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I went the opposite way. Used Spacemacs to introduce me to Emacs, and then got rid of it once I got the hang of things, and noticed all the extra packages I don't need that were just impacting (the already poor) Emacs performance.

A few years later, I'm still using my config and wouldn't go back. It's what allows me to make Emacs _mine_, after all. It requires a minimal amount of maintenance, mostly whenever I decide to upgrade the packages.

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Is base Emacs performance actually poor? I’ve generally found it to be pretty quick and it performs well in environments that other programs totally fail in, eg in a terminal or over X forwarding.

Well, it depends on your system. In my experience, Emacs without native-comp is way snappier on Linux than on Mac and Windows -- and getting native-comp working is also much easier on Linux, which has a big impact. Large numbers of pixels (high-DPI / Retina displays) can increase stuttering and flickering in the GUI version, in which case performance can improve by using `emacs -nw` in a GPU-accelerated terminal (Kitty/Alacritty), or maybe by switching to a different GUI frontend (e.g. the NS Port vs. Mac Port on MacOS, or the X11 vs. PGTK version on Linux).

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