Look I live in emacs. I cannot explain to you why this is such a shitty experience. I assume there are random assholes around the world who are holding emacs back so they can view their email from a repl or some bullshit.
I've used neovim for the last 10 years, but before that I used emacs with R for many years at work and it was great, certainly not slow.
How long does it take to start emacs for you?
> Multithreading just sidesteps the problem while introducing its own can of worms.
In the meantime we're all stuck waiting for package downloads. I don't know the specifics about why emacs can't move to a concurrent model but it's embarrassing at this point
> The current async facilities are fine by me (I don’t use any auto* things, so YMMV).
Yes, it is clear the people who maintain emacs are fine with it. This is why using emacs in 2026 is so shitty.
I use Elpaca instead of the built-in package manager, which is better designed (declarative package specification) and fully asynchronous. The UI is also more thoughtful, with more granular search-as-you-type capability and easy git commit reviews of pending package updates.
package.el is catching up to Elpaca in features, but async installs/updates is not one of them.
And for some reason, most of the screenshots on that page are in super low res, e.g. I see https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/images/gnus-small.pn... instead of https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/images/gnus.png , I really don't see why they'd want to make it look even worse.
And then on the other hand you have people like Nicolas Rougier https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fp... or Álvaro Ramírez https://xenodium.com/awesome-emacs-on-macos who show how great it can really look.
> ...
> One of the truths preached in the Gospel of Mac is that ALL programs need to be consistent with one another, and use the same visual look, menu hierarchy, and keybindings for corresponding commands.
I started using Emacs on a Mac recently and was pleased to discover that it is, in fact, consistent with other programs.
- Cmd-C/X/V work as expected (copy/cut/paste from system clipboard)
- Cmd-Z undoes,
- Cmd-O brings up the open-file dialog, Cmd-T opens a new tab,
- Cmd-F invokes search and Cmd-L goes to line, and so on.
It uses the same global menu bar as other programs, and setting the font from the menu works. The only thing that didn't work is using Cmd-Shift-? to search through menu bar options. This is GNU's official MacOS build, not the custom-built emacs-mac or emacs-plus packages.
Last year I helped a non-programmer get started with Emacs (for the first time) on a Mac. After a couple of weeks their only remarks were that the customize interface looks a little dated and the config/custom file has a weird format. They never brought up the keybindings or other UI as an issue. Now I understand why -- Emacs is a reasonably good citizen on MacOS.
On macOS some of the Emacs keybindings also work system-wide. You can e.g. use C-a/e, C-k, and C-n/p/f/b in every macOS text field, like e.g. in browser text fields. This is one of the main macOS features I miss on GNU/Linux. (Actually, that subset of Emacs keybindings even works on iPad with an external keyboard.)
Aside from keybindings, there are also some packages that provide deeper integration with macOS. For example, org-mac-link can save Org-mode links to currently open emails in Mail.app. And the built-in `C-x m` can author emails that are then sent to Mail.app for further processing, if you’re not able to use mu4e and similar (e.g. strict Exchange email servers).
I think the point you're missing is that Emacs just isn't meant to appeal to people who want a mouse/visual based UI. More traditional editors are "better" for those types of people, but that doesn't make them "better" in any kind of absolute sense like you are implying. There are plenty of people for whom a traditional editor is far worse than Emacs. "Better" is subjective.