Emacs Startup Time Doesn’t Matter

Every now and then I see people discussion one of the following:

• How editor X has faster startup time than Emacs (in a classic apples to oranges comparison style) and Emacs sucks because it doesn’t start “fast enough”
• How certain config changes or Elisp hacks optimized by 0.5 seconds someone’s Emacs startup time

Here’s one hot take from me - none of this really matters. Emacs startup time doesn’t matter.¹ Why so? Because of how people normally use Emacs, compared to some other editors:

• If you’re the type of person who uses Emacs in the terminal, you’re likely using emacs --daemon
• If you’re the type of person who uses Emacs’s GUI - you don’t restart it very often
• If you’re the type of person who uses both - you’re definitely using emacs --daemon (or you’re missing out a lot if you’re not)

In the end of the day Emacs sessions tend to be “long-lived”. By this I mean that often I restart Emacs only when I restart my computer. I recall M-x uptime often showing 3+ months of uptime. So, why then would I care about micro-optimizations to my startup time?

I think those conversations are mostly driven by users coming from other editors (usually vim), where people have pretty different usage patterns - e.g. they’d work on files in one project, exit their editor, start it again, ad infinitum. For them - startup time probably matters a lot…

But they also care a lot about their shell, terminal emulator, terminal multiplexer (e.g. tmux) and in the world of Emacs none of those are really as important, as Emacs is the unifying interface of everything that we need to use.²

Emacs is different. Emacs is special. Emacs startup time doesn’t matter most of the time. Remember this. M-x forever!

Update: This short article sparkled a lively discussion on Reddit.

1. Unless it’s insanely slow, that is. ↩

2. I’ve noticed most Emacs users really struggle to understand the value of something like tmux, as Emacs is the ultimate window multiplexer for pretty much anything. ↩