I've given Emacs a handful of good tries, but it always lets me down. I've tried out "vanilla", Spacemacs and Doom (the last one being my favorite so far), but it's not working for me. I keep going back to good old Vim.
For example, when I was learning Clojure I used Doom Emacs for a few months, but gave up because:
- Emacs is slow. There's no way around that. It's even slower than VSCode or other IDE-ish editors. If you're used to Vim speeds, that's pretty annoying.
- The Vim keybindings are not available everywhere, for example in some plugins you would fall back to pinky-breaker, wrist punishing Emacs standard keybindings.
- There's some uncanny valley where keybindings are mostly like Vim but you have constantly paper cuts from small differences here and there, among the occasional Emacs-mode fallback.
Don't take me wrong, I can see how Emacs is a great editor, but for me, it's way too late it seems. Seems like I'm going to keep on vimming until the end.
It can be, because it is :) If you want a really technical explanation, you can profile the application. If that is too much work, I'll generalise and say that the tendency for the UI to lock when performing CPU heavy computations makes it feel slow. Because of the things you will be asking it to do (i.e. solve modern problems), sometimes such computations exist and lead to blocks of 1s or more. That will never feel fast.
> Also we are talking here about Emacs "distributions" (Spacemacs, Doom Emacs) which come with a lot of code, and ELisp is not particularly fast.
I've just tried Doom Emacs on 27.1, with the default stuff plus some minor additions, and it starts within 900 ms on my laptop (Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-9850H CPU @ 2.60GHz).
It isn't. I still use it once in a while on an old netbook with a couple of gigs of memory, and it flies for any editing task. In comparison, no IDE can even hope to run on that unit.
HOWEVER, a heavily and naively reconfigured emacs, possibly with uncompiled elisp code and copy-pasted invocations that wait for network responses could take ages to open.
If you are finding emacs to be slow, try it vanilla first ("--no-init-file") before deciding it's the program and not your configuration.
Wish I started out with Emacs, but after 10 years of curating my vimrc, I don't have time to replace all my custom plugins/bindings by figuring out elisp.
I liked Doom as a vanilla editor, but I went back to vim.
For what it's worth `vim-iced` is pretty cool for Clojure. I didn't like Fireplace at all.
