Comment by armitron
15 hours ago
If you're a power user, the sooner you learn Emacs the better as the synergies with any Lisp language (particularly Common Lisp) are simply too strong to be ignored and there is no contemporary alternative that rivals it.
For new users, this looks like a welcome alternative to messy things like Lem that never really worked very well for me.
Problem is, Emacs is really slow on Windows. If I can get a reasonably fast Lisp IDE on Windows, I'm all for it.
> Emacs is really slow on Windows
Emacs on native Windows has to go through the Win32 API for everything - file I/O, process spawning, subprocesses. Packages that shell out constantly (lsp-mode, magit, etc) will feel sluggish because spawning processes on Windows is genuinely slow compared to Unix. The more shell-heavy your config, the worse it gets. This isn't really Emacs' fault.
I really don't understand devs still insisting on running Emacs on Windows natively. Come on, guys, WSL2 been around like forever. You get real fork/exec speeds, proper shell integration, the full Unix toolchain, etc. Why choose inflicting pain instead of a trodden, well-known, existing path?
Lem doesn't claim to be a Lisp development environment or IDE. It describes itself as
General-purpose editor/IDE with high expansibility in Common Lisp
For historical interest, Lem did used to advertise itself as a Common Lisp development tool specifically, but that has changed relatively recently (past year?). From my distant vantage point, it looks like general interest in it grew, and Lem itself evolved in general-purpose directions, so they pivoted the messaging to be about it serving as a general-purpose editor instead of one just for Common Lisp.