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Comment by sandos | Hacker News Reader

Not terribly impressed. I have been working on a 148MiB HTML file the last couple of days, and opening it with textadept was quick enough but it basically hangs when scrolling around.

Notepad++ handles it without any major problems. VS Code almost does, sometimes it has crashed on closing a tab with the file open. Emacs I should not even try... (Wow: spacemacs asked me to "open literally" and the performance is really good! Nice!)

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Out of curiosity, how do you end up with a 148 MB HTML file?

Seriously @sandos, what are you working on there ? I want in

goldenmean.info

Emacs is a fast, minimalist, and extensible cross-platform text editor.

Fast, unless you happen to have very very long lines and word wrap enabled.

Syntax highlighting in very large files is what kills it for me. I usually open very very large files in literal mode to avoid lag

Minimalist? Really now.

Well, it depends on what you compare it with. IDEA, Visual Studio, Eclipse, you know. Of course, comparing to nano and nvi, Emacs isn't so much minimalist - but hey, did you ever try to run Emacs with no elisp packages?

Comparing Emacs with ed is a point in ed's favor, sure.

Ditto Emacs and Notepad, or nano.

Comparing Emacs with anything else is more likely to look favorable to Emacs.

It's basically a Lisp machine runtime that happens to include a built-in text editing window.

Compared to the likes of Visual Studio, Eclipse, or Sublime, though, it's certainly minimalist. The typical "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping" joke is a bit quaint nowadays.

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