I have been using Emacs for 32 years now. It had its ups and downs: there was a period of very slow development, which led to the XEmacs fork, which I used for many years.
These days I see a renaissance of sorts. First, the development progress is excellent. Second, Emacs turned out to be the ultimate material for AI. I no longer write my own Emacs functions. I tell AI to modify the Emacs behavior the way I want. I now have a development environment that I fully control. Windows open where I want them. Keystrokes do what I want them to do. I have tools for annotating Claude Code plans in Emacs and plenty of other functionality. Without AI, I would never be able to implement all these tiny fixes and improvements. It would cost me too much time. And in other IDEs, I would have to "ask for permission", because not every behavior is exposed and modifiable. In Emacs, almost everything is, and you can change the behavior of other packages, too.
It feels great to have a development environment that I am in control of and that won't disappear tomorrow, like so many other IDEs did.
LLMs are particularly strong for this because it really doesn't matter if the code is a hacked together mess. Most user configs are already like that anyway.
Similar story here (user since early 90s). I wish more AI harnesses could also have a dumb-terminal mode in addition to the fully non-interactove mode, so they could all stay naturally searchable/copyable in simple comint buffers. Even the best current terminal emulators within Emacs are not great to recursively handle Emacs (or modern AI TUI) well enough, so I occasionally also use a shell putside Emacs.
Ghostel is fantastic for this. It is very fast, fully compatible, and you can quickly enter a copy-paste mode with C-c C-t. With ace-jump this makes for very efficient copying.
Since I started using Ghostel, my Claude Code and Codex sessions started gradually migrating into Emacs. They work just as well as in a terminal and managing them is more convenient. This is also why I can't really find any use for all those newfangled tools that are intended to help with managing multiple coding sessions.
Have you tried Ghostel for this? I'm one of the Ghostel maintainers so if you have any particular harness that behaves poorly in Ghostel we'd like to know about it so we can fix it.
Thanks so much for your work. I moved to emacs to have a better integration between cli and the editor I am using and ghostel is a tremendous improvement over vterm.
It's hard to explain my relationship with Emacs, but starting it is the first thing I do when I turn on my computer.
I don't use it much for development these days, but I always have a bunch of buffers open and I do a lot of residual work on it.
If I install Linux on my computer, the first thing I always do is install Emacs, it's like a kind of default environment for doing everything text related, and it feels incredibly unfamiliar not to have it open all the time.
For those who use Emacs on macOS, I highly recommend upgrading to 31.1 ASAP since several memory leaks have been fixed by Przemysław Alexander Kamiński [1] et al.
30.2 is the currect release, but I expect that it will be updated shortly after Emacs 31.1 is officially released. If you're _really_ impatient, it seems that there are nightly builds here: <https://emacsformacos.com/builds>.
I have been using Emacs for 32 years now. It had its ups and downs: there was a period of very slow development, which led to the XEmacs fork, which I used for many years.
These days I see a renaissance of sorts. First, the development progress is excellent. Second, Emacs turned out to be the ultimate material for AI. I no longer write my own Emacs functions. I tell AI to modify the Emacs behavior the way I want. I now have a development environment that I fully control. Windows open where I want them. Keystrokes do what I want them to do. I have tools for annotating Claude Code plans in Emacs and plenty of other functionality. Without AI, I would never be able to implement all these tiny fixes and improvements. It would cost me too much time. And in other IDEs, I would have to "ask for permission", because not every behavior is exposed and modifiable. In Emacs, almost everything is, and you can change the behavior of other packages, too.
It feels great to have a development environment that I am in control of and that won't disappear tomorrow, like so many other IDEs did.
LLMs are particularly strong for this because it really doesn't matter if the code is a hacked together mess. Most user configs are already like that anyway.
Similar story here (user since early 90s). I wish more AI harnesses could also have a dumb-terminal mode in addition to the fully non-interactove mode, so they could all stay naturally searchable/copyable in simple comint buffers. Even the best current terminal emulators within Emacs are not great to recursively handle Emacs (or modern AI TUI) well enough, so I occasionally also use a shell putside Emacs.
Ghostel is fantastic for this. It is very fast, fully compatible, and you can quickly enter a copy-paste mode with C-c C-t. With ace-jump this makes for very efficient copying.
Since I started using Ghostel, my Claude Code and Codex sessions started gradually migrating into Emacs. They work just as well as in a terminal and managing them is more convenient. This is also why I can't really find any use for all those newfangled tools that are intended to help with managing multiple coding sessions.
Have you tried Ghostel for this? I'm one of the Ghostel maintainers so if you have any particular harness that behaves poorly in Ghostel we'd like to know about it so we can fix it.
Thanks so much for your work. I moved to emacs to have a better integration between cli and the editor I am using and ghostel is a tremendous improvement over vterm.
> I wish more AI harnesses could also have a dumb-terminal mode
you don't need that, you can use an acp (agent-client protocol) client like agent-shell - https://github.com/xenodium/agent-shell
I've tried it with cursor and it works okay.
It's hard to explain my relationship with Emacs, but starting it is the first thing I do when I turn on my computer.
I don't use it much for development these days, but I always have a bunch of buffers open and I do a lot of residual work on it.
If I install Linux on my computer, the first thing I always do is install Emacs, it's like a kind of default environment for doing everything text related, and it feels incredibly unfamiliar not to have it open all the time.
For those who use Emacs on macOS, I highly recommend upgrading to 31.1 ASAP since several memory leaks have been fixed by Przemysław Alexander Kamiński [1] et al.
[1]: Author of "Emacs: The macOS Bug" (<https://xlii.space/eng/emacs-the-macos-bug/>), which surfaced on HN some time ago.
Well, once MacPorts (https://ports.macports.org/port/emacs) has it!
Agreed! I've been building from source for now, and I can't wait to return to the MacPorts version as soon as it is available.
i usually get my emacs from https://emacsformacos.com/ but it seems to be stuck on version 30.2 :(
30.2 is the currect release, but I expect that it will be updated shortly after Emacs 31.1 is officially released. If you're _really_ impatient, it seems that there are nightly builds here: <https://emacsformacos.com/builds>.
Related cool thing: Emacs may be getting a new GC in 32, https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/feature/igc3/READ...
Maybe Emacs 31.1 will be able to use OpenBSD's RCS Utilities. One can hope :)
To use RCS with Emacs on OpenBSD, you need to install GNU's version of RCS (grcs).
Congratulations to the team.