I used Emacs for nearly my whole professional life, always using one of the evil-based distributions like Spacemacs or Doom, after firmly seating vim muscle memory into my fingers in college.
There are many advantages to Emacs, even (especially) in the Age of AI. LLMs are uniformly better elispers than the average bear, and being able to mould the editor to do exactly what you want is incredibly useful. Even more interesting, since you can get the LLMs to execute arbitrary elisp, you can enable workflows like “open the three most important files in three columns and scroll through them one line per second”. There’s so much value to be found here, and I wrote one of the earlier ChatGPT-in-Emacs libraries, chatgpt-arcana, now vastly outclassed and superceded by gptel. Fun fact: chatgpt-arcana was the very last code I wrote by hand. There’s something vaguely poetic about that I think.
Anyway, after finally switching away from Linux and back to MacOS early this year, I decided I should continue to masquerade as a cool kid and that I should switch to an editor that was created in the last 50 years.
AI-driven IDEs were all the rage in early 2025, so I figured Cursor was a reasonable way to go. I sprung for an annual subscription (paying for your text editor?) and gave it a go. Six months later I still use Cursor almost all the time, but the AI zeitgeist moves fast and I now use Claude Code for basically all actual development. Now I mostly just use Cursor to read code and see diffs. Last night I had the bright idea that Emacs is pretty good for reading code and seeing diffs, and these days with things like the claude-code-ide.el package, I could do everything in the one place again and I’d be back in the safe embrace of elisp.ll
I figured that now, with the help of Claude Code, I could go even further with my emacs and become the all-powerful text-editing alpha and omega, so I decided I would start from a bare Doom Emacs install and bring stuff over from my old and gnarled, organically grown, decade+ old configuration piece by piece as needed - is known as “Emacs bankruptcy”. (Although REAL Emacs users will scoff at my using Doom Emacs…)
However, I am getting older. I’ve just spent the last few waking hours installing, configuring, hacking, elisping, and honestly, not having any fun at all. Once upon a time, I definitely found this enjoyable. I thought it was so cool that I had a unique editor. Look at me whizzing about from codebase to codebase. Look at how few characters I need to type. Look at how efficient I am being.
Man, I just don’t care anymore. I just want to be able to see the code. I want to click buttons, not remember key combinations. I want things to Just Work. I don’t want to debug my editor. I don’t want a special, unique sawblade just for me, hewn from the finest low-background steel, forged in the fires of Mount Doom, that you must caress and whisper sweet nothings to in order to get the best cut. Now, I just want the sawblade I can get in the shop.
I’m going back to Cursor for now, for the odd time when I actually need to read the code. Sorry, Emacs. We had something special for years but it’s over. This one-night stand has really shown me that I’m in a different place now.