Re: light versions of emacs and getting it to start faster

[kgold@watson.ibm.com (kgold)]

For me the best answer to "how do I get emacs to start faster" is to
start it once at login and then run gnuserv. Run emacs as a server
and use gnuclient to attach additional processes to it.

I start emacs about once a month, so I don't really care about the 5
second startup.

GI <gautam@math.uchicago.edu> writes:
>
> I'm interested in reducing the binary size of emacs, and getting it to start/load faster.
> 
> Reason:
 
> My current system (Redhat 7.2 on an i686) has an old version of
> emacs. My system administrator has not yet upgraded (and knowing
> him, it'll be a while ...). So I compiled my own version and have it
> somewhere in my homedirectory (on the network). I have to load up
> emacs multiple times in one session (I use it as my default editor
> in my mailreader - Mutt), and a large binary size stored remotely is
> painfully slow.
> 
> What I've done so far: I compiled it (emacs 21.2) without X
> support. It reduced the binary size from 7MB to about 5. I can't get
> any lower than that.
> 
> I'm sure one can make the binary a lot smaller since the binary
> distributed by Redhat 7.3 is only about 4MB (and that has X support
> too!)
> 
> Also, it would be nice if emacs never loaded some pointless lisp
> files to begin with (like I never use the menu bar mode when i'm
> writiing emails). So if anyone knows how to strip down the lisp
> files emacs loads on startup to a bare minimum, that would also be
> helpful. But I guess what would give me most performace is killing
> the binary size!

-- 
-- 
Ken Goldman   kgold@watson.ibm.com   914-784-7646