Emacs can run external processes asynchronously. It is true that Emacs locks up while updating packages but it is actually not while downloading or unpacking them! It locks up while byte-compiling them. :)
I remember I looked into a lockup I was experiencing (this was a few years a ago so I forget the mode). Turns out emacs was writing to disk every so often and this was noticeably causing stutters in the main thread.
> would never describe it as snappy. The entire thing is single threaded so the UI locks up at the slightest provocation
This part seems to be about the User eXperience. (which I agree with, but elisp can start child processes and wait for the results asynchronously, so this is the fault of whoever wrote the code https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Ou... )
I've been using Emacs for over 25 years, and I cannot agree at all with the sentiment that the UI locks up frequently. I mean, it depends on exactly what you do with the program, but for me, the UI is always responsive.
> feel a little exhausted just thinking about needing to be on 14 different chat networks.
You do not need to be on all 14 to find Beeper useful! Even if you only use a few you might still want them to be together in a single app. As to why you might be on several different chat networks, you might have different friend or family circles that use different chat networks and may have failed to convinced them to move to a single one or, like me, may think it is a bad use of time to even attempt to convince them to. I'm using Beeper for WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger and Discord and it's great!
And people wishing to delve even deeper switch back to R? I don't use it, but I understood that most advanced techniques in statistics are implemented first, and sometimes only, as R packages, no?
Taking notes in math courses in Vim on a netbook (remember those?) is what made me switch to Emacs! I tried taking notes both in LaTeX and in Markdown with syntax highlighting for embedded LaTeX math formulas, and Vim just lagged behind my typing —and I'm not that fast a typist. In the case of LaTeX this is a well-known problem that's addressed in the manual (see :help tex-slow). I tried all the tips the manual suggested and Vim still lagged, the only thing that fixed it was turning off syntax-highlighting completely. On a whim I tried Emacs, saw it was perfectly snappy (like Vim with non-LaTeX files) and switched.
This is a serious problem with some Vim plugins and plugin interactions; the user doesn't feel like they've done anything wrong, and yet text insertion is absolutely sluggish. Tex plugins in particular combined with text folding seem prone to this problem.
For the record though, this slowness has nothing to do with Vim itself, or the low power of the netbook; it is purely due to inauspicious interaction between specific plugins and can be fixed at the .vimrc level if you are willing to debug.
I was using a third-party plugin for markdown (I think it was called pandoc.vim), but for LaTeX files I was using only plugins that come with Vim. The documentation in :help tex-slow did suggest things to put in .vimrc to help make syntax-highlighting faster and I did try all of them. The only thing that solved the lag was disabling syntax highlighting for LaTeX completely.
The slowness I experienced for LaTeX files happened even without any third-party plugins installed, using a one-line .vimrc that only turned on syntax highlighting. So I think it is unfair to say "the slowness has nothing to do with Vim itself". Probably also "or the low power of the netbook" is unjustified, in the sense that the tips in :help tex-slow do likely solve the problem on computers a little beefier than my old netbook (which is probably more than 15 years old at this point). I mean, those suggestions are in the official Vim documentation presumably because they did work for someone.
Think of it this way: if the slowness of LaTeX syntax-highlighting were not a problem in Vim itself (where by "Vim itself" I'm including the vimscript files that ship with Vim, not just the executable), would it be documented in the official Vim documentation?
As the link shows, the syntax section of the Vim manual offers suggestions to increase speed on slow computers for all syntax categories, tex being one of them. That does not mean all those categories are a problem in Vim itself.
However, I do not mean to deny your actual experiences; I have seen all sorts of performance-related craziness that doesn't make sense, and I fully believe you when you say you had slow editing with near-empty .vimrc. I just find it baffling; for instance, here is a sample of my using vim in an older tablet, with latex syntax highlighting, UltiSnips, builtin terminal and w3m browser without any lag:
> As the link shows, the syntax section of the Vim manual offers suggestions to increase speed on slow computers for all syntax categories, tex being one of them. That does not mean all those categories are a problem in Vim itself.
Oh, absolutely! I should have said before that I edited many file types in Vim on that netbook and syntax highlighting was lighting fast on all types except LaTeX. Sorry if I gave the wrong impression. Unfortunately for me, LaTeX is by far what I most wrote at the time, so it was an annoying problem.
> So, baffling discrepancies; I wish software performance was more predictable.
Amen to that! I've even been on the other side of this issue, with some Emacs packages I've written. I've received reports of some operations being very slow that I've been unable to reproduce (even though I continue to use underpowered hardware because I value battery life more than speed —I'm typing this, in Emacs, on a 10 year old Chromebook!).
I don't think this is a big problem with VimTeX; I've worked quite a lot on these things, and my personal experience is that VimTeX is now quite fast both with syntax highlighting and with folding; although for folding, you do want to use the various "hacks" like the manual fold option or a plugin like FastFold.
I started using manual folds with latex. Works fine esp if you have a hotkey/snip for inserting these. % {{{ and % }}} for begin/end for instance. Much faster!
Just be aware that the marker based folding can be annoying to collaborators if you are working on documents with other authors. With a plugin like FastFold [0] you should be able to have fast folding with the expr foldtype.
My impression is that all of those are fads, we jsut haven't seen VS Code fade way yet, like the others have. I've used Emacs throughout all of those fads, seems easier than switching editors every few years.
I wouldn't characterize languages in the K family as particularly focused on math. They have vectors, but do not have matrices or higher dimensional arrays, they don't have a built-in to compute factorials, binomial coefficients, roots of a polynomial or hypergeometric functions. And Ks do have dictionaries and tables. Maybe you're thinking of J or some dialects of APL?
