Nice writeup! The list of Emacs packages to use LLMs is the roadmap for getting started with AI Emacs integrations and I also liked his list of AI dangers at the end.

I have used Emacs for over 40 years but I found myself getting sucked into the black hole of VSCode as discussed in the article. When I bought a new MacBook a few months ago, I only installed Emacs, no VSCode, and so far that is working out for me.

Also, after many hours of experimenting with AI packages for Emacs, I have reverted to keeping Emacs mostly a pure human activity, and several times a week have sessions with gemini-cli and Claude Code when I want an AI coding assistant. This is just for me, not general advice, but I like to separate use of AI from my regular coding and writing workflows. I use AI for coding cumulatively about three or four hours a week.

I swapped from jetbrains products to lazyvim/nvim and honestly without AI it would have not been possible. The speed I was able to configure it exactly how I wanted and support workflows jetbrains would never support is great.

Escaping the god awful AI implementations in both vscode and jetbrains product is also a refresher. They don't know what the ** is going on, they don't know what users want, but I do and AI being able to extend my IDE in a way that helps me be more productive is very undervalued.

I'm not sure AI Agents can already beat the average VIM user.

I use VIM and I get some inspiration from LLMs sometimes, but me and other developers always after some time give up and just quickly do it manually.

AI Agents will just full the code with maaaassive swaths of texts it will just make a project unusable.

We even get paid to turn client's AI LLM Claude sketches into real programs.

I put off adopting popular agents for most of 2025 primarily because there was no agent-agnostic path to first-class Emacs integration. That changed with ACP (https://agentclientprotocol.com), thus I started working on agent-shell.

I'm happy with how the integration is shaping up, enabling me to have my cake and eat it too (Emacs + AI agents).

I wrote an agent-shell post recently with the latest changes https://xenodium.com/agent-shell-0-47-1-updates

I have been a die hard emacs user for 20 years, and I have a very nice emacs setup (if a little bit idiosyncratic, but all emacs configs are idiosyncratic). However, recently I realized that I read code, but almost never write it. What is more, I spend a lot of time doing it in tmux, over mosh, from my phone. Emacs ergonomy is just not great if all you have is a horrible phone keyboard (and no swiping, because tmux redraws the screen if you swipe). And then I discovered helix. It has all the things I was jealous about vim, BUT it has sane defaults ootb. And truth be told, another thing I use a lot is bat, which is cat with syntax highlighting and an automatic pager.

I gave up on emacs and vim. Its like fighting bad design. Im long time users of both, but no plugins sufficiently provide a quality integrated experience with AI, MCP and agents. Emacs and neovim AFAIK are not designed for streaming. And with what each of them do, you can just build an IDE yourself (Claude Code). I combined with Vim bindings, spacemacs interface and built an IDE from scratch in one week with Rust. Its my daily drivers. This is true customization.

I'm a long time VS Code boy, but have recently started dabbling in Vim because I'm exhausted with AI.

Every VS Code update these days feels like it's exclusively AI orientated. The Vim approach seems fundamentally opposed to an AI-driven development model, or at least says, like everything else, "sure, you can do that, but set it up yourself."

I find the Vim philosophy appealing coming from a work environment that wants to replace me with API calls to American companies.

My time spent in Emacs has *increased* with the increased use of AI. I have to read, edit, accept and reject all those code changes and Emacs+Magit is pretty much the best interface for that.

I'm not convinced that terminal orientedness of AI tooling itself will last. My hypothesis is that it was chosen by developers of the current generation building for developers of the current generation. I hypothesize that there is a future where command lines and terminals don't matter, and hence I feel the focus will shift to, as the author points out, to planning, reviewing and ideation tools none of which demands a command line. In fact I expect an entirely new class of tool to emerge that does these things well that is neither an IDE nor terminal based. I think Claude Code's core will live but it's interface will morph in the coming years to adapt to the builders of the next generation. The analogy I use is my kids and manual transmission cars -- they grow up with EVs and single gear drives with linear torque curves, and will have no nostalgia for a manual transmission, engine noises, or supercharger whines. If you never used a terminal, will you pine for it?

> AI makes configuration and extension trivial

I recently said to a co-worker:

"Linux is free if your time has no value" is no longer true in the era of LLMs. Just about any wonky Linux issue can be fixed quickly with even just OpenCode and free models.

These were always personal preferences (I’ve used all types at different times and contexts), and I don’t think AI will have any major effect on their usage numbers.

May be splitting hairs, but I don't think it's the terminal-native part that's relevant, so much as that both LLMs and emacs/vim are text oriented in ways which e.g. VSCode isn't. (Or perhaps just the text-oriented nature is a result from initial constraint from being terminal-native).

As the author points out, that Emacs is a highly extensible 'operating system' which makes it relatively easy to bring different tasks together. -- This ought to be a natural parallel to what the agentic tools are trying to do (use MCPs and skills etc. to bring different functionality to the LLM execution environment).

That LLMs can help users extend emacs ought to lower the difficulty curve.

Still. It's silly to wish that Emacs could be the LLM's best friend, rather than demonstrating how it is.

RE: "what if in the future all coding skills are irrelevant". My experience has been that good results from LLMs come from putting good thought into its usage. They're quite far from a magic "push the button and get the result you want" where the skill doesn't matter.

I dont know what the deal is with these editors that makes them on HN front page so frequently. In my opinion they are good text editors (used emacs for 4 years, and switched to vim nearly 10 years ago) but for coding I see them as a joke apart from some edge cases(clojure, lisp...). They are hard to setup as code editors, lots of customizations are needed and in my opinion it does not pay off.

In my view, Emacs is getting more powerful in the AI era. The cost of writing Elisp has dropped significantly — I've ended up with 15+ personal Elisp packages as a result. The freedom Emacs offers is still unmatched. For example, I heavily rely on sending automatic response (https://github.com/ywatanabe1989/emacs-claude-code), monitoring repository, and targeted context building from dired.

I'm a muggle when it comes to vim, but I've considered learning it again recently because of AI. I'm building more than I have in years because I love being able to try things out without investing 3 months to get something working before I can really test the idea. And so I am typing A LOT. Less code, but lots of markdown, prompts and config. My hands are hurting, I really wish I had a power tool for typing. Writing is always going to allow us to be more precise than speech, and is a tool for creative thought in its self. I can see how we might be bearish on our expectations around new adoptees, but I think there's pressure to get more out of our editors too. Two of my recent projects have been vscode extensions, because I'm needing more help from my editor, not less: https://www.appsoftware.com/blog/fixing-agent-llm-context-de..., https://www.appsoftware.com/blog/as-notes-turn-vs-code-into-...

Agreed on the config. I just launch a Claude code in my vimrc directory now if I want to change anything about my setup or have any questions about how to do something.

Also, I love running a tmux pane for vim, and then like 4 or 5 more -- a few Claude code instances, one for the dev environment, one for interacting with jj/git or other random commands. So easy to switch between tasks. My main annoyance with my setup is that my Bluetooth trackball times out after a period of inactivity, and when I eventually need to use the pointer again there's a lag while it reconnects...

I lived in XEmacs between 1995 and 2005, because in many UNIX variants having an IDE was a foreign word, not even something that could provide the affordances of a Turbo Pascal with Turbo Vision based IDE for MS-DOS.

Between Emacs, the improved XEmacs, and vi, the answer was obvious at the time, I joined the Emacs faction with XEmacs.

Mastered elisp good enough, had my configuration scripts, go to know enough vi to handle telneting (or sshing) into random UNIX servers without anything else installed.

Both are still kind of stuck in time, going back to them in random UNIX distribution feels like I am back in that UNIX decade.

Yeah, I use Slime in vim to drive programs (like psql) via their stdin/stdout, so an "agent" that does stdin/stdout only for UI is perfect.

If I ever write my own agent, it will be in this fashion.

-----------------

[1] I have a `scratchpad.sql` file filled with whatever sql snippets I am testing and have `psql mydbname` in a vertical split. Doing C-c C-c in the scratchpad sends the paragraph to the psql instance.

Not sure these and other editors have a future when the SOTA models can generate code better than 99% of the best devs in the world 100x faster, 10x cheaper and never get tired or want pesky time off. Maybe the use case it to view code while humans are still required in the loop (I think they just about still are) or to edit a commit msg.

I suspect terminals will stick around longer than people expect. Not because they’re ideal, but because they compose well with everything else.

I think a terminal is still the perfect UI for coding agents on desktop systems. But now that I have running agents in background that only sometimes require some extra input on the go - I hate the terminal use on the go: terminus or other mobile app + virtual keyboard is horrible to use. For that I envision a better interface.

Agreed.

We should also consider whether the rise of AI for any type of implementation task will reduce the number of new Emacs and Vim users, thereby limiting and ultimately killing the communities' growth.

I came to Vim, and then Emacs, because I wanted a tool for coding that I could configure exactly how I liked. If AI does my coding for me, my need for a custom editor will decrease. More generally speaking, if AI can do any type of implementation task -- coding, task management, email, etc -- my need for software customized for those things will decrease.

If people don't need custom software, many fewer people may seek out and find Emacs and Vim.

Who will maintain them and evangelize once today's generation cannot?

You can have Vim bindings in vscode.

How much of this article was AI written? I can sense the AI smell all over the place, also I found it way too long with little substance, but maybe that’s just me.

vim (neovim these days) for me is my text editor I use to look at code when dealing with AI, more often than not I'm working on a bug list as I test things. I haven't opened my IDE (Jetbrains tools) for nearly 2 weeks now. Only thing I often want is to be able to run sql queries, I used datagrip for that... Now I'm writing my own tui sql tool that is lightning quick and has most of the features I like from data grip, plus a bunch of new things that make my life easier. I've made it work as a MCP server also so that I can get my agent to directly inject queries and I can browse the result sets easily. I feel like the terminal, because its text based and super great at manipulating text is such a perfect match for these AI agents. But, yes, the need for code editing itself is really limited.

I have been an emacs user for almost a decade now.

My laptop taskbar is: terminal, filebrowser, emacs, firefox.

With emacsd running to make startup instance.

This week I removed emacsd service and Emacs from my taskbar because I had more miss-clicks - accidentally opening it - than I had need for it in the past few months.

With the idea of the recent HN article that files are the common media of communication between humans and LLM's, it's still useful to have direct file-skills; to be able to read raw files the LLM outputs, or give it input through files, and able to manipulate the files efficiently. You can use an LLM to prompt to search through the files and all that, but for such basic things it's worth learning it yourself, if you do it often.

If AI companies don't break even and continue to remain in 2 digit billions and more growing debt, all these are nice cookies that can be taken away at any time with a 5-10x increase in price.

I find Emacs better than ever in the age of AI. Install agent-shell to run Claude Code inside Emacs and give it a skill to run Emacs Lisp using emacsclient. Voila - now you have all the integration you could ever need if you are a little resourceful.

Claude Code can now introspect the entire editor and it can manipulate everything. You can have it build whatever features are missing - it will even debug those features for you, live in the editor.

I recently came back to Emacs from VSCode and ended up just letting Claude build me the features I was missing, mainly related to tabs and project management.

I think Emacs has unique advantages in the age of LLMs, you can just mold it like clay.

learning and using and customizing emacs has never been better

getting a bibliography and citation workflow up and running in org is incredibly easy. Use a model to read the first page of your PDFs dir and add bibtex entries...

then you just build your static site around that

please don't write with a model. We want your own prose

Hmm.. asistant i can't escape this screen what is it?

A.i: this is vi text editor.

Human: exit from it and open word processor.

A.i: rm -rf /

Human: good job exiting. Now where's my word processor? ....

Hello? Where's my word processor? Brint it on screen.

Can you hear me ?

In my mind I had the opposite picture than the one the article portrays.

Emacs was lagging behind common IDEs, like IntelliJ and VsCode, cause big companies put thousands of developers to combine many features into one integrated package and everything works together providing a very smooth experience compared to Emacs (and Vim probably).

Now IDEs are useless. I personally haven't felt the need to goto_definition or autocomplete variable names for almost 2 years.

Now programming becomes closer to plain text writing and editing and it levels the playing fields for all editors.

Also Emacs can run Rust plugins, the user is not limited to Elisp. Not very convenient but possible.

emacsclient + codex has been a game changer.

I probably add or change a feature in emacs once a day, or every other day. I've been using emacs for some insane amount of time, maybe 20 years? And still I had more customization to go.

Emacs and programs with it's level of programmatic user customization will survive the AI period in my opinion. Anything static will falter.

Emacs is a true bicycle for the mind. It sets you free in many ways, always wanting to be the tool that simply allows you to do your job more efficiently and effectively.

LLMs are like living with a depressed person who doesn't see the point in doing anything because it's all just been done before. Who cares if you do a good job? Just recycle some shit that others have done and it'll be passable. This isn't a bicycle for the mind, it's just going to drag you into depression with it.

¿Por qué no los dos?

> Part of the case for Emacs and Vim has always been that they make you faster at writing and editing code.

That was a side-effect of using software that is deeply customizable, but not the main goal. It comes from being comfortable with your tools to the point of relying on muscle memory to use them. The main benefit to me has always been comfort. My favorite commands are a keystroke away, I know how the tool will react and what it's doing at any moment, I know all of its quirks, etc.

None of that changes in the age of "AI". This new technology won't replace computing for me. My hurdle to adopting "agentic" workflows has nothing to do with my choice of tools, and everything with not trusting the companies and ecosystems around this new tech, especially during this insane hype cycle. I've been slowly adopting parts of the stack I'm comfortable with, because, again, my comfort trumps anything else.

Besides, if anything, a deeply customizable platform like Emacs is ideal for building any type of workflow. There are already great packages for LLM integration, and I don't think Emacs users are missing out on anything. The fact "AI" companies decide to build their moats with custom tooling is not a problem I care about. Apple has been pushing their idea of what computing should look like for decades, and it has never appealed to me. I don't miss something I don't want.

Anyway, confusing article. The author acknowledges all of these points, but also the alternative scenarios. Both cannot be true for the same person. There will always be people who enjoy using Emacs and Vim because of their customizability, not necessarily their features. And there will always be people who just want to use a supported and official product, without any tinkering. Emacs and Vim will outlast this hype cycle just fine.

Thanks for all your work, batsov! I do hope you stick around these communities. :)

For me, AI increased my NeoVim usage. Claude Code and Codex made me go full cli. I run several sessions in multiple tabs in WezTerm, using Tmux, Tmuxinator, and excellent tui based file manager named Yazi in left pane, opening files in NeoVim, running Claude Code in right split. With this setup I work on several projects in parallel. Use lazygit as git client. Everything in cli, super fast.

Initially I went with Cursor, but the terminal setup feels way faster, more natural.

> Imagine an AI assistant that can read your org-mode agenda, draft email replies in mu4e, help you write commit messages in Magit, and refactor code in your source buffers – all within the same environment, sharing context. No other editor architecture makes this kind of deep, cross-domain integration as natural as Emacs does.

I've been a devout emacs amateur for 10 years, and recently learned nvim/lazy.vim because I was tired of web dev kinda sucking in emacs. Sure, you can get a setup with lint-on-save, inline TS errors, and all the other bells and whistles you get in vscode working on a react-tsx project, but then when you `helm-projectile-switch-project` to a vue project, suddenly you have to get a whole new config set up. And oops, for whatever reason, tab spacing isn't being pulled from the editor config for this directory...

But like the author says, LLMs fixed that. I pointed Warp at my emacs config, said my problems, and said "fix plz," and it did. No more "oops," just "fix plz" whenever I'm editing rust, or svelte, or golang, or whatever else for the first time in emacs.

I'm very excited for the possibility in the portion I quoted. I moved away from mu4e and org mode because managing it all was getting tedious: too much time procrastinating by tweaking org configs. Too many emails not rendered properly in mu4e or fat fingered by me and lost. But in world+llm, that's not really a problem anymore. I haven't migrated back to org mode yet but I did an experiment recently asking claude to set up org similar to my trilium set up, and it did a passable enough job that I was convinced it's possible.

So, now I'm back in emacs, trying out the various LLM tools, doing poorly at getting anything other than copilot to work well, and waiting with patience and desperation for someone to make an LLM completion experience in emacs that has a multiline completion experience at least 50% as good as Cursor's.

> The learning curve argument gets harder to justify too. “Spend six months learning Emacs and you’ll be 10x faster” is a tough sell when a junior developer with Cursor can scaffold an entire application in an afternoon.

IF this is the case. But is it?

I have some doubts because to me it seems as if domain knowledge is shifted onto an AI. Then you become dependent on the AI. Is AI really better than a skilled human though? After all, if AI is doing the work and the human providing the input to it as guide, it should be possible to cut away the human completely. So Skynet 3.0 does not need humans. But when it does, then something doesn't work in that explanation - AI must thus not be "smart enough".

Emacs and Vim in the Age of Slop