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Comment by k_bx | Hacker News Reader

I wonder whether there's any discussion around addressing the elephant in the room: big config files.

Is there any work towards making Emacs be usable immediately, while config being loaded asynchronously in background, adding features like syntax highlighting without blocking the main editing experience?

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use-package already has a way to defer configuration until it’s needed.

Yes, I'm certainly using that, but it's far from being enough to make emacs-with-config a usable replacement for the in-terminal editor.

It’s probably not what you want to hear, but I just use emacsclient for that. I agree that the startup time is annoying, though.

Yes, I just use "emacs -nw -q" (aliased as eq) when in terminals, and it's surprisingly good most of the time. But having good startup time always would make a huge difference imho, including Emacs's popularity.

Parent is talking about using "emacsclient". Basically you start Emacs in daemon mode (e.g. add "(server-start)" at end of config), and you never kill it. You just pay slow startup cost once, any subsequent client invocation after that is instantaneous.

I understand. I use it for my git commit editing in my “master” emacs. It’s just not usable when you want multiple instances in different tmux windows

I have this little handy shell function for that:

    semacs () {
        emacs --eval "(setq server-name \"$1\")" --daemon
    }

`semacs foo` then starts an emacs server named foo and and `emacsclient -s foo -c` attaches to it.

I've used use-package to get my startup time from 10-20 seconds to <500 ms. (But to be fair I did trim a lot of useless cruft.)

emacs --daemon/emacsclient solves that for me. Emacs doom, which is sort of custom distribution of emacs, also solves this problem in another way by carefully optimizing startup times. Either way, its a solved problem.

Not really. The dominent solution nowadays is to use starterpacks/distributions of emacs-configurations. Spacemacs and doom-emacs are pretty popular. Emacs-Project itself is rather conservative in that regard. Vanilla-Emacs is still ugly has hell and not much different from decades ago.

There are voices who demand to lean more toward VS Code in that aspect, so maybe in another 10+ years emacs will finally innovate itself there.

Main use-case here is to open emacs in terminal (emacs -nw) for a quick edit. Emacs in terminal doesn't look ugly at all (because of lack of GUI), and is quite usable without config actually (that's how I'm using it for quick edits, "emacs -nw -q"), but modes and configurations would be definitely helpful to have without sacrificing time-to-edit.

This elephant was addressed long ago by Jon Wiegly's use-package.

I’d bet my money that most people (esp those using spacemacs) have multi-second time-till-edit still.

I don't use Emacs but is loading perf still a concern in this age of SSD ubiquity ?

Would be nice to know some stats, of course. I suspect that for most people it’s pretty bad and disk isn’t the limiting factor.

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