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Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

I used emacsclient for many years but these days, TBH emacs with the right knobs twiddled starts up at usually an entirely reasonable speed.

But definitely out of the box with a stock emacs install it seems too interested in doing a bunch of stuff that gets in the way.

My EDITOR has been just regular "emacs" for years now.

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Speed is not the only thing `emacsclient` addresses. When your $EDITOR is `emacsclient`, the newly spawned frame will share state (kill ring, buffer list etc.) with your Emacs server. This might be helpful e.g. when you (like me) are a heavy user of `dabbrev-expand`, and also with numerous other little things.

My relatively new stance is that sometimes having an Emacs process that doesn't share the state is a feature, not a flaw. Specifically I started using non-daemon Emacs processes alongside my main Emacs daemon to compartmentalize my work. Each non-trivial project, or "workspace", gets its own Emacs process, possibly with a persistent state with desktop-save & desktop-change-dir. The newish tab-bar-mode helps with that a lot as I cannot stand using multiple frames on a non-daemon Emacs due to it not always being obvious when I close just a frame and when I close the whole process.

Yeah I personally prefer to have the separation of buffer sets between tasks. Especially for something as transient as "write a git commit message" or do an interactive rebase, or write a quick note.

A personal preference is a personal preference, ofc, but what exactly are the actual benefits?

While project.el or projectile.el are good sometimes you don't want to see anything else except your current project. A new instance is an easy way to achieve that.

> My relatively new stance is that sometimes having an Emacs process that doesn't share the state is a feature, not a flaw.

That is a fair point, though not really fitting my workflow. (Also, my Emacs needs ~20 seconds to start, and I tend to have Emacs uptime of several days or sometimes even weeks.)

> I cannot stand using multiple frames on a non-daemon Emacs due to it not always being obvious when I close just a frame and when I close the whole process.

This is strange. In my Emacs, C-x 5 0 on the last frame results in "Attempt to delete the sole visible or iconified frame". (And I have `(setq confirm-kill-emacs #'yes-or-no-p)` in my init.el anyway.)

Yes, C-x 5 0 is safe, but I often use my window manager's keybinding for closing a window instead. Customizing confirm-kill-emacs sounds like a great idea, I'll consider it, thanks!

I think your opinion as built is reasonable, but wouldn’t a better mechanism be an internal segregation concept?

Emacs supports a "projects" concept: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Pr...

This is useful for segregating groups of work related to a set of files but I would be interested if there's anything for arbitrary unsaved buffers in general.

Depends on what you mean by entirely reasonable.

I’m by no means a package maniac, and I lazyload with use-package almost entirely, but a cold start still takes a second or two. To me, a choice between a second or two and instantly is a no brainer.

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