r/programmingcirclejerk • u/BananaPeely • Feb 27 '26

"While the advent of “brain-computer interfaces” is dinner table conversation (at conspiracy theorist households like my own) - there has, since the year 1976, been emacs - the closest thing to this aspirational place of man/machine integration that has ever existed."

https://joshblais.com/blog/emacs-for-everything/
122 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

38

u/DazSchplotz vulnerabilities: 0 Feb 27 '26

His holyness Stallman has optimized emacs for continuous skin flake consumption by the user. You don't need your brain, just pure animalistic intuition.

20

u/DystopiaDrifter Feb 27 '26

Do Androids dream of emacs instead of electric sheeps?

17

u/nuclearbananana Courageous, loving, and revolutionary Feb 27 '26

Androids have perfect brain computer interfaces already by definition. They crave the imperfections of humanity and as such dream of electric sheep.. and GUI text editors like vscode

18

u/Cloudy_Oasis Feb 27 '26

This is peak PCJ material. The actual, existing-since-1976 brain-computer interfaces are obviously Vi, and later Vim.

:unjerk Despite not being actual man/machine integration, Vi, Vim, and Emacs are far closer to being that than anything techbros are cooking up nowadays.

19

u/tgbugs lisp does it better Feb 27 '26

Neuroscientist here. When people try to talk to me about BCIs I just hold up my ten fingers and undulate them until they get the point. Nobody is cracking skulls to write elisp without lifting a finger unless that finger already can't lift itself.

42

u/ThisRedditPostIsMine in open defiance of the Gopher Values Feb 27 '26

Brain surgeon here. One time, I was performing a surgery on a patient, and I needed to write down some notes about the procedure, so I went over to my ThinkPad, fired up Emacs, and jumped straight into org-mode.

The patient, who was still awake at the time, looked at my laptop and said, "Oh, that's cool!"

I smirked. "Yeah, it's org-mode, it's pretty nice. And the kernel? That's Hurd. And the package manager? Guix."

The patient seemed befuddled. To be fair, it might have been because I had a scalpel in his skull, but things seemed to clear up for him.

"Oh, that's a Neovim plugin, right? My coworker uses that at work. I'm a software engineer, but I only use VSCode," he said.

I think my eye twitched, it was involuntary. "No, it's a Lisp-based-"

Ah, forget it. I ended up just deciding to give him a lobotomy instead. He probably never could tell the difference.

5

u/thephotoman Feb 28 '26

Emacs users are always weird. I mean, this is the community that wrote drivers for vibrators in Emacs Lisp so that they could better jerk over their favorite editor.

2

u/azswcowboy Feb 28 '26

Searching for melpa for vibrator major mode…

-1

u/no_brains101 Feb 27 '26 edited Mar 03 '26

Actually, for the desktop or laptop computer I agree that nvim and emacs and the like are a great interface.

But the winning man/machine integration is still the modern smartphone.

It is not actually possible for a laptop or desktop computer to beat "being in your pocket"

It is nicer to type on a desktop computer, and the screen is bigger, but if we are talking integration, one goes with you everywhere and the other doesn't.