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Comment by roel_v | Hacker News Reader

No, starting emacs is 5 seconds faster - at least that's what I got from it.

Agree -- but doesn't strike me as a big deal. For me, emacs is something I start and will often have running for months. 5 second startup time is irrelevant. That's no slower than starting Word or Excel, either. Even browsers take a couple of seconds to start from cold.

Personally, I use Emacs as a Notepad as well as a coding environment.

Also, if I'm screwing with my .emacs it's nice to have instant feedback beyond eval'ing any changes I make as I go.

I agree that a five-second startup can hardly be said to break usability, especially for something that many people will leave running for a long time.

That said, though, if I was accustomed to one of my primary tools taking a half-second to start, I think I'd miss it pretty bad if it went away.

Just the fact that people on both sides (glibc and emacs) are treating this so seriously seems to indicate a rather admirable dedication to keeping the quality of the software as high as possible.

Not everybody does, and not everybody who does that does it on all systems.

A 5 second startup time for a text editor is extremely annoying when all you want to do is, say, type some small commit message.

Agreed. Even as a regular emacs user, if I just want to quickly edit a config file on a remote box I just open nano or vim, because they open nearly instantly.

For local quick edits of things like commit messages, you can run emacs as a daemon and use emacsclient as your editor command.

For remote files there's tramp.

But, I do agree that any sysadmin should know enough basic vi[m] to get around, because vi is almost always available on any unix system. Emacs (or nano) might not be installed.

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