removing all the comments and junk collected over the years it is likely ~200 that actually does anything useful at this point, I should probably clean up. I use emacs everyday. I get the desire to want to do everything in emacs but I also don't. It is good at what it does, it happens to do other things too but I don't know if that is the best way to work.

> keep their Emacs configs/setup "lean"

With my last bankruptcy where I tried to dissect my 12K LOC config to identify the bloat and the crap I no longer needed, I found very few pieces that weren't used. Turns out, my config was already modular and lean, in the sense that everything I had there had a practical reason to be in there.

Once I started using LLMs to deal with Emacs, I decided to add a bunch of tests to run them in CI, just to prevent regressions. My config since then has grown to 26K LOC + 35K of tests. I consume 250 third-party packages, plus about 100 built-in libs.

My Emacs starts and loads within a second. I have no problems such as freezing, breaking or leaking memory. With all this stuff I have in it, it can run for days and weeks and its memory usage on Mac stays within a comparable range with the Slack app - around 500MB.

I never understood this obsession with keeping Emacs lean. Bruh, throw some shit into it, let it burn, it'll chug on any large amount of Lisp and still give you the smoothest ride ever. What's the point of keeping a colossal beast under a mountain and feeding it a low-calorie diet? It's like digital abuse. Emacs these days is capable of rendering Doom-level graphics, it's offending to use it like notepad.exe.

> Is anybody here consciously trying to keep their Emacs configs/setup "lean", minimalist, as small as possible?

Me too, for some reason. I've been using Emacs for 8 years and my init.el is 94 lines long. I guess the defaults mostly work for me.

I usually just use Prelude for some modern defaults

I ran Emacs for ~25 years with almost no custom configuration. I could not be bothered, and the defaults were great

In the last decade I have started to add configuration. When GPT-3 became available, and I did not have to learn Elisp (another f%^&*n computer language - with no other use) I have extensively configured my Emacs

My point is it is very usable with no config

> though the minimalist in me always whined that "an editor" should not weigh 100+ megabytes

Heh. At work many in our department installed a (voluntary) tool that logs the apps we have in memory, and how much RAM they consume.[1]

My manager came to me and said "Your Emacs is taking 8GB of RAM?!"

Guess we should call it EGACS now.[2]

I had an LLM do some debug and it turned out my copy of Emacs is a bit buggy in MacOS. Every time I open a new frame, and then close it, it doesn't release a lot of GUI related stuff. Over several weeks, this leak adds up. I open new frames multiple times a day.

And of course, I got the LLM to make a package I can load in Emacs that cleans it all up without needing to quit.

After cleanup, it's taking "only" 1.5 GB of RAM.

[1] Company is dramatically reducing the amount of RAM on new laptops, so we want to gather data to show it's too little RAM.

[2] For those who don't get it, a common joke decades ago was that Emacs stood for Eight Megabytes and Constantly Swapping. Back when 8MB RAM was huge.

> Is anybody here consciously trying to keep their Emacs configs/setup "lean", minimalist, as small as possible?

I tried but most of my config is just variable settings (with the use-package macro). I don’t really have custom code there. If I do think about a feature, I tried to build a package instead (like one for bridging subsonic and emms).

Native compilation is now default, so elisp is much faster than it was out of the box.

Tree-sitter support is quite smooth now, with automatic grammar installation.

Apparently very good Android support.

Canvas support is in master, people are building all kinds of crazy stuff[0] with this

Lots of nice built-in packages like modus themes, eglot, which-key. Editable grep/xref/occur results is also built-in now. New context menu things.

Load the "newcomer-presets" theme to enable stuff that newcomers tend to want enabled (tab bar, fancy completion, lots of little things).

[0] e.g. https://monadicsheep.org/blog/an-introduction-to-canvas-in-e..., and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61-uNV9N154 / https://github.com/yibie/exc.el

> biggest things that have come out

Just ask Claude or whatever to hook up gptel and eca (or agent-shell). You don't even need to read anything, just literally talk to the LLM. The first step is to get to the point where agents can change Emacs from the inside out - and then, that opens the floodgates for any ideas.

Just yesterday I decided to make it possible to detach a video I'm watching (and of course controlling directly from Emacs) from my browser. The active YT video stops playing in the browser, loads mpv, and seamlessly continues, while keeping the time, speed, and volume. It's now possible with the new Canvas API to play videos directly in Emacs; at some point I may try to figure that out. Why? Well, just because I can. With Emacs, the limit is your imagination and nothing else.

Craziest thing? I never had to restart, recompile, rebuild anything. I was watching a video, thought: "hmm, a floating window would be nice..."; without missing a beat, just typed the prompt and made that happen within minutes.

not big but i'm still happy about how it allowed me to build a really expressive musical tracker with micro-tonality implemented by default. partly by Csound score paradigm but we also have an interesting macros, a scale paradigm for adding notes and real-time p-field information

[0] https://github.com/luqtas/csound-score-emacs

About two or three months ago I ditched Neovim as all the complicated modern crap wasn't working for me, and instead of reverting to Vim, I switched to Emacs and Doom + eVil, and am relieved to be back in a nice stable system again. I did ask GPT to port over my key commands and shortcuts, which it did, and things are great again!

Stallman’s Principle:

The extension language should be a full featured programming language in its own right capable of creating substantial applications because that is something people will want to do!

I wish every application worth putting a plugin system in it followed this philosophy.

I named my cat Emacs, and he's only three years old. His sister's name is Pip.

And to answer the question I get a lot: no, it would be morally reprehensible to name a cat after an inferior editor such as "vi".

A coworker of mine launched a Windows port (clone?) of emacs when he came in for the day, and never left it for the entire workday --- always envied him his facility with that, but never quite got comfortable with it (and even in a fit of pique gave away a printed copy of the LISP manual which I kind of regret now).

The ironic thing is I've been fascinated by similar graphical efforts such as the Glamorous Toolkit.

Also:

Interview with an Emacs Enthusiast [Colorized]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urcL86UpqZc

Deldo - Vibration Control and Teledildonics Mode for Emacs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1sXuHnf_lo

You’re taking this way too seriously.

I was lucky enough to have access to TOPS-20 at WPI in 1986 - 1988 (The DEC-20 was replaced with an Encore Multimax running UNIX as the student mainframe). TOPS-20 had a bunch of editors, I tried them all. I remember TVI, TECO and EDT, but I'm sure there were more. I already had experience with WordStar (C and assembly language programming on a PC) and various line editors, so although I used it, I never became an Emacs fanatic.

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.

Anyone that wishes the death of Intel/AMD, will dearly miss the PC clones.

or, maybe more hopefully, Windows as a whole becomes a legacy platform soon :)

> I don't know LISP (any LISP!) at all

I'm a Lisper. I switch between Lisp dialects, sometimes multiple times a day. Since I got my LLM harness to work from inside of Emacs I no longer need to even look at Lisp that it generates for my config.

It is very justified use of AI - if anything breaks, it breaks for me, and mostly just for me. And whenever something doesn't work as expected - I don't even try to debug it anymore - my harness has introspective capabilities - it can run the profiler, monitor changing vars, debug and just fix things.

Now is the best time to try Emacs. If people before could complain that Lisp is weird and not easy to grok, it's not a valid complaint anymore.

Been using Emacs for 37 years. Didn't start learning Elisp until 6 years ago. It's never too late. Wrote an Elisp Cheatsheet for Python Programmers, which helped me level up. Perhaps this might as helpful to you.

https://kickingvegas.github.io/elisp-for-python/

I find it interesting actually. Not embarrassing. You mastered the feature layer more than I. I went into lisp with dreams of making my own features but turns out I was quite limited.

Different psychologies

You're doing it right. When I was gainfully employed, emacs was purely a black-box means to a greater end, i.e., promotions and added responsibility. In my premature retirement, the vortex of emacs became an end unto itself. Believe me, I'd happily trade my emacs expertise for a more meaningful pursuit.

I've been using emacs everyday for the last 25ish years. Although I do read elisp and occasionally write some, I'm far from fluent. You do not need to know lisp to use emacs (although it is funny you didn't pickup some just by osmosis).

We have finite time in our lives. I'd argue it's eminently reasonable to spend time on things other that Emacs' guts, unless that's what tickles your interest.

You may be the most productive emacs user.

emacs is a rabbithole and the cost is rarely worth it. LLM agents do a great job already customizing your configuration for you.

I've always told people: You can be a power Emacs user without learning elisp.

I myself used Emacs heavily for 9 years before learning elisp (clicked on my 3rd attempt).

IMO, the included Elisp guide is not good for beginners. My recommendation:

Separate the language from the ecosystem. First focus on simply learning the basics. How do you set a variable? How do you write a loop? How do you write a function? These things are as easy in Elisp as they are in other languages. Perhaps use Exercism to practice.

Of course, also learn the related keybindings (C-M-x to evaluate, C-x C-e, etc).

Only then start understanding some of the basics of integrating with the rest of Emacs (unwind-protect, save-excursion, save-restriction, etc).

> 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.

With Claude it feels like you don’t need IDE’s anymore though. emacs/vim are more relevant than ever imo.

Some of us would say it is a Lisp programming environment, with influences from Lisp Machines (Zmacs), having a text editor as sample application.

It's kind of striking how that joke post about ed (from 1991) presented Emacs as extremely resource-wasteful

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html

but I guess trends elsewhere were so keen on adding abstractions that now Emacs is an efficient, parsimonious choice by comparison.

GNU Emacs really didn't start until 1984, but I keep thinking it would be interesting to compare Emacs' resource usage to Zed (or Gram). Then I realize I can't be bothered to run either of those long enough to do it.

Compared to VSCode, Eight Meg And Constantly Swapping does sound ridiculously parsimonious in 2026.

You apparently missed the explosion in Emacs activity in the 2010s. I, too, remember using Emacs in the early millennium and feeling like a partisan of one powerful but nevertheless unpopular editor, with an uncertain future. But once the Mastering Emacs blog, Org-Mode, and Sacha Chua came along, suddenly there were so many new packages to install and tips for one's own config, and things like the pure-gtk build brought UI improvements going beyond merely look and feel.

In the early millennium, I as a Emacs user had hardly anyone to actually talk about Emacs with, even on nerd hangouts like Slashdot or the dedicated Freenode channel. Since the 2010s, one can make oneself practically a whole social life around Emacs.