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by JadedEngineer 1150 days ago
I absolutely get not wanting to leave the terminal, I'm the same. And I wanted to like Emacs for that. But it's just really slow, and the moment you have a number of buffers with lots of content it's hardly usable. And don't get me started on its terminal emulators, anything with lots of outputs will show on screen at x0.5 speed. I compare with tmux for changing context and it's night and day.
2 comments
pama 1150 days ago
I use the latest versions with native compilation and gave up on terminals and curses codes in favor of plain M-x shells. I tend to accumulate hundreds of buffers, some of them GB size, and all is super snappy. I am very sensitive to latency and can’t stand slow pings, avoid wireless for that reason, and have tuned my keyboards over the years to reduce input latency and errors. Emacs out of the box is super fast. The plain text input loop is in microseconds so not perceptible. And there is hardly ever a need for terminal emulators but when there absolutely is (say htop) then you can use vterm.
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ParetoOptimal 1149 days ago
With eat I can even run htop. This means I have the typical char, semi-char, emacs-mode while the terminal application is active but as soon as I exit it I'm returned to normal eshell where I can treat it as a mostly normal buffer and evaluate elisp.

It really feels like the best of all worlds.

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pmoriarty 1150 days ago
On the terminal emulator front, emacs-eat[1] is also worth mentioning.

[1] - https://codeberg.org/akib/emacs-eat

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ParetoOptimal 1149 days ago
> And I wanted to like Emacs for that. But it's just really slow, and the moment you have a number of buffers with lots of content it's hardly usable.

Do you mean vanilla emacs or a bespoke configuration?

Number of buffers should not slow emacs down and never has across many versions and platforms for me on vanilla emacs.

I would find it hard to believe vanilla emacs was slow switching between lots of buffers. Perhaps if you had 6 windows (as emacs refers to panes) evenly split of minified javascript on a single line it would be slow?

However an issue in my bespoke configurations that has caused the buffer switching issue you mention before is adding a call to the modeline and not debouncing.

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