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Comment by shadowofneptune | Hacker News Reader

This was not my experience with Emacs, oddly enough. I started using it because it was the only editor that both supported a terminal and had a top bar. Like a windows program, pressing F10 gets you a File, Options, etc. menu that helped me get through that first session. Emacs (and other Vi's, I should note) has made a nod towards accessibility that Vim has not.

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As a long-time Vim'er who has had a dalliance with emacs a few times before fleeing - I always saw the bar and had no idea how to use it. f10. Nice. What always got me was how it still* felt sluggish on my intel 32gb rMBP.

Performance has improved a lot. I'm on version 28 with native compilation enabled and I just opened a 12599 line yaml file and there is no lag. In the prior version the file was pretty much uneditable in emacs. There are probably still cases where vim outperforms emacs, but for any reasonably sized file it should be good.

Every single time I press M-x my Emacs lags.

I use Emacs 29 RC with JIT compilation. Seldom any difference at all.

Granted I use a Doom derivative that shows a popup where you see command auto-completion but in 2023 this is absolutely inexcusable, if not laughable.

It is likely the fault of an extension or misconfiguration. It is instant for me, with ivy typeahead/fuzzy match magic. You would need to start uninstalling packages until you find the offender. I don't know if that is easy with something like doom since a ton is stuff is pre-installed.

Exactly the problem. I lost all will to tinker with it (and I've done that a lot in the past).

If it can't work reasonably well out of the box then it is a failure.

I'm already eating down votes in another comment which ironically only cements my decision to move away from Emacs.

>> Granted I use a Doom derivative that shows a popup

> If it can't work reasonably well out of the box then it is a failure.

It is not out of the box though, is it? It sounds like the code that shows you the popup might not ship with stock Emacs.

Do you get the lag if you start Emacs with `emacs -Q`? Do you get it with Doom proper?

Switching Emacs distro sounds like doing a favor to a friend that kept stealing my money but I'll grant you that yes, I'm not using stock Doom and that might be the problem.

Can't promise I'll try again ever. I tinkered a good amount and lost faith. Nothing should need that much time and effort spent to have basic stuff working acceptably.

That's fair. The most important thing is that you get your work done.

Yep. NeoVim + LunarVim gives me that (as long as I don't update it often, lol, it has similar problems -- people over-excited to pimp it forever and ever).

I think people easily lose perspective. It's OK to love what you do and play with it but people swing too far in that direction and forget that others actually use their stuff and need to get work done with it.

gvim has a menu bar by default. I believe it's possible to enable it in the terminal assuming vim has been compiled with the necessary options.

Ah, this is what I was thinking of when I said other Vi's. Did not realize it's a fork of Vim.

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