Making My Emacs Start Faster

http://www.wmecole.com/2015/11/making-my-emacs-start-faster.html

by gk1 • 11 years ago

64 46 11 years ago

wmecole.com

sokoloff• 11 years ago

I took the opposite extreme approach (and I think this is fairly common):

Launch emacs once ever and use emacsclient for the typical short-duration invoke/shutdown use cases.

krylon• 11 years ago

Me too. Well, once per reboot. Even under very good circumstances, Emacs' startup time is worse than mg or vi. And having it run in the background, keeping its state, open buffers, shell history, etc. is very convenient.

kbutler• 11 years ago

This. This emacsclient startup time is excellent. The complaint that each launched client shares the same buffers is hardly sufficient to justify the effort of lazy loading to achieve only mediocre performance.

NoGravitas3• 11 years ago

Likewise. I start emacs --daemon from systemd, and have aliases for using emacsclient to open emacs in a new frame, in the current terminal, or in a new screen window.

theophrastus• 11 years ago

If you have any details, links, hints about how to accomplish this (for instance, where does one find a proper "emacsclient.service" file?) please consider yourself emboldened

DannoHung4• 11 years ago

Since I moved to spacemacs, I've been doing this.

However, I am bummed by emacsclient's inability to open multiple files from the command line.

And apparently the total lack of a Tab-like experience on Emacs in general. I used to use "vim -p" SO MUCH.

ithkuil• 11 years ago

what's wrong with http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TabBarMode ?

weavie• 11 years ago

Moving to Emacs from Visual Studio means that I am amazed at how quickly it starts up even without any optimization.

Walkman• 11 years ago

Spacemacs solves this by lazy loading every package possible: https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/blob/master/doc/DOCUME...

evilduck• 11 years ago

Spacemacs still starts up really slowly compared to vim and roughly equivalent plugins delivering similar features.

khgvljhkb2• 11 years ago

No, vim does not have anything that comes close to the killer feature (and only good feature) of Emacs: lisp.

joosters• 11 years ago

I remember back in the day when Emacs stood for 'Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping' ... since then I've always got into the habit of keeping it running & never shutting down, startup was never speedy. It's nice to see that today's computers actually make a difference to emacs' startup times!

jussij• 11 years ago

If whatever development system you are using is showing signs of being slow to start, I would say it is time to find a better, faster alternative?

chipaca• 11 years ago

I'd argue that startup time is very low on the list of things you want from your development system. Sure, quicker startup time is better, so improve it if you can, but you being productive in it once it's up is a lot more important, for example.

wnoise• 11 years ago

The shell is my development system. The editor is a small part of it. Starting it should be as fast as, say, opening a window in an IDE.

pyre3• 11 years ago

I'd argue that startup time is very low on the list of things you want from your development system.

Depends on what part of your "development system" you're talking about. If your test suite takes a minute to load before it will even execute a single test, I'd argue that you might want to see what can be done about it.

justinhj• 11 years ago

I start emacs maybe once every 3 months if I have to reboot or something. Then it just runs constantly. The article is an interesting exercise but hardly important to optimize away 3 or 4 seconds a quarter.

JoachimS• 11 years ago

Exactly, I always have an Emacs window (with tons of buffers, split screens) running.

davexunit2• 11 years ago

Just use 'emacs --daemon'!

kruhft• 11 years ago

I used to do this:

    emacs --batch --eval '(dump-emacs "em" "/usr/local/bin/emacs")'

This would load everything from your .emacs file into a fresh executable that would then start instantly.

Unfortunately, since I've done it last, it seems that this feature has been 'fixed' with emacs now printing that it can only be dumped once. Never had a problem with multiple dumping before.

cmrdporcupine• 11 years ago

I have been using Emacs semi-casually since 1993, when I got into it because it had a really good [Lambda]MOO client. I have always hated Vi and like the C++ mode in Emacs, so when I'm on a shell-only or editing something that the IntelliJ suite doesn't do, I use Emacs.

It was slow to load back then on an early 90s HP/UX workstation. And it's slow to load now on a modern quad core i7 machine with 16 gigs of RAM and an SSD drive.

How this can be baffles me. I don't know what they're doing wrong, but it continues to grow and grow.

Semiapies• 11 years ago

How slow is "slow", for you? When my init was at its most bloated, it only took about ten seconds. I took out some things I wasn't using and got it down to similar timings to the article. (No SSD on this box, though.)

pyre3• 11 years ago

It actually loaded pretty fast for me on a less beefy system when I was using it. Even with SpaceMacs (which was a lot slower than my custom .emacs) loaded in 6 ~ 7 seconds.

zeveb• 11 years ago

I too run emacs via systemd, and have emacsclient bound to a convenient shortcut in my window manager. It's just wonderful.

film42• 11 years ago

You should give emacsclient a try. I start emacs once when my computer starts up, after that, emacs is instantaneous. I use projectile and neo-tree to customize my workflow, so I rarely need to leave my editor to switch projects, etc.

nodivbyzero• 11 years ago

Emacs Reddit discussion "2 easy little known steps to speed up Emacs start up time"

https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/3kqt6e/2_easy_little...

erikcw• 11 years ago

I also use spacemacs (GUI mostly), and would love to speed up the launch time when working from the terminal.

Spacemacs recommends[0] using `emacs-mac-port` via homebrew on OSX, but warns of the "strange"[1] emacs server behavior:

""" Note that the emacs-mac-port server behaves differently than the regular Emacs server. Details can be found on the emacs-mac-port README[1]. """

Has anyone taken the time to figure out a workaround to make this work in the traditional emacs manner?

[0] https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs#os-x [1] https://github.com/railwaycat/emacs-mac-port/blob/master/REA...

curiousdude99• 11 years ago

Run emacs as a daemon and use emacsclient. Instant startup!

Making My Emacs Start Faster

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