{"id":11176,"date":"2023-02-26T13:27:46","date_gmt":"2023-02-26T18:27:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=11176"},"modified":"2023-02-26T13:27:46","modified_gmt":"2023-02-26T18:27:46","slug":"emacs-startup-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=11176","title":{"rendered":"Emacs Startup Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

FreeAd7233 has an interesting reddit post on Emacs startup time<\/a>. He\u2019s recently moved from Doom Emacs<\/a> to his own configuration and is amazed at how quickly Emacs loads. It\u2019s less than a third of a second on his local (Apple M1) machine and less than three quarters of a second on a VPS. That\u2019s fast enough for all but the most anal but as I\u2019ve said before, for me, at least, it doesn\u2019t matter.<\/p>\n

I was a long time Vim user and followed the usual procedure of invoking the editor whenever I wanted to work on a file. When I moved to Emacs many years ago, one of the hardest things for me was adapting to a new way of working: rather than start Emacs when I needed it, I simply left it running and switched focus to it when I needed it. Later, as Emacs became more central to my workflow, this wasn\u2019t even an option. Of course<\/i> I left it running because I was almost always in it.<\/p>\n

So the point of this post\u2014if there is one\u2014is why should I care how long Emacs takes to start? I do it only once when I start my system or possibly when I upgrade my packages. You can even make this part of the boot process if you like but I\u2019ve never felt the need.<\/p>\n

Still, not everyone has my workflow. FreeAd7233, for instance, treats the idea of leaving Emacs running as a sort of strange idea practiced only by aliens. Even those folks who want to start Emacs on demand have a way of accomplishing that. Of course they do. It\u2019s Emacs. You can simply start Emacs in demon mode and invoke emacsclient<\/code> to popup a \u201cnew\u201d instance when needed. Of course, it\u2019s not really \u201cnew\u201d because it still has your previous state remembered so it\u2019s even better than a fresh start.<\/p>\n

The takeaway is that there\u2019s really no reason to obsess about Emacs startup time but, of course, folks still will. It\u2019s just that it\u2019s not a reason to avoid Emacs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

FreeAd7233 has an interesting reddit post on Emacs startup time. He\u2019s recently moved from Doom Emacs to his own configuration and is amazed at how quickly Emacs loads. It\u2019s less than a third of a second on his local (Apple … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[18],"class_list":["post-11176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-emacs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11176"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11177,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11176\/revisions\/11177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}