IdeaWell

Project ideas from Hacker News discussions.

Neo Emacs – Emacs from the Future

Original Article

Hacker News Discussion

📝 Discussion Summary (Click to expand)

Theme 1 – Enthusiasm for trying Emacs / a modern rewrite
- “Oh that looks so pretty! I've wanted an excuse to try out emacs in the first place, and this could be it!” – tommica
- “Just try Emacs! … there's no reason to not just do it.” – bch
- “I am actually a little surprised… So far, all of my configuration and packages have just worked out of the box.” – eastwd

Theme 2 – Skepticism about AI‑generated/vibe‑coded code and compatibility
- “I'm afraid that 100% compatibility may be very often at odds with multi‑threaded elisp.” – nine_k
- “I just cant imagine anything vibe coded being maintained for more than a few months… will devolve into a slop fest.” – timacles
- “Everything has become ‘same’y … it's AI slop.” – jchw

Theme 3 – Preference for existing alternatives and criticism of UI/UX
- “I'm huge into Emacs and have felt like Emacs has needed a Neovim sort of moment…” – whois
- “JFC, who wants animations in their editor? … Pages that are filled with useless animations … tells me the dev is either incompetent … or an asshole.” – nosioptar
- “Lem throws away any attempts at compatibility with GNU Emacs.” – dismalaf

🚀 Project Ideas

Generating project ideas…

RuEmacs: Rust‑based Emacs Core with Pluggable Scripting

Summary

  • A modular editor kernel written in Rust that provides buffer management, display, and a threaded Elisp VM while allowing Lua or JavaScript as alternative extension languages.
  • Solves the pain of Elisp‑only extensibility and the lack of proven multi‑threading in GNU Emacs by offering a clean, maintainable core with optional language bindings.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience Emacs power‑users, package maintainers, and developers wanting a modern, hackable editor without abandoning Elisp
Core Feature Rust core with interchangeable scripting runtimes (Elisp via guile‑like VM, LuaJIT, QuickJS) and built‑in thread‑safe buffer primitives
Tech Stack Rust (wgpu for GPU‑accelerated rendering, tokio for async), libffi for Elisp VM, mlua/rulua for Lua, quickjs‑rs for JS
Difficulty High
Monetization Hobby

Notes

  • HN commenters lamented the “AI slop” vibe and broken demos; a transparent, well‑tested Rust core would address trust and maintainability concerns (“I'm pretty jaded these days… I decided to compile this and give it a go”).
  • Providing Lua as a first‑class scripting language answers the frequent request for a more familiar, reusable language (“Does anybody know if they plan to add something like Lua?”).

Emacs Launchpad: Beginner‑Friendly, Accessible Distribution

Summary

  • An opinionated Emacs starter kit that ships with a modern, GPU‑accelerated UI, respects prefers‑reduced‑motion, includes a working interactive demo, and offers guided onboarding tutorials.
  • Targets the frustration of steep learning curves, flashy but distracting animations, and non‑functional demo links that deter new users.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience New Emacs users, developers exploring editors, and accessibility‑conscious users
Core Feature Pre‑configured Emacs with sane defaults, optional Lua scripting, accessible theme, and a built‑in tutorial that steps through keybindings and customization
Tech Stack GNU Emacs (or RuEmacs core) + use‑package + straight.el + custom theme (based on doom‑one) + optional wgpu frontend via emacs‑webkit
Difficulty Medium
Monetization Hobby

Notes

  • Commenters asked for “a Neovim sort of moment” and an exciting context to try Emacs; Launchpad delivers a polished, out‑of‑the‑box experience that encourages prolonged use (“It helps to have some kind of exciting, exotic, whimsical, or challenging context to try it out in”).
  • The repeated complaints about non‑working “Watch Demo” buttons and intrusive animations are directly addressed by providing a functional demo and honoring prefers‑reduced‑motion (“Pages that are filled with useless animations … tells me the dev is either incompetent … or an asshole”).

Emacs Threadify: Thread‑Safety Analyzer & Parallelism Assist

Summary

  • A static analysis and runtime aid that scans Elisp codebases for thread‑unsafe patterns (global buffer modifications, unprotected side‑effects) and suggests safe parallel constructs (make‑thread, future, mvcc‑style wrappers).
  • Enables gradual adoption of multi‑threading in existing Emacs packages without rewriting from scratch, addressing the core performance concerns raised in the thread.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience Emacs package maintainers, contributors to ELPA/Melpa, and power users who write custom Elisp
Core Feature Analyzer (via tree‑sitter‑elisp) + optional runtime library providing thread‑safe primitives and automatic retry/rollback for conflicting edits
Tech Stack tree‑sitter, Rust (for analyzer daemon), Elisp library (threadify‑elisp) with macros for safe parallel execution
Difficulty Medium
Monetization Hobby

Notes

  • Many users expressed skepticism about achieving 100% compatibility while adding multi‑threading (“I'm afraid that 100% compatibility may be very often at odds with multi‑threaded elisp”); Threadify offers a pragmatic path to parallelism without breaking existing code.
  • The discussion highlighted desires for evidence of speedup; providing concrete, measurable parallelism improvements in popular packages (e.g., font‑lock, LSP) would give the proof users asked for (“Do you have any evidence that neomac witnesses any speedup?”).

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