Actually, he's a 40+ year old person. His obsession with Emacs is what prevented him from graduating high school all these years :-)

He opened his ~/.emacs file as a Junior in High School. Says he'll be ready to close it as soon as he gets this particular edit just right

I mean, this and native compilation. And the new json parser that landed. And... (I'm sure I could go on.)

What it doesn't have is a marketing department pushing it. But it has plenty of new users. No?

The comment you answered is tongue in cheek, the joke being that emacs is for old people.

:) Always fun to realize you missed an obvious joke.

I'm an old person. I love emacs, no complaints here. Does this mean that when you are old, you will love emacs as well? Conclusion: in the long run, everyone loves emacs :-)

My favourite emacs-is-for-old-people joke is the backronym "Editor for Middle-Aged Computer Scientists".

Joking aside, you're right. It's easy to imagine that Emacs has stagnated, but there are regular releases with improvements, some of them important fundamental improvements like native compilation.

I recently saw a Reddit post in a vim subreddit about using AI for coding, the response was "we don't do that here". I saw the same thing in the Emacs subreddit, and there's like 10 different packages for AI integrations, and, allegedly, Emacs is state-of-the-art when it comes to AI interactions through the editor (if only the user can configure it correctly). It's something I've been meaning to try.

https://www.reddit.com/r/neovim/comments/1js30ep/whats_every...

Vim is an editor with quite a good API for integration with other tools and I don't see how you can't build one for AI (and you can use python for the integration). Emacs will have it much easier as almost everything you need has a better interface there.

I’m pretty sure that the answer you quoted was a joke, mainly because the topic of AI packages comes up all the time on that subreddit and people are starting to make fun of the same question that’s asked every other day.

Codecompanion (Zed-like experience), Avante (Cursor-like experience), and Copilot all exist and integrate well with the rest of the neovim ecosystem.

gptel.el is straightforward to configure and comfortable to use. It is indeed opinionated in ways that don't exactly match anything else out there, but if that sort of thing bothers you, you should not expect a comfortable time at first with Emacs. I like it a lot.

This undersells gptel.el, because IMHO it does a really good job of feeling emacs-native: you can read from the minibuffer or active region; send outputs to the message area, another buffer, or replace the marked region; use buffers or files as context sources; build "tools" out of elisp, ...

I'm not surprised I undersell it. I try to take a few months to a year's break from programming once a decade or so, when I can, both for the sake of coming back with fresh eyes and because anything gets miserable if you do it hard enough for long enough. This seemed like a good time. So though I've installed and set up gptel and chatted enough over some Elisp to see that it's functional with local models, I haven't as yet actually used it in a serious way.

On that note, I'm not much in the Emacs blog/creator scene or ecosystem this decade, either. Do you know any good topical resources that might fit well with time spent mostly away from keys? I realize I may be asking quite a lot.

I don't follow that scene much, either, but I do subscribe to https://www.masteringemacs.org/ which has good roundups when new major versions come out. I also have several open tabs from there about various libraries I need to fold into my own emacs configuration.

The irony that Lisp was and AI were almost synonymous before the AI winter, and now AI is back, the Lispers distance themselves from it.