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Emacs users: how good is ChatGPT in creating emacs config files?

(I can't assess it myself myself because .el files are at the sorcery level too high for Rincewind-like skills.)




I've had some success asking it to write me basic elisp functions to perform basic transformations of data or do stuff for window management. It starts hallucinating when I involve 3rd party packages, though.


You have to fill in some gaps (and occasional paranthesis) but it’s pretty darn good at writing elisp for improving your config. I find it’s helpful enough that you can take on medium hanging fruit that you wouldn’t attempt otherwise.

For example, I wrote a minor mode for centering text, an org-export backend for Notion, and some plumbing for chatgpt-shell.

https://notes.alexkehayias.com/using-chatgpt-with-emacs/


GPT-4 is generally excellent. If you have errors, you can often ask it to fix them. GPT-3.5 is not so good.

I recently asked GPT-4 to write an elisp function that would automatically query GPT using an openai client and insert a docstring written by GPT for any Python function under the point. It worked on the first try!




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