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Comment by quanticle | Hacker News Reader

    requires barely any ram

It's incredible to me that our tools have bloated to the point where we look at Emacs and think, "Ah yes, what a svelte program!"

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But Emacs is incredibly light for the current generation hardware... and it's been incredibly light for probably 15 years or more.

On my "small" laptop, I only use Emacs... Trying to run IntelliJ or VSCode makes the laptop burning hot and forces the fan to keep running. With Emacs, no matter what I do, it's always quiet and cool.

One gripe I have with Emacs is that it doesn't boot instantly enough. Annoys me every time I edit a Git commit message.

Though it's not horrible enough that I found the courage to set up an Emacs server, as easy as it is… Anyway, it would be nice if it could just boot instantly by default.

> One gripe I have with Emacs is that it doesn't boot instantly enough.

You must have accidentally closed it. Closing Emacs or your Web browser are common mistakes, and as you will surely have realized almost immediately, you needed to re-open either program within minutes.

I don't get the important people put on that.

Emacs takes 10 seconds to open. Firefox takes 15. Yes, those are wasted seconds, but it's not like they are anywhere close to the largest wastes of my day. (Hell, I'm writing a comment in HN right now!)

It's different for things like VS, Pycharm, VSCode, or Eclipse. But emacs isn't there.

> You must have accidentally closed [Emacs]. Closing Emacs or your Web browser are common mistakes, and as you will surely have realized almost immediately, you needed to re-open either program within minutes.

Thank you for this! This cracked me up.

DOOM Emacs addresses this issue (and is an incredible, if opinionated, Emacs “platform”): https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs

> Gotta go fast. Startup and run-time performance are priorities. Doom goes beyond by modifying packages to be snappier and load lazier.

Simply set EDITOR to emacsclient -a “”. See https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/em...

Setting up emacs server is as easy as:

    alias emacs='emacsclient -c -nw -a ""'

Seriously, that's it!

Why is an emacs server needed

It makes launching emacs practically instant because it’s always running in the background—emacsclient connects to the already running instance so you get to skip the startup process.

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