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Re: Emacs's popularity


From: Phil Carmody
Subject: Re: Emacs's popularity
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2008 13:34:42 +0200
User-agent: Gnus/5.11 (Gnus v5.11) Emacs/22.2 (gnu/linux)

"Lennart Borgman" <lennart.borgman@gmail.com> writes:
> On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 11:28 PM, Richard Riley <rileyrgdev@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>>> But Vim is not only installed; it's really used a lot. In Debian Vim has
>>>> always been a bit more popular than Emacs but in the first half of 2007
>>>> Vim really got popular (around Vim 7.1 and Debian 4.0 release). This
>>>> "used actively" graph compares vim-common, emacs21-bin-common and
>>>> emacs22-bin-common packages:
>>>>
>>>>    http://preview.tinyurl.com/5thmmx
>>>
>>> That is a bit strange since the vi emulator Viper in Emacs is now so good.
>>>
>>
>> Not strange at all Lennart, Why would someone run the Emacs OS to run
>> emulated vim  when they can run the real thing in 100th of the
>> footprint?
>
> Exactly why do you think the footprint matter?

1 vote for 'emacs has a large footprint, and that matters to me'. My machine
has 128MB RAM. Emacs 21 is pretty OK, but 22 uses noticeably more memory,
which is my most limited resource.

Exactly why do you think that it doesn't matter?

But it's not just RAM footprint where emacs compares unfavourably to vim, 
in fact, RAM-wise it's not a huge difference, only about a couple of megs
difference. Far more importantly is the CPU footprint.  Emacs 21 takes 3 
times as long to start up as vim does on a large plain text file (so no 
syntax highlighting or anything being done). Emacs 22 takes even longer, 
in particular as the loading was interrupted with a "that's a big file, 
are you sure?" prompt.

Can you imagine vim-proponents not looking at these times (averaged over
3 runs, after everything was in the cache) with a sense of pride?

   vim  emacs21 emacs22
 0.004    0.10    0.20   = start with no file, quit
 0.18     0.58    0.62   = start with 12MB file, quit
 ????     0.59    0.66   = start with no file, open 12MB file, quit

(didn't know how to open a file from within vim, as it's utterly illucid.)

In which case, why shouldn't we emacs proponents look on them with a sense
of shame? More than 3 times slower - is that not shameful?

Phil
-- 
I tried the Vista speech recognition by running the tutorial. I was 
amazed, it was awesome, recognised every word I said. Then I said the 
wrong word ... and it typed the right one. It was actually just 
detecting a sound and printing the expected word! -- pbhj on /.


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