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Comment by ByteJockey | Hacker News Reader

I mean. Emacs has the ability to do basically what vim does. Evil mode is really nice (though I can never get used the = register evaluating elisp instead of vimscript).

What kills me about emacs is the startup time. Breaks my flow when I'm jumping around and need to edit something quickly.

Though I'll admit that doom provides a very nice environment for when I want to play around with some lisp.

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Run Emacs as a server. Then open with emacsclient. Instant and you have access to the same process you've been using with all the buffers, etc.

emacs --daemon

emacsclient <fie>

  emacs --daemon=<name>
  emacsclient -s <name>

Useful for when you have different contexts and want to separate them more cleanly.

Absolutely worth it, but it needs mentioned that bundled in Emacs is a sytemd job for launching the server at user login(!!!):

    systemctl --user enable emacs.service  # For next login
    systemctl --user start emacs.service  # launches it just this once

This means I never have to even THINK "I should boot the editor", because it's already ready.

Add a keyboard shortcut for emacsclient and you're golden

Brilliant! Thanks for sharing. Info on setting up:

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsAsDaemon

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsClient

Use emacsclient and don't close emacs server. Super fast startup (for emacs). There is a guide on emacswiki afaicr

I've had M-x emacs-uptime hit nearly 200 days before. It takes a little effort to get used to that style of working, but it's definitely handy once you do. (Also, I

    alias ec="emacsclient -n"

in my shell.)

Check out Doom Emacs for a fast startup time with no server.

I mention using doom in the last line of the comment you responded to.

But, yeah. I use it for the start up time/vim compatibility out of the box.

I use vanilla Emacs with 145 packages and my startup time is 0.9 sec on a 6 y/o thinkpad. With deferred evaluation, there is no need to use a daemon.

Is your initial hosted anywhere? I'm interested in how you implement that.

No, the configuration is private. At this point, many of the tricks are well known, so you probably don't need to see my config to get a fast emacs. Here is a great starting point: https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/f3ed3r/comment/fhicv...

The maintainer of Doom responded with a good list of improvements that he uses in his distribution to achieve fast startup. If you transplant all of them into your configuration, your startup time would probably be 1-2 sec.

emacsclient can also talk to multiple emacs-servers by name. this is awesome to keep different sets of buffers available.

also, there's zile.

It's still not instantaneous like `vim .` is. Also it leaves me outside of my terminal. I know, I know, just don't leave emacs, but that's not how I work.

I appreciate the tip about zile though. That looks cool.

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