4 ms·

To be fair on a modern setup it is fast. Sure it's not nano or vi(m) but compared to Electron-based stuff, it's plenty fast. Five years ago: time emacs -Q

To be fair on a modern setup it is fast. Sure it's not nano or vi(m) but compared to Electron-based stuff, it's plenty fast. Five years ago: time emacs -Q -eval '(kill-emacs)' would be slow at 320 ms. But on a "recent" AMD 7700X that'd be 80ms. That's starting emacs, evaluating elisp code, and exiting Emacs. Surely if you can start Emacs, execute elisp, code and exit in 80ms it shouldn't lag too much to insert a character. Now, I know, some modes can be slow. But Emacs in recent version as seen lots of changes enhancing its performances. And hardware have become really very fast. YMMV but my Emacs is really incredibly responsive. P.S: I was already using Emacs on a 486 back in the "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping" days. The joke was fun and true. Nowadays Emacs is actually one of the lightest sofware I use.

cb321 3y ago
Yeppers. The days of waiting a minute or more for emacs to initialize itself are long gone for most. Still marginally slower than nvim or vim for me (on a 2016 vintage i7-6700k on Linux under X11 inside of a sucksless `st` terminal): $ tim 'vim --clean -c quit' 'nvim --clean -c quit' 'emacs -nw -Q -eval "(kill-emacs)"' (3.45 +- 0.27)e-04 (AlreadySubtracted)Overhead (7.929 +- 0.052)e-03 vim --clean -c quit (8.329 +- 0.031)e-03 nvim --clean -c quit 0.05302 +- 0.00023 emacs -nw -Q -eval "(kill-emacs)" There can still be a human-noticeable difference when you fire up emacs on some 2.5 MiB org-mode "active document" and it takes over 1000 milliseconds (a whole heartbeat! omg! /scarcasm) while vim still takes under 20 ms. And, similarly, vim/nvim with a lot of plugins loading can push up their start-up times as well. EDIT: BTW, chances are good that the 4X reduction from 320ms to 80ms over 5 years you are seeing is in large part due to ahead-of-time native compilation of elisp (https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Native-Compilation.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Na... ) and libgccjit/etc. not just CPU/DRAM improvement.
9front 3y ago
Even under WSL emacs is fast: [9front@RIPPER ~]$ time emacs -Q -eval '(kill-emacs)' real 0m0.193s user 0m0.136s sys 0m0.010s

cb321 3y ago

Yeppers. The days of waiting a minute or more for emacs to initialize itself are long gone for most. Still marginally slower than nvim or vim for me (on a 2016 vintage i7-6700k on Linux under X11 inside of a sucksless `st` terminal): $ tim 'vim --clean -c quit' 'nvim --clean -c quit' 'emacs -nw -Q -eval "(kill-emacs)"' (3.45 +- 0.27)e-04 (AlreadySubtracted)Overhead (7.929 +- 0.052)e-03 vim --clean -c quit (8.329 +- 0.031)e-03 nvim --clean -c quit 0.05302 +- 0.00023 emacs -nw -Q -eval "(kill-emacs)" There can still be a human-noticeable difference when you fire up emacs on some 2.5 MiB org-mode "active document" and it takes over 1000 milliseconds (a whole heartbeat! omg! /scarcasm) while vim still takes under 20 ms. And, similarly, vim/nvim with a lot of plugins loading can push up their start-up times as well. EDIT: BTW, chances are good that the 4X reduction from 320ms to 80ms over 5 years you are seeing is in large part due to ahead-of-time native compilation of elisp (https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Native-Compilation.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Na... ) and libgccjit/etc. not just CPU/DRAM improvement.

9front 3y ago

Even under WSL emacs is fast: [9front@RIPPER ~]$ time emacs -Q -eval '(kill-emacs)' real 0m0.193s user 0m0.136s sys 0m0.010s