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Out of the box, Emacs is slower than vim, and this is part of the reason why Emacs isn't installed by default on distros. Serious users don't care about startup performance, but that helps to explain why Emacs isn't gaining new users. Emacs isn't the quickest and easiest way to edit a file.


You're repeating this in several places, and it's not true. See my comment about POSIX above.


Is a second vs. a half second much of a difference? I think users start noticing at about 5 seconds.


Users start noticing ~200 ms. A full second is huge.


I use vim for quick tasks because of the difference in startup time




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