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Comment by jzl | Hacker News Reader

The emacs "JOKES" file contains an extended section of proposed backronyms, along with a bunch of other 20-30 year-old jokey bits from usenet:

https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/etc/JOKES

  EMACS may stand for "Editing MACroS," but some friends of mine suggested some more creative definitions.
  Here they are. Anyone have any additions?

  Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping
  Even a Master of Arts Comes Simpler
  ...

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I've heard it as Emacs Makes All Computers Slow.

Probably was more applicable in the old days (as one call tell from the "megabytes" in the parent comment) than nowadays :)

Thats because it Eventually Mallocs All Computer Storage.

I'm often surprised how Emacs can struggle sometimes on modern hardware, like for example when chain-executing complex keyboard macros - though mostly yeah, it doesn't apply all that much anymore.

Emacs is actually faster than most editors, but it lets you do anything so of course you can slow it down.

The issue is it remains non-concurrent and any code (macros, extensions, …) executes in place of the editor doing its thang, so any non-trivial operation (or trivial operation on an entire buffer) locks up the editor until it's done and does its thing.

And while it might technically be faster for the process, as is the case with e.g. STW GCs on large processes it 1. feels horrible and 2. as an editor is interactive it stops the user in their tracks and slows them down to hell

Escape-meta-alt-ctrl-shift!

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