emacs VS popper

The ugly: Handling JSONRPC synchronously. Now that eldoc is in core emacs, LSP is officially supported by core emacs but from this branch https://github.com/emacs-lsp/emacs/tree/json-rpc-29 it looks like core emacs still handles JSONRPC synchronously and blocking.

Without perf profile, it is hard to say. For starters, you may remove lsp-ui. After this: https://emacs-lsp.github.io/lsp-mode/page/performance/ it should be good enough for most use usecases. If you want blazingly fast lsp-mode, you need the LSP Emacs fork https://github.com/emacs-lsp/emacs which is another beast(see https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/ymrkyn/async_nonblocking_jsonrpc_or_lsp_performance/ as well).

https://emacs-lsp.github.io/lsp-mode/page/performance/ . If this doesn't do, then https://github.com/emacs-lsp/emacs

The other major performance boost is if you're using lsp-mode and this fork. And an lsp-server that sends waaay too much info, I guess.

lsp-mode is async, but sending the messages. If the server is busy and not reading the input messages then lsp-mode will block. The only way ATM to avoid the issue is to use https://github.com/emacs-lsp/emacs .

I disagree. When I am running a compilation (with output being dumped into a visible buffer) + query magit for large commit. Over tramp. Things noticeably freeze. Technically it all is async. Practically, it is implemented as polling things on main thread with some witing happening in non-async fashion.

> For example, querying your compiler for a list of methods that apply to the current object, or a list of functions that start with “Foo” are mostly moving to external processes using LSP as the communication protocol.

That's why we have lsp-bridge and lsp-mode emacs fork :) Both of which build some infrastructure to avoid doing communication work with lsp-mode work in main emacs thread. So, heavy emacs users are building some async machinery which wraps another already async and relatively lightweight protocol, because core emacs facilities can't keep up with it. Architecturally it is kind of insane.

I think, lsp-mode fork is doing the right thing (from practical POV; it goes against "emacs is just an elisp interpreter" ideology though) and hope it gets into core at some point. A better solution would have being having first class async and background threads support at the elisp level. Which would never happen due to elisp messiness.

https://github.com/emacs-lsp/emacs

Locks: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Mu...

Semaphores are not there, my mistake; I was thinking about: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Co...

That's basically what every other threading library provides in most languages... and it's also what was shown time and again to be very hard to work with directly. Higher-order abstractions are necessary to make parallelism safe and concurrency convenient.

> and atomicity is guaranteed apart from when you use these calls. So you'd never be in a problem state of `setq` failing halfway, for example.

That's true - it looks like Emacs uses a global lock to ensure the atomicity, similarly to what Python does. Also like in Python, you can release that lock from native code (module or core). You cannot touch any interpreter state from other threads, so you need a bit of plumbing to get the results back, but it's possible. I found this: https://github.com/emacs-lsp/emacs/blob/json-rpc/src/json.c very interesting: it's a fork that moves JSONRPC from Lisp to C and out of the main thread. See for example line 1109 and related.

> but threads are pretty useful already if hard to code with.

That's the point: the capabilities are there (mostly), but abstractions are not. Coding with threads, even in the presence of the global lock, is hard, and ensuring correctness is nontrivial. At the very least we should get channels for communication (share by communicating, don't communicate by sharing) between threads and thread pools for executing tasks (like futures in Java or Python, or Task in Elixir). Threads and locks are way too low-level for normal coding. I suspect that's the reason why they're not used more widely, even though they're there for the third(?) release now.

Aside: Racket is actually a nice example of concurrency and parallelism being treated as completely separate concerns. IIRC threads in Racket are call/cc-based green threads, while places are separate instances of the VM that execute in OS-level thread or separate process. Threads provide concurrency and places provide parallelism. It's actually a good thing, I think. Mixing the two is often a major source of errors. Racket also has futures, which are parallel-if-possible primitives that can benefit from parallelism if they don't touch external state - a sort of a middle ground.

In any case: yes, Elisp threads are a good addition to the language, but they alone are not enough to bring concurrency to the masses, so to speak. As a concurrency primitives, and compared to callbacks, they have few advantages and some serious downsides. Emacs still needs a lot of work on the concurrency front. And don't even mention parallelism, that's another can of worms that we don't really need to open :)

In order for that to work, you have to use the json-rpc branch from here: https://github.com/emacs-lsp/emacs .

popper: Summon, dismiss or cycle through "popup" buffers. Like drop-down terminals (guake, yakuake etc) but in Emacs and for any buffer, not just shells.

Karthink's config, good integration with the popper package

I love emacs, but agree with many of your criticisms.

Emacs can be slow. I don't use LSP, so can't comment on that, but it's definitely slow on long lines with syntax highlighting.

I don't use TRAMP for exactly one of the reasons you mentioned: it can hang Emacs. I want to avoid that at all costs, because I pretty much live in Emacs.

Handling buffers is tedious, but you can improve that through various packages, like popper[1]

Depending on what problems you run in to and your skill level, it could be tricky to debug elisp programs. However, compare that to when you run in to some bug in VSCode... how are you going to debug that? You'll probably have to submit a bug report and wait for the developers to get to it (if they ever do)... how is that better than emacs?

Also, remember that you don't have to go it alone in troubleshooting the issues you run in to with emacs. There's a whole community ready and willing to help.

Despite the downsides of emacs, I still use and love it. Every editor has downsides, and emacs is no exception. Its positives far, far outweigh the negatives for me. There's just so much more that it can do than other editors, and it's far more customizable. I very much doubt I'll ever seriously consider switching to another.

[1] - https://github.com/karthink/popper

Thanks for these tips! I'll explore tabspaces, apheleia, async-shell-command (and the Go lib) — all of those are new to me.

> Can you give a specific example of something you had trouble with?

I hoped to recreate multiple long-running terminal sessions in splits and tabs, similar to functionality I now use from:

Neovim (plugin): https://github.com/akinsho/toggleterm.nvim

VS Code (built-in): https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/terminal/basics#_managing...

I just found “popper”, which didn't exist the last time I looked. It seems like a pretty close substitute:

https://github.com/karthink/popper

I find it pretty unintuitive how magit, vterm, rg, and other commands that want to open a new window will interact with a multi-window setup. Sometimes they'll use an existing window, sometimes they'll make a new one. I prefer having things be predictable: terminals always go here, search results go there, and so on. I was looking for ways to tame this, and I found purpose, popper, shackle, and of course, directly hacking on display-buffer-alist.

I use popper for buffers I only need to see briefly.

I haven't used popper but its description sounds promising: https://github.com/karthink/popper

Maybe this can help: https://github.com/karthink/popper

Consider Popper