Emacs is fast and responsive in my experience, as I'd expect relatively small software to be; the old jibe was Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping, after all, but if your system can't devote eight megs of RAM to a text editor you've got other problems.
Are certain extensions slow? I won't say "no", because there's a ton of them out there, which is probably part of the problem here: My Emacs isn't your Emacs, my set of extensions and modifications isn't yours, and, therefore, my experience with Emacs isn't yours.
I don't find Emacs clunky, but I like chorded UIs and I know the basic Emacs workflow by muscle memory at this point. I can't say if it's clunky or not because my hands know it, so I don't think about it anymore. There was a time when I didn't know it that well, so it was clunky for me, but I would have gone through the same period with Vim.
My big reason to stick with Emacs is that it's stable. There's a stable core, composed of C and the core Emacs Lisp libraries, which is unchanging, so my muscle memory is never punished by someone deciding that keys should work differently now so we're going to improve all of them you're welcome. I can keep my configuraton files and my hands and everything continues to work, which seems to be counter to the trend of modern productivity software.
Are certain extensions slow? I won't say "no", because there's a ton of them out there, which is probably part of the problem here: My Emacs isn't your Emacs, my set of extensions and modifications isn't yours, and, therefore, my experience with Emacs isn't yours.
I don't find Emacs clunky, but I like chorded UIs and I know the basic Emacs workflow by muscle memory at this point. I can't say if it's clunky or not because my hands know it, so I don't think about it anymore. There was a time when I didn't know it that well, so it was clunky for me, but I would have gone through the same period with Vim.
My big reason to stick with Emacs is that it's stable. There's a stable core, composed of C and the core Emacs Lisp libraries, which is unchanging, so my muscle memory is never punished by someone deciding that keys should work differently now so we're going to improve all of them you're welcome. I can keep my configuraton files and my hands and everything continues to work, which seems to be counter to the trend of modern productivity software.