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by adrian_b 11 hours ago
I have been using only 4k monitors in Linux, with X11 (and XFCE) for more than a decade.

During the years, I have used a great number of text editors, e.g. vim, jedit, kate, geany, Visual Studio Code, neovim, etc.

Only this year I have switched to emacs, because it is more suitable for certain customizations that I prefer (for scripting, I like more Emacs Lisp than alternatives like Lua).

I have seen no performance problems (in GUI mode, I do not use it under a terminal emulator). On my hardware (with NVIDIA GPU) it is at least as fast as any other text editor that I had been using. Certainly much faster than Visual Studio Code.

As a terminal emulator I am now using ghostty, after previously using kitty and many other terminal emulators more distantly in the past, so GUI performance is important for me.

Ghostty seems faster than Emacs, so I believe that switching to GPU text rendering could accelerate Emacs, but for a significant speedup a more complete redesign of the graphics output would be necessary than in the parent article.

The problem is that this might be easy only when targeting a single GUI environment, but that would be in contradiction with the original Emacs goal, to be usable under many operating systems and GUI environments.