Dear Skeeto of nullprogram fame,
I read in a 5-year-old reddit comment of yours that you found lucid
emacs to be significantly faster, in terms of latency and resource
usage.
I recently re-read Dan Luu's latency blogpost and have become
fascinated in configuring a low latency emacs machine.
I was wondering if your decision to stick with lucid has survived 5 years.
Best,
Anoop
Yup, I still use that. My system-configuration-options in Emacs 28.1:
--without-all --with-xml2 --with-xft --with-libotf --with-x-toolkit=lucid
--with-cairo --without-modules --without-threads --without-pop
(Unfortunately "all" does not cover modules, threads, or mail. I wish
there was a --without-ctags so I wouldn't have to delete it manually.)
Is it still lower latency than the alternatives? I'm not sure. I haven't
tried anything different for several major releases. Also, the past
several years I've only used Emacs for Elfeed and Calc, so my interaction
is limited. If you take any measurements I'd be curious to know. Low
latency is important to me, too, and boy does all the slow web stuff these
days drive me nuts.