[zexbha]

I don't mean this to be a striking criticism of Emacs, however, I had the exact same experience. To be fair I've been using Vim for many years so that may have influenced how difficult it was for me to understand the Emacs key bindings. I didn't even have enough time to check out all the cool extensions

[hsbauauvhabzb]

As an emacs user I genuinely believe vim bindings are better, but emacs is more powerful than at least vim (I can’t speak for neovim).

Edit: and I really do wish there was more unbiased content relating to the pros and cons of either.

[samatman]

Emacs has a very long tail indeed of elisp extensions which Neovim has yet to fully catch up with. Neovim is well on its way however, and uses a programming language which many people already know and which is in any case familiar and easy to pick up. Lua has its quirks, elisp is pretty weird even for a Lisp (credit where credit is due, the elisp documentation is fantastic).

I've used Emacs off and on for years, and lately have settled on Neovim. The Spacemacs / Doom style configuration gives Emacs a fairly nice user interface, but I've never managed to hit a sweet spot of running all the fancy stuff I want to run, and not having the editor randomly pause / stutter.

With Neovim I've found that I can load it up and it still starts in under half a second, keeps up with typing/scrolling under all circumstances, and so on. For me that's the right tradeoff, ymmv.

[hsbauauvhabzb]

Thanks for your input.

I’m under the impression emacs performance will improve but agree it’s an issue, particularly on very long lines - my understanding is that any modes must recalculate things (font colors, etc) on every change and recalculate major parts of the file. Iirc emacs 30 implements treesitter and a few other things which should improve performance, but some issues still undoubtedly remain.