Small<br>I was fed up with how I had to keep jumping between windows to do my development. Like most engineers these days, I make ample use of Claude, Codex, anything really that can save me some keystrokes and extra mental load. So I found myself Cmd+Tabing to new windows to switch between my beloved emacs instance and an instance I had running of Claude code. This moment was a moment of illumination, my epiphany, my proverbial apple falling from the tree.

I've been an emacs guy on and off since college, since it was ingrained by department as a whole. It's funny to think, now, that every incoming CS student, major track or not, used Emacs via the GUI on old Mac workstations... Anyway, I bounce between editors, mostly trying to find something that drives as well for as many things as emacs, and have come up (somewhat, shoutout to Zed.dev) empty handed. Although it always felt powerful, however, I didn't fully grok it until that moment.

Functional programming has always somewhat eluded me, so my customization experience in emacs mostly dealt with downloading new plugins and packages from the ecosystem. Although I was never great with elisp, Claude seems to excel in it.

As I was swapping back and forth, I thought "Well, wouldn't it be great if I just could make a TODO(@claude) or QUESTION(@claude) and Claude would pick up the save, and respond or make changes in line?" To which, I pessimistically let out a little snort, "sure, as if you don't have enough half finished projects to deal with. Go write an emacs plugin in a language you barely recognize." That's when the moment happened though, why not just have Claude write it?

I'd be remiss without mentioning at this point that most of my agentic coding ends up moving more towrards conversations rather than one shots. That's why I was shocked to have Claude not only spit out a working solution, but one that looked fantastic. It worked well, great in fact! Emacs excels in quick development loops, so even bringing the plugin "in" to my current emacs window was trivial.

We have reached a point in time where if you want your editor to look, act, or work a certain way, you have a powerhouse developer in your pocket. I'd recommend you start up an emacs instance, even if you never have before, and make a note of things you'd like changed. Simply hand that list to Claude and watch it build your dream editor. Emacs is an OS, it runs your programs, and agentic coding has essentially unblocked your ideal workstation.