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I’ve been using Emacs for 6 years now. But recently it became clear to me that it’s really optimised for Linux and doesn’t work as well on Mac and Windows[1]. O

I’ve been using Emacs for 6 years now. But recently it became clear to me that it’s really optimised for Linux and doesn’t work as well on Mac and Windows[1]. On top of that I kept running into performance issues with large files. It took me a while, but I’ve finally adjusted to Sublime and am quite satisfied for now. It’s snappy and doesn’t break as easily. The only issue I have is that, unlike Vim and Emacs, Sublime macros seem to record movement by characters, not text objects. So if I move cursor by words inside a macro and then replay it in another place, where words have different lengths, the macro won’t do what it should. For those cases I’ll still switch to Vim probably. [1]: On Windows my config doesn’t work at all. I have no idea why. I didn’t have the energy to debug it.

hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
Performance is a killer for me also. I suspect once better tree parsing is implemented many of those issues will be solved. Then it’s just the lack of threading in the gui thread, and a few other nitpicks.
- guenthert 4y ago
  Given that Emacs worked for me alright on a 20MHz 386 30 years ago, I must ask, what in the world are you doing with Emacs that its performance turns out to be inadequate on current hardware?
  - hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
    Probably syntax and long line parsing. I also run in daemon mode. I imagine emacs 28 wouldn’t run well on those specs with a default confit. But also the biggest killer is probably the lack of code trees, forward/backward searches to do syntax highlighting etc is pretty expensive.
User23 4y ago
> I’ve been using Emacs for 6 years now. But recently it became clear to me that it’s really optimised for Linux and doesn’t work as well on Mac and Windows[1]. The Emacs devs definitely are biased in favor of free platforms, that’s true. However something like 30% of users are on MacOS and I’ve personally never noted any deficiency there. The native Windows builds definitely don’t run as well though. A big part of that is because NTFS is poorly suited to Emacs IO patterns. I use the same config for all three, but I did have to disable certain parts when running on Windows. One that immediately comes to mind is the vterm package.
- mumblemumble 4y ago
  > The Emacs devs definitely are biased in favor of free platforms This strikes me as shortsighted. Most of us don't have much control over the platform we use. I, for example, was a very happy (even mildly evangelistic) emacs user up until my last job change. The new company issued me a Windows laptop. After a couple days of fussing with trying to get it to work acceptably well on either native Windows or WSL, I finally gave up and switched to vscode. This probably spells the doom of my use of emacs for hobby work, too. Virtually all of my programming time happens at work these days, so my emacs proficiency is rapidly declining. Soon not even nostalgia will be able to overcome the inconvenience of using an editor that's becoming decreasingly familiar by the day. I suppose I am only one person and I don't speak for everyone, but being able to spare at least a little more love for Windows users might have prevented at least this one developer from attriting out of the community.
  - bachmeier 4y ago
    > This strikes me as shortsighted. More likely it simply reflects the platform they use.
    - macintux 4y ago
      Agreed. You'd have to pay me to improve software under Windows, because I do my best to never have to use it.
  - ubermonkey 4y ago
    >This strikes me as shortsighted. Most of us don't have much control over the platform we use. Well, that's the thing. This is NOT my POV, but I have definitely heard true-believer libre/Free software people opine that making it too easy to use Free software on nonFree platforms isn't desirable. I think this is a silly perspective, but it's definitely one that's out there.
    - mumblemumble 4y ago
      What I worry about there is that letting it become too inconvenient to use Free development tools on non-Free platforms will eventually harm the Free Software community's ability to produce competitive Free software, by encouraging a brain drain in the communities that develop Free development tools.
jcynix 4y ago
On Macs I use Aquamacs (http://aquamacs.org/ http://aquamacs.org/), which seems quite nicely adapted to the macOS environment and I'm comfortable with it. Switching between macOS and Linux is easy for me, but if I have to use a Windows machine, I feel lost most of the time.
untilted 4y ago
Eli Zaretskii, one of the emacs lead maintainers, develops mostly on a windows platform, if I'm not mistaken. As such it may be worth a shot to report windows-specific issues to their bug tracker.
gpderetta 4y ago
During my stint at MS, I used to use emacs on windows and it was ok. I do not remember whether the vanilla variant, the cygwin variant, msys2 or some other custom build, were the best though.
- yakubin 4y ago
  Yeah, I know some people do use it on Windows. But I already felt that I sunk lots of time into debugging my config on multiple occasions, so when on Windows basically nothing from my config worked I lost any will to debug it yet again.
ctrlmeta 4y ago
> doesn’t work as well on Mac What specific issues do you face? I've been using Emacs both on Mac and Linux for >= 10 years and never really had any problem. Genuinely want to know what problems other Emacs users on Mac face?
- jskulski 4y ago
  One issue is there are competing forks for mac and it’s not clear which to chose. In general, emacs locks up on me in OS X but not so in linux. I don’t have more info than that, but I find I have to restart emacs more than pycharm
pawelkobojek 4y ago
Have you tried emacs-plus[1]? That's what I've been using for years now on macOS and never ran into issues. Opening big files is a different topic though I believe it doesn't work much better on Linux too. [1] https://github.com/d12frosted/homebrew-emacs-plus https://github.com/d12frosted/homebrew-emacs-plus
BeetleB 4y ago
> On Windows my config doesn’t work at all. I have no idea why. I didn’t have the energy to debug it. I'm a Linux person, but need Windows for work. I've used Emacs on Windows for over a decade now, and with the exception of magit, everything works just as fine as on my Linux machine. In fact, I have the same config for both, with only a few lines dealing with Linux vs Windows specifics. So it may be worth debugging your config. I use emax64, BTW: https://github.com/m-parashar/emax64 https://github.com/m-parashar/emax64
m463 4y ago
I've been using emacs on mac for decades. check out: https://emacsformacosx.com/ https://emacsformacosx.com/ That said, occasionally upgrading doesn't work as expected, and I stay with the previous version. I'm on 27.2 because something didn't work on 28.x and I haven't debugged it.

hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago

Performance is a killer for me also. I suspect once better tree parsing is implemented many of those issues will be solved. Then it’s just the lack of threading in the gui thread, and a few other nitpicks.

guenthert 4y ago
Given that Emacs worked for me alright on a 20MHz 386 30 years ago, I must ask, what in the world are you doing with Emacs that its performance turns out to be inadequate on current hardware?
- hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
  Probably syntax and long line parsing. I also run in daemon mode. I imagine emacs 28 wouldn’t run well on those specs with a default confit. But also the biggest killer is probably the lack of code trees, forward/backward searches to do syntax highlighting etc is pretty expensive.

User23 4y ago

> I’ve been using Emacs for 6 years now. But recently it became clear to me that it’s really optimised for Linux and doesn’t work as well on Mac and Windows[1]. The Emacs devs definitely are biased in favor of free platforms, that’s true. However something like 30% of users are on MacOS and I’ve personally never noted any deficiency there. The native Windows builds definitely don’t run as well though. A big part of that is because NTFS is poorly suited to Emacs IO patterns. I use the same config for all three, but I did have to disable certain parts when running on Windows. One that immediately comes to mind is the vterm package.

mumblemumble 4y ago
> The Emacs devs definitely are biased in favor of free platforms This strikes me as shortsighted. Most of us don't have much control over the platform we use. I, for example, was a very happy (even mildly evangelistic) emacs user up until my last job change. The new company issued me a Windows laptop. After a couple days of fussing with trying to get it to work acceptably well on either native Windows or WSL, I finally gave up and switched to vscode. This probably spells the doom of my use of emacs for hobby work, too. Virtually all of my programming time happens at work these days, so my emacs proficiency is rapidly declining. Soon not even nostalgia will be able to overcome the inconvenience of using an editor that's becoming decreasingly familiar by the day. I suppose I am only one person and I don't speak for everyone, but being able to spare at least a little more love for Windows users might have prevented at least this one developer from attriting out of the community.
- bachmeier 4y ago
  > This strikes me as shortsighted. More likely it simply reflects the platform they use.
  - macintux 4y ago
    Agreed. You'd have to pay me to improve software under Windows, because I do my best to never have to use it.
- ubermonkey 4y ago
  >This strikes me as shortsighted. Most of us don't have much control over the platform we use. Well, that's the thing. This is NOT my POV, but I have definitely heard true-believer libre/Free software people opine that making it too easy to use Free software on nonFree platforms isn't desirable. I think this is a silly perspective, but it's definitely one that's out there.
  - mumblemumble 4y ago
    What I worry about there is that letting it become too inconvenient to use Free development tools on non-Free platforms will eventually harm the Free Software community's ability to produce competitive Free software, by encouraging a brain drain in the communities that develop Free development tools.

jcynix 4y ago

On Macs I use Aquamacs (http://aquamacs.org/ http://aquamacs.org/), which seems quite nicely adapted to the macOS environment and I'm comfortable with it. Switching between macOS and Linux is easy for me, but if I have to use a Windows machine, I feel lost most of the time.

untilted 4y ago

Eli Zaretskii, one of the emacs lead maintainers, develops mostly on a windows platform, if I'm not mistaken. As such it may be worth a shot to report windows-specific issues to their bug tracker.

gpderetta 4y ago

During my stint at MS, I used to use emacs on windows and it was ok. I do not remember whether the vanilla variant, the cygwin variant, msys2 or some other custom build, were the best though.

yakubin 4y ago
Yeah, I know some people do use it on Windows. But I already felt that I sunk lots of time into debugging my config on multiple occasions, so when on Windows basically nothing from my config worked I lost any will to debug it yet again.

ctrlmeta 4y ago

> doesn’t work as well on Mac What specific issues do you face? I've been using Emacs both on Mac and Linux for >= 10 years and never really had any problem. Genuinely want to know what problems other Emacs users on Mac face?

jskulski 4y ago
One issue is there are competing forks for mac and it’s not clear which to chose. In general, emacs locks up on me in OS X but not so in linux. I don’t have more info than that, but I find I have to restart emacs more than pycharm

pawelkobojek 4y ago

Have you tried emacs-plus[1]? That's what I've been using for years now on macOS and never ran into issues. Opening big files is a different topic though I believe it doesn't work much better on Linux too. [1] https://github.com/d12frosted/homebrew-emacs-plus https://github.com/d12frosted/homebrew-emacs-plus

BeetleB 4y ago

> On Windows my config doesn’t work at all. I have no idea why. I didn’t have the energy to debug it. I'm a Linux person, but need Windows for work. I've used Emacs on Windows for over a decade now, and with the exception of magit, everything works just as fine as on my Linux machine. In fact, I have the same config for both, with only a few lines dealing with Linux vs Windows specifics. So it may be worth debugging your config. I use emax64, BTW: https://github.com/m-parashar/emax64 https://github.com/m-parashar/emax64

m463 4y ago

I've been using emacs on mac for decades. check out: https://emacsformacosx.com/ https://emacsformacosx.com/ That said, occasionally upgrading doesn't work as expected, and I stay with the previous version. I'm on 27.2 because something didn't work on 28.x and I haven't debugged it.