
Text Editor Performance Comparison (2016) - luu
https://github.com/jhallen/joes-sandbox/blob/master/editor-perf/readme.md
======
tambourine_man
This was submitted five months ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13933128](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13933128)

Suggestion: previous submission should be at least a year old before rehashing
is allowed

~~~
Uehreka
I don't check HN every day, so I totally missed this. I enjoyed reading it
today.

~~~
tambourine_man
The solution maybe better ways to find old content.

But having the same links resurface over and over doesn't seem optimal to me.

~~~
infogulch
There is a "past" link at under the article link that opens up agnolia search.

I'm gonna throw out the idea that it should show the number of exact url
results right there without having to click it.

~~~
tambourine_man
I thought of something along this lines, but your idea is better. I hope the
mods are reading :)

------
whatever_dude
This is from September 2016.

I'm sure many editors there have changed since then. This is true of Visual
Studio Code, at least - the tests uses 1.4, way behind the current 1.14. I
know the team has been spending some time doing performance improvements (e.g.
1.9 had some big improvements in highlight performance[1]) and I wonder how it
compares.

1: [https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2017/02/08/syntax-
highli...](https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2017/02/08/syntax-highlighting-
optimizations)

~~~
theaustinseven
Yeah, for reference, VS Code had just a couple of months prior added editor
tabs. The VS Code today is vastly different from the one a year ago.

~~~
baldfat
The speed also increased, but I use editors due to interface and usage over
any speed seen.

------
mzzter
I really wanted to give Atom a chance since it gets stuff like ligatures
right, but I find its slow startup speed to be a no-go. I simply find in
Sublime a much stabler experience and faster startup time, which makes it feel
more productive.

~~~
waynecochran
ligatures in source code? It seems as soon as I use a non-fixed width font,
then indenting and other code formatting becomes tricky. Bjarne Stroustrup
uses a proportional spaced font in his C++ book and I hate it.

~~~
mzzter
Yes, specifically ligatures in fixed-width fonts like erik-g mentioned. My
personal favorite is Hasklig[0], which is based on Source Code Pro.

[0]: [https://github.com/i-tu/Hasklig](https://github.com/i-tu/Hasklig)

~~~
waynecochran
Okay then ... does look good ... I assume that normal ascii is used under the
hood and that is what the lexical analyzer sees. I am open minded -- of course
it has to work with emacs -- I am not that open minded ;)

~~~
Uehreka
It's just a font, the underlying text is still the same no matter what font
you use to render it. In fact, you could set Fira Code (or Hasklig) as the
font for your terminal and (as long as your terminal app can render ligatures)
it would render in emacs or any terminal-based editor.

------
pselbert
When I read the headline I thought it would be a link to Dan Luu's recent post
[1]. Not too surprising that it was actually submitted by him!

The most amazing part of this is the JOE editor. Performance and memory aside,
I'm astounded it has been maintained by the same person since 1988! [2]

[1]: [https://danluu.com/term-latency/](https://danluu.com/term-latency/) [2]:
[http://joe-editor.sourceforge.net/](http://joe-editor.sourceforge.net/)

------
doktrin
Nice to see Sublime performing so well relative to Code and Atom

~~~
ajross
Hilarious to see GNU Emacs keeping its head high in the pack of "lightweight"
editors.

~~~
agentgt
Not really... IMO whats far more hilarious is to see an editor written in
_Java_ handily beat the newer editors like Atom, Code, etc.

~~~
btym
Think carefully about what you just posted. Java has to load the JVM. Atom and
VS Code have to load _Chromium_.

~~~
agentgt
Of course I know they load up a web browser but you would think that is
something what Java people would do (in terms of over engineering and over use
frameworks and fair game as I'm a Java developer).

I'm basing this on the original poster that thought it was funny that Emacs is
fast/small. You don't think its ironic that a Java editor is small and fast
given its history of being slow and bloated?

------
to3m
I was moved to try Emacs with my own test file and (somewhat to my surprise -
it's normally pretty crap with long lines) it had no problem loading a 3GByte
file consisting of 3,000,000 1K lines.

For short lines it's generally fine. I've never had a problem working with
multi-GByte log files with 100-chars per line or so.

(Even if it's OK for text, you are probably best off avoiding very large
source files - some of the major modes seem to be written assuming <100K files
and/or short lines. Python mode in particular seems to bog down very easily. C
mode is fine for editing, but large-scale reindents can get pretty slow. And
so on.)

------
nooreen
Nice that you can do so much in so many editors. Luckily, Emacs had me at
hello and I will never turn back.

------
lihaoyi
Approaching the subject another way, Pavel Fatin's excellent article Typing
with Pleasure ([https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-
pleasure/](https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/)) goes really (
_really_ ) deep into another way in which text editor performance can be
compared

------
keyle
I wish IntelliJ was added to the list. It's a monster in comparison but it
feels much faster than Code...

~~~
crispinb
With 'zero-latency typing' enabled (which it is by default on current
versions), IntelliJ rates well on typing lag comparisons which are probably
the most consequent metric for 'feel'.

~~~
keyle
True I can't stand typing in a "text editor" only to see it lagging behind.
That wasn't a thing back in DOS and that shouldn't be a thing today!

------
nkkollaw
Very cool. I thought Nano would perform much better..?

A problem with some fast editors might be ease of use. For instance, I would
have loved to try out JOE editor, but I couldn't find builds, the code is
hosted on Sourceforge, etc. etc.

I think a huge feature for an editor is usability: is there a website where I
can download a build for my OS? Does it update by itself? Is it easy to
configure, install plugins, etc.?

~~~
zeptomu
Assuming you are on a proper OS, it comes with your distribution, e.g. via
Ubuntu it's just

    
    
      $ apt install joe
    

And it's ready (obviously you might want to configure it differently than the
default).

~~~
mikejmoffitt
I agree with you about a package manager being a good OS feature, but this is
unnecessary snark when the two most popular operating systems don't come with
a package manager (of this sort, at least).

~~~
a_t48
For what it's worth, `sudo apt install joe` works fine on my windows machine.
:)

~~~
mikejmoffitt
Joke aside, that didn't install a Windows program, and I'm willing to bet the
WSL wasn't installed by default either, and I'll also bet that didn't work in
a Windows command prompt.

------
agentgt
Oh man I forgot about JED! It was my first editor. At the time Emacs was often
too slow on my computer (circa 1995 maybe even as early as 93).

That editor was awesome and it had a cool library I think called Slang which
had its own sort of ncurses implementation and scripting language (probably
wrong on the details).

The author also implemented an awesome news reader back you know when people
used news readers.

~~~
6502nerdface
> At the time Emacs was often too slow on my computer (circa 1995 maybe even
> as early as 93).

Recalls to mind that old joke, "Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping."

------
agentgt
I'm actually sort of impressed how well JEdit performed. Other than micro its
one of the only not written in a C/C++ language (the critical components... I
realize emacs, code, atom, sublime all have their extension languages).

~~~
slavapestov
Java virtual machines generate very efficient machine code nowadays,
especially for an older codebase like jEdit's that is not particularly "object
oriented".

~~~
lokedhs
I think it would be more fair to call it object oriented. It's just not
framework oriented, and that's a good thing.

------
michaelmior
Very cool. Would be really interesting to see how neovim compares.

------
laylomo2
This is really cool. It would also be useful to provide a visualization of
these numbers for easier scanning. Thanks for sharing.

------
bronz
why is there no good, fast, open source text editor that is user friendly like
vscode but written in a low level language?

~~~
sidlls
Emacs doesn't qualify? Why not?

~~~
ledgerdev
That would be the "user friendly" part.

~~~
sidlls
To each his own, I guess. I find it user friendly enough.

------
hammerandtongs
This is lacking input latency unfortunately ie how long it takes for a typed
character to appear.

That unsurprisingly quite critical and surprisingly variable -

[https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/#input-
latency](https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/#input-latency)

------
loeg
Does neovim do any better than vim in any of these?

~~~
fishywang
I'm wondering the same thing.

------
ledgerdev
I guess the focus on large files has it's certainly useful in certain cases
like viewing log files, data dumps, etc... but for the most part I find myself
opening many many small files with less than a couple hundred lines each.

We need tools that focus on application development needs, not text editing.

------
hossbeast
What is "nvi" in the tables? Neovim?

~~~
billsnow
No it's the BSD clone from the nineties. Ascii only.

