[ParetoOptimal]

> 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.