My IDE is too heavy so I moved to Emacs

As an emacs user I have to say that IntelliJ (and pretty much any modern IDE) feels snappier than emacs configured to do anything comparable (lsp-mode&#x2F;eglot, corfu&#x2F;company, tree-sitter etc).<p>While IDEs may require more resources, they usually utilize them better.<p>Emacs is fundamentally single-threaded and not great at async things. With most of the logic written in a very slow non-JIT friendly language with naive blocking GC. Rendering pipeline is also a mess. Underlying internal datastructures are also very naive (which is a good thing when you implement things in C).<p>Things are slowly changing. emacs now is a lot better than 5 years. So may be in 10 years it will really rival more modern competitors in terms of performance.<p>Having said all this, emacs universality and extensibility keep me with it.

I assume I&#x27;ll use emacs as long as I continue to use computers, and it&#x27;s been decades since I thought editors really should be written in assembler, but this:<p>&quot;I use an underpowered MacBook Air from around 2019&quot;<p>and this:<p>&quot;Mac M1 with 64GB of RAM and 10 CPU cores, everything feels lightweight&quot;<p>are insane sentiments to express, and it&#x27;s an insane world that makes those thoughts seem agreeable to anyone.<p>There is zero justification to consider a 2019 Air &quot;underpowered&quot; for this task. There is zero justification to consider that of course one needs an obscenely powerful portable supercomputer for this task.<p>IDEs do a lot. They do NOT do enough to justify this insanity.<p>I&#x27;m sure there&#x27;s an element of people not knowing what&#x27;s been lost, and an element of people not understanding just how inconceivably fast computers are today, but it&#x27;s hard to wrap the brain around anyone tolerating this (as customers, as purchasers, as users).<p>Perhaps the same sort of jaw-drop that occurs when someone takes a naive python app to go or rust and discovers that python is in fact actually really slow (whether or not it&#x27;s &quot;fast enough&quot;)?<p>Get off my porch, whippersnappers, etc etc.

I&#x27;m still on Sublime Text, after briefly switching to VSCode. Unless you&#x27;re on latest-gen hardware it seems that most feature-rich IDEs are just terribly laggy, which drives me nuts. A computer just shouldn&#x27;t need several seconds to load and parse a source file even if it has 100.000 lines. Editors like Emacs or Vim were always too low-level for me though, Sublime is a nice compromise between simplicity and speed.

&gt; IntelliJ is a great product and I don’t even consider switching to anything else for professional development, where having the greatest laptop and the best tools possible should be a priority.<p>The title should really be &quot;My IDE is too heavy so I moved to Emacs for hobby projects&quot;.

A long time ago I switched to Emacs(with evil mode) from whatever IDEs I was using but it was also way too slow. I then switched to vim and configured it with lots of plugins. This was the best thing ever. I transitioned to Neovim but Vim would also be OK.<p>Vim&#x2F;Neovim are always fast. Even with 30+ plugins configured. I can run them on any hardware and they are blazing fast. Not to mention the superiority of modal editing if you are used to it. I have every feature I need (LSP&#x2F;code completion&#x2F;diagnostics&#x2F;even debugging via DAP).<p>Pretty sure that I won&#x27;t switch setup for a long time&#x2F;ever again.

&gt; <i>That’s why I am currently trying to get back to using Emacs.</i><p>I just wish that people write such posts six months <i>after</i> they have made the switch.<p>The author has only started. He only has stuff set up and checked speed. He hasn’t yet become as efficient as he was with JetBrains.<p>He might never become that, and after 20-30 days, he might throw in the towel and go back to JB.<p><i>_Being too bullish too soon_</i> is one of the serious maladies of the present personal-brand&#x2F;influencer culture.

I&#x27;ve never understood why developers look to be _tied_ to a single IDE&#x2F;editor. I also don&#x27;t get the obsession that some of us have with our IDEs.<p>What&#x27;s with the &quot;I am moving to editor X...&quot;. You don&#x27;t have to give up one editor to use another. You can use whichever may be convenient for a given situation.<p>I use several editors&#x2F;IDEs based on whatever the language&#x2F;ecosystem&#x2F;task at hand is.<p>Quickly editing a config file? I just use a barebones vim or Sublime Text.<p>Writing some quick Python&#x2F;Rust code, I use nvim with plugins.<p>Writing some SQL: I spin up DBeaver.<p>When I want to do extensive refactoring or step debugging in Java&#x2F;Rust&#x2F;Python: I open a Jetbrains flavour: Jetbrains vanilla&#x2F;PyCharm&#x2F;CLion.<p>IDE at work containing a mix of JS+TS frontends and Go+Python+Rust services: VSCode (it&#x27;s a nice general purpose workhorse).<p>I guess the secret sauce to all this is that I have vim shortcuts configured everywhere, so the transitions are easy.<p>I don&#x27;t see a reason to be monogamous to one IDE&#x2F;editor :)

I also find intellij idea (and friends) too heavy. I am using it only when developing java or kotlin because the experience is much better than anything else, despite the slowness.<p>For anything else (python, js, elixir) I use VSCode with a careful selection of plugins. It works very nice even on my Thinkpad T420.<p>I agree with the people that said that if you install a lot of plugins (lsp etc) on a bare bones editor it will feel very slow; I had exactly this experience using vim on Windows: Using it as a text editor with only a few plugins (fzf etc) was great but when I started using is more like an IDE the experience wasn&#x27;t that good anymore resulting in choosing VSCode instead.

I thought the title was a joke, until I remembered a second later Emacs is now perceived as lightweight. The same Emacs was that belittled for its insane memory usage, typically megabytes of memory.<p>I must be an old-timer now.

I remember when I was a kid, I wanted to start coding so naturally most places mentioned Visual Studio.<p>I installed it in the hopes to begin something new and challenging.<p>Every time I open Visual Studio, it took an average of 18 minutes (yes, I timed it), and it was using my full 2 gigs of ram that I had at that time, so the typing experience was even worse.<p>I wish I was more persistent with the idea of start coding, but a heavy IDE was one of the causes my curiosity was killed.<p>Since that day I have kind of a resentment against big IDEs like the ones from Jetbrains and VS, although my PC doesn&#x27;t struggle at all with them nowadays.<p>I mostly use VIM and it&#x27;s enough for me.

Submitted a bug report regarding poor performance like 2 years ago and they are still &quot;looking&quot; into it. I guess the shiny look has priority over performance for them.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtrack.jetbrains.com&#x2F;issue&#x2F;IDEA-270042&#x2F;High-CPU-usage-due-to-DFAEngine.performDFA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtrack.jetbrains.com&#x2F;issue&#x2F;IDEA-270042&#x2F;High-CPU-us...</a>

&gt; <i>On my top-of-the-line Mac M1 with 64GB of RAM and 10 CPU cores, everything feels lightweight and smooth [...] But when I am at home and want to work on a hobby project, I prefer to use my less powerful laptops [...] after just an hour or so writing code and running tests using IntelliJ, the laptop becomes unusably hot. The fans get louder and louder until it’s really annoying.</i><p>To add my anecdotal evidence: I have a relatively new Dell Core i7 laptop with &quot;only&quot; 16 GB of RAM, and while using IntelliJ IDEs &quot;normally&quot; (i.e. not while it&#x27;s updating its cache), the CPU usage rarely goes above 5%. So the impression that you need top of the line hardware for running IntelliJ products that the blog post is giving is a bit exaggerated...

<p><pre><code> As much as it hurts me to say this, as a fan of JetBrains and its tools, IntelliJ just seems to have become too heavy to run properly on a laptop that’s not at the very higher end of laptops in the early 2020’s. </code></pre> They advised you to turn off&#x2F;uninstall plugins, which I did as well. I disabled most of the plugins, even the ones that get shipped by default. For me it improved the performance a lot.<p>But imho you just need a more powerful computer :). You are obviously missing the features from IntelliJ :).

&gt; running the community edition of Jetbrains’ IntelliJ IDEA<p>...<p>&gt; As much as it hurts me to say this, as a fan of JetBrains and its tools, IntelliJ just seems to have become too heavy to run properly on a laptop that’s not at the very higher end of laptops in the early 2020’s.<p>IntelliJ does what I want, but only barely. The autocompletion gets it wrong as much as it gets it right and it is a performance <i>hog</i>.<p>I can deal with that.<p>The problem for me was JetBrains&#x27; privacy policy[0]. It is loosely-worded enough to forbid them practically nothing, and I find that especially appalling in a so-called &quot;community edition&quot;.<p>So I began searching for alternatives. Emacs may serve for OP but I always forget how to exit it so I wanted something with a clickable &quot;close&quot; button in the top right.<p>I am getting a good initial impression from Codelite[1]. I&#x27;m sure Codelite doesn&#x27;t do everything IntelliJ&#x27;s IDEs do, but it has the functionality I use and it is a breath of fresh air after waiting for IDEA and the like to catch their breath during text editing.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jetbrains.com&#x2F;legal&#x2F;docs&#x2F;privacy&#x2F;third-parties&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jetbrains.com&#x2F;legal&#x2F;docs&#x2F;privacy&#x2F;third-parties&#x2F;</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codelite.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codelite.org&#x2F;</a>

While lightweightness is often an important factor considered in choosing text editors, their hackability and the fun associated with it can be so rewarding (if you&#x27;re into it of course).<p>Sure, elisp may take a bit of time to get used to but writing short snippets can often bring delight, tailored to your needs.<p>A couple of years ago, I wrote a smartish Swift yasnippet (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xenodium.com&#x2F;emacs-generate-a-swift-initializer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xenodium.com&#x2F;emacs-generate-a-swift-initializer</a>). A few days ago, I revisted and made it smarter (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xenodium.com&#x2F;emacs-generate-a-swift-initializer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xenodium.com&#x2F;emacs-generate-a-swift-initializer</a>). Lately, I&#x27;ve made lots of command-line utilities easily accessible with a small package I wrote (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xenodium.com&#x2F;seamless-command-line-utils" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xenodium.com&#x2F;seamless-command-line-utils</a>). You can accomplish quite a bit with very little code. Here&#x27;s another usage integrating with macOS (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xenodium.com&#x2F;emacs-reveal-in-finder-dwim-style" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xenodium.com&#x2F;emacs-reveal-in-finder-dwim-style</a>). You can also goof around a little and create a welcome screen (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xenodium.com&#x2F;emacs-a-welcoming-experiment" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xenodium.com&#x2F;emacs-a-welcoming-experiment</a>). Perhaps you want to blur the lines between your editor and your shell (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xenodium.com&#x2F;yasnippet-in-emacs-eshell" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xenodium.com&#x2F;yasnippet-in-emacs-eshell</a>). There are lots of packages available that do the heavy lifting, like multiple cursors (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xenodium.com&#x2F;inserting-numbers-with-emacs-multiple-cursors" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xenodium.com&#x2F;inserting-numbers-with-emacs-multiple-c...</a>).<p>An all-time favorite of mine is the Emacs Rocks multiple cursors episode (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;emacsrocks.com&#x2F;e13.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;emacsrocks.com&#x2F;e13.html</a>). Well worth the watch to the very end. He&#x27;s just having so much fun.

&gt; Jetbrains is working on Fleet, a new, lighter editor from JetBrains, and while it seems very promising (it’s quite pretty, well thought out, modern)<p>Heh, these days I&#x27;d consider a program advertising a &quot;modern&quot; UI&#x2F;UX to be a bug, not a feature. Current trends of making everything flat and hiding functionality sucks.

Kiss your productivity goodbye. Emacs has lots of half-baked features that you&#x27;ll be tempted to fix with its LISP dialect. It&#x27;s so much fun to tinker that you&#x27;ll wonder where your day went.<p>The $20 I spend every month on my JetBrains subscription is easily worth it. I can depend on my IDE to be working well and not waste time on fixing buggy features. The JetBrains people are also highly responsive to bug reports.

True - nowadays, `Eight Megabytes Always Continuous Swapping` is a feature, not a bug...

I love emacs. I don&#x27;t use an IDE unless I&#x27;m forced to, mainly because I simply don&#x27;t use the features most IDEs offer, and have considered them bloated nightmares since the first time I used one. Emacs has everything you need, and is fast enough, with few exceptions. Same for vi(m).

I recently started using intelliJ&#x27;s datagrip. For some reason, it stores its metadata in xml files, 150Mb or so per database. One postgres DB cluster it actually refuses to index unless I select only some of the DBs in it. Mind you, these databases are not particularly big, e.g. 17GB for the cluster it doesn&#x27;t want to index.<p>When it starts up, it loads all this metadata in memory. You feel the laptop being slow for a minute or so. After that, its mostly a good tool. Once in a while, it indexes something and grants you another coffee break.<p>I keep wondering, why XML? If you build this much metadata, wouldn&#x27;t it make a lot more sense to store it in a database itself, and only load what you need from it? Say sqlite or h2 or something.

IntelliJ needs a lightweight competitor, if that&#x27;s possible. As the article points out, it&#x27;s slow! Drains laptop battery, requires a powerful computer not to have slowdowns etc. (Using PyCharm, mainly with Rust plugin)<p>Sublime is much lighter, but not as powerful.

&gt; ... apparently, writing code on anything other than top-of-the-line machines is too much to ask for.<p>You guys are way ahead of me, so I need to learn. E.g., I&#x27;m missing the need for &quot;top of the line&quot;.<p>For my Web site startup, I typed in 100,000 lines of text, 24,000 programming language statements, in Microsoft&#x27;s Visual Basic .NET using an old desktop computer with a processor with a single core with a with a 1.8 GHz clock, Windows XP, SQL Server, calling LINPACK via Microsoft&#x27;s <i>platform invoke</i>, and the editor KEDIT (with ~100 macros I wrote) with command line commands in ~100 Rexx scripts I wrote.<p>Once I got past some documentation frustrations, I was thrilled with all of it: I typed in code using KEdit, compiled it using a Rexx script, then used another Rexx script to run it, e.g., to run the Web site <i>locally</i>, i.e., with IP address 10.0.0.177.<p>I thought that the compiling was fast, nicely fast, really, blindingly fast. For the code to start running and the Web site to be functioning -- again blindingly fast. I was thrilled.<p>Something went wrong, apparently with the motherboard, and I got an HP laptop with a 2 core processor and a 2.5 GHz clock to use while I plugged together a desktop with an 8 core processor and a 4.0 GHz clock. Then compiling the code and running it were faster than blindingly fast, nearly too fast to get finger off the Enter key.<p>I&#x27;ve considered moving to Emacs instead of KEdit and to Power Shell instead of Rexx, but so far I&#x27;ve not seen anything like<p>&gt; ... apparently, writing code on anything other than top-of-the-line machines is too much to ask for.<p>What am I missing? Maybe I&#x27;m missing some big things an IDE (integrated development environment) would do for me?<p>I&#x27;ve been delayed by collecting data, etc., but am getting back to code writing and running so would like to know what I&#x27;m missing?<p>In simple terms, I see programming as just typing in text and like KEdit, and my macros, for that. Then for the compiling, <i>building</i>, just run the compiler -- it runs right away.

I’m still waiting for a rust text editor or ide to emerge and take off. I think that’s going to be ‘the one’. I’ve been trying to go for rust software wherever I can on my new MacBook and it’s always blazingly fast. Alacritty literally loads instantly - makes the terminal experience so much nicer.<p>In the mean time, I’ve tried out Atom, VSCode, Vim, Emacs and PhpStorm but settled on using Sublime Text and Sublime Merge after watching a senior wizard use them day in day out at my last job. I absolutely love their minimalism: I want as little as possible on the screen to distract me when I’m coding. Atom, VSCode and especially PhpStorm all felt too bloated and cluttered: way too many panels and buttons taking up real estate from the text editor. Focus mode isn’t the solution for me because it’s annoying coming in and out of it all the time when you want to do a file search or look for something in the directory tree or what not. For me, Vim and Emacs were too much of a pain in the arse, both with the endless configuration and research you have to do to get a decent set up and with having to remember all the keyboard shortcuts and look one of them up from a cheat sheet when you inevitably forget. For me, Sublime Text really is the sweet spot between the two worlds.

XEmacs was my IDE when UNIX environments didn&#x27;t offer anything better, and most likely Emacs nowadays has implemented most of the stuff that XEmacs had going for it over Emacs.<p>So it was my &quot;IDE&quot; between 1995 - 2005 when working on UNIX, muscle memory is still there and I still remember basic elisp stuff, yet I see no reason to abandon my IDE&#x27;s, now that they are available everywhere that matters to me.

Emacs people: How well does Emacs manage many files being open in disparate directories? I&#x27;ve often got two dozen files open as I navigate source code of a new codebase, and my current IDE (Jetbrains) does not have a good way of organizing the tabs so that I can quickly find them by module (not filename).<p>For instance, consider the following open files:<p><pre><code> projectRoot&#x2F;beatles&#x2F;foo&#x2F;bar&#x2F;alice&#x2F;bob&#x2F;charlie&#x2F;a.c projectRoot&#x2F;beatles&#x2F;foo&#x2F;bar&#x2F;alice&#x2F;bob&#x2F;charlie&#x2F;b.c projectRoot&#x2F;beatles&#x2F;foo&#x2F;somethingElse&#x2F;UI&#x2F;keyboard&#x2F;usbSupport.c projectRoot&#x2F;stones&#x2F;mick.c projectRoot&#x2F;stones&#x2F;bass&#x2F;dick.c projectRoot&#x2F;stones&#x2F;bass&#x2F;ricky.c </code></pre> I&#x27;d like a single &quot;view&quot; (whatever that may be. In Jetbrains it&#x27;s a tab bar, in VIM it&#x27;s an ASCII list) to see all the files, but collected into &quot;groups&quot;. So the files in the `projectRoot&#x2F;beatles&#x2F;foo&#x2F;bar&#x2F;alice&#x2F;` group are all together, the files in the `projectRoot&#x2F;beatles&#x2F;foo&#x2F;somethingElse&#x2F;` group are all together, and the files in the `projectRoot&#x2F;stones&#x2F;` group are all together. All other files would be in a separate &quot;group&quot; visually.<p>Notice that each &quot;group&quot; is _not_ a child of a single parent directory. I would define these groups manually - each project only has a handful of groups that I need. This is the feature request for Jetbrains, with each group defined as a Jetbrains &quot;scope&quot;:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtrack.jetbrains.com&#x2F;issue&#x2F;WI-61955&#x2F;Tab-bar-row-per-scope" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtrack.jetbrains.com&#x2F;issue&#x2F;WI-61955&#x2F;Tab-bar-row-pe...</a><p>Any ideas for how to handle this situation in Emacs would be much appreciated. I&#x27;ve begun using Emacs for org-mode (with Evil) and I&#x27;d love to actually develop in Emacs if it has really good groupings of files.

I write C++ professionally and primarily edit code using Emacs inside Tmux over ssh, and I&#x27;ve found once you get accustomed to it you can be just as productive without any fancy plugins. E.g. instead of autocomplete, it only takes a couple seconds to split the window, open the other source file in the second pane, jump (by text-based search, if you weren&#x27;t already there) to where the definition is, highlight the word and copy-paste it back to the first pane. And that way you never have to worry about your tooling randomly breaking in template-heavy code, something no C++ IDE is safe from. No more moments of frustration when the IDE randomly freezes while you&#x27;re trying to do something important.

TBH nowadays I give up learning either emacs and vim, it&#x27;s just too much time to replicate the experience in Jetbrain editors. I&#x27;d just throw in an extra thousand and buy something more powerful, like a 16g m1 macbook pro. Time is precious.

IntelliJ also has a &quot;Power Save&quot; mode if you want to disable a lot of the background stuff while on battery.<p>The reality is, with large projects there is a lot of crunching going on in the background. Laptops tend to reduce their processing power when on battery, so a few options are:<p>- use a dev server! I have a desktop at home I can use - a cheap desktop is much better than a cheap laptop. Or rent an on-demand from the cloud. IntelliJ has nice remote development support.<p>- plug into the wall<p>- turn off everything non-essential like plugins<p>- use emacs&#x2F;vim!<p>I love vim as much as anybody but now that I am older I don&#x27;t have much time to mess around with configurations. I am learning rust and it is great to open up CLion and just get down to business.

Back in Emacs&#x27;s heyday, it was the editor everyone was complaining about for being too bloated and slow (&quot;Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping&quot;).<p>Today, Emacs is a great retro video game, but you will be kneecapped if relying on it for serious programming work. For pay or otherwise. And if you&#x27;re like me, you&#x27;ll become mired in it and everything else will seem as a pebble in the shoe. Don&#x27;t be like me.<p>Using a modern IDE, or IDE-like editor, is a critical developer skill because that&#x27;s where all the tooling and attention is. Focus on that and don&#x27;t attempt to cosplay as an old-school wizard by faffing about with things like Emacs.

What really irritates me about IntelliJ is the terminal (on Windows). It is slow as molasses (can be down to two characters per second), and sometimes typing occurs not at the prompt, but a few lines above. How can something like a terminal be that broken? And there were a ton of issue reports in the past, so I don&#x27;t even bother to write another issue report.<p>I finally found that disabling &quot;Typeahead&quot; in Advanced Settings seems to help quite a bit so I will stick with IntelliJ, because I quite like it aside from the terminal. But I was ready to jump ship a short while ago (because of the performance of the terminal, can you even imagine?).

I absolutely love Kotlin (and I do like the folks behind Jetbrains), so I&#x27;m kinda de facto locked onto IntelliJ but damn that post is right in the feels.<p>Yesterday, I had to let go of my 4K screen and go back to working on the laptop screen of my 1 year old M1 because of some issue that is open for 7 years (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jlengrand&#x2F;status&#x2F;1601246555066859520" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jlengrand&#x2F;status&#x2F;1601246555066859520</a>).<p>Back then, I upgraded my laptop because the indexing of semi-large projects was making me go bonkers.<p>Sometimes, it does feel like my DevEx is getting worse over time. Not better

I don&#x27;t know the impact on battery, but there&#x27;s a Power Save mode in Jetbrains IDEs that makes the IDE slightly snappier, when you just want to read some code or do one or two modifications.

I&#x27;ve got an Emacs window open on the top and PyCharm on the bottom of the screen. The main story in the IDE for me is first class debugger, visual refactoring tools and luxury level toolchain integration. The main story in Emacs is org-mode, runs almost anywhere, plus, great text editing features (try running a macro in the IDE... sometimes I can actually type faster... all on a 2022 i7 with 32GB of RAM). I think we&#x27;re dealing with the same problem we do with all development tools: functionality vs. performance.

The OP would probably find that any IDE works just fine on the baseline MacBook Air from the Apple Silicon era. But anything older than that is probably going to have problems.

As an nvim user – the IntelliJ feels a lot more responsive than VScode, and the whole thing when configured carefully is a breeze compared to everything else i used. It&#x27;s pane management is so good, and it fits seamlessly inside a vanilla terminal. It&#x27;s keyboard-first support is, with no doubts, the best-in-class. I can navigate it so quickly at this point any other IDE feels like an aimless turtling

Checkout also <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;AstroNvim&#x2F;AstroNvim" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;AstroNvim&#x2F;AstroNvim</a>

Yes. I have to build small, permacomputing-inspired stuff, so I resort to (neo)vim wherever possible.<p>The complexity of the toolchain tends to sip into the result over time.<p>Conway&#x27;s law.

I&#x27;ve used Emacs for years now.<p>What I like about it is how little I have to use the mouse. Actually, I don&#x27;t have to use the mouse at all, but sometimes I&#x27;m just lazy. It&#x27;s all keyboard, baby. :)<p>Once you get used to the keybindings you can keep a steady flow and concentrate on your work, in contrast to pretty much all modern IDEs which are mouse driven.

I noticed that I focussed more when my Mac terminal was full screen and only using vi to learn rust with almost no plugins. It forced me to reason about the borrow checker before cargo build. I still use vscode for debugging once in a while, but I think it improved my understanding of the language and also prevented me from getting distracted.

I&#x27;d be happier if:<p>1) Some random mode couldn&#x27;t kill M-% search and replace. Something somewhere does it in some of my installs.<p>2) Magit was reliable on MacOS. On one machine, it&#x27;s fine. On another, I have some random issue with emacs server and therefore I&#x27;m not able to commit, or do anything where I can edit a message buffer.

I abandoned JetBrains a long time ago.. too bad, because they always have really good language&#x2F;framework&#x2F;platform tooling, but I just can’t stand the IDE. I don’t see them just creating a language backend for VSCode.

&gt; (funny, because at the time it was created it was considered a heavyweight… how things change)<p>No kidding, but I remember in the early days, when people complained, RMS said something like &quot;the hardware will catch up&quot;.<p>Seems he was right :)

I highly recommend the Geany IDE as well, it&#x27;s very simple and lightweight, but still has conveniences like an integrated terminal if you like, automatic state saving, etc. Best IDE in my humble opinion!

My &quot;least powerful&quot; laptop that I still use for development is ASUS TUF A15. With Ryzen 7 4800H CPU. 8 Cores 16 threads. I bought it recently dirt cheap for $799 Canadian (translates to $586US approximately). Stuffed it with 64GB RAM (I had it lying around but it is cheap anyways).<p>I run CLion from JetBrains on it for my C++ development. When doing full rebuild of the project and libs (all cores at 100%) the fan comes on but not really loud and goes back to sleep for the rest of the development. Building itself is really fast.<p>Not sure why you have such poor experience. Maybe those thin laptops can&#x27;t really handle CPU loads without overheating.

Something I recently missed emacs for, was being able to use it to transparent edit a file over SSH.<p>I couldn&#x27;t find an easy way to do that with IntelliJ&#x2F;phpstorm.

Slightly off topic: any reviews of Zed or Helix here?<p>How does it compare?

I think the cycle repeats itself, there used to be bloat-wares like Eclipse (IntelliFuck) that programmers would swear by. Then came Sublime and people had a revelation about how light and fast an IDE can and should be. Recently there has been another wave of hipster programmers swearing by bloat-wares like VSCode.<p>Now people have to rediscover Emacs from 47 years ago.

&gt; and inserting custom snippets for things like System.out.println and public static void main<p>YASnippet!

&gt; The shortcuts are just unergonomic in my opinion<p>Extensions -&gt; type &quot;emacs&quot; -&gt; done<p>I really hate this articles that scream &quot;look I&#x27;m so old school I use vim&#x2F;emacs&quot; while emacs is a single threaded nightmare that will work worse than any IDE if you will try to configure it to make it usable for actual every day work.

My space suit is too heavy so I moved into my bathing suit.

Cooking is too complicated so I&#x27;m back to hunting and gathering.

1. Disable unused plugins<p>2. Exclude folders from indexing<p>3. Tune the JVM<p>It is less work than tuning emacs.

I use vim inside a VS Code terminal. Best of both worlds.<p>I&#x27;ve heard of a vim extension&#x2F;mod for VS Code but haven&#x27;t had the time to dig into it.