After nearly 40 years with Emacs, I think i'm ready to move on.

I started programming on a PDP11-45 back in 1982 when our university got a source code copy of AT&T Unix System 7. It was all on a teletype paper terminal, and we used "ed" as the line editor. We could do amazing things. We also had access to a Univac mainframe where we could run punch cards, but that's a different story. I started programming in high school back in the late 70s. It was on a microcontroller board with a keyboard where you could enter the hex codes for your program, and then later save it to tape. Using a PDP-11 with a teletype was a massive step up.

The university soom got VT100 terminals connected to the PDP, and new editors turned up. The first one was "ded" which was a full screen mode editor variation of ed, not sure where it came from. Vi and Emacs soon turned up after that. The general consensus in my group was that vi was primitive and emacs was just way advanced and could be extended in lisp to do anything. (Side note, im sad lisp didn't featured more prominently in computer science since then). At the first work place we wanted to download sources for emacs, which needed a dialup line for 26 hours, and we needed managers approval to do so.

Every system I have ever used since then, if it didn't come with emacs, it would be the first package I installed.

I ran my startups on emacs, anything complicated, massive edit and refactor of the codebase ? … write some macros and run some magic. No task seems too big. For the past 20 years, I have mostly been in management, but with some hands-on in the projects to understand what was going on underneath, and emacs it was. All the new college kids had their own favorite editor and they had no idea how I could remember what all the key sequences were doing, but they were pretending to be impressed when I could do my massive edits with macros.

I'm now starting a new project. No, actually, I started a new project a year ago, and I'm heavily leaning into AI for coding. I've been using the browser and doing cut-and-paste into the source code files, but clearly that isn't scalable. The AI needs to see all the same source code you can see; otherwise, it just makes guesses on how everything integrates, and those guesses fails once you add some of your own edits.

So I installed gptel in emacs to bridge my source code repo with my AI, and ... I hate it. I'm now going to try to see if I like VS Code better and if it makes my life easier. I think the era of me refactoring code using giant emacs macros is over.

Emacs, you have been a good companion through the years.

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