5 ms·

I'll stick with Emacs for now. $250 is a bit heavy for those of us with little disposable income. In addition, I fail to see the advantage of this over Emacs:

I'll stick with Emacs for now. $250 is a bit heavy for those of us with little disposable income. In addition, I fail to see the advantage of this over Emacs: Emacs already has pretty much all of Epsilon's features, and a larger community. Furthermore, I highly doubt that its extensibility features are as extensive. It's kinda cool, though. Sidenote: why do I always see the HN headlines up to a day ahead in the previous headlines? Is this just thing everybody sees? Or am I just really lucky picking my threads?

ww520 10y ago
Epsilon is very fast, like coming up in a second. Emacs takes tens of seconds up to a minute. You start Emacs and hope to never shut it down. With epsilon you can start it on a file quickly and move on.
- robobro 10y ago
  one word: emacsclient
  - sooheon 10y ago
    Only use emacs, not epsilon, but someone above mentioned that it can handle long lines. Emacs, despite being a good editor, is not performant in such cases.
    - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
      You can do some optmizations to Emacs line handling. emacs -nw can help, I think. But by the time you've really hit Emacs' limit, you should have split your line anyway. And there is always nano, for the truly desparate.
      - GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
        How does "-nw" help with long lines?
        qwertyuiop924 10y ago
        Apparently, one of the scans is for glyph height. In -nw, your font's monospaced. If emacs is smart enough to drop the check, it should be slightly faster.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > Emacs takes tens of seconds up to a minute. I need to seriously rethink my Emacs configuration. I thought I had a lot of packages and elisp scripts loaded at startup, but I don't think I ever hit the 5-second mark. Emacs starting up a whole minute? What great packages am I missing?
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    Me neither, and you'll most often run through emacsclient anyways, so...
- notalaser 10y ago
  What are you running it on? Tens of seconds... I remember that, from back when it was rumored that EMACS was an acronym for "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping". 8 MB of RAM haven't been anything to brag about for a while, though, nor has emacs started in tens of seconds up to a minute.
- Philipp__ 10y ago
  I don't know, but I Emacs 25.0.9 on my 2016 MacBook Pro is really fast. Like really close to vim.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    It depends on how much you've got loaded. Most serious emacs users have a vast corpus of elisp loading on boot. Nowadays, some people will load the elisp lazily, so the files are only evaluated of you use their functions. This is also why emacsclient exists: To try to amortize the startup cost.
- michaelcampbell 10y ago
  > Emacs takes tens of seconds up to a minute Not in 10+ years has this been true, at least for me. > You start Emacs and hope to never shut it down. It's not hope for me. I start emacs when the machine starts and quite literally never shut it down. Not because I don't want to start it up, but because without it running, I don't get work done. I even generally have a copy running in an (again) always-on tmux session, for when I login to a box via ssh. I feel this "big bloaty" anti-emacs argument really lost its legs ~1989; I'm not sure why people cling to it unless they have a vested interest elsewhere.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    An always on tmux session? That seems kinda hacky, given emacsclient exists for exactly this reason...
    - michaelcampbell 10y ago
      Maybe I'm not using it right then, but I log in and out of these boxes several times a day from several different remote locations and just `tmux a` when I do. How does emacsclient protect me from ssh disconnects? I thought all it did was use an existing emacs instance.
      - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
        IIRC, that's exactly how it protects you: if your ssh drops, your buffer won't close. check the docs, though. I'm not 100% sure.

ww520 10y ago

Epsilon is very fast, like coming up in a second. Emacs takes tens of seconds up to a minute. You start Emacs and hope to never shut it down. With epsilon you can start it on a file quickly and move on.

robobro 10y ago
one word: emacsclient
- sooheon 10y ago
  Only use emacs, not epsilon, but someone above mentioned that it can handle long lines. Emacs, despite being a good editor, is not performant in such cases.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    You can do some optmizations to Emacs line handling. emacs -nw can help, I think. But by the time you've really hit Emacs' limit, you should have split your line anyway. And there is always nano, for the truly desparate.
    - GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
      How does "-nw" help with long lines?
      - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
        Apparently, one of the scans is for glyph height. In -nw, your font's monospaced. If emacs is smart enough to drop the check, it should be slightly faster.
TeMPOraL 10y ago
> Emacs takes tens of seconds up to a minute. I need to seriously rethink my Emacs configuration. I thought I had a lot of packages and elisp scripts loaded at startup, but I don't think I ever hit the 5-second mark. Emacs starting up a whole minute? What great packages am I missing?
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  Me neither, and you'll most often run through emacsclient anyways, so...
notalaser 10y ago
What are you running it on? Tens of seconds... I remember that, from back when it was rumored that EMACS was an acronym for "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping". 8 MB of RAM haven't been anything to brag about for a while, though, nor has emacs started in tens of seconds up to a minute.
Philipp__ 10y ago
I don't know, but I Emacs 25.0.9 on my 2016 MacBook Pro is really fast. Like really close to vim.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  It depends on how much you've got loaded. Most serious emacs users have a vast corpus of elisp loading on boot. Nowadays, some people will load the elisp lazily, so the files are only evaluated of you use their functions. This is also why emacsclient exists: To try to amortize the startup cost.
michaelcampbell 10y ago
> Emacs takes tens of seconds up to a minute Not in 10+ years has this been true, at least for me. > You start Emacs and hope to never shut it down. It's not hope for me. I start emacs when the machine starts and quite literally never shut it down. Not because I don't want to start it up, but because without it running, I don't get work done. I even generally have a copy running in an (again) always-on tmux session, for when I login to a box via ssh. I feel this "big bloaty" anti-emacs argument really lost its legs ~1989; I'm not sure why people cling to it unless they have a vested interest elsewhere.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  An always on tmux session? That seems kinda hacky, given emacsclient exists for exactly this reason...
  - michaelcampbell 10y ago
    Maybe I'm not using it right then, but I log in and out of these boxes several times a day from several different remote locations and just `tmux a` when I do. How does emacsclient protect me from ssh disconnects? I thought all it did was use an existing emacs instance.
    - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
      IIRC, that's exactly how it protects you: if your ssh drops, your buffer won't close. check the docs, though. I'm not 100% sure.