
The Power That is GNU Emacs - apgwoz
http://sigusr2.net/2009/Apr/30/the-power-that-is-gnu-emacs.html
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st3fan
"""I'm not going to lie—not even a little bit, in 2003, Emacs was slow."""

Really? In 2003 most of us were working on G4 Macs, Pentium IVs at 3Ghz or
even Xeons. Emacs worked fine and very fast on all those machines.

Personally I have been using Emacs since around 1997 and even then it was not
slow. Not on intel machines that were slow by today's standard and it was
certainly not slow on the Sun Sparcs that I used to work with and develop on.

I think the author is confused and really meant to say: emacs had a reputation
of being slow. Considering emacs originated in 1976 this is not surprising.

~~~
apgwoz
I'm referring more to startup time than I am responsiveness. Emacs has only
ever been "sluggish" when I've used it on a system with little memory.

~~~
biotech
I have the same problem. Startup time is over a second on some modern systems.
There is some good advice on how to avoid this on Stack Overflow:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/778716/how-can-i-make-
ema...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/778716/how-can-i-make-emacs-start-
up-faster)

~~~
ellyagg
Haha. You must be missing a ton of cool extensions. My startup time is like 10
seconds. I could certainly work hard to bring it down, but who cares? I never
turn off emacs or my computer.

------
richieb
Emacs is an operating system, cleverly disguised as an editor.....

~~~
iamwil
Emacs is not just a text editor, but a way of life.

~~~
rbanffy
It's the One True Text Editor

