> The editor should never, ever block and prevent the user from getting their work done.
A thousand times this. Emacs and vim are both guilty of failing this most basic principle. It frustrates me to no end that a text editor will hang while font locking text, or printing repl results.
A lot of what used to cause trouble for Vim was fixed with Neovim and the new async stuff Vim 8 introduced. This mainly ensures plugins don't have to block (though a lot still do).
That said, there's still parts of Vim that don't benefit from this and especially on large files can get annoying. But since switching to Neovim I've had a significant drop in the amount of times I have to wait for vim to do something and sit there screaming "oh come on" at my monitor.
Maybe eval'ing to the repl is almost a tic of mine. But as a contrived example, (range 100000) is instantaneous in a clojure repl in the terminal, and interminably slow in cider (emacs package for clojure). There's also SO questions like this[1], and I've personally come across it a lot as well. Anytime lines get long emacs grinds to a halt.
Geiser might just be adding a lot more newlines by default. There is a setting in CIDER to pretty print everything, which alleviates the issue. The core problem is emacs is terrible at displaying/wrapping/navigating/editing long lines.
A thousand times this. Emacs and vim are both guilty of failing this most basic principle. It frustrates me to no end that a text editor will hang while font locking text, or printing repl results.