Hacker News Reader

Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

Looks good. For me, the best recent feature is native compilation so Emacs feels super fast and responsive. I often use macOS and I wonder is going to GTK will help a lot there?

View on HN

As another commenter has said native compilation has been there for a while, but you may need to explicitly enable it if you’re installing via brew or similar. The macOS port doesn’t use GTK or X unless you specifically link them. What problems are you having?

Native compilation has been in emacs since 28.1.

AFAIK native GTK should be unrelated to macOS since macOS version uses its own cocoa frontend

I wonder if the latency would be comparable to neovim/vim? I've only tried Emacs without nativecomp and the really noticeable input lag left a bad impression.

As someone, who jumps between neovim and emacs on a regular basis - no, neovim is much faster. If speed and general snappiness is your most concern you should stay with neovim.

But, emacs is in most cases fast enough, faster than vscode and has other advantages.

In my experience Emacs is slow when I enable evil. I do like vim keybinding, but using evil negates most of the benefits for me since it introduces unbearables pauses. That is with Doom emacs under Linux.

They can be disabled in the init.el, I’ve done it for a year or so. Emacs-keybindings are less ergonomic, but also have less cognitive overhead imo.

The exact setup I tested (evil+doom) but without nativecomp, same feedback

Native compilation makes a big difference, but neovim is still snappier, especially if you’re using lots of packages or a framework like doom or whatever

Tui emacs is a bit slower than nvim, but close enough.

Gui emacs is much, much slower than nvim

How do you compile Emails on OSX? I use `brew install emacs-head@30 --with-cocoa` and I feel that org-mode is bit laggy. Is there a better way?

download the source, unpack, cd into directory, ./autogen.sh, ./configure --with-imagemagick --with-json --with-mailutils --with-modules --with-rsvg --with-gnutls --with-xml2 --with-native-compilation=aot --with-pop --without-compress-install --without-dbus, gmake (gnumake from brew), src/emacs to test, gmake install, pickup the app in nextstep and done I think.

(thats on intel monterey though)

Add `--with-native-comp` to that.

Thanks, time to try this

Oh, I just realized I'm using https://github.com/d12frosted/homebrew-emacs-plus . I recommend using that over the default formula.

I use this one https://github.com/daviderestivo/homebrew-emacs-head

makes me wonder, is the target of native compilation something general like 386 ? can i share .eln between x86 computers ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com