[ragnese]

I know that these "works for me" discussion are often not fruitful. But, I'll ask this: have you done a several hour session of typing/programming into a JetBrains IDE? I'm claiming that on my work Macbook Pro, even just typing plain text into a file and scrolling lines in IDEA is smoother and more responsive than doing the same in Emacs.

I use the Vim plugin for IDEA and evil mode in Emacs. Even things like holding 'j' or 'k' to scroll lines is painful in Emacs compared to IDEA.

I'll admit that if I spend some hours/days in Emacs, I stop noticing it much, so it isn't THAT egregious. But if I switch back and forth, it really sucks.

[metroholografix]

Something is definitely wrong with your configuration (in a wide sense, not necessarily restricted to just the editor).

Emacs is at least an order of magnitude more responsive than IDEA (or any other JetBrains IDE). Start with a stock Emacs, no extra third party packages loaded, to get a sense of performance. There is a lot of great Emacs Lisp code out there, but the opposite is also true: Horrible code written by folks new to Emacs and Emacs Lisp, that can slow down Emacs a lot and contribute to a degraded experience. Which is why I recommend starting from scratch and incrementally adding third party code/configuration (ideally, understanding the code as you go along and avoiding packages with lots of dependencies).

[gpderetta]

Personally, I find that normally emacs latency is more than tolerable. But LSP is pretty bad, at least with clang-lsp, especially on a fairly loaded machine. I have yet to try the jit branch though.

[mumblemumble]

It's really hard to tell. The configurability of emacs is both a blessing and a curse. Since you can customize basically anything, there are all sorts of opportunities for funky config or a weird extension to slow things down.

I know, for example, that a lot of people who have tried both report that Doom Emacs is much faster than Spacemacs. That implies to me that it's not evil mode. For my part (fairly vanilla Doom setup), I find holding j/k to scroll in Doom is snappier than IntelliJ, on the same computer.

But then, I've also heard people complain that it's just the opposite on Windows, where Doom emacs is apparently just really laggy.

That said, I agree that the "works for me" discussions aren't very fruitful, and I'm definitely not here to tell you which editor to use. More observing that, what with how... emacsy... emacs is, you're definitely not alone. It's entirely possible that the problem you had is both something specific to how you had things set up, and also absolutely not at all your fault.

[creese]

If you're using HJKL to navigate more than a few lines, you're doing it wrong. Use 'search' instead.

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/In...

[michaelcampbell]

Is it possible that your vi plugin is introducing some lag?