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by natrys 1053 days ago
Doom Emacs loads very fast so theoretically it's possible to configure Emacs to be fast too (mine starts in a second, cold start is a little slower).

But I think most people don't care about it enough because they either never close Emacs and/or use it in server-mode where emacsclient is pretty much instantaneous. Can I ask why you don't like doing that?

2 comments

Because I conserve energy: I turn my PC off at the end of each session (so about one/two times a day). And because the "sleep" mode is not reliable (I have a 14 years old PC, upgraded in RAM and GPU and SDD; and here I conserve hardware).

So having things take time on start up is an annoyance to me (but I live with it, I was just saying that emacs is slower than VSCode)

So your point is that emacs is slow on slow hardware?

I’m sure vscode would chew through resources during a heavy session, have you benchmarked more than just the startup of the application?

my overall feeling on my own (slow) PC is that VSCode is faster on load (or, to be exact, I perceive it be to be faster) and provides a few features that I don't have on emacs.

You're right: once VSCode is in memory I think it uses more of it. But that's barely nothing when compared to rust-analyzer (which emacs LSP uses too).

I use Doom Emacs with the Yamamoto port of Emacs [1] on MacOS (M1) and the startup time is quite slow: it takes around 6-7 sec. for the editor window to show up. It doesn’t bother me too much since I usually start it once a day and just never close it, as you mentioned.

However, I also have many plugins installed, so it might be just that. I wonder if it is possible to install a separate instance of Emacs, then I would be able to test the performance without all the plugins and configuration.

[1]: https://github.com/railwaycat/homebrew-emacsmacport