Re: Emacs's popularity

[Phil Carmody]

Andreas Politz <politza@fh-trier.de> writes:
> Phil Carmody wrote:
>>    vim  emacs21 emacs22
>>  0.004    0.10    0.20   = start with no file, quit
>> [0.16]   [0.43]   0.62   = start with 12MB file, quit
>> [0.16]   [0.44]   0.66   = start with no file, open 12MB file, quit
>
> The command to open a <file> is ':edit <file>'.

Ta! Times in [] adjusted to some new runs (I also equalised the
load on the otherwise identical machines too). (For reference, 
all were non-X versions of the editors.)

> Here are a couple more numbers :
>
> $ time vim -c 'quit'
>
> real    0m0.226s
> user    0m0.112s
> sys     0m0.048s
>
> Processed lines of vimscript : 18867
> (According to the vim command :scriptnames)*

Yikes!

real    0m0.012s
user    0m0.004s
sys     0m0.004s

125 lines (default Debian install)

> However, vim is completely written in C with an optional
> interpreter for it's own extension language (you can start
> editing in vim w/o reading a single line of vimscript), it'll
> always be faster, in some sense of 'faster'.

Indeed. One of the reasons I like emacs is because of the 
'kitchen sink' nature of it. I've tried a dozen newsreaders
in my time, and none of them quite do it for me like GNUS 
does. compile and (r)grep mode are undispensible. gdb likewise.
I love the unbounded scrollback history and incremental search
in shell windows, etc. ad nauseam, I simply can't survive 
without it.

I suspect that a poweruser could also do most of the above 
in vim too, but the learning curve is just too steep. Out of
the box, emacs does more, and gets me doing more, quicker 
than vim.

One thing that shocked me whilst looking at some simple core 
lisp modules in emacs, in order to get some hints how to do 
a quick 'copy one character from the line above' function,
the other week was the absurd inefficiency of some of the 
functions. The transpose-* family, for example. Imagine
what the number of bit-ops the transpose-chars equivalent
in vim would be compared with the emacs implementation. 
(go on - have a look - it's in simple.el)

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 /.