I use emacs basically all day and so my comment was partially in jest. I find the following things to be slow:
1. Large files
2. Anything synchronous and blocking that takes a little too long can be frustratingly slow. This often isn’t entirely the fault of emacs (e.g. if it is slow because an external program is slow) but async isn’t done for everything so sometimes things block and you can’t do anything while they are working. This is particularly annoying if the external program provides eg auto-completion
3. Running a macro a large number of times
4. Building the completion list when finding files (I think this is a combination of an issue with the extension for finding files and how it reads a directory and just reading a very large directory over nfs)
5. Sometimes it becomes slow enough that the visual lag between key press and character-on-screen is annoyingly large
Launching `emacs -Q` (=no daemon, start without init.el) – which is equivalent to a typical way of starting `vi` or (shudder) `nano` – opens essentially instantly. A more complicated init.el/.emacs will take longer to start, but I fail to see how this is 'poor performance'.
There's nothing standard about Spacemacs. It's a tremendously useful premade config, but it's not indicative of the performance of the Emacs environment.
I’ve never understood the load time argument about IDEs, I probably restart my IDE whenever I do os upgrades every other week or so. This is true when I use IntelliJ, Emacs, or VS Code. Any of these could take 30s or longer to start for all I care.
The issue with VS Code is that it’s more memory hungry than google chrome. More than once I’ve caught it using half a gig of memory, with various instances of flow using up to a gig on top of that.
I prefer using one editor for every task. This means both coding and quick config edits or jotting down notes. So while I often keep an instance up for hours, I also open and close it frequently enough that load time is enough of an issue.
Too bad porting[1] Emacs to Guile wasn't finished (even seems abandoned), could have improved speed and multithreading (and even better extensibility too).
Can I get a quick vim vs emacs usage vote here? Not looking for a war. Just a usage vote. I will try and update results. Feel free to reply with your daily hours too
Results below- small sample but makes me wonder about stack overflow survey about vim being thrice as used as emacs. I am a very loyal vim user but I would wager that those results were influenced by the occasional vim user. What are others thoughts on this?
>makes me wonder about stack overflow survey about vim being thrice as used as emacs.
Your poll has more selection bias than the SO survey: your poll was seen only by HNers who decided to read comments on a story with "Emacs" in the title.
Correct, but given the lingering sense of the two editors being polar opposites, left behind from centuries-past flame wars of the internets, both vim and emacs users are likely to come forward, just to see what the fuss is about.
Emacs. Vi is awesome — it really is — and vim is neat too, but I prefer an entire operating environment. And Lisp. And man-centuries (man-millennia?) of usability improvements.
Vim's command-line is more alien to the last 4 or 5 gui-bred younger generations of programmers. Learning to master it is therefore more of a badge of hounour, and for that, more sought-after, than learning to master Emacs.
Personally, I'd rather have Vim, but with Emacs-Lisp as a scripting language. That would rock.:x
> Personally, I'd rather have Vim, but with Emacs-Lisp as a scripting language
Vim does have a scheme language binding such that vimscript can call an embedded script written in scheme, and that scheme script can interface with vim. This is also the case for other languages like perl, python, ruby, tcl, and several other languages.
Syntax highlighting and basic outline support is not orgmode. Orgmode is an agenda, a smart task scheduler, a spaced repetition learning system, a publishing environment, a literate code tool, a knowledge base...
Nah, vim's modal. True, one of those modes is 'break everything', but the other mode is 'beeping furiously', so I generally notice I'm not in emacs pretty quickly.
Beeping is a feature. The user must be made aware that they are typing in vim, lest they start pressing random key combinations, like C-x, C-m etc.
It is well known that users may press these keys by mistake, while falling asleep on their keyboard. Therefore, vim beeps to keep them awake and avoid trouble.
