Re: interactive feel of Emacs: the need for speed, and -Q [measure.el]

[Michael Welsh Duggan]

Emanuel Berg via "Emacs development discussions." <address@hidden>
writes:

> Michael Welsh Duggan wrote:
>
>> off the latter using --no-site-file
>
> Thanks, that works with all my Elisp!
>
> Perhaps it isn't that big? Where is it? The man page for
> emacs(1) just says what it do (or don't), "Do not load
> the site-wide startup file." - OS/distro specific
> location/contents?
>
> Or is my Elisp just plain modular? :)
>
>> (See emacs info: "The Emacs Initialization File".)
>
> (info "(emacs) Init File") ?

Sorry, yes.  A slightly more detailed explanation can be found in (info
"(elisp) Startup Summary").

> Seems to by default be, uhm, default.el and
> site-start.el, in /usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp ...
> only that is empty for me... ?

Could be anywhere in the load-path.  

>> (which is implied by -Q), and you can turn off the
>> former by adding (setq inhibit-default-init t) in your
>> init file
>
> Again, that didn't brake anything.
>
> OK, so I greped the drive for default.el and
> site-start.el, either my commands stink or they don't
> exist on the drive.
>
> Most likely, they are not the reason!
>
> But do I `require' tons of stuff as you mention as
> a possible cause. but shouldn't that be sound stuff that
> don't overpopulate hooks etc? actually, I have 273
> `require's! But as long as that's sound stuff,
> where/what is the problem? sum effect?

It's too hard to say for sure.  Some packages have more of an effect
than others.  That is why it is recommended to bisect your emacs init
file to find out what might be causing the problem.

Although you showed a list of your customizations split between files, I
have no idea how you are loading these files, whether it is due to a
list of require statements in your init file or if you do something
else.  If the list of things you set/load/include is fairly small at the
top-level, it might be worth starting with -Q and then manually
evaluating your init file with C-x C-e until you find out what is
causing you problems.  

> Most of it is just vanilla Emacs stuff being required so
> configuration and extension will go thru compilation w/o
> error messages a/o warnings, I'm not a heavy M/ELPA user
> at all, not that I think quality anywhere should be so
> lousy it'd cause all this...

Once again, I couldn't say.  Although the code quality of the elisp
distributed with Emacs is fairly high, it is a large community project,
and not everything is tested equally.  Some packages are used by only a
small number of people, while others are used by just about everybody.
And different people have differing expectations when it comes to
interactivity (and different computers which may be slower/faster).  One
thing I can say for certain is that the current set of active
maintainers has done a very good job of tracking the bug reporting list
and working hard at alleviating defects, once they are reported.

-- 
Michael Welsh Duggan
(address@hidden)