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Comment by stackghost | Hacker News Reader

RMS may be legendary but he's no John Carmack or whomever else. I use emacs every day, and nobody who does the same can honestly say the foundations are good. The performance is atrocious. The UI locks up when you make network calls because the whole thing is single threaded. The whole thing is a mess of spaghetti code and there are multiple instances of core developers like Eli Zarerski admitting on emacs-devel that they don't know how <internal core system> works.

RMS is a visionary but as an actual software developer he's pretty mid.

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You’re judging RMS skills based on the current performance of a tool he created 40 years ago using the tools available at the time. That’s wild. You complain about emacs being single threaded but computers in the 80s had a single core. Software at that time was always single threaded. By the time multiple cores became available, emacs wasn’t RMS’s personal project anymore and with lots of users it couldn’t just replace the core to make it multithreaded.

Tell me what Carmack has written that’s still widely used but did not start with the same “problems” as emacs.

Emacs is just old. Its foundations (as in the general design) are truly fantastic. I still don't understand how the heck not a single other editor over so many years has even considered replicating ideas like indirect buffers. That alone is a truly brilliant idea, and there are so many more.

Performance is atrocious today. At some point, a couple of decades ago, it might have been considered superb, but some may still remember "8 megabytes and constantly swapping". Emacs can be slow, yet its keyboard latency is still better compared to some other, more modern tools.

I'm not disagreeing with you, Emacs can be so damn annoying, and yet paradoxically remain enormously useful. Sadly (or otherwise), there's still no meaningful alternative to it, nothing even comes close. Lem has a promising story, but I remain skeptical. I think Emacs gets core C improvements sooner than Lem reaches meaningful, practical parity, although I might be wildly wrong in my prediction simply because I don't understand the scale of entanglement of the C-written core of Emacs, yet surely it's probably easier than porting the gigantic body of Elisp in existence to work in Lem.

I can't really comment on RMS' software developer skills - I have never directly reviewed his code. Perhaps, in modern times he'd be considered a "no hire", because being a software developer today requires a little bit more than just being a brilliant code writer.

sorry for the stupid quesiton, but why do you use Emacs daily if you consider the performance atrocious and the foundations unsound?

Do you have to use it for work? Do you just consider other editors to be even worse, so Emacs is the best of a bad bunch?

> Do you have to use it for work? Do you just consider other editors to be even worse, so Emacs is the best of a bad bunch?

Not who you’re asking but:

- I have a very long legacy of both muscle memory and “just right” coziness in my Emacs environment, that has followed me around from machine to machine since about 2003.

- I have flip-flopped between GUI Emacs and terminal Emacs probably a dozen times, with my most recent flop being due to Codex and Claude Code, which I run side-by-side with Emacs in a split pane tmux window.

- Yes, best of a bad bunch. I am also reasonably comfortable in Vi(m) but dislike how it handles having many open files, which is unfortunately necessary for most of the work I do.

- I have used VSCode off and on over the years as well, most recently with Gemini, but found the GUI experience quite frustrating and the lack of a CLI option ended up being a show stopper (I sometimes need to write code over SSH and the way VSCode handles remote editing is highly unpalatable to me)

Edit: one other nice perk that I discovered the other day: Claude is quite good at elisp. I was having a really weird issue that seemed like it sat at the intersection of a few packages interacting funny. Put Claude on the problem, got a very detailed explanation of how three packages had evolved and how one of them hadn’t caught up with subtle changes the other two had done. Put together a patch and suggested I make a PR to upstream. I haven’t fully reviewed the patch but the bug seems fixed properly.

Emacs is not an editor. It's a Lisp-driven text orchestrator with a built-in editor. You can type your text in whatever IDE and still control everything through Emacs.

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