Sorry, I only recently started contributing and don't really have an answer to your question. I'd venture to say there aren't that many lem devs/"enthusiasts" browsing this thread so I can only speak from my own limited experience. You're free to open an issue to get better feedback though. Also, I'm having trouble visualizing the workflow you mentioned with overlapping frames, do you have a clip/screenshot or something? Using the mouse to focus overlapping emacs frames just sounds like a window manager thing in my head.

Hahaha I've seen some pretty nutty maintainers so can't blame you! That being said I can vouch for the guy, he's extremely nice and responsive.

Re: terrible maintainers, I'm reminded of "Fox" who maintains (maintained?) TTRSS (Tiny Tiny RSS) dude is atrocious. Makes Linus and jwz and Theo De Raadt look like saints.

To be fair, this project is not a CL Emacs. It's a separate editor doing its own thing that happens to share the same keybinds and a few architectural decisions.

That's literally what an emacs is though.

long history of that that predates GNU emacs, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zmacs

Sure, I get what you mean. Reminds me of the whole "GNU plus Linux" thing. I think it's more a matter of setting expectations, a lot of users come in expecting it to behave like or be compatible with GNU Emacs, when it's not trying to do that. What comes to my head when I think of "CL Emacs" is a CL variant of a project like Guile Emacs, Remacs, etc. and not a standalone editor. You're right, but I'd venture to say most hear the word "Emacs" and only associate it with GNU Emacs.

Pretty much. The whole thing (including scripts, packages, configuration, etc.) is written in CL, there's no C core (minus a bit of ffi here and there for e.g. shell interaction). This makes it really easy to modify the editor's source code while you're in it. Another bonus of everything being written in a general-purpose language like CL is that you can leverage any random CL library for your config/packages, and don't have to do janky stuff like lsp-bridge calling Python in order to have non-blocking completion.

Besides better defaults, it supports multithreading and launches instantly, feeling a lot snappier all-around. When I first started using lem, I basically just used it as a shell editor for non-code stuff like text/config files, since it started much faster than emacs (I don't like using the daemon) and had the same keybinds. At some point I started using common lisp for a personal project and it's become my main editor since. Development is also super active.

Lem has Legit. While missing some features, it works well enough for the daily add/stage/commit loop that makes up 90% of my git commands. It also uses less git commands so it's a fair bit snappier than Magit on large repos.

I can see the lack of org-mode being a dealbreaker for some, but I personally use markdown for my notes/docs so no issue there.