Fast Emacs Startup by Dumping

Many Emacs users obsess about the editor’s startup time. I’ve never understood this. Even if Emacs takes 15 seconds or more to start, who cares? The thing is that if you are using Emacs correctly, you need only start it when you boot your machine or, perhaps, update your packages. The point is, starting Emacs is, or should be, a rare event.

When I moved to Emacs from Vim 15 or 16 years ago, the hardest thing to get used to was not firing up my editor when I needed it. The correct operation was to simply start it once and switch focus to it when I needed it. Even if you can’t break the “startup the editor when I need it” habit, you can still start it once in server mode and simply invoke emacsclient when you need the editor.

Still, some folks can’t let go of the startup time issue. For those people, mmontone has a solution: dump the Emacs image after it has loaded all its packages and been completely configured. You can see exactly how to do it by following the link but Eli Zaretskii notes in the comments that the technique is not yet 100% reliable and you may have to tweak your configuration a bit to get it to work. Even so, mmontone says it’s working well for him.

Again, you’ll be much happier if you accept that Emacs should be started rarely and can wean yourself from worrying about how long those infrequent startups take.

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