Re: How to Reduce Emacs Load Time

[Pascal J. Bourguignon]

formido <formido@gmail.com> writes:

> Hello there,
>
> Emacs takes like 10 seconds to load. It's a lot faster if I don't load
> all my packages. What strategies could I use to get my load time down?
> Emacs itself is made up of tons of elisp files and it doesn't take
> forever to load, so I don't see why I should be forced to endure long
> load times just because I add third party packages. If I do, 'require
> package', I'm at the mercy of the package maker's initialization
> process, right?

Right.

- compile ~/.emacs ; this is not a good idea, because the gain is
  minimal, and you have to remember compiling it everytime you update
  ~/.emacs.

- don't load what you don't need.  Remove cruft from your ~/.emacs.

- don't load what you need, yet.  This means, instead of loading or
  requiring the packages you may need, define autoloading functions.
  Good packages will do that for you, when you require them, they load
  only a file which defines autoloading functions, so you spend time
  loading the package only when you try to run these functions.

- load everything, in advance.  And save a new emacs image, then boot
  that emacs image instead of the empty standard one.  It's not as
  easy to do in emacs than in Common Lisp implementations, but it's
  possible.



-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                     http://www.informatimago.com/
You're always typing.
Well, let's see you ignore my
sitting on your hands.