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Comment by Hammershaft | Hacker News Reader

Emacs is the fastest editor the author has worked with!!??

To be fair on a modern setup it is fast. Sure it's not nano or vi(m) but compared to Electron-based stuff, it's plenty fast.

Five years ago:

    time emacs -Q -eval '(kill-emacs)'

would be slow at 320 ms.

But on a "recent" AMD 7700X that'd be 80ms.

That's starting emacs, evaluating elisp code, and exiting Emacs.

Surely if you can start Emacs, execute elisp, code and exit in 80ms it shouldn't lag too much to insert a character.

Now, I know, some modes can be slow. But Emacs in recent version as seen lots of changes enhancing its performances. And hardware have become really very fast.

YMMV but my Emacs is really incredibly responsive.

P.S: I was already using Emacs on a 486 back in the "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping" days. The joke was fun and true. Nowadays Emacs is actually one of the lightest sofware I use.

Yeppers. The days of waiting a minute or more for emacs to initialize itself are long gone for most. Still marginally slower than nvim or vim for me (on a 2016 vintage i7-6700k on Linux under X11 inside of a sucksless `st` terminal):

    $ tim 'vim --clean -c quit' 'nvim --clean -c quit' 'emacs -nw -Q -eval "(kill-emacs)"'

    (3.45 +- 0.27)e-04      (AlreadySubtracted)Overhead
    (7.929 +- 0.052)e-03    vim --clean -c quit
    (8.329 +- 0.031)e-03    nvim --clean -c quit
    0.05302 +- 0.00023      emacs -nw -Q -eval "(kill-emacs)"

There can still be a human-noticeable difference when you fire up emacs on some 2.5 MiB org-mode "active document" and it takes over 1000 milliseconds (a whole heartbeat! omg! /scarcasm) while vim still takes under 20 ms. And, similarly, vim/nvim with a lot of plugins loading can push up their start-up times as well.

EDIT: BTW, chances are good that the 4X reduction from 320ms to 80ms over 5 years you are seeing is in large part due to ahead-of-time native compilation of elisp (https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Na... ) and libgccjit/etc. not just CPU/DRAM improvement.

Even under WSL emacs is fast:

    [9front@RIPPER ~]$ time emacs -Q -eval '(kill-emacs)'
    
    real    0m0.193s
    user    0m0.136s
    sys     0m0.010s

There are other editors?!

He never tried anything else. For speed, vi is number one, followed by sublimetext.

Even the suggestion that vim is fast is funny to me.

Vim feels sluggish compared to NeoVim.

NeoVim feels sluggish compared to Helix.

> NeoVim feels sluggish compared to Helix.

Of course, if you offer only a portion of NeoVim's features the speed improvement should not be surprising.

At the same time, NeoVim lacks many, many of Helix' features unless you use plugins. That's fine, of course, plugins and customization are part of what makes NeoVim so great.

Anyway, can you name a few NeoVim features you miss in Helix? I still use NeoVim now and then, so I'd be happy to learn more, even if it's something small.

How does Vim feel sluggish? Everything in Vim feels instantaneous to me.

Granted, it's been long enough I don't even quite remember the exact issues I had, so take it with a grain of salt. It was definitely primarily weird edge cases, and might've been related to plugin use.

This is one area where NeoVim afaik comes out on top: Vimscript isn't fast, and NeoVim allows Lua plugins via the embedded LuaJit, and those should be significantly faster.

That's why GP said 'vi', not 'vim' or 'neovim'. It's an important distinction. You can still get old-school vi on most distributions, and it is far smaller and lighter than vim. In my experience, it feels snappy even if you're in an ssh session to a server in a different timezone.

As an emacs user I find it offensive that he tried other editors

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