Re: Speeding up Emacs load time

[J. David Boyd]

Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> writes:

> Andrew Pennebaker <andrew.pennebaker@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> I love Emacs's customizability! I regularly edit my .emacs file,
>> and the community has been helpful and encouraging. But I do
>> notice that Emacs can take several (10) seconds or longer to load.
>
> I did so much fancy things once in .emacs I noticed it took some
> seconds to load Emacs. But, I configured one of my many ttys to
> automatically start Emacs when I start my computer, so starting
> Emacs is really part of my boot time - and then, as everyone else
> has told you, use different buffers and modes for everything,
> within a single instance of Emacs, and shut Emacs down, not as a
> program (although in practice, possible so) but as the final step
> of your productive cycle, when you shut down you system.
>
> But, to give you something concrete, I have a lot of files like
> .emacs-message etc. which I load from Emacs - check out the URL
> below, and search for "Emacs" and "conf" - and I did that to get a
> modular, overviewable design so I never had to "look" for anything
> - just open the correct file, and make a search - not for
> searching, but for *navigating* - and I noticed that this solution
> was a bit slower than doing everything in one file (as for
> startup) - so I put it back to one file - only to very quickly
> realizing that that extra few seconds once in a while was totally
> worth it, compared to having to browse one monster file that
> included everything I ever did in Emacs.
>
> Remember, time is not a quantity that is straightforward to
> measure. It is like beer - it is not how much you drink, it is
> how you feel when you drink it, and how you feel the couple of
> days after that. Wait the extra second now, and don't be stressed
> tomorrow.

Right.  Wouldn't really bother me if it took 5 minutes to start, since I
normally only start it once a day, at the most....