Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by samatman 617 days ago
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.

1 comments

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.