I use vanilla Emacs for everything. For me customisation isn't what matters, it's having an editor that will never lag, requires barely any ram, and can be used over SSH on pretty much any machine.

    requires barely any ram

It's incredible to me that our tools have bloated to the point where we look at Emacs and think, "Ah yes, what a svelte program!"

brabel

But Emacs is incredibly light for the current generation hardware... and it's been incredibly light for probably 15 years or more.

On my "small" laptop, I only use Emacs... Trying to run IntelliJ or VSCode makes the laptop burning hot and forces the fan to keep running. With Emacs, no matter what I do, it's always quiet and cool.

loup-vaillant

One gripe I have with Emacs is that it doesn't boot instantly enough. Annoys me every time I edit a Git commit message.

Though it's not horrible enough that I found the courage to set up an Emacs server, as easy as it is… Anyway, it would be nice if it could just boot instantly by default.

dan-g

DOOM Emacs addresses this issue (and is an incredible, if opinionated, Emacs “platform”): https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs

> Gotta go fast. Startup and run-time performance are priorities. Doom goes beyond by modifying packages to be snappier and load lazier.