Emacs jank on macos has been slowly killing me. Enough so, that I am thinking of completely jumping ship after almost a decade of using emacs.
I often end up facing lag and performance issues in several different aspects of using emacs. Every time I boot up vim or any of the modern editors (zed/vscode), I get shocked at how smooth they are.
I only have 3 realistic options at this point:
- stop using macos (won't because macbooks are the best hardware I can get)
- stop using emacs
- keep suffering
currently I'm doing #3, but I soon need to make the hard call and swallow the pill.
What will my next editor be? Zed? NeoVim? write my own? Is there any other lisp/emacs like editor?
EDIT: helix looks cool
Just out of curiosity, what issue did you encounter? I have a quite customized emacs, and the only lag I really notice between Linux and macOS is in magit, where operations are noticeably slower.
> What will my next editor be?
Fancy giving a shot to Helix[0]? Not even is it pretty good out of the box, it has a scheme extension language in the work.
[0] https://helix-editor.com/
Believe it or not but I tried to use Helix when my Emacs build was completely broken.
It couldn't handle the Git repo of Emacs' size. Every keystroke took 3 seconds to process.
I found it somewhat funny. But otherwise Helix is still a great editor worth recommending.
helix looks cool and the scheme PR open with STEEL looks quite at home for me. I'll check it out, Thanks!
There is a plugin I can't live without: aggressive-indent, and it is awfully slow for me. I don't use any emacs distributions like doom, everything is hand rolled yet my keystrokes are noticeably slower than any other place.
Sometimes random operations like projectile get slow down, sometimes I'm stuck hitting c-g multiple times, it keeps popping up every now and then.
I need to restart emacs once every week because things tend to get slow by then.
And yes, magit is the slowest of them all. I've spent weeks trying to debug and fix magit but it's so slow for me. I am a magit power user despite all the jank, because it really gives me superpower.
Emacs has made me a much better developer, both because of repl driven development, and by making me grok how much power you can wield when you can mold an editor to your needs.
Switching from emacs to something else will be a long and arduous journey for me, but I can't live with the jank anymore as I get frustrated by it almost every day.
Ah I see, I personally only use electric-mode + [insert language]-format on save, so that's much lighter.
And I restart mine every 2-3 days, so it doesn't have that much time to get slowed down.
Have you tried installing the latest version of git via homebrew? I found it to be noticeably faster.
How about Emacs in the terminal? Now I'm a lowly neovim user so I don't know what I'm missing but I feel like I get on fine without a graphical web browser in my text editor or whatever Emacs people use the GUI mode for
you might enjoy Lem! for ages i thought it was an editor _for_ common lisp, and then i learned the other day that it has built in lsp mode and highlighting for typescript and lots of other langs. it's pretty good!
though i highly recommend writing your own editor. there aren't really any editors out there that can provide what emacs can provide someone who's been using it for almost a decade.
> Is there any other lisp/emacs like editor?
There is Lem, an Emacs- like editor written in Common Lisp, which seems quite active.
Yeah I'm a 20 year emacs user in the same boat. Kinda curious what the learning curve is like going from emacs keybindings to vim style modal editing. Bonus points if Dvorak typists can tell me what they do because I've been sadly typing in Dvorak for even longer than I've been using emacs.
As a Dvorak typist and Emacs user (repented from using Vim in the past), when I need to use a vi-like I just use the standard key bindings. Nothing good comes from rebinding keys in my opinion. But the way my brain works is by remembering that scroll down in Vim is Control + D and my fingers remember where Control and D are located on the keyboard.
I was an Emacs user for many years. I used it to write my papers and dissertation (AUCTeX mode was great), and a huge amount of code.
I switched to Vim, and later to NeoVim. I'd highly recommend it.
It's scriptable, and these days is scriptable in multiple "real" programming languages. It took some getting used to, but I found myself going faster in vim than I ever did in Emacs.
You might find https://vim-adventures.com/ fun for learning some of the basics. In particular, it's worth spending time learning the motion commands "in the small", because you'll spend a lot of time using them. For instance:
t (up to character) and f (up to and including character)
i( (inside parens, works with [ or < or ", or p for paragraph)
a( (same thing but includes the delimiters).
Things like that are extremely worth learning, in part because they're the "nouns" in vim's verb-noun editing model, so you'll use them in many different commands.
Even if macbooks were indeed the best hardware you can get, does having the best hardware you can get really matters more that having the best IDE you can get?
I liked emacs, still use it for a lot of things, but the instantly tinkering and changing got to me. Took longer to set something up to work how I wanted than to do the thing.
Try Doom Emacs with native-comp enabled - it significantly reduces the macOS jank while preserving your Emacs workflow and keybindings.
option 1 - run your dev env in a linux vm
There is fennel which compiles into lua. I know there are some people who use fennel almost exclusively, and have some sort of system set up that watches and auto-compiles and sources. I only ever used emac as a basic text editor in the terminal (years ago), so I can't say if this will be sufficient compared to the "real" experience in emacs. Just letting you know in case it is helpful.
edit: I forgot to mention the most important thing, I am talking about using neovim