Over at the Emacs subreddit, harmanola, an Emacs user of 16 years, says that he’s recently switched from Emacs to Cursor, the AI code editor. It’s his opinion that Emacs has become unstable, that he’s tired of its “non-standard defaults”, that AI can increase his productivity by 5 times, that Emacs doesn’t scale, and that its developers aren’t on Discord. He also thinks that Emacs might be history soon.
One hardly knows where to begin. Well, I may not but the commenters certainly do. If there was ever a legitimate point to harmanola’s post, it got demolished by one or more of the commenters. To me, the silliest of his arguments is that one needs an “AI editor” to be productive. It seems to me that the AI suggestions are usually just slightly better than the code generated by previous editors that offered to write code for you: great for folks who are mostly generating boilerplate but used by virtually no one else.
The silliness about the Emacs developers not being on Discord strikes me as revealing a sense of entitlement: “I would like your help but I don’t want to go where you give it; please come over here instead.” If you spend 10 minutes on the Emacs mailing list you can’t help but be impressed by how much time guys like Eli Zaretskii spend—for free—on Emacs. As one of the commenters noted, all the things that comprise a healthy development environment—bug fixes, responding to pull requests, and regular updates—are, in fact, happening.
I’m sorry to see harmanola abandon Emacs and I hope he finds happiness elsewhere but his arguments for why we should leave Emacs for an AI editor just don’t withstand scrutiny.