January 29, 2026
LLM drama hits Emacs—bring popcorn
Agent-shell: A native Emacs buffer to interact with LLM agents powered by ACP
Emacs gets an AI chat window—fans cheer, purists nitpick
TLDR: Agent-shell brings AI chat into Emacs using a simple, native buffer and supports multiple assistants. Commenters split between loving its minimal approach, wanting deeper Claude features, or sticking with org-mode for long-term chat tracking, with a side of Emacs vs Vim banter.
Agent-shell drops into Emacs like a built-in chat window for AI helpers, powered by ACP (Agent Client Protocol), and the comment section immediately split into camps. One side is swooning over the simplicity: it’s just a native buffer, no fancy terminal tricks, and it plays nice with agents like Claude, Gemini, and Mistral Vibe. The other side? They want deeper integration and aren’t shy about saying so. As matthewbauer points out, claude-code-ide.el goes further with Claude-specific features, and some folks miss that polish.
Meanwhile, productivity power-users swooped in with a flex: “Why chat in a shell when you can turn your whole life into a searchable AI diary?” Enter org-mode, Emacs’s note system. ryanobjc has ten months of chats organized like a bullet journal and now can analyze them. That turned into a mini meme: Emacs users turning AI chats into spreadsheets of feelings.
And because no dev thread is complete without Vim vs Emacs vibes, jauntywundrkind compares a Neovim plugin and shrugs—“never clicked.” Cue the rivalry jokes: Emacs is an operating system, Vim is a lifestyle, and ACP is the new bridge everyone’s testing. Oh, and the project’s asking for sponsorship—some cheer the hustle, others smirk with “paying for tokens and plugins, what a time” energy.
Key Points
- •Agent-shell provides a native Emacs buffer to interact with multiple ACP-enabled LLM agents.
- •The project and its dependency acp.el are available on MELPA, with installation examples via use-package and Doom Emacs.
- •Setup instructions detail external dependencies and installation steps for agents like Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Goose, Cursor, Qwen Code, Auggie, Mistral Vibe, Factory Droid, and Pi.
- •Configuration guidance shows how to pass authentication and other environment variables to agent processes using agent-shell-make-environment-variables.
- •Related Emacs packages include acp.el, agent-shell-manager, agent-shell-sidebar, agent-review, and agent-shell-attention.el, with icons credited to Lobe Icons.