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Comment by ashton314 | Hacker News Reader

Opening my Emacs config on a top i9 mbp takes an average of 3–4 seconds. On an M1: <1s.

Not to stir the eternal debate, but if my Vim config takes > 100ms, I start debugging what's going on/figuring out the responsible plugin.

3-4seconds would drive me insane :O

Nah, that's fair. I've got about runs ls -l | wc -l 143 packages that I load. My Emacs config is pretty heavy. I keep trying to trim it down a bit. Though, sometimes I have edit sessions that last several weeks, so it's not that bit a deal. But still.

Two things. Emacs as a daemon! And. Emacs 28 native compilation. Absolute game changer for speed in a million ways. Scrolling a 5000 line python source file with all the packages, syntax highlighting, etc etc, is buttery smooth:

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GccEmacs

Yeah… I should probably set up the daemon sometime. I just tweak my config so much (it's Emacs, c'mon) that it's just been simpler for me for some reason to just launch it fresh for forever.

native-comp doesn't do anything for start up. Good tip though—I've been running bleeding-edge Emacs for a while now. ;-)

I ran `esup` and figured out most of the slowdown is from the otherwise excellent straight.el [1] package manager. I put

    (setq straight-check-for-modifications '(check-on-save find-when-checking))

in my init, and now everything is really speedy!

[1]: https://github.com/raxod502/straight.el#my-init-time-got-slo...

Native comp doesn't do anything for for startup implicitly, absolutely. There are no startup optimizations or anything like that. However, the speed with which elisp runs on native comp seems to be between 1.5 and 10 times faster. I run emacs on a lot of underpowered arm devices (think rpi zero) and use my full config. And the decrease in startup time on those machines was astonishing.

It's not really an issue for many, perhaps even most, emacs users. I have a my emacs set to launch when my window manager starts on login, after which it stays open until I log off or shut the computer down. Emacs and Vim have such different workflows that this type of comparison isn't all that meaningful.

A few seconds isn’t bad to boot an OS, no? ;-)

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