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I love Emacs and have used it since the start of my programming career. It is so powerful and I consider it more like a portable programming environment than a
by Decabytes 3y ago
I love Emacs and have used it since the start of my programming career. It is so powerful and I consider it more like a portable programming environment than a text editor. But I find it's performance frustratingly slow. I accept that it will never be as fast as Vim, but when it takes as long or longer to boot up as a regular IDE it makes me question why I'm not using that. Plus there are large json files I can open up no problem in NeoVim that Emacs chokes on.
With that being said, there is no program that has come along that is a sufficient modern replacement for Emacs like Neovim is for Vim. Unless you've used Emacs heavily then it's just hard to understand. And it's not just being able to use a terminal or write some markdown/org notes in it.
It's built in support for IRC. Reading email. Emacs Speaks Statistics. It's being able to make functions and bind just about anything to a set of key chords. It's using things like restclient to send rest requests, and many other awesome things. Using Emacs kind of feels like programming in Smalltalk in a way.
- ashton314 3y ago> but when it takes as long or longer to boot up as a regular IDE it makes me question why I'm not using that How many packages do you have? I have over 200 enabled but my startup time is consistently >2 seconds on average. The `use-package` macro really helps here. (And now it’s built-in to Emacs 29!) Yeah, performance is a bit of an issue. But recent development has put it on a good trajectory with native comp and better JSON handling.
- teddyh 3y agoFor startup speed, use an Emacs server. For speed in JSON files, the new fixes for long lines in Emacs 29 should improve the situation markedly.
- gaws 3y ago> I accept that it will never be as fast as Vim, but when it takes as long or longer to boot up as a regular IDE it makes me question why I'm not using that. You can significantly increase startup speed by running the emacs daemon on boot and using `emacsclient` for each new instance.