# Lem editor

18 Hacker News commenters recommended Lem editor and 9 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Recommended as a modern, Emacs-like editor written in Common Lisp, appealing to Lisp users. Critics note it is less polished, with weak mouse support, a webview dependency and some install problems.

## Why people recommend it

- Written in Common Lisp (8 comments): "The reason I recommend Lem is because CL is a general purpose programming language." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46136452)) "There's an attempt to do this with Common Lisp that's quite cool, called Lem" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50280236)) "Lisp all the way down apart from the native bits of the rendering layers." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49703299))
- Emacs alternative with familiar feel (6 comments): "It's very impressive and usable for its age and I can see why some people see it as a better Emacs." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46130430)) "something like lem is probably more amenable to that refactoring/restructuring than GNU emacs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48257497)) "Lem is great and I'm happy there's finally something out there to challenge Emacs' hegemony" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49027605))
- Solid, readable codebase (3 comments): "Was also really good at analyzing the lem codebase as well." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47388929)) "which was easy thanks to Lem's quality code base" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46463844)) "it looks like a very solid foundation" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45943788))
- Fast, snappy performance (2 comments): "The WebKit UI is actually snappier and more performant than the previous SDL2 one." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49030524)) "it's way more performant than GNU Emacs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48589184))

## What people warn about

- Install problems on some systems (2 comments): "I tried the latest nightly release AppImage on Fedora 43 and got a nice undefined symbol error" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46461462)) "I tried installing Lem on Windows and I couldn't get it to work." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47908904))
- Webview renderer dependency (2 comments): "I am suspicious about the dependency of Lem on Webkit" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49024625)) "until they decided to adopt a webview renderer" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49026786))
- High barrier to entry (2 comments): "I also considered lem, but the barrier also seems much higher." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46614463)) "the barrier also seems much higher" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46614639))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Zed](https://hackerapproved.com/p/zed.md): 700 recommend
- [GNU Emacs](https://hackerapproved.com/p/emacs.md): 648 recommend
- [Vim](https://hackerapproved.com/p/vim.md): 513 recommend
- [Visual Studio Code](https://hackerapproved.com/p/visual-studio-code.md): 485 recommend
- [Neovim](https://hackerapproved.com/p/neovim.md): 295 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Lem editor", https://hackerapproved.com/p/lem/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).