I’ve come realize that, sadly, I’m addicted to posts about Emacs startup time. Every healthy person knows that Emacs startup time doesn’t matter. That’s because, of course, experienced Emacs users seldom restart their editor. They just leave it running all the time. Some, like me, just have it running in a dedicated work area, others run Emacs in server mode and invoke it when needed by calling emacsclient.
Everyone knows all this so you’d think that we’d all get on with our lives and stop worrying about Emacs startup time. We don’t, of course. As soon as I saw this post by No_Cartographer1492 over at the Emacs subreddit, I had to jump in. It’s not that Cartographer1492’s post was objectionable. He was just trying to figure out how to structure his configuration for minimum startup time. There’s nothing wrong with that but whatever figure he announces you can be sure that someone else will announce that their Emacs loads a tenth of a second faster and we’re off to the races.
The best answer was from Lalylulelo who simply observed that they stopped worrying about startup time the day they discovered server mode and emacsclient. But really, you don’t even need that. Only the realization that you can simply leave Emacs running and only restart it when you reboot the system and update Emacs and that tenths of seconds or even tens of seconds in the startup time just don’t matter.
So please, help me get better by not writing about Emacs startup time. We all know that except in special circumstances it simply doesn’t matter. You might like to pretend it does but it doesn’t.