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,

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.