Over at the Emacs subreddit, MarkieAurelius has a mini-poll that asks: Is Emacs Slow For You? That’s a perennial question, of course. I last wrote about it a year ago. Not much has changed since then.
The same uninformed people are opining at the top of their lungs about how slow and unusable Emacs is and, of course, the ankle biters are as active as ever. The best contrary opinion was from danderzei who said “Emacs works as fast as I can type and think.” That’s been my experience too. Emacs is more than able to keep up with my typing even though I’m a reasonably good touch typist.
Many of the comments blame LSP for any perceived slowness. I program in C and Lisp so I’ve never seen the point of LSP and have never used it. It may be that it does slow things down. How this compares to other editors, if it actually happens, I don’t know. In this case, I’m able to get away with saying “I don’t care.”
The other cause of slowness appears to be running on Windows. Some commenters report that running Emacs under WSL resolves the problem for window users. I’m happy to say that I really don’t care about any Windows related problems.
Some commenters suggest that maybe having a lot of packages slows things down. I have a a moderate number—probably about 80—of packages installed and it doesn’t seem to affect the speed of my Emacs. It’s hard to see why having a lot of packages, per se, would have much effect unless they’re something like LSP that has to look at every keystroke.
So that’s it for another year. Emacs is (still) not slow in any way that matters for most users and you folks claiming otherwise are going to have to find something else to complain about.