My Emacs Zero to IDE Journey
I recently encountered a situation where JetBrains IDEs weren't working for a project, and I wasn't even sure I wanted to keep paying the yearly fee. I decided to de-IDE myself and as part of it I decided to look at my options. The more I saw of Emacs the more interested I got. However using the Doom emacs distribution kind of threw me in the deep end without actually understanding how Emacs operates. I was lost and bounced off quick. I decided to take the approach of starting with vanilla Emacs and trying to get it to work for me as an IDE one step at a time. This post was me documenting…
My Emacs Zero to IDE Journey launched on August 24, 2026 with 15 votes, #819 of 23,274 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches.
In plain words
This is a documentation series and GitHub repository that guides developers through configuring vanilla Emacs as a fully-featured IDE from scratch. The author documents the step-by-step process of building IDE capabilities in Emacs, explaining the reasoning behind each configuration choice and extension, rather than providing quick tips. It is intended for developers interested in transitioning away from commercial IDEs and understanding how to customize and extend Emacs to meet their specific needs.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Contribute to KallDrexx/emacs-zero-to-ide-journey development by creating an account on GitHub.
In the maker’s words, at launch
I recently encountered a situation where JetBrains IDEs weren't working for a project, and I wasn't even sure I wanted to keep paying the yearly fee. I decided to de-IDE myself and as part of it I decided to look at my options. The more I saw of Emacs the more interested I got. However using the Doom emacs…
Does a similar job
all alternatives →
Tmux-IDE, OSS agent-first terminal IDEMar 2026 · tmux.thijsverreck.com · ▲88Hey HN, Small OSS project that i created for myself and want to share with the community. It's a declarative, scriptable, terminal-based IDE focussed on agentic engineering. That's a lot of jargon, but essentially its a multi-agent IDE that you start in your terminal. Why is that relevant? Thanks to tmux and SSH, it means that you have a really simple and efficient way to create your own always-on coding setup. Boot into your IDE through ssh, give a prompt to claude and close off your machine. In tmux-ide claude will keep working. The tool is intentionally really lightweight, because I think…
Continue for JetBrains - how we made it IDE-agnostic2023 · plugins.jetbrains.com · ▲7Hi HN! Since launching Continue two months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36882146), we've received amazing feedback, added features, and greatly improved reliability. But one of the biggest things we heard was the desire for a JetBrains extension. My co-founder Ty and I are super excited to share that we've released an extension for PyCharm, Intellij, WebStorm, and most other JetBrains IDEs - ready for alpha users at https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/22707-continue. Perhaps the most exciting part is that this effort was kickstarted and in…
My Attempt to Organize the World of AI Dev Tools2025 · aicode.danvoronov.com · ▲101I've been exploring the (not so=) amazing potential of AI in coding and have compiled a list of tools. From AI-powered IDEs to code generators, this resource is my contribution to the community. I'm still on the fence about including txt2sql projects, as their functionality seems too basic to me. And I'm personally maintaining this, so your feedback is wellcome.
My first programming project – userscripts to change forum UIs2024 · github.com · ▲89Hi, I'm Will. I'm 24, autistic, and have OCD tendencies. I'm learning to code and this is my first public project. I’d really appreciate your feedback and encouragement! This project lets me solve some of my OCD problems online. There are a couple of parts of the forums that I visit – Space Battles, Sufficient Velocity, and Questionable Questing – that I want to remove. Specifically, I hate seeing indicators of how much is left in a forum thread, because I keep thinking about how much content is left. It stops me from immersing myself in the story. It stressed me out. Before I learned to…
A C/C++ IDE written in C from scratch with zero dependenciesMar 2026 · giovannicarlino04.itch.io · ▲10I’ve spent the last ~2 years building a C/C++ IDE for Windows entirely in C99. My goal was to eliminate the bloat of the modern Visual Studio environment keeping its core features. Key Technical Highlights: Zero Dependencies: Just the Windows API Performance: Starts in 0.1ms on a twelve year old machine. It handles projects with 500k+ lines without UI lag or indexing stutters. Integrated Tools: Includes a custom-built debugger, profiler, and Intellisense engine designed for speed. Portability: It’s a single executable. No installer required. I built this because I was tired of waiting…
I vibe coded a DAW for the terminal. how'd I do?Feb 2026 · github.com · ▲5So, I've never written a line of Rust in my life. I wouldn't know an `&mut this` from a mutandis. But I saw a tweet about a month ago that said, in this new era of AI, you'd be able to just take a library that you love, throw a TUI around it, and call it an app. So I spent about 200 bucks last month, here's what I came up with: Imbolc is a DAW that runs entirely in your terminal. It talks to scsynth over OSC and ships 58 instruments and 39 effects. VSTs are a work in progress, also GarageBand loops if you want to recreate "Umbrella". The codebase is about 60k? lines of Rust across 5 crates,…
More work this month
the category →
Endless lofi beats composed live in your browser, over pixel-art nights in Paris, Tokyo, New York, Hong Kong, Sydney, San Francisco and more. Free, no sign-up.
Work · 25d ago · loficities.com
Smooth Recorder▲257Mac screen recordings that look edited when you hit stop
Work · 19d ago · smoothrecorder.com
Work · 13d ago · readrare.com
Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part
Launched alongside, August 2026
the whole month →- TL
Life & fun · Aug 2026 · louisabraham.github.io
Clipto MCP▲655Hey HN, We recently built Clipto. It’s a tool that lets you search over terabytes of video, audio, and images on your computer, without relying on the cloud. Motivation: we probably all had this similar experience, we know a moment exists in a video or audio, but finding it takes hours scrubbing the timeline. You can send all the media to process in the cloud, but it’s slow, expensive and raises privacy concerns. So we decided to build our own on-device media search engine. How it works (high level): 1. We ingest video, audio, image; normalize formats via ffmpeg; run content analysis to…
Work · Aug 2026 · clipto.com
Hello HN! I found that picking out plausible but diverse skin tones for my digital art and game development projects was kind of difficult, and I got curious about if there was a way to define a color space that made it easy. I've built a color picker and procedural generation algorithm based on the space as well as a bunch of other fun js features and demos throughout the page that use the equations. If you find it interesting, I have lots of explanations of how I built it and what properties the space has. The methodology might be a bit shaky, but hopefully the result is as helpful for…
Life & fun · Aug 2026 · toneyalexander.github.io
Astute▲606Automate your B2B brand going viral, with new media creators
AI · Aug 2026 · company-app.joinastute.com