[derefr]

That would be about the era when people who weren't so keen on hardware upgrades as a solution to their problem were denouncing Emacs for its memory usage, and encouraging people to "stick to" vi if they wanted a performant development system.

Imagine denouncing Emacs for its runtime size today, relative to the bloat that is VS Code or IntelliJ :)

[retrac]

Emacs? Eight megabytes and constantly swapping.

Even today editor bloat is real. On my netbook VSCode is noticeably laggy sometimes, and it wouldn't take too much more to start paging out the editor! It amazes me that we still can't do instantly responsive editors. Even my dinky notebook still has a gigabyte of RAM and can do a billion integer operations a second. But VSCode can't show text instantly. I guess I'll stick with vi!

[xvilka]

> Even today editor bloat is real.

Because it's not an editor - it's a browser. I wish some day all those Electron-based "applications" would go away forever. Worst of all technology "inventions".

[burlesona]

Just for what it’s worth, I’ve never had any lag, hanging, stuttering, etc. with Sublime Text 3. It’s very fast.

[simongr3dal]

It is fast and I find myself going between the two. But intellisense and the language plugins that Microsoft makes are just so much better than what Sublime Text offers.

[mixmastamyk]

Language servers often run anywhere, and generally aren't using up all the ram.

[asymptotically4]

For me (emacs + clangd), the language server slowly grows in memory usage until it's eaten up 32G and then gets OOM killed :(

[mixmastamyk]

Sounds like a bug.

[IgorPartola]

It’s ironic that I still get lag with my vim setup running on the latest MacBook Pro today but ran a 486 and was able to write code back then with about the same or better responsiveness. Biggest issue seems syntax checking and code folding on files over 3000 lines long. Yes I know long files aren’t ideal but also for the specific project I’m currently working on it’s somewhat better than a thousand 3 line files.

[ploxiln]

In my experience, it's just some particular syntaxes that vim is slow to process - large XML/HTML files in particular. But just ":synax off" when you want responsiveness more than you want colors :)

[IgorPartola]

For me it’s Python code. Django views and models. Which honestly should be pretty fast because it’s all indent based but I’ve tried a number of things and while I would up with acceptable results they still aren’t lag free.

[anthk]

There were lightweight Emacs clones, to be honest. And joe/jed.

[dekhn]

I had already bought into the emacs ecosystem- it ran fine on the micros that I had been using previously.

For most work programming I still use emacs 20+ years later but that's because of muscle memory. For hobby projects I use VS Code. It runs just fine on my 32-core, 64GB RAM desktop :)

[indymike]

I never had any problems with emacs on my low end 90Mhz Pentium with 8MB of RAM, as long as I stuck to -nox.

[dekhn]

yes, I should have mentioned: I was using the X windows version of emacs (at the time, I thought that was a Really Cool Thing- now, I use text emacs in tmux). I think it has a much larger footprint.