[nextos]

I've found Emacs plus gptel very pleasant to use. And following the ethos of Emacs, it is backend agnostic and very malleable.

Besides, if you want something inexpensive, using Gemini 2.0 Flash as a backend is completely free. Google provides an API key at no cost.

[fhd2]

Ha, same. How do you use it? I tried all the fancy context management stuff multiple times, but I mostly just have a chat buffer open and copy paste stuff manually. Text wrangling is so damn efficient in Emacs. I pay around 10$ to Anthropic per month in API tokens for pretty heavy usage. With deliberate context management (I found keeping it small and focused vastly improves responses), cost is really not an issue.

Didn't try anything agentic within Emacs yet, don't find that helpful enough so far.

[karthink]

> tried all the fancy context management stuff multiple times, but I mostly just have a chat buffer open and copy paste stuff manually.

As of last week you can insert a link to a plain-text file in a chat buffer to include its contents in the prompt. It must be on a line by itself. In Markdown it looks

[like this](/path/to/file)

with Org links in Org chat buffers.

This feature is disabled by default to minimize confusion. To enable it you can flip the header line button that says "ignoring media" to "sending media". This works for sending images and other media too, if the model supports it.

[fhd2]

Nice! I love how practical gptel is :D

[nextos]

> How do you use it?

I have a global bind for gptel-send (C-c g).

Then, in any buffer, I typically type C-u C-c g.

This lets me customize the prompt and lots of parameters, such as the context, before gptel-send is actually called.

[natrys]

I tried aidermacs yesterday, it's neat if you use the vterm backend. Does a few things more automatically.