Re: Speeding up Emacs load time

[Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se>]

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.

-- 
Emanuel Berg - programmer (hire me! CV below)
computer projects: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
internet activity: http://home.student.uu.se/embe8573