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Comment by dragonsh | Hacker News Reader

Personally for me spacemacs is bit slower in startup for my liking, so I use my own custom configuration. It's just lisp at the end of the day. Also for people who prefer emacs keys instead of vi, they can start with emacs-prelude package. But it will be hard to beat custom configuration in long run.

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You can also have emacs run as a daemon(1). That way you never have to wait.

1 https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Emacs#As_a_daemon

This is the /real/ killer feature for me that I would find very difficult to live without and I don't know of any other editors that offer this functionality.

Being able to remotely open my editor (either from a terminal, or with X11 forwarding) with all the files I have open, exactly where I left off is incredibly useful.

I never really learned screen because daemonised emacs sufficed for me. My daemon uptimes are normally the same as my system uptimes, with the one on my VPS currently at 77 days.

A few years ago, I started using one daemon per project with server-use-tcp, each with a slightly different theme so I can easily tell them apart.

(posted from emacs-w3m)

using emacsclient in screen or tmux is kinda handy if you're using a flaky connection and keep disconnecting (like on a train)

Any benefit over using screen/tmux?

Main benefit is you don't need to remember to start your editor frame in screen/tmux and you can use both terminal and gui/x11. So when I'm at work I start emacs in X11 windows, when remote I simply ssh in and do emacsclient and connect to all the buffers I have open (if I have low latency i'll do x11 forwarding and start x11 emacsclient ) It's basically the same as tmux/screen but gives you a lot more flexibility.

Other big benefit is starting emacsclient is basically instant, so opening a file from a webbrowser or whatever is super fast (some folks have 30 second or longer emacs startup times).

Only real downside is it really sucks bringing back your state when emacs crashes and you have hundreds of buffers open for multiple projects across 20-30 emacs clients.

There's the promise of faster Emacs (https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs written in Guile Scheme.) But it has 2 main problems: A) it's apparently stalled and B) not even it's supposedly known-good commit is compilable... :-(

> Personally for me spacemacs is bit slower in startup for my liking

I have see this many times and never understood how startup time could be an issue. I startup Spacemacs at the beginning of the day, and close it when I leave. 10 second of startup time is nothing.

10 seconds of startup time 10 years ago was nothing.

The day had 86400s then as now.

I wonder if part of it is some people hacking emacs and going through a update-save-restart cycle instead of just evaluating their change in place.

Then again it may be the case that part of the cycle is seeing if the package management system of your custom distro (be it spacemacs, doom, or whatever) picks up and configures the new packages correctly.

I've noticed a divide between the workflows of emacs and vim users and I think it ties directly back to startup times. I'm an emacs user and, like you, I start it up once and keep it running indefinitely. Vim users tend to enter and exit the editor repeatedly during the day, typically alternating with their shell of choice.

I would say this is largely true in practice, although when I found out that vim could have multiple buffers, windows, tabs, and that you could save session files, I suddenly was keeping vim open for many hours and opening new files in my existing instance. I would say a lot of people learn vim in a hurry and don't go far beyond the basics.

I never close Emacs unless I am shutting down the machine and that happens, perhaps once every month or two.

It's kind of a sign of inefficiency as, at least as far as you can tell, a similar task was done in 1/10th of the time on a 1/1000th as powerful system. This may not be true, but just as you can't get to know every person you interract with you need to use plausible correlations to make judgements and predictions.

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