What are your thoughts about these? I know there was LLM Assistance but we waited so long for a Replacement for EXWM in Wayland and now with a little help from LLMs and with plausible ideas (like taking bits of Niris Code) we get them. Somebody else seems to found a way with LLMs to get a better Display Engine. We are fighting these but one day that would be the start of something mature. EWM seems to work already and Neomacs also has something going. I know a lot of people dont like that Claude is everywhere but we are waiting for so long for a modernized core and we failed so many times. And now we really are getting small steps with Results. Is that nothing to be cheering for? I know i would be happier if Remacs or stuff like that would be successfull.
Not happy about the LLM agents involved because of the unsolved legal problems.
Does EWM and Neomacs work together?
It would be great if the move form elisp to guile would also solve the single thread problem.
what do you mean by the legal problems?
i want to try it out. it would be crazy if it would work together. more performant emacs with gpu sideloading and wayland with a seperate thread exwm. would be awesome. if guile would be implemented instead of elisp even more cause we just would have guile for everything
AI work can’t be copy righted AFAIK.
Also what does the license of the training data mean for the generated code?
Currently I will only toy with LLMs and it’s a wash for my use cases. For single agents it’s like having to babysit an apprentice or intern. Colleagues work with multiple agents and report good results but it’s like working with outsourced teams with a faster turn around time.
I tried out neomacs a couple days ago and it did not work well at all on my computer. To me, it seems the largely unguarded use of AI and high velocity of the project thanks to AI with little oversight made the project seem flashy and cool but ultimately have poor quality. I would be worried about making my workflow dependent on a tool that has demonstrated to me that it is fragile and dependent on AI.
This is my first time looking at EWM, and I haven’t used it yet, so take this next part with a grain of salt.
From the EWM readme:
Writing a Wayland compositor from scratch is a staggering amount of work. I wanted to switch from EXWM as soon as possible, so the initial bootstrap was done with Claude, which helped a lot in reverse-engineering the brilliant niri codebase and surgically extracting the pieces relevant to EWM. Inherently, this means the codebase still needs validation and cleanup, which is the current priority
The approach to AI between EWM and Neomacs seems fundamentally different. The commit history on EWM and this message make it seem as though the author is very aware that vibe-coded/AI dependent projects are inherently prone to bugs that are hard to solve due to there being nobody who actually knows the codebase, and I respect them for making it their chief priority to clean up the poor quality work left behind by claude. This understanding and desire for quality makes EWM seem significantly more hopeful to me than Neomacs.
I agree with all the Replys. Hopefully EWM stays on track and could be useful.
A bit tangential but when I first saw “Neomacs” in the title I thought you were talking about this other project: GitHub - neomacs-project/neomacs: Structural Lisp IDE/browser/computing environment · GitHub
On a more related note, while I’m of course happy with the work in this area, I still have the lingering suspicion that more investment in non-Emacs, but still Lisp window managers (and more Lispy, Emacs style tools) would pay off better in the long run. Like in the short term, I would love to have my window manager nice and programmable in a Lisp, but I also think that you really start to push Emacs (as an implementation of a programming language) a bit too far when you do more intensive things like this with it. There are too many random Emacs things that are blocking. When it is just Emacs that freezes for a second it doesn’t bother me too much, but if my whole WM hangs when I accidentally run a code block the wrong way in Org, I don’t think I’ll like that.
Of course I suppose it is possible to run multiple Emacs (like one as a WM and use another inside it) but still, I think a more concerted effort on tools in a general purpose focused Lisp (Common Lisp or Guile) would ultimately get us to a better place than digging into Emacs more.
(Though don’t get me wrong, Emacs is still my favorite program, and I will take Emacs Lisp over basically all non-Lisp languages, but I have to say that I think it would do more for the goal of “Lispy Emacs goodness everywhere!!!” to invest in say Nyxt over say the EAF browser).
stumpwm is a common lisp window manager. It is available for guix. I think under stumpwm if your emacs stucks, you can still switch to other windows.