Hacker News: achyudh

New comment by achyudh in "AI Usage Policy"

achyudh — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 20:54:35 +0000

Mailing lists essentially solve this by introducing friction: only those who genuinely care about the project will bother to git send-email and defend a patch over an email thread. The incentive for low-quality drive-by submissions also evaporates as there is no profile page with green squares to farm. The downside is that it potentially reduces the number of contributors by making it a lot harder for new contributors to onboard.

New comment by achyudh in "GNU Guix 1.5.0 Released"

achyudh — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 17:16:51 +0000

I have slowly been migrating my Nix configuration to Guix as there is just so much to like about Guix such as Scheme and full-source bootstrap. I am also very happy about the move to Codeberg which hopefully results in more contributors. The new Rust packaging process is also worth reading about: https://guix.gnu.org/tr/blog/2025/a-new-rust-packaging-model...

New comment by achyudh in "Jank Lang Hit Alpha"

achyudh — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 02:21:17 +0000

Congrats on the alpha release! I've been following the jank blog for a year now and it's great to see it reach this milestone. What is the current state of development tooling (such as CIDER support) for Emacs users?

Also I noticed a typo/broken link in the Welcome section: The link for "foreward" points to https://book.jank-lang.org/foreward.html, but it should be https://book.jank-lang.org/foreword.html

5 Years of UnifiedPush

achyudh — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 22:40:52 +0000

Article URL: https://s1m.fr/unifiedpush-5-years/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46449104

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by achyudh in "VSCode rebrands as "The open source AI code editor""

achyudh — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 21:09:06 +0000

While Emacs can run in a terminal, it is more widely used as a GUI application that can render images, PDFs, variable-pitch fonts, handle mouse support (drag-and-drop, menus, scrollbars), and even work on touchscreens such as on Android [1].

You are right that VS Code has a "nicer" out of the box UX (this is subjective of course), but Emacs offers a malleable environment. In VS Code, you are limited to what the APIs the developers decided to expose. If you want a specific behavior that isn't supported, you either fork the editor or create a feature request ticket and wait for someone to prioritize it. In Emacs, because you have full access to the internal runtime, you can implement that feature yourself in a couple of lines of Lisp.

1: https://kristofferbalintona.me/posts/202505291438/

New comment by achyudh in "VSCode rebrands as "The open source AI code editor""

achyudh — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 20:38:17 +0000

I was more familiar with Vim bindings and relied on Vim emulation layers in various IDEs before I moved to Emacs. Evil mode and Doom made the jump possible without sacrificing too much productivity. With Evil, I didn't have to retrain my muscle memory and with Doom I didn't have to cobble together a functional config from scratch.

After a couple of months of using Doom, I felt comfortable enough to roll my own config which also helped me better understand how things worked at a lower level. More interestingly, after a couple of years, I transitioned from Evil to standard Emacs bindings as that felt better integrated with the rest of Emacs.

New comment by achyudh in "VSCode rebrands as "The open source AI code editor""

achyudh — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 19:50:17 +0000

This pivot sounds like VS Code is moving from a text editor to a thin client for AI services that Microsoft wants to push. It is one more step towards a future where our development tools (just like everything else on our computers these days) are just thin clients/wrappers around SaaS.

Emacs remains the antidote to this. I use Emacs because I want to remain the architect of my development environment, not become the consumer of a telemetry-gathering platform architected by PMs at a big tech company. It is also an absolute joy to use an environment that provides you with the same amount of power as the core maintainers, allowing you to fully inspect and modify the system even while it is running.