Elemental; changes a bunch of the default configurations of Emacs to be more intuitive and also handles some typical performance issues.
If you decide to give Elemental a try and find one or more behaviors unintuitive, please let me know by filing an issue.
While Elemental goes a long way, it’s still a package that you’ll have to bring in to your environment and there are actually things you can do to improve the experience of Emacs, even before package-management is available to you.
I recommend that you create a file that sets up the chrome you would like and put it at ~~/.emacs.d/early-init.el~. Doing so, you’ll get rid of some initial flickering and will shed some hundred milliseconds off the startup time.
My early-init file looks like this:
;; -*- no-byte-compile: t; -*-
;; -*- lexical-binding: t; -*-
(setq-default gc-cons-threshold most-positive-fixnum)
(setq-default package-enable-at-startup nil)
(advice-add #'package--ensure-init-file :override #'ignore)
(setq-default frame-inhibit-implied-resize t)
(push '(menu-bar-lines . 0) default-frame-alist)
(push '(tool-bar-lines . 0) default-frame-alist)
(push '(vertical-scroll-bars) default-frame-alist)
(setq-default debug-on-error (getenv "DEBUG")
init-file-debug (getenv "DEBUG"))Another recommendation of mine is to use straight.el. You get all the declarative goodness of use-package and in addition, it will be easier to contribute to packages or manage your own.
With straight.. or use-package for that matter, all you need is this line in your emacs configuration-file.
(use-package elemental)Note that one of the above is required as Emacs does not ship with a package-manager.
Last recommendation is to run an Emacs-server and connect to it with Emacs-client. When using a demonized Emacs you can open files with immediate response since you don’t have to load your configuration over and over.
All you do is invoke emacsclient as below, which basically means; try starting emacs-client, if there’s no server running, start a new server and connect to it.
emacsclient -c -a "" "$@" &Now, for all sequential invocations of that line, a frame will be created instantly. Neat!