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Comment by dan-robertson | Hacker News Reader

Emacs itself starts fast. Most people who use emacs have a lot of packages that load on startup or autoload files that need to be read and this makes startup slow. Maybe if saving an image were easier then things would be faster but I think most serious users don’t care because they start emacs once a week

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Out of the box, Emacs is slower than vim, and this is part of the reason why Emacs isn't installed by default on distros. Serious users don't care about startup performance, but that helps to explain why Emacs isn't gaining new users. Emacs isn't the quickest and easiest way to edit a file.

Is a second vs. a half second much of a difference? I think users start noticing at about 5 seconds.

I use vim for quick tasks because of the difference in startup time

Users start noticing ~200 ms. A full second is huge.

You're repeating this in several places, and it's not true. See my comment about POSIX above.

If my emacs is a slow start, it is because I have a lot of previously opened files that it reads at startup. Otherwise, it is as quick as anything.

Interesting. How did you get it to store the list of previously opened files?

In the Emacs manual, read the "Saving Emacs Sessions" chapter (or get there from the 'desktop-save-mode' function documentation). Emacs can save and restore your current session, with opened files and windows layout, and as usual it's highly configurable.

By default it uses a global session context, but for example I configure mine to save the session locally in the directory where emacs is started. Then I can have several projects in parallel, and when I start emacs in the project top level directory it restores the session for this specific project. I also make the session saving file name machine specific, and ignored by unison for file synchronization. So the layout is specific for each machines with possible different screen setup leading to different window organizations. Just an example, you can tune it to fit your own needs --- that's the whole point of Emacs to me.

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Sa...

What 'yaantc and 'rataata_jr said in this thread.

Not only does the desktop session remember and re-open the files, but it also remembers what frames you had open, what position on the screen and which screen the windows are on.

It is a huge convenience.

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