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> No, Evil mode is not better than Vim itself Emacs provides a convincing Vim layer on top of a hackable LISP runtime. While there's not much point in trying t

> No, Evil mode is not better than Vim itself Emacs provides a convincing Vim layer on top of a hackable LISP runtime. While there's not much point in trying to decide which one is "better," it's not an entirely unfounded point. > For one it's slower Could you be more specific? At least for me, there's no noticeable lag when using Evil mode. > defining keybindings is much more verbose This is why some use Vim? I don't see how this: (define-key evil-normal-state-map (kbd "w") 'some-function) is any worse than this: nnoremap w :<C-u>call some-function()<CR> I for one could care less about how keybindings are set, as it's just something that I write once in a config file and forget about. > everything outside the actual text file has completely different controls It's because Emacs is more of a runtime for elisp applications. As such, it makes sense to have different behaviors for each key depending on context. FWIW evil-collection does a pretty good job of making keybindings feel consistent outside of ordinary text buffers, so you won't have to fall back to Emacs keybindings these days. > I lose most of the seamless interoperability with other terminal tools This is plainly false. Shell interoperability in evil works exactly the same as in Vim. > overly complicated in many aspects This doesn't mean much without specifics. Implementation complexity isn't inherently a bad thing as long as it provides value. Besides, Emacs is a just a LISP interpreter at its core. If anything, it's easy for programmers to grasp and hack on.

jdiez17 5y ago
> Could you be more specific? At least for me, there's no noticeable lag when using Evil mode. Long-time Vim user here. I tried switching to Doom Emacs for a few months. I really, really wanted to like it. As a nerd, the infinite customizability is like catnip to me. It has a really mature plugin ecosystem and you can have a really comfy computing setup with magit, org mode, dired, mu4e, etc... But Emacs is intrinsically slow as molasses. The nail in the coffin for me was the scrolling performance. And I don't mean line-by-line. Even going half a page, or a full page at a time, pegs a CPU core and there is noticeable latency. The Doom Emacs documentation straight up admits it [0]. They recommend crazy things like turning off line numbers. Even with newfangled native Elisp compiler, it doesn't come even close to vim on alacritty. [0] https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs/blob/develop/docs/faq.org#why-is-emacsdoom-slow https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs/blob/develop/docs/faq...
- dhagz 5y ago
  I've been pretty happy with Emacs 27. I haven't noticed significant slowness with that version.
- soraminazuki 5y ago
  As an actual user of both editors, I have a hard time believing that scrolling performance between the two is different in a way that's recognizable. For both, scrolling is instantaneous unless 1. you spam the scroll key 2. you're viewing a exceptionally large buffer 3. syntax highlighting happens to perform badly on the buffer 4. some plugin is blocking the editor For Vim, the forth situation has vastly improved with async APIs pioneered by Neovim, but it still can happen nonetheless. As for the advice about turning off line numbers, that's just a micro-optimization. I've seen similar advice with Vim too. set nonumber nocursorline etc etc... I don't follow any of those overzealous optimization advice either on Vim or Emacs, and scrolling performance is just fine most of the time. Though for Vim, "set lazyredraw" did make a big difference in terms of scrolling performance, but that piece of advice isn't the sort that hampers usability so I don't think it really counts as an overzealous micro-optimization. But back to Emacs, my view is that general editing performance is just fine. When you think about it, if general editing performance were noticeably horrid, that would be a deal breaker for pretty much everyone. It's mostly blocking operations that's causing problems, but that's a slightly different situation from Emacs being sluggish in general. Vim used to have this problem too up until a few years ago, but it ceased to be a major source of pain after plugins adopted async APIs. I just wish Emacs would follow suite.
  - pdimitar 5y ago
    On a beefy (iMac Pro) macOS workstation Emacs 27.2 is often slow at scrolling, which is also admitted in various places -- it has to do with the more pixels, apparently. Regardless of the fact that this station can also play various games at 5K resolution fairly decently... There are zero excuses for a widely used editor program to lag that badly in 2021, on very strong hardware nonetheless. One "hack" I found is to have your font not contain emojis. That was literally the only thing that actually helped. And Emacs itself isn't at fault that LSP does its thing in a synchronous manner in the same main UI thread and makes Emacs super slow. I know that. But I also know that NeoVIM does the same thing asynchronously and doesn't stutter. Sadly I'll be done with Emacs soon. I like it quite a lot but I'm not seeing any will to make it adequately fast or, at the very least, make it so its main UI thread can't be blocked. This sends a message to me that the maintainers are using Emacs in a specific way and don't care about how others are using it. Which means that it's time to part ways.

jdiez17 5y ago

> Could you be more specific? At least for me, there's no noticeable lag when using Evil mode. Long-time Vim user here. I tried switching to Doom Emacs for a few months. I really, really wanted to like it. As a nerd, the infinite customizability is like catnip to me. It has a really mature plugin ecosystem and you can have a really comfy computing setup with magit, org mode, dired, mu4e, etc... But Emacs is intrinsically slow as molasses. The nail in the coffin for me was the scrolling performance. And I don't mean line-by-line. Even going half a page, or a full page at a time, pegs a CPU core and there is noticeable latency. The Doom Emacs documentation straight up admits it [0]. They recommend crazy things like turning off line numbers. Even with newfangled native Elisp compiler, it doesn't come even close to vim on alacritty. [0] https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs/blob/develop/docs/faq.org#why-is-emacsdoom-slow https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs/blob/develop/docs/faq...

dhagz 5y ago
I've been pretty happy with Emacs 27. I haven't noticed significant slowness with that version.
soraminazuki 5y ago
As an actual user of both editors, I have a hard time believing that scrolling performance between the two is different in a way that's recognizable. For both, scrolling is instantaneous unless 1. you spam the scroll key 2. you're viewing a exceptionally large buffer 3. syntax highlighting happens to perform badly on the buffer 4. some plugin is blocking the editor For Vim, the forth situation has vastly improved with async APIs pioneered by Neovim, but it still can happen nonetheless. As for the advice about turning off line numbers, that's just a micro-optimization. I've seen similar advice with Vim too. set nonumber nocursorline etc etc... I don't follow any of those overzealous optimization advice either on Vim or Emacs, and scrolling performance is just fine most of the time. Though for Vim, "set lazyredraw" did make a big difference in terms of scrolling performance, but that piece of advice isn't the sort that hampers usability so I don't think it really counts as an overzealous micro-optimization. But back to Emacs, my view is that general editing performance is just fine. When you think about it, if general editing performance were noticeably horrid, that would be a deal breaker for pretty much everyone. It's mostly blocking operations that's causing problems, but that's a slightly different situation from Emacs being sluggish in general. Vim used to have this problem too up until a few years ago, but it ceased to be a major source of pain after plugins adopted async APIs. I just wish Emacs would follow suite.
- pdimitar 5y ago
  On a beefy (iMac Pro) macOS workstation Emacs 27.2 is often slow at scrolling, which is also admitted in various places -- it has to do with the more pixels, apparently. Regardless of the fact that this station can also play various games at 5K resolution fairly decently... There are zero excuses for a widely used editor program to lag that badly in 2021, on very strong hardware nonetheless. One "hack" I found is to have your font not contain emojis. That was literally the only thing that actually helped. And Emacs itself isn't at fault that LSP does its thing in a synchronous manner in the same main UI thread and makes Emacs super slow. I know that. But I also know that NeoVIM does the same thing asynchronously and doesn't stutter. Sadly I'll be done with Emacs soon. I like it quite a lot but I'm not seeing any will to make it adequately fast or, at the very least, make it so its main UI thread can't be blocked. This sends a message to me that the maintainers are using Emacs in a specific way and don't care about how others are using it. Which means that it's time to part ways.