> This 1970s vintage text editor is also a futuristic language learning platform, it blows my mind.
and all it took was a deep understanding of software development, experience with lisp and a bunch of your own time coding and debugging! what a piece of software!
Many HN readers grok software development, would likely get a kick out of learning Emacs Lisp, and have time to invest in coding and debugging. Emacs is not as clumsy or random as modern user-hostile software -- it's an elegant tool for a more civilized age, and as such is not for everyone.
> Many HN readers grok software development, would likely get a kick out of learning Emacs Lisp, and have time to invest in coding and debugging.
but why would they? what problems are they solving by being able to paste text into your web browsers address bar? or load a pdf into an LLM? or some other incredibly specific-to-you ability youve added?
if simply adding a lisp interpreter to a program is enough to impress people, why not add it to something other than 1970s terminal text editor? surely an LLM plus lisp can do more of these inane tricks than a 70s text editor plus lisp?
For me, it's about making a repeated workflow efficient. Sure, I could alt+tab over to my PDF viewer, figure out the range of pages I want, then switch to my terminal window, run qpdf with the right arguments to split the PDF into chunks, alt+tab over to my web browser, log into Google's AI studio, mouse over add context to the LLM, navigate a file-open dialog to find my PDF, paste in my OCR prompt, have Gemini spit out my text, press download, navigate another file-open dialog, and then open the resulting file in my editor of choice.
Instead I can open my PDF, press a few keys, and have the whole process done for me without having to think too much about it and get back to wondering if this damn verb should be in the continual/habitual, completed, or more than completed past.
> why not add it to something other than 1970s terminal text editor?
We're responding to an article entitled "The terminal of the future", and even the GUI version of Emacs is still very much rooted in the paradigm of the terminal but with some very nice improvements. I'm arguing that much of the future this article pines for is already here.
“What is the point of a paint brush? Sure, an artist picks it up and paints a masterpiece, but I see no utility in that because when I pick it up, all I can paint are squiggly lines. Paint brushes are useless!”
and all it took was a deep understanding of software development, experience with lisp and a bunch of your own time coding and debugging! what a piece of software!