homebrew-emacsmacport VS popper

Run emacs -q (no add-ons loaded) and it should be a lot faster than VS Code. Which means that a library you loaded is the culprit. Things like Doom Emacs are notorious for unexpected slowness since they're not very well put together and load questionable libraries.

In the unlikely case where emacs -q is still slow, use Emacs Mac Port (https://github.com/railwaycat/homebrew-emacsmacport/releases...).

This is at least 2x perceivably faster than VS Code on Mac.

Important note: I learned that apparently not all Emacsen properly support :stipple (despite happily accepting it as a face attribute). Linux/UNIX is safe, emacs-mac supports it on MacOS, but Windows may not at all (untested). Also, terminal emacs does not (to my knowledge) implement :stipple. Let me know how you fare. Update: Pure GTK emacs apparently does display stipples, but incorrectly (as an inverse mask).

I don't use macOS anymore, but the best port I found for speed was https://github.com/railwaycat/homebrew-emacsmacport

There is the code to do just that. Works with emacs-mac and emacs-plus.

There's the "Mac" version, from Mitsuharu Yamamoto or railwaycat. The Mac port works more like Mac than the NextStep port. And it looks like the Mac port does work with C-f4.

Homebrew

You can install emacs-mac by homebrew (see https://github.com/railwaycat/homebrew-emacsmacport). $ brew tap railwaycat/emacsmacport $ brew install emacs-mac This emacs contains mac-win.el. Mac Auto ASCII mode in the mac-win.el automatically selects the most-recently-used ASCII-capable keyboard input source on some occasions: after prefix key (bound in the global keymap) press such as C-x and M-g, and at the start of minibuffer input. This function is very useful. I guess you can read Japanese, please visit Japanese setup page of my website (https://taipapamotohus.com/post/japanese\_setup/).

For what it's worth, the emacs-mac port provides a mac-effective-appearance-change-hook hook to do the same thing as the System appearance change plugin. I use it like this:

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