Sometimes. Vanilla emacs is lightning fast, but it's also missing critical features for most people.

If you want to use emacs as a an alternative to VSCode, or IDE in general, you'll find high quality plugins that will enable you to do so. But then you might experience slow downs.

As emacs is single-threaded (people will come and tell me it's not anymore, I know, but in practice it still is) you'll feel any slow downs in those plugins. Emacs typing latency isn't great.

It's a mixed bag really. It can be fast, it can be slow. It's still my favorite editor.

For me as a long term Emacs user, started using it 1994ish, it is not an issue. I don't mind the occasional minor lag. In my usage it is rarely in a range where it actually makes me wait.

Emacs has a certain feel to it. Hard to put the finger on, but the movement of the cursor and the scrolling, it just feels nice for me. Like a well worn favourite T-Shirt.

What are you using now? If VScode or Atom you won't feel any degradation. If vim or SublimeText, some things will take few extra dozens of milliseconds. You could test the Doom Emacs, which is trying to be a feature-full emacs environment optimized for speed.

I've been using Vim for a very long time now, recently adding CoC has slowed things a bit however I am quite fond of some of the features, so I might start enabling it only when I want those.

I'm not looking to encouragement to change (after 20 years in Vim that ship has likely sailed for good), I was just curious if the speed of Emacs lisp was a frequent bugbear.

Sometimes. But, in my experience a lot of these advanced development environments can be quite hang-ey if you know what I mean. It’s quite lightweight relatively speaking so more than makes up for it.

Speaking as recent(4-5 months) Emacs(spacemacs) convert - it is slower compared to even "decked out" vim. An important caveat to mention is that it very much depends on what modes you are operating in -- each file type will usually operate in its own mode, with varying performance. In my experience the lagginess is rare, but its very workflow dependent, there's this one large(1.5k line) php file I have to edit semi-regularly on which I switch off the php mode, just to avoid the pain of jankiness. It isn't very noticeable in other, "regular" sized files.

But overall I'm a very happy emacs convert. It's extremely malleable and pleasant development environment and I think it definitely deserves all the gushing articles/posts its been receiving past few years.

Spacemacs is actually quite a bit slower than it probably needs to be (by which I mean "slower than Doom emacs [https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs]").

I don't know the reason but for me Emacs is frustratingly slow compared to Vim.