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?

formido gmail.com> writes:

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.

formido gmail.com> writes:

Ah, also even it emacs took one hour to load, it woudn't matter much,
because you should leave your emacs process running. On this machine,
emacs uptime is close to the system uptime.

Keep emacs running, and use emacsclient. So the boot time is amortized.

On Aug 30, 3:05 pm, p...@informatimago.com (Pascal J. Bourguignon)
wrote:

formido gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

I use late binding, I load the package when I start using it. For
example for ido mode:

(defun ivan-ido-file ()
"Find file, late bind ido."
(interactive)
(ivan-ido-late-bind)
(ido-find-file))

pjb@informatimago.com (Pascal J. Bourguignon) wrote:

Another tip:
Use `eval-after-load' a lot. With that you can load minor modes and
configurations only when a specific major mode has been (auto-)loaded.

I use this to load cedet only when cc-mode is loaded, for example.

I don't think /good/ packages do that, just /huge/ packages.
IHMO the proper thing for packages to do is just add ;;;###autoload
markers, so /you/ can generate the autoloads automatically, if you want
them (using `update-directory-autoloads').

Package managers like ELPA will do that step automatically when the
package is updated.

formido gmail.com> writes:

First, you should identify what parts of your .emacs take so long. You
can do this e.g. by starting emacs with "emacs -q", set up your
load-path, and then evaluate

(benchmark-run
(require 'package))

The first number appearing in the echo area will be the time needed to
run that command.

Many packages from Emacs use autoloads, which delay the loading of the
complete package until one of the interactive functions is used.

Ivan Kanis wrote:

Emacs already provides a mechanism for that. I think you can get rid of
most of these custom commands simply with these lines:

On Aug 31, 4:26 am, Nikolaj Schumacher wrote:

Haha! I see others have mentioned cedet, too. That's the package
that's causing me the most pain. See, I just followed .emacs setup
instructions, and I went with the whole kit and kaboodle by using the
load-excessive-helper-functions or whatever. My .emacs looks like:

My .emacs has:

(load "lisp/cedet-1.0pre4/common/cedet.elc")
(semantic-load-enable-excessive-code-helpers)

So, when Emacs starts up, the relevant sections of *messages* looks
like this:

Loading lisp/cedet-1.0pre4/common/cedet.elc...
"/Users/formido/.emacs.d/lisp/cedet-1.0pre4/common/" added to `load-
path'
"/Users/formido/.emacs.d/lisp/cedet-1.0pre4/cogre" added to `load-
path'
"/Users/formido/...

On Aug 31, 4:39 am, David wrote:

Thanks very much for that. In this case, by inspection I can tell
CEDET is a major culprit.

Mind telling me how you load CEDET? I just used instruction they gave--
you can see above what my *messages* looks like at init.