3 ms·

I use Emacs for everything except web-browsing. Performance has never been a major concern for me. When Emacs is slow it’s almost always due to a faulty configu

I use Emacs for everything except web-browsing. Performance has never been a major concern for me. When Emacs is slow it’s almost always due to a faulty configuration. E.g., spellchecker configured to run is gigantic .csv files and similar. When native compilation dropped a while ago, Emacs became technically 2-4 times faster but I hardly noticed it. I think the perception of Emacs being slow is 90% due to the Spacemacs distro. But Doom or hand-written configs should be fine.

bzxcvbn 4y ago
I used to use Emacs (for 15+ years) with a handcrafted config. It didn't feel slow because of spacemacs, which didn't even exist when I started using it. It felt slow because anything that should have been async (pushing to git, asking the LSP server to do something, you named it: spell checking, etc.) would hang up the whole UI.
- seanw444 4y ago
  Which it does have threading now, at least.
- d0mine 4y ago
  There is no need to hang UI while communicating with external processes. There can be both sync and async interfaces (you don't even need threads, though they could be handy sometimes). I use magit everyday and can't tell whether it sync or async (meaning no performance issues). jupyter-python code blocks are definitely async (I can type in the same buffer while they are calculating something). There is no issue with tailing logs in one vterm buffer and doing whatever in another. Some operations are slow e.g., generating daily agenda from multi year org files (though it is not slow enough that I've bothered to do anything about it).
mark_l_watson 4y ago
I wish I could do the same thing. I am really happiest using Emacs for Common Lisp, markdown, Scheme, and Haskell; and I am a fan of the very old Emacs Python support. My problem is that I am a little obsessive about keeping all my JetBrain IDEs, LispWorks, and VSCode all set up with useful plugins. As you might imagine, I also use them. However, I think my work flow would be better just using one tool. I like to play around with dev tools and configurations too much. I am 71 years old, I should know better :-)
- Y_Y 4y ago
  I might be less than half that age, but I've given up on listening to complaints about spending time making the editor nice. I don't have any super-big configs but what I do have is careful and precise and ass a result Emacs (spacemacs) feels as much at home to me as sitting on my couch. Furthermore I enjoy tweaking my workspace. If you spend all day at it you'll never get any work done, but if you don't spend any time at it you'll miss the active enjoyment of tweaking and the passive enjoyment of having a nicer workspace. I'll not mention all the time people gripe at me about how hard it is to learn vim commands while I save so much time on large repetitive edits that I've made back my (enjoyable) investment years ago.
giraffe_lady 4y ago
My emacs config is about a hundred lines and I'm not using anything unusual at all and it's slow as shit compared to other editors. Like you said this isn't a major concern for me most of the time but I won't pretend it isn't there.
- tmalsburg2 4y ago
  Out of curiosity: what’s slow with your config?
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    Nothing is slow with my config I don't think, it's just some font and keybind changes. I actually just checked and it's 38 lines, way less than the 100 I had guessed. Emacs is slow. Even with native compilation. Even with the default or a minimal config. Opening files or switching buffers, imenu, isearch, etc especially in files of a few thousand lines or more, have a noticeable UI grogginess to them. It's probably only dozens or maybe hundreds of milliseconds but it's very clearly there and always has been on every system I've used emacs on for nearly 20 years now. I do not understand emacs people who claim it isn't, or try to make it a "you're using it wrong" matter based around my config. Your config can certainly make it much worse, but you can't config it out of emacs it is part of the software.
    - nequo 4y ago
      “Slow as shit” is relative, I guess. Vim definitely starts up faster. But to make it more comparable, do you consider “emacs -nw -Q” slow too? What do you get for “time emacs -nw -Q -eval '(kill-emacs)'”?
      - giraffe_lady 4y ago
        Yes it is relative, I probably should have been more clear about that. I am basing this entirely off of how it feels to use the tool, rather than measured timings, because I am a person who feels and not a clock that measures. I also don't care all that much! Emacs is slow and also still the best tool for many of my uses. If it's unbearably slow for a given task I just use something else for that.

bzxcvbn 4y ago

I used to use Emacs (for 15+ years) with a handcrafted config. It didn't feel slow because of spacemacs, which didn't even exist when I started using it. It felt slow because anything that should have been async (pushing to git, asking the LSP server to do something, you named it: spell checking, etc.) would hang up the whole UI.

seanw444 4y ago
Which it does have threading now, at least.
d0mine 4y ago
There is no need to hang UI while communicating with external processes. There can be both sync and async interfaces (you don't even need threads, though they could be handy sometimes). I use magit everyday and can't tell whether it sync or async (meaning no performance issues). jupyter-python code blocks are definitely async (I can type in the same buffer while they are calculating something). There is no issue with tailing logs in one vterm buffer and doing whatever in another. Some operations are slow e.g., generating daily agenda from multi year org files (though it is not slow enough that I've bothered to do anything about it).

mark_l_watson 4y ago

I wish I could do the same thing. I am really happiest using Emacs for Common Lisp, markdown, Scheme, and Haskell; and I am a fan of the very old Emacs Python support. My problem is that I am a little obsessive about keeping all my JetBrain IDEs, LispWorks, and VSCode all set up with useful plugins. As you might imagine, I also use them. However, I think my work flow would be better just using one tool. I like to play around with dev tools and configurations too much. I am 71 years old, I should know better :-)

Y_Y 4y ago
I might be less than half that age, but I've given up on listening to complaints about spending time making the editor nice. I don't have any super-big configs but what I do have is careful and precise and ass a result Emacs (spacemacs) feels as much at home to me as sitting on my couch. Furthermore I enjoy tweaking my workspace. If you spend all day at it you'll never get any work done, but if you don't spend any time at it you'll miss the active enjoyment of tweaking and the passive enjoyment of having a nicer workspace. I'll not mention all the time people gripe at me about how hard it is to learn vim commands while I save so much time on large repetitive edits that I've made back my (enjoyable) investment years ago.

giraffe_lady 4y ago

My emacs config is about a hundred lines and I'm not using anything unusual at all and it's slow as shit compared to other editors. Like you said this isn't a major concern for me most of the time but I won't pretend it isn't there.

tmalsburg2 4y ago
Out of curiosity: what’s slow with your config?
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  Nothing is slow with my config I don't think, it's just some font and keybind changes. I actually just checked and it's 38 lines, way less than the 100 I had guessed. Emacs is slow. Even with native compilation. Even with the default or a minimal config. Opening files or switching buffers, imenu, isearch, etc especially in files of a few thousand lines or more, have a noticeable UI grogginess to them. It's probably only dozens or maybe hundreds of milliseconds but it's very clearly there and always has been on every system I've used emacs on for nearly 20 years now. I do not understand emacs people who claim it isn't, or try to make it a "you're using it wrong" matter based around my config. Your config can certainly make it much worse, but you can't config it out of emacs it is part of the software.
  - nequo 4y ago
    “Slow as shit” is relative, I guess. Vim definitely starts up faster. But to make it more comparable, do you consider “emacs -nw -Q” slow too? What do you get for “time emacs -nw -Q -eval '(kill-emacs)'”?
    - giraffe_lady 4y ago
      Yes it is relative, I probably should have been more clear about that. I am basing this entirely off of how it feels to use the tool, rather than measured timings, because I am a person who feels and not a clock that measures. I also don't care all that much! Emacs is slow and also still the best tool for many of my uses. If it's unbearably slow for a given task I just use something else for that.