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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like something that could be done with by pulling in a few dozen Emacs extensions and writing a few thousand lines of elisp. (And one of those extensions would be the libghostty base ghostel.)

It's sort of what I'm doing already -- using emacs-server to provide portable persistent sessions on top of a bunch of terminals, agents and editor buffers.

It's a 1% effort on my part and super janky and super me-specific -- if somebody put a small fraction of the effort into it that others are putting into superlogical and the other alternatives listed here, it could be awesome....

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This is like the “why not use FTP yourself” response to the YC Dropbox page.

Yes, but good, standardized developer tooling is valuable.

Postman could’ve also been a “just use CURL and dump to JSON” for example.

I actually am bullish on this. Tmux and ssh are somewhat clunky and probably under utilized by most people. I struggle to find commands, navigate sessions, see history, and so on.

Also in an “agent” based world where you might ask an agent to execute things for you, how do you manage that context well beyond just giving it its own Tmux session to drive?

It’s a good idea, and I’m surprised no one’s built it sooner.

Devs don't use Dropbox, they use git. Git is probably the poster-child example of an unfriendly interface, and yet it's the standard way for devs to share files.

Emacs is downright friendly compared to git & tmux IMO.

Sounds like you're using LLMs correctly IMO. The entire appeal of LLMs in dev-tooling is being able to setup hyper-specific, customized workflows and have "extensions" be done by telling the LLM what to fix. For that, the smaller and more minimal the base is, the better.

Care to share your setup? I'm currently working on pretty much the same thing and it's looking good so far, but having a single user makes it hard to get enough feedback.

Hmmm, it's a fairly stock emacs setup. Most of the weird/specific stuff is outside of emacs: setting up a sandbox, managing worktrees, managing disk space because each worktree can easily contain 200GiB of build artifacts, et cetera.

The Emacs parts of it are all either stock or partially or fully broken.

I've got notification support but it's broken.

I'd love to use agent-shell because it's a much better way to interact with agents than using their stupid TUI's, but it's currently broken with Claude for me and is way behind the claude TUI.

So instead I use claude-code-ide.el inside of a ghostel, but it's got a large number of friction points. Mostly due to claude's broken TUI.

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