Irreal

James Cherti has another excellent post in his series exploring Emacs optimizations. This one discusses improving Emacs performance on files with long lines. As those of you who have to deal with long lines know, Emacs doesn’t handle them very well and is prone to freeze while trying to render them.

One good solution for this is Phil Sainty’s excellent so-long package. The idea is that so-long detects when when Emacs is dealing with long lines and turns off certain computationally expensive features such as syntax highlighting and font-lock mode. This is a big help in speeding up Emacs’ processing of long lines but it also disables some useful features.

Cherti’s idea to to provide more granular control. For example, while syntax highlight does impose a processing penalty, it also makes code easier to read for many people. Cherti shows how to get so-long to not disable syntax highlighting.

Cherti examines several other features that can be disabled, or not, by so-long and discusses the pros and cons of doing so. He shows you how, in effect, to fine tune so-long to achieve your desired balance between performance and utility.

I really like this story because it’s a perfect example of how Emacs makes it easy to solve problems. First, there was the problem of Emacs freezing when dealing with long lines. Phil Sainty, who is not a member of the Emacs development team, helped ameliorate that problem with a third party package. Then James Cherti noticed that in certain situations you might want a less drastic effect than the default so-long action and showed how to achieve that. Even Cherti’s suggestions can be customized to suit the individual user. It’s Emacs at its best.

Another great post from James Cherti. This one’s about speeding up Emacs terminal emulators. As Cherti says, Emacs terminals can be slow especially when they get pounded with a lot of output. He offers some suggestions to help.

Those changes are mostly what you’d expect. They turn off things like line wrapping that take extra cycles to calculate. Most of his post is his suggested code to remedy the slowness—although he does offer an explanations of what they’re doing—so rather than repeat what he’s already written, I’ll just send you to his post for the details.

If you’ve been bothered by slow Emacs terminal emulators, take at look at Cherti’s post.

If you’re a macOS user, you probably know about Homebrew, a repository of easy to install apps and libraries. I use it all the time because it’s so much easier than hunting up all the dependencies required for compiling them yourself.

If you’re a Linux user, you may or may not be familiar with Homebrew. It provides the same services for Linux but my—possible wrong—impression is that its Linux take-up is not as great as it is in macOS.

Regardless, if you’re on Linux or macOS, you should definitely check it out. The TL;DR of this post is that Homebrew has just released version 7.0.0, a major release. That probably wouldn’t be worth an Irreal post except for the “major release” part. On the macOS side, macOS 10.5 and earlier are no longer supported. Being a Mac-head, I didn’t check discontinued versions on Linux so if you’re using Homebrew on Linux you should check that out.

The other big change for Mac-heads is that Intel Macs are moved to Tier 3. You can check out the announcement for exactly what that means but basically it indicates that support is limited and end-of-life is approaching (in September of 2027).

Homebrew is an excellent repository and well worth investigating if you’re not familiar with it. I still have an Intel Mac so it’s a bit of a pain that support is diminishing but I need to upgrade anyway so this is probably the push I need.

James Cherti has been busy producing a lot of posts about optimizing various aspects of Emacs behavior. I’ve just come across his post that discusses optimizing buffer line numbering. It explains the different line numbering schemes and their relative costs.

I not a big user of line numbering. I usually turn it on for the Elfeed index but hardly every use it otherwise unless I have a specific need. In particular, I hardly ever use them in code buffers because I prefer to jump to a particular construct rather than a line number, which, irrationally, always seem to me to be ephemeral.

When I do use line numbers, I like absolute line numbers rather than the two types of relative numbers. That turns out to the right choice as far as efficiency is concerned but many people—including Cherti—prefer relative numbering. That can be expensive, especially for long lines, but there are some settings that can speed things up.

The descriptions of those settings don’t really capture what they do and why you might prefer one value over another so Cherti’s post is especially helpful. If you’re one of the people who like having your buffers numbered in one way or another, take a look at Cherti’s post to see how to get the best possible performance for your choice of representation.

Three years ago, I wrote about the Bedrock starter kit for Emacs by Ashton Wiersdorf. Now Wiersdorf has issued a new major release of the kit. It’s mainly an update for Emacs 31 and requires that version to run. I liked his announcement and description of Bedrock 2.0 and decided to write about it on Irreal. To be honest, I’d forgotten that I’d already written about Bedrock and didn’t discover that I had until I chose the obvious name for the post source file (bedrock.org) and found that such a file already existed.

You should read what I wrote before; everything from that post applies to the new version. The TL;DR is that although I don’t generally care for starter kits, I do like Wiersdorf’s because it mainly concerns itself with simple variable settings rather than configuring a bunch of packages that a user may or may not want¹. His init.el is well commented to explain what everything does and some items are commented out with an explanation of why you might want to enable them. You can see the file here.

If you’re looking for a simple, minimal configuration for Emacs as a starting point or you know a n00b who is, take a look at Bedrock.