11 ms·

have you actually used emacs on a cpu made in the last 20 years and found it to be slow? compared to vim or bash, it is cpu intensive. compared to any of the g

have you actually used emacs on a cpu made in the last 20 years and found it to be slow? compared to vim or bash, it is cpu intensive. compared to any of the graphical apps that come with a mac, it is easier on the cpu (and on RAM).

dan-robertson 8y ago
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
- em-bee 8y ago
  we used to call it: Eight Megabytes And Currently Swapping. but those days are long gone...
WalterGR 8y ago
have you actually used emacs on a cpu made in the last 20 years and found it to be slow? Yes. Early 2015 Macbook Pro.
na85 8y ago
It's hella slow to start up, of course, even on my 2017 mbp. Chugs when scrolling depending on active modes, too.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
  Launch it as a daemon and instantly connect via emacsclient.
  - na85 8y ago
    I should do that, but it seems like a Band-Aid solution to the real problem which is poor performance.
    - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
      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'.
eubarbosa 8y ago
Emacs is meant to be open all the time. As it is way more than a simple Editor. You can do all the CLI tasks inside Emacs. Emacs Vanilla takes less than a second to open in my t430(2011)

dan-robertson 8y ago

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

em-bee 8y ago
we used to call it: Eight Megabytes And Currently Swapping. but those days are long gone...

WalterGR 8y ago

have you actually used emacs on a cpu made in the last 20 years and found it to be slow? Yes. Early 2015 Macbook Pro.

na85 8y ago

It's hella slow to start up, of course, even on my 2017 mbp. Chugs when scrolling depending on active modes, too.

_emacsomancer_ 8y ago
Launch it as a daemon and instantly connect via emacsclient.
- na85 8y ago
  I should do that, but it seems like a Band-Aid solution to the real problem which is poor performance.
  - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
    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'.

eubarbosa 8y ago

Emacs is meant to be open all the time. As it is way more than a simple Editor. You can do all the CLI tasks inside Emacs. Emacs Vanilla takes less than a second to open in my t430(2011)