> i thought emacs loaded slow
Compared to vi in 1980s, yes. Compared to most other IDEs and popular text editors like VSCode, Jetbrains family in 2023, emacs not only loads fast but consumes far less resources. I have 69 packages sprinkled in over 800 lines of pure elisp config (not counting comments). It loads in less than 1 second for me on an M2 pro MacBook. That’s without using emacsclient. If you use that, it’s more or less instantaneous, since the server is already running.
> for me speed is topmost priority
How fast are you in neovim? Most popular text editors have a very high skill ceiling. Switching to another won’t make you magically fast. There’s a learning curve involved and you’ll need to customise things according your workflow to become one of those “extremely fast people code on neovim”. If you’re already somewhat experienced in neovim, it’s a great ecosystem and you can go very far. There’s no real need to switch unless you find a real pain point. Switching takes time and effort so any gains should justify that.
> is there a video you guys can link me of a user using emacs who is extremely fast and not just because of his typing speed but because he’s using emacs
With evil mode, you can use most vim commands and ideas (text objects, modal editing, registers) as-is in emacs. So emacs is “at-least” as fast to work on as raw vim/neovim.
When you throw in extensions and plugins into the mix, it’ll depend hugely on what you use and how baked it is. There’s nothing quite like magit or dired, IMO, but if you don’t use that, YMMV. Having used both vim and emacs, I have found some of the most popular packages on emacs to be much larger in scope than their vim counterparts, mature in development and absolutely pushing state-of-art in execution. Again, as an example, there’s no git workflow (ui or tui or cli) that has a better UX than magit. People have constantly tried and failed to recreate org mode alternatives.
5 would be extremely nice but IMO those options purposely bury the ‘talk to human’ to the underworld, which a lot of people calling customer care are looking for. If it were visual, I feel most people will just use that (I know I would). Happy to be proven wrong here.