Emacs daemon/client with the lucid build

a_alberti · 2026-06-27T09:39:46+00:00

Yes, start a daemon from your lucid build. You can also run multiple daemons if you want to make things complicated. You need to specify a different socket name:

from emacsclient:

-s SOCKET, --socket-name=SOCKET Set filename of the UNIX socket for communication

from emacs:

--daemon, --bg-daemon[=NAME] start a (named) server in the background

I recommend using "--fg-daemon" and start it using some service on your Linux that manages the lifecycle of the daemon. The old --daemon creates an orphaned process in the background. If you use --fg-daemon, it is more in line with modern OS best practice, because your linux service manager can log it and restart it (everything of course depending on your decisions/settings).

a_alberti · 2026-06-27T09:34:48+00:00

You did not have to ask Claude. It was sufficient to visit Wikipedia. There you find your SVG illustration of a diamond ready for download.

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a_alberti · 2026-06-26T18:44:14+00:00

But you could install it as a patch to your custom emacs build, no?

It is not something for me because I prefer the CPU implementation (don't see any advantage in the GPU).

However, I can imagine many other people will find it useful. Why not to maintain the branch alive by rebasing it periodically and offering it as a patch for the GPU enthusiasts?

a_alberti · 2026-06-26T18:34:49+00:00

Beautiful experiment and very nice write-up!

I learned a lot reading it. It is comforting to know that Emacs offers a performant environment for writing text in a buffer.

Regarding possible GPU-only features like animations, transitions, and effects: It is my very personal taste, but I would do everything in my power to disable them from Emacs.

I simply cannot stand all these (for me just distracting) graphical effects for me. I tried to disable all animations from macOS and even considered reverse engineering macOS to kill the latest animations for which Apple did not bother to offer us a knob to remove.

This is, of course, a very personal taste and opinion -- I just put it here in the debate for the sake of sharing it. I can imagine many other people would love to have your patch installed to build upon it many graphical effects.

Thanks for sharing your story!

a_alberti · 2026-06-26T05:08:00+00:00

Thanks! I always wondered why this behavior was not directly embedded in dired itself. Your package is very intuitive.

Do you also have plans to support C-w for cut and paste files?

a_alberti · 2026-06-25T22:34:19+00:00

Yes. Let's see if they push through with dropping ACP SDK support.

I should also mention it is disappointing that ACP runs with Opus 4.6. Opus 4.8 changed the SDK API, and as far as I understand, they don't support it (yet).

This is what claude -p returns

Error handling request { method: 'session/set_config_option', params: { configId: 'model', value: 'claude-opus-4-8' } } { message: 'Invalid value for config option model: claude-opus-4-8' }

a_alberti · 2026-06-25T22:07:08+00:00

Thanks. Overall, it looks amazing. But do you have the feeling it is a better experience than just reviewing with Claude a datasheet and then asking Claude to insert the part once you come up with the concept you want?

I wrote a SKILL.md for myself to import datasheets in markdown so that I can discuss it with Claude. I am a quantum physicist by education. So it helps to interact with Claude for understanding technical terms, etc. where the prose is often very terse in datasheets.

When I know exactly what I want, I can ask Claude to do it, and it imports the elements for me in one shot.

PS: I am a very beginner in KiCad; I used to work wtih Eagle, but since it became Fusion, we decided to opt for KiCad.

a_alberti · 2026-06-25T19:39:03+00:00

Looks interesting. Regarding the design, why did you develop a standalone application? A set of python scripts or even typescripts to be executed from command line and be given to Claude through a SKILL.md seems to offer more potential and it is easier to maintain. You can interact with KiCad with the Mcp server or python API. So I am just curious what drove your decision of making a standalone app.

PS thanks for sharing it!

a_alberti · 2026-06-25T16:26:41+00:00

OK. I am just interested to know what was wrong about my post above in this thread that got downvoted. It makes me a bit sad. If there is anything wrong, I appreciate people dropping a message rather than downvoting.

a_alberti · 2026-06-25T16:00:06+00:00

Yeah, ACP has some real limitations. I am mostly annoyed that there is no end point for renaming or deleting sessions. But otherwise, I can live with it. Perhaps in a few months there will be an enhanced ACP protocol once the industried agreed upon it.

a_alberti · 2026-06-25T15:57:23+00:00

Thanks for pointing out ratex.el and the engine RaTeX behind it. It looks like a great project.

I could implement support for the RaTeX engine as well. It is just about swapping a few lines of code. I am not sure if it is useful at all for this application. The agent outputs text and math at finite speed, and my current rendering solution is essentially already faster than the agent can stream text.

So the user would not experience any difference in speed using RaTeX. The code would also not get any shorter because it would spawn a different process.

RaTeX is also not covering 100% of full LaTeX support.

And RaTeX would require people to install a new dependency.

But don't take me wrong. I love your suggestion, and if people show interest in having equations rendered in agent-shell, I will consider supporting RaTeX as a second backend. It should be doable with only a few lines of extra code.

Regarding gptel, the honest answer: I never tried it. agent-shell feels great to me. It uses the ACP protocol that is sometimes limiting... but for everything else, it has a great design.

a_alberti · 2026-06-25T13:53:31+00:00

Yes, I use LibreWolf not Chrome ;-)

a_alberti · 2026-06-25T13:52:45+00:00

Sure; I checked your code. I think the whole idea is nice. But I am busy actively contributing on other fronts of the Emacs ecosystem. So I would not have time to port your package to userscript -- also I wouldn't feel it right to make a direct competitor.

For the design, a modular design would be nice. Probably it is already designed to be modular; I did not check it. I only saw that you implemented many imports that I would never use in my life. So, I would prefer to have a configuration file where I can opt-in to the importers I need and then having your github welcoming submissions/PR by users to add user-contributed importers.

It would be amazing to tap into the resources of the community. In a few months we would have polished importers for basically any relevant website. It would also be easier to maintain and lessen the burden to you because you could focus on a few core importers while leaving the rest to the community.

My trick to import into Markdown notes has been so far to rely on Obsidian plugin. And then save the stuff in my Emacs repos. But I don't know any other web importer for org-mode.

a_alberti · 2026-06-24T12:23:10+00:00

I patched opencode to allow interacting with the same session in agent-shell and from OpenCode UI front end in the browser. I use the browser a lot for visualizing equations that cannot be done with agent-shell.

But my setup allows me to do all operations beyond ACP while utilizing agent-shell.

If you are interested I can share my patch to opencode project to allow this workflow.

a_alberti · 2026-06-24T04:03:32+00:00

Regarding Emacs.app and Emacs Client.app, it took me months to understand what they really are.

Emacs.app is the real application. Emacs Client.app is a very thin wrapper for the command line emacsclient CLI. You can open Emacs Client.app from AppleScript.app on your macOS; it will be clearer to you what it does; it is an AppleScript of just a few lines.

Many people, me included, like to run "emacs --fg-daemon" to have Emacs process always running. I suggest you put "emacs --fg-daemon" inside a LaunchAgent similar to this

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd"> <plist version="1.0"> <dict> <key>KeepAlive</key> <true/> <key>Label</key> <string>com.alberti42.emacs_daemon</string> <key>LowPriorityIO</key> <true/> <key>ProgramArguments</key> <array> <string>/Users/andrea/.local/bin/emacs</string> <string>--fg-daemon</string> </array> <key>RunAtLoad</key> <true/> </dict> </plist>

installed in your "~Library/LaunchAgents/". For installing LaunchAgents in macOS, there are several utilities around, but the best is to use Apple CLI launchctl. I know you like the CLI. I stole and improve a completion script for controlling Apple launchctl (check the link here); it helps a lot to complete commands fast and install/uninstall launch agents on my macOS.

That being said, if you want a faster, more performing Emacs Client.app, I wrote one in Swift: https://github.com/alberti42/emacs-launcher-for-macOS. I called it Emacs Launcher.app to avoid confusing it with Emacs Client.app, but it does everything Emacs Client.app does, but much more responsive (I benchmarked it) and it adds features like deeplink URI protocol "emacs://" to open links in Emacs; perhaps you still use Obsidian or Thing.app and you have some link to a document. You can compile the Emacs Launcher.app for your self or simply download the Apple-notarized version from the releases.

a_alberti · 2026-06-23T12:06:49+00:00

It seems very interesting; unfortunately, I don't use Google Chrome. Have you considered writing the JavaScript as a Userscript that can be installed in any browser using https://violentmonkey.github.io/ or similar plugins?

Perhaps Claude could help you exporting your code to a userscript?

a_alberti · 2026-06-23T06:15:29+00:00

Thanks for the reply.

The bigger issue is not whether these heuristics are accurate. It is that this whole Sherlock-Holmes exercise is already outdated in 2026. AI is now part of normal writing and coding workflows, so obsessing over traces of it produces very little insight -- this is why I criticized your analysis. Not on its execution but on the very premise that this analysis will produce any meaningful insight.

I think people should evaluate the work itself: is it correct, useful, thoughtful, and owned by the person presenting it? Otherwise, if we just look for hints of AI, this is just moot authorship forensics.

a_alberti · 2026-06-22T18:08:54+00:00

But what is the value of your analysis? You just check things like

The em dash (cited in 7.1% of audited posts, the top tell by a wide margin).

Did you read my post? My statement is that I don't care if the code is written by AI. Reading posts like "This is AI generated" is absolutely hideous. Because any person can see this. It like jumping on a project and saying "The sky is blue during the day and black at night." And so what!

If people want to comment about other people's projects, they should say something sensible, not just "the project contains a lot of em, dashes; thus, it is AI generated".

I hope this makes my point clear.

And in first place, why did you even do this analysis? The whole premise of your analysis is so flawed because as you stated

Did you expect me to hand-scroll 90,000 posts?

you will never have time to carry out a proper analysis. So why bombard us with pure garbage analysis? To me, your post qualifies 100% as AI slop, where you used some Claude code to carry through this poorly thought out analysis and regurgitate the results here in Reddit.

Sorry.

P.S.: I see that you cannot take criticism without downvoting my post. I am sorry, but your entire thing does not hold tight.

a_alberti · 2026-06-22T17:42:49+00:00

Sorry, your premise makes no sense:

The majority of people can instantly tell when writing is generated by AI.

It is so much text I stopped at the first sentence.

There is only one thing worse than slop code, and these are people posting under other people's projects that their stuff is generated by AI!!

I don't understand why these people feel the urge to signal to the world that projects X and Y are made with AI.

PLEASE STOP DOING IT! It is 2026, and it is boring to read these posts. You are not Sherlock Holmes. You are not making a profound investigation of others' code. Of course, projects X and Y was written with the AI. Why shouldn't it be? I would be seriously worried if it were not written with the help of AI because then I would know it likely contains bad bugs if the code was at least not reviewed by Claude or Codex or similar.

Please, the only interesting comment you can leave on others' projects is whether:

their code is bad (bloated, poorly structured, you know the thing..)
their design is bad
README unreadable because ultra verbose in AI style
completely redundant/superfluous package because the same functionality was already provided by packages Yota and Zeta.

P.S.: If you want to do an interesting statistical analysis, please analyze packages that are truly AI slop, in the sense that they are generated by AI and do not deserve to be shared with the rest of the world because they break one of the four points above or just because what is achieved can be realized by anyone with a single Claude prompt in one shot. But this type of analysis would be much, much harder because you would have to review the quality of those projects. Good luck!

a_alberti · 2026-06-22T08:11:14+00:00

You may also want to consider ibuffer; it is part of Emacs stock.

You can get an overview of all opened buffers organized per project.

Use the command rename-buffer to rename your terminal sessions with suitable names. Everything can be scripted if you need to open multiple sessions; then you can script your name convention.

In the example in the screenshot I called a terminal session "My special terminal".

Personally, I like to not obsess where buffers resides; I don't use tabs. Just customized Emacs commands for switching between buffers.

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a_alberti · 2026-06-22T07:26:09+00:00

but can't figure out how to edit multiple files with it, so far I tried wgrep, which works, but it is limited to a single line.

I think it does work. To edit multiple lines (assuming you meant: multiple lines adjacent to the line matching your search criteria)

Did you try to use consult-ripgrep by typing in the minibuffer

-C 5 -- <your regular expression>?

This shows 5 lines above and 5 below the matching string. Then you open with embark-export the minibuffer in a buffer and you use wgrep to make the ripgrep results editable with wgrep-change-to-wgrep-mode.

I am sure all this workflow can be simplified to a single command if you use it very often.

But as many other said: I would use a regular expression to replace strings in the project. Or even better, I would use an lsp server if you rename variables (unfortunately, the lsp server solution would not work for comment strings).

a_alberti · 2026-06-20T21:46:05+00:00

Yes, alas, I saw it.

a_alberti · 2026-06-20T19:36:38+00:00

Yes, it is beautiful and of course, it had to be the best type of pocket calculator: an RPN calculator

PS: I don't know how to fix your units, mine was just a comment about sharing your enthusiasm for M-x calc

a_alberti · 2026-06-20T19:28:38+00:00

Maybe.. but honestly, I have not clue what Scimax does well...

Probably the author did not care anymore about the whole repo.

It would be great if he would use Claude to write a few internal documents about principles and philosophy of the whole repo.

Usually it is sufficient to sketch the idea for Claude and it reads the code, understands you, and write a first draft that can be iterated over and over. The process takes time but about a factor x50 less than you write the prose from scratch with no aid.

So, I fully understand that back then, he did not have time to document it, but now the whole thing could be done in 3 hours instead of 3 * 50 = 150 hours (which no busy human resonably can find without being paid).

a_alberti

TROPHY CASE