e is a customizable self-aware Emacs-like editor written in Chez Scheme

github.com20 pointsby p4bl011 comments

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Hacker News
What does self-aware even mean in this context?
by ekr
M-x doctor
by klntsky
M-x ?
by postepowanieadm
Given the obvious AI vocabulary scattered through the README, I'm hoping it doesn't mean "self-aware" in the HAL sense.
```
    `C-x C-c`

    I'm afraid I can't let you do that, $USER
```
by rmunn
can you confirm whether this is ai-written or human driven?
by sammy0910
Could you clarify what you mean by "human driven"? It's clear from the AGENTS.md and the AI-sounding vocabulary of the README that this is in part written with LLMs. But what exactly are you asking? Are you asking "Was this vibe coded, or was it carefully crafted with a human making most of the design decisions and the LLM used mostly as a quicker alternative to typing in all the code"? Or are you asking something else?
(I'm not the author of the software, BTW, so I can't actually answer your question. But I found it ambiguous and thought it was worth asking for clarification).
by rmunn
pretty cool to read the source and interact with a bare lisp based editor (emacs has decades of culture baked in so it's hard to appreciate)
by agumonkey
Chapter 12.2, Guideline 1: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1... Program names should be between 2 and 9 characters; As a thing to consider. Also, searching for `e` may be weird.
by tommyage

On my machine, e is just a way to send things into Emacs.

    $ which e
    e () {
            snippet="(nkv-find-file-and-jump \"$1\")" 
            emacsclient --no-wait -e $snippet
    }

Hi! Author here. Thanks for the attention :)
I created e for fun. It’s self-aware because it’s aware of its internals (like all other Lisp based editors). After all, how do you define “self-aware”? :)
It’s “fully configurable” because its code is just a big configuration (code is data :).
I obviously used AI agents, but I’m the author. AIs are Turing machines - they don’t author anything, in the same way as Emacs doesn’t author programs you write with its help.
Chez Scheme is great! I bumped into it while learning Idris 2, which uses it as a default backend.
by paveluv
What is meant to be the selling point over Emacs? Apart from scheme>elisp?
Arguably 80% of the emacs goodness is the terabytes of elisp written in the last few decades, if you break compatibility with that you need to throw in something pretty compelling.
by rich_sasha
Not the author, but I've heard many people complain about elisp and wish they could have written (name of Emacs package) in Scheme. I mean, there's a reason why the https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/WhyDoesElispSuck page exists (HN discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41347697 (2024)). But what's the point of porting (package name) to Scheme if there isn't an editor in Scheme?
So that's my guess as to the motivation: solving the chicken-and-egg problem of wanting an Emacs written in a nicer-to-work-with Lisp dialect. Maybe the author will come along and prove me wrong; this is just my guess.
by rmunn