Re: ISO a fast-loading Emacs

[Anselm Helbig]

kenneth already mentioned zile. 

i'm still using `jove' ("jonathan's own version of emacs") for quick
editing tasks, and in fact, i've been using jove for years before i
got started with the real thing. jove is more old fashioned than zile:
no color, a silly limit on the length of lines, etc. 

other choices are `qemacs' (which is said to be good for big files as
well, another task you wouldn't want to use gnu emacs for, has
utf8-support) and jed (customizable with `slang').

hum, sounds like i should put a 

        function jove { qemacs -nw $*; }

in my .bashrc. 8-)

and a last option, that has not yet been mentioned: you could work on
your `.emacs' to cut down startup time, throw out packages you once
played with but never use, and use autoloads for the rest. 

when i did that, i was able to reduce my startup time from 16s to 4s
for the first start (this is on an athlon xp 1600+). it goes further
down to 1.4s for following starts because of caching.

HTH, 

anselm