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by darthrupert 1853 days ago
Perhaps this is about MacOS vs Linux. I'm also suffering from slow emacs on mac, and no combination of flags seems to help.

Use case: open a yaml file with syntax highlightning, scroll it with the mouse. The latency should be as low as possible.

6 comments

It's most likely a Mac thing. And is probably the main reason I gave up on OS X as a serious work OS, since I'm so dependent on Emacs (org-mode in particular). I hope it gets sorted one day. Apparently it has to do with certain system calls on OS X just being very slow.
Emacs on MacOS was also laggy for me before I started using the native comp feature. It takes a while to compile but it's seriously one of the best QoL changes I've had in years.
Does Emacs native-comp work outside X (i.e. works with the Cocoa port)? I thought it only worked through XQuartz b.c. gcc can’t parse the Objective-C required for the Cocoa port…

If the Cocoa port runs well, well that changes everything to me

Yes, it does. I run my macOS nativecomp Emacs on it. Just the UI is not as good as on X. I have my mouse miles more than on X.
This is my experience as well. I know it can be fast because emacs absolutely screams on my Linux machines, but it's super sluggish on the Mac I have to use for work.
Fwiw, I'm not seeing lag on my end doing the same. Can turn on magit blame and it still scrolls fine. :(

Opening a very large file?

Edit: I have found that if I don't reboot my Mac, the environment that a launcher emacs finds is sometimes off. Is it the same slow if you launch from a terminal versus the dock?

No, not very large.

I'm using Doom with pretty much default settings. Perhaps there's something heavy there.

I don't think anyone really wants to profile their editor. That said, if you have the cycles to spare, M-x profiler-start, scroll, M-x profiler-stop may have some obvious culprit.
I have a very underpowered Macos machine (2010 Mac mini) which faces latency problems with most things. Except Emacs. E.g., Eshell is much snappier for issuing shell commands than bash on iTerm2.
I don't find emacs especially laggy on mac os.