Over at the Emacs subreddit, EachDaySameAsLast asks the perennial question: why does Emacs take so long to load. Actually, his question is, “Why do people say Emacs takes so long to load?” He has, he says, been using Emacs since its TECO days and has never, even in the old days, experienced overly long load times. To be sure, his configuration file is relatively short—about 100 lines—but Emacs loads for him in under 2 seconds.
Of course, as many of us have been saying and saying, none of that matters. For almost every user, Emacs shouldn’t be started very often: once a day at most, once every week or month typically.
As usual, the interesting part of the post is the comments. Almost everyone agrees: the load times don’t matter but if you use use-package and the defer option judiciously, your load time can be small too.
I’m beginning to feel as if I’m codependent with those people claiming that Emacs takes too long to load. I should probably just stop writing about it. Of course, it won’t matter. People—many of whom don’t even use Emacs—will keep repeating it.
But let me just repeat, with Batsov, that Emacs load time doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t.