5 ms·

Spacemacs is slow as molasses on macOS and yes I have the latest Emacs. It became so bad I switched to a Doom derivative (CentaurEmacs) and while it did improv

Spacemacs is slow as molasses on macOS and yes I have the latest Emacs. It became so bad I switched to a Doom derivative (CentaurEmacs) and while it did improve the speed, it merely reduced it from "almost impossible to work with" to "noticeably and annoyingly laggy fairly often". I gave up on Emacs after trying to make it work for a loooong time. Carefully and slowly making my way through NeoVim in the last 6 or so months now, and it's much easier to work with and configure, not to mention 99.9% of everything is instant (the only time it lagged was opening a source file of 1.7M size and I suspect the slowness came from the LSP server and not NeoVim itself). Emacs seems to be carried by nostalgia from folks that love to tinker with their tools more than they like to actually get any job done. A bit of a toxic statement, surely, but I'm pretty salty still and I haven't seen any objective evidence to make me look at Emacs and its fans more charitably. For anything and everything the answer always is "hack it for the 6328th time to make it even more your own!" No thanks. I actually have a job to do.

lycopodiopsida 4y ago
While I have big respect for neovim, it's performance on big files is actually worse than emacs. I've submitted a bug on that upstream - it gets stuck with disabled TS, LSP, highlighting where vim and emacs chew through without any issues. Emacs has its problems but is actually OK performance-wise, if you avoid the obvious (long lines) and less obvious (custom modelines, fancy pseudo-tabs, etc) pitfalls. Thing is, emacs is constantly improving - 28 is faster than 27, 29 will be again faster and solve the problem with long lines. > Carefully and slowly making my way through NeoVim in the last 6 or so months now Emacs has also a ton of stuff included, so that you could carefully and slowly make your way through emacs instead of jumping through distros and complaining. In the end, I am pretty sure that you will not be able to freely configure and alter and neovim distribution, such as LazyVim or AstroVim - they have a rather complex structure. > and it's much easier to work with and configure No, it is not - it has poor discoverability, you have to reload it on changing the config file. Configuring emacs is a breeze - you can eval blocks of code, check, eval again - until it sticks. Every function is can be called and inspected. Oh, and have you tried to debug your config code in lua? Tell me how it went. > Emacs seems to be carried by nostalgia Emacs is carried by the fact that it is the only editor alive almost completely written and documented in it's extension language. > No thanks. I actually have a job to do. Of course you do - why else would you jump between emacs and neovim :)
- pdimitar 4y ago
  Your snark doesn't make my Emacs run faster but if it makes you feel better, do continue. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I switched editors because my job was suffering because of impossibly slow Emacs, not because I don't value my free time -- of which Emacs wasted plenty. Chose the lesser evil. Not a hard concept to grasp, I hope. Shame that you felt attacked and figured you have to be nasty but you helped with exactly zero of my concerns, in practical terms. NeoVim + LunarVim worked for me out of the box. The tweaks I did were entirely cosmetic. That's valuable. So far I spent exactly 5 minutes on functionality in it -- namely TS and LSP installs. Oh and if I have to debug my editor then the battle is lost anyway. Not sure why you put any value on that at all; if anything, it's a negative value.
  - lycopodiopsida 4y ago
    > Your snark doesn't make my Emacs run faster but if it makes you feel better, do continue. Unspecific complains will not let it run faster, indeed. > I switched editors because my job was suffering because of impossibly slow Emacs, not because I don't value my free time -- of which Emacs wasted plenty. Chose the lesser evil. The lesser evil would be to start the included profiler and check what is actually slow - you've wasted more time on complaining here, then M-x profiler-start takes. :) > Shame that you felt attacked and figured you have to be nasty but you helped with exactly zero of my concerns, in practical terms. I am not paid to support you, and you've started on a niveau where I also do not want to help you. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ > NeoVim + LunarVim worked for me out of the box. The tweaks I did were entirely cosmetic. Oh, LunarVim has its share of bugs, being a complex and fast-developed disto. Since you are not interested in debugging, I am curious what will happen when it breaks - will we see another post with accusations of neovim (another distro you never cared to understand, really) to waste your precious time? :)
    - pdimitar 4y ago
      Needlessly aggressive but as said already, you do you. Nowhere did I say you "owe" me anything so maybe stop projecting and act like you're personally attacked. And yes my time is precious.
iLemming 4y ago
> Spacemacs is slow as molasses on macOS and yes I have the latest Emacs. Spacemacs and Doom can be slow because they offer tons of modules. You can't blame the buffet owner if you glut yourself till unconscious. One has to carefully choose and pick the modules and packages they need and disable/remove stuff they don't. Typical Spacemacs/Doom config can contain a few hundred packages. Show me a single piece of software that enables you to load hundreds of plugins that seamlessly intoroperate with one another. Emacs can do that, but it's not a sentient super AI, you can't just throw a bunch of things at it and hope it figures that out. Sometimes you even have to set the loading order right. > folks that love to tinker with their tools more than they like to actually get any job done. Emacsers hear that shit all the time, and they'd be like "yeah, whatever". But I beg to differ. Nothing else allows me get my job done quickly and with such joy. And I've seen and used many different editors and IDEs. You simply have no idea. Here's a deal, name just a few real-world example use-cases related to text manipulation. Not some goofy vim-golf challenges, something practical. I'm confident, I can probably demonstrate how Emacs does things in a much better fashion than any other editors. > I'm pretty salty still You're salty, perhaps because you couldn't spare enough patience and willpower to learn some Emacs Lisp, to figure out how the built-in profiler works, how to troubleshoot things. You've failed to cultivate some curiosity for basic things like, "what exactly happens when I press a key", open a file, etc. Emacs did not fail you. You just gave up. No, don't get me wrong. I have plenty of reasons to hate Emacs myself. It's definitely not perfect. I hate it, and I still love it. Simply, because there isn't another alternative that I would hate less and love more. Anything else just falls short.
- pdimitar 4y ago
  > One has to carefully choose and pick the modules... ...And you lost me right there. I am looking for a good experience out of the box. Emacs is not it. I don't want to pick anything, even less so doing it carefully. I only stuck with Emacs because my life has been hell for a long time and I couldn't muster the energy, time and motivation to look for an alternative. The moment I actually had some of these I immediately jumped ship. (And yeah 20 years is a long time, just be grateful your life doesn't have such a big hole in it.) > You're salty, perhaps because you couldn't spare enough patience and willpower to learn some Emacs Lisp I don't want to. I am salty because I had no clue what I was getting involved with. > You've failed to cultivate some curiosity for basic things like, "what exactly happens when I press a key", open a file, etc. That's not basic curiosity, that's a chore. If I wanted to do kernel development I would, but I don't. I am a user of these things. I will sooner die than go and be "curious" about them. I want to get work done. > You just gave up. No, don't get me wrong. But I said as much myself, didn't I? Though I'll maintain and still claim that it did waste my time, insofar as not making itself COMPLETELY AND PAINFULLY OBVIOUS. I don't care which "function's definition is void", dude. I care about "can't initialize TreeSitter for Golang, we seem to be missing module X which actually should come pre-installed with your Emacs 29 so WTF man, go ask these doofuses maintaining the Mac Homebrew -- the hell are they doing?!", or some such. You try not getting me wrong either. I am not a script kiddie. I am a guy who absolutely LOVES programming and is doing it for 30 years but is now sick and tired of constantly having to pamper his tools. I think it's a fair requirement in 2023 to want to run a few commands, make a bash script that updates the editor + its internally used stuff (packages in Emacs, plugins in VIM) and have a basic guarantee their dev setup won't break after an update. But alas, no. And to make it completely fair to all sides -- LunarVim (it is basically an opinionated set of plugins on top of vanilla NeoVim, akin to DOOM for Emacs) suffers the same problems. I figured I'll only update once a month now because the maintainers, like the over-excited kids that they seem to be, figure will break everyone's setup every week because they found this awesome new VIM plugin and the previous one is not "elegant" or whatever, bro. I really see no way out. Nobody gives a crap about good developer experience, you're expected to be on the treadmill of always pimping your tools until your death apparently. Almost nobody sees technology as a beast to be tamed and made to do work we don't want to do ourselves; they see it as a dog to play with.

lycopodiopsida 4y ago

While I have big respect for neovim, it's performance on big files is actually worse than emacs. I've submitted a bug on that upstream - it gets stuck with disabled TS, LSP, highlighting where vim and emacs chew through without any issues. Emacs has its problems but is actually OK performance-wise, if you avoid the obvious (long lines) and less obvious (custom modelines, fancy pseudo-tabs, etc) pitfalls. Thing is, emacs is constantly improving - 28 is faster than 27, 29 will be again faster and solve the problem with long lines. > Carefully and slowly making my way through NeoVim in the last 6 or so months now Emacs has also a ton of stuff included, so that you could carefully and slowly make your way through emacs instead of jumping through distros and complaining. In the end, I am pretty sure that you will not be able to freely configure and alter and neovim distribution, such as LazyVim or AstroVim - they have a rather complex structure. > and it's much easier to work with and configure No, it is not - it has poor discoverability, you have to reload it on changing the config file. Configuring emacs is a breeze - you can eval blocks of code, check, eval again - until it sticks. Every function is can be called and inspected. Oh, and have you tried to debug your config code in lua? Tell me how it went. > Emacs seems to be carried by nostalgia Emacs is carried by the fact that it is the only editor alive almost completely written and documented in it's extension language. > No thanks. I actually have a job to do. Of course you do - why else would you jump between emacs and neovim :)

pdimitar 4y ago
Your snark doesn't make my Emacs run faster but if it makes you feel better, do continue. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I switched editors because my job was suffering because of impossibly slow Emacs, not because I don't value my free time -- of which Emacs wasted plenty. Chose the lesser evil. Not a hard concept to grasp, I hope. Shame that you felt attacked and figured you have to be nasty but you helped with exactly zero of my concerns, in practical terms. NeoVim + LunarVim worked for me out of the box. The tweaks I did were entirely cosmetic. That's valuable. So far I spent exactly 5 minutes on functionality in it -- namely TS and LSP installs. Oh and if I have to debug my editor then the battle is lost anyway. Not sure why you put any value on that at all; if anything, it's a negative value.
- lycopodiopsida 4y ago
  > Your snark doesn't make my Emacs run faster but if it makes you feel better, do continue. Unspecific complains will not let it run faster, indeed. > I switched editors because my job was suffering because of impossibly slow Emacs, not because I don't value my free time -- of which Emacs wasted plenty. Chose the lesser evil. The lesser evil would be to start the included profiler and check what is actually slow - you've wasted more time on complaining here, then M-x profiler-start takes. :) > Shame that you felt attacked and figured you have to be nasty but you helped with exactly zero of my concerns, in practical terms. I am not paid to support you, and you've started on a niveau where I also do not want to help you. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ > NeoVim + LunarVim worked for me out of the box. The tweaks I did were entirely cosmetic. Oh, LunarVim has its share of bugs, being a complex and fast-developed disto. Since you are not interested in debugging, I am curious what will happen when it breaks - will we see another post with accusations of neovim (another distro you never cared to understand, really) to waste your precious time? :)
  - pdimitar 4y ago
    Needlessly aggressive but as said already, you do you. Nowhere did I say you "owe" me anything so maybe stop projecting and act like you're personally attacked. And yes my time is precious.

iLemming 4y ago

> Spacemacs is slow as molasses on macOS and yes I have the latest Emacs. Spacemacs and Doom can be slow because they offer tons of modules. You can't blame the buffet owner if you glut yourself till unconscious. One has to carefully choose and pick the modules and packages they need and disable/remove stuff they don't. Typical Spacemacs/Doom config can contain a few hundred packages. Show me a single piece of software that enables you to load hundreds of plugins that seamlessly intoroperate with one another. Emacs can do that, but it's not a sentient super AI, you can't just throw a bunch of things at it and hope it figures that out. Sometimes you even have to set the loading order right. > folks that love to tinker with their tools more than they like to actually get any job done. Emacsers hear that shit all the time, and they'd be like "yeah, whatever". But I beg to differ. Nothing else allows me get my job done quickly and with such joy. And I've seen and used many different editors and IDEs. You simply have no idea. Here's a deal, name just a few real-world example use-cases related to text manipulation. Not some goofy vim-golf challenges, something practical. I'm confident, I can probably demonstrate how Emacs does things in a much better fashion than any other editors. > I'm pretty salty still You're salty, perhaps because you couldn't spare enough patience and willpower to learn some Emacs Lisp, to figure out how the built-in profiler works, how to troubleshoot things. You've failed to cultivate some curiosity for basic things like, "what exactly happens when I press a key", open a file, etc. Emacs did not fail you. You just gave up. No, don't get me wrong. I have plenty of reasons to hate Emacs myself. It's definitely not perfect. I hate it, and I still love it. Simply, because there isn't another alternative that I would hate less and love more. Anything else just falls short.

pdimitar 4y ago
> One has to carefully choose and pick the modules... ...And you lost me right there. I am looking for a good experience out of the box. Emacs is not it. I don't want to pick anything, even less so doing it carefully. I only stuck with Emacs because my life has been hell for a long time and I couldn't muster the energy, time and motivation to look for an alternative. The moment I actually had some of these I immediately jumped ship. (And yeah 20 years is a long time, just be grateful your life doesn't have such a big hole in it.) > You're salty, perhaps because you couldn't spare enough patience and willpower to learn some Emacs Lisp I don't want to. I am salty because I had no clue what I was getting involved with. > You've failed to cultivate some curiosity for basic things like, "what exactly happens when I press a key", open a file, etc. That's not basic curiosity, that's a chore. If I wanted to do kernel development I would, but I don't. I am a user of these things. I will sooner die than go and be "curious" about them. I want to get work done. > You just gave up. No, don't get me wrong. But I said as much myself, didn't I? Though I'll maintain and still claim that it did waste my time, insofar as not making itself COMPLETELY AND PAINFULLY OBVIOUS. I don't care which "function's definition is void", dude. I care about "can't initialize TreeSitter for Golang, we seem to be missing module X which actually should come pre-installed with your Emacs 29 so WTF man, go ask these doofuses maintaining the Mac Homebrew -- the hell are they doing?!", or some such. You try not getting me wrong either. I am not a script kiddie. I am a guy who absolutely LOVES programming and is doing it for 30 years but is now sick and tired of constantly having to pamper his tools. I think it's a fair requirement in 2023 to want to run a few commands, make a bash script that updates the editor + its internally used stuff (packages in Emacs, plugins in VIM) and have a basic guarantee their dev setup won't break after an update. But alas, no. And to make it completely fair to all sides -- LunarVim (it is basically an opinionated set of plugins on top of vanilla NeoVim, akin to DOOM for Emacs) suffers the same problems. I figured I'll only update once a month now because the maintainers, like the over-excited kids that they seem to be, figure will break everyone's setup every week because they found this awesome new VIM plugin and the previous one is not "elegant" or whatever, bro. I really see no way out. Nobody gives a crap about good developer experience, you're expected to be on the treadmill of always pimping your tools until your death apparently. Almost nobody sees technology as a beast to be tamed and made to do work we don't want to do ourselves; they see it as a dog to play with.