> ... while in VSCode for example the file is opened immediately and things like LSP and syntax highlighting are loaded in the background. I'm not saying you'r

> ... while in VSCode for example the file is opened immediately and things like LSP and syntax highlighting are loaded in the background. I'm not saying you're not experiencing what you're describing but I find that weird because I use Emacs with LSP and the system is responsive while LSP loads up. And I'm using lsp-mode, not Eglot (I should really try Eglot). I mostly use it for Clojure: I'm using both Cider and lsp-mode and they work fine together. And as soon as I open any Clojure source file, I can keep using Emacs while LSP starts (which is not that slow btw: only about three seconds I'd say). LSP is one of those things that runs in another process, so it's one of those case, for me at least, where Emacs acts like if it was multithreaded. I haven't seen this lock up / freeze while waiting for some LSP server answer. For example I'll typically open a Cojure file, lsp-mode shall begin loading automatically and then I manually launch Cider: everything happens "simultaneously" and I'm not blocked. I'll play more attention with other LSP servers (like the CSS one) but nothing strikes me as slow or frozen. If there's one thing I could complain about is that when I'm busy doing other things (because my Emacs ain't blocked), I see spurious LSP messages telling me where it's at kinda distracting me. Now I take you're using a native-comp Emacs? And a fast JSON parsing lib? Emacs 28, native comp, lsp-mode, AMD 3700X, NVMe SSD, 16 GB of RAM. A good machine but nothing crazy fast.