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Comment by karthink | Hacker News Reader

The start up time of emacs isn't slow if you know what you're doing. I have a 14,000 line init.el and about 355,000 lines of code across ~150 installed packages. Emacs starts in 0.2-0.3 seconds. Not instant but practically there's no difference.

The downside of autoloading (lazy loading) all libraries is that there's a hitch when I first open a "heavy" elisp library. A PDF, an org mode document or something that launches an LSP server, say. But if I launch emacs to edit a bash script or a config file the speed is indistinguishable from vim.

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Agreed, and use-package is a big reason for this. New users, take heed and use-package from the start. Regarding the topic of using both Vim and Emacs, I do, but switching from one to the other can really mess me up. I would prefer to just use one, generally, and use TRAMP instead of Vim when possible for editing server configs and such. I have considered using EVIL mode, but I am wary of losing touch with default Emacs, as it's something that comes up from time to time as well.

Worth noting that you can replace evil-mode's insert-state with its emacs-state, thereby getting conventional Emacs keybindings when you're typing.

That's how I have it configured.

"I have considered using EVIL mode, but I am wary of losing touch with default Emacs, as it's something that comes up from time to time as well"

You're basically giving up almost everything that makes Emacs great: its ecosystem. Bare-bones, default, vanilla Emacs, without any packages or configuration is woefully underpowered compared to Emacs or vim with lots of packages and configuration. I hate to use either in their default states, and would have never switched to Emacs if I wasn't able to use Evil.

Oh, I'm not at all saying I use default Emacs, I'm just saying that I'm concerned that Evil would change it so drastically that I would forget how to use default Emacs. Default in this case meaning "not evil".

In those rare situations where I need to edit a file on a machine that doesn't have Emacs+Evil, I just use vim or vi... which even when unconfigured are good enough to make small edits without much pain.

So I get the best of both worlds: Emacs+Evil 99% of the time, and vim/vi 1% of the time when Emacs+Evil is not available.

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