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by tsimionescu 1676 days ago
> Rock, rock, rock solid no matter what I through at it.

This is definitely not my experience. I regularly see emacs lock up indefinitely when asked to handle large buffers, especially when also using TRAMP. Even when it doesn't lock up indefinitely, it can easily stall for minutes(!) when doing something like moving point to the end of a large minified JS file (C-E).

There are many reasons to love Emacs, and I use it as my main development OS almost, but stability and performance are not among those reasons.

Note: mostly used it in console mode on Linux (Ubuntu WSL 2).

2 comments

Well, I guess we have different experiences then. That kind of thing hasn't happened to me in 25 years. Not once.

The OS could matter, I guess. I didn't even think about that. I used Debian Stable and have been since the last century. Always a version or two behind, at least, so I guess bugs could be resolved before I get a chance to encounter them.

I have experienced the same things but even so I would classify it as fairly rock solid overall. Under certain circumstances a rock can split. I see far more fragile, and unpredictable behaviour in other environments.

It must be said that large file handling is an area that could do with some improvement - vlf-mode is okay as a workaround but it would be nice if I could deal with a large file in much the same way as a regular sized files. Few environments will provide this either though.

> Few environments will provide this either though.

I used vim for ~12 years and then emacs for ~12 years, and this emacs has never been able to handle large files well. vim meanwhile has zero trouble with files of any size that I've ever tried.

"Vim can do it" doesn't counter you saying "few environments" though. I haven't needed to look much farther than vim/emacs.

I was thinking more along the lines of eclipse or IntelliJ … yes of course vi/m can do it and that would be my go to for quick edits on the console, the kind of thing that typically lends itself to large files funnily enough.

Now that I’m talking about it I do remember a couple of times where vi (rather than vim) choked on some very very large files but she always got there.