Systems like Emacs that are hyper-configurable via a text file seem tailor made for modern LLM's. If you've got a little bit of Emacs experience but bounced off of it because the learning curve was too steep I highly recommend diving back in with your agent. Agents are really good at setting up and maintaining your .emacs/init.el.

▲

varun_ch 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Doing this for Neovim at work and it’s so much fun. I justify the slopped config to myself because I want to get work done rather than learn the config of some random Neovim package and how it interacts with the rest of the system.

I can just ask Claude, “make leader / toggle a terminal at the bottom of the screen , and leader t swaps it to the right side” and it’ll just do that. I liked a theme but I wanted it to also change the status line of the focused window, and it just did that for me. I had an issue where the neo tree would freeze for a few seconds, and Claude figured out it was a bad interaction with the git in our toolchain, etc etc.

I have my very own text editor that I customized in plain English! I could’ve learnt spent hours learning Neovim’s style of Lua, researching packages, debugging, etc, but this gets the same stuff done way faster and lets me get to work. This was the biggest thing that kept me going back to either a preconfigured Vim setup like LazyVim or vscode. Definitely recommend.

	▲	kristjansson 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		My .emacs.d has been carefully handcrafted over years. My .vim/.vimrc accreted over the same period, bits copied in, commented out, … Claude did my neovim in about 45 seconds, with the instruction “make it work like my vimrc but better and using the cool new stuff” and it’s great! Not my daily driver, but serviceable as EDITOR and prettiest of the bunch.
	▲	richard_todd 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I agree this is great, but I also feel like it's an intermediate step to just asking Claude for whatever file edits you want... and then you don't even need the text editor.

▲

sporedro 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’ve always used vim/neovim but fell in love with some of the features of emacs (org, magit, lisp). My problem was spending the time to configure it though.

Even with spaceman’s/doom and the amazing documentation it was always still so much work to configure emacs as a newer user. LLMS have made this nearly instant.

This is a bit of a ramble but it’s so amazing having emacs and an LLM now, I don’t even touch vscode anymore and only find myself touching things like IntelliJ when I really need to dig into something with a debugger.

▲

blks 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Modern LLMs are ok with that, but they do make silly mistakes; and a major problem here is that your init.el stops being your own, if it’s written and maintained by an LLM, you will have no idea what’s going on there. And if you would be reviewing every single line of your init file, then what’s the point

	▲	kstrauser 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		By elapsed time, I use vim to edit my init.el more than for anything else.
	▲	bryanlarsen 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		That's a skillset any coder in 2026 pretty much has to pick up. If you don't understand the code an LLM writes for you for your day job then you're contaminating your employer's code base with slop. But if you don't use an LLM then you're not as valuable to your employer as you otherwise would be. So most of us need to figure out how to use an LLM and still understand the code. Using an LLM on init.el is a lot easier than using it in your day job. A 2 line change that you told the LLM to make is easy to internalize.

▲

yoyohello13 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A programmable editor really is so amazing now. You can have a LLMs whip up anything you can think of in minutes. Ive used neovim for a long time but never really customized it much. Now I’ve got tons of plugins and can add new features on a whim.

I’ve been thinking of trying out emacs because I think the native gui can probably be even more powerful

▲

mbil 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Agree, I put off using org-roam a few times in the past because I couldn’t be bothered to keep my notes in such order. But now I have an agent that set it up and it’s also recording, organizing, and referencing everything.

▲

seanc 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I agree. It's amazing. I feel like I've got a private Emacs consultant at my elbow.

▲

DonHopkins 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I know a bunch of people (including me) who decades ago wished they had a private sendmail.cf expert at their elbow, and even a few sendmail.cf experts who were sick and tired of always being asked to help random people with their sendmail.cf file for free.

Maybe there will be a resurgance of terribly obscure totally unique quirky configuration files for all these vibe coded apps, unique enough that they don't appear in the training data, so you have to hire real humans to sit at your elbow and help you!

	▲	kstrauser 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I came into that after sendmail.m4 got popular. I'm not sure if that's better or worse.