[OS X Emacs] faster aquamacs ?

[David Reitter]

On Nov 30, 2010, at 5:10 AM, Peter Dyballa wrote:

> 
> Am 30.11.2010 um 10:49 schrieb Jean-Christophe Helary:
> 
>> open -a ../Aquamacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Aquamacs -n --args -q
> 
> 
> You could simply use:
> 
> 	../Aquamacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Aquamacs -n --args -q &

Not the officially (by Apple) supported way, and it will also kill the Aquamacs process when the parent is killed.
Other differences as well, such as standard output (and errors) appearing in the terminal, not in the console.  Quite a few people dislike that. 

I believe the intended usage is

open -a ../Aquamacs.app -n --args -q


On Nov 30, 2010, at 4:49 AM, Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:

> Basically when I launch Emacs.app from Spotlight, the app appears almost instantaneously. With Aquamacs, I need to wait 4-5 seconds. That's on a 3ghz Core 2 Duo with 8gb of ram.

That's because Aquamacs loads a lot of Lisp-level code, while Emacs.app doesn't.   Some of it can be (and has been) pre-compiled into the binary (see the file site-load.el).  To make startup faster, one would have to move more of the initialization code into site-load.el.   This comes with a range of caveats, the simple one being that most of the code that is not preloaded relies on runtime-only information (such as paths), or that strings and vectors need special treatment.  Feel free to work on this.

I start my Aquamacs once a week or so and let it run.  With 8 GB, why not do the same?

Aquamacs does not take very long to start (from cache):

dr at elin:~/MURI/usar-master master$ time ~/ae.git/nextstep/Aquamacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Aquamacs -q -eval '(kill-emacs)'

real    0m2.442s
user    0m1.727s
sys     0m0.276s
 
Un-cached it's more like this:

real    0m2.806s
user    0m1.729s
sys     0m0.275s


--
http://aquamacs.org -- Aquamacs: Emacs on Mac OS X
http://aquamacs.org/donate -- Could we help you? Return the favor and support the Aquamacs Project!