Re: New start up splash screen annoyance...

[Chong Yidong]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> On modern computers, Emacs starts up so quickly and uses such an
>> insignificant amount of memory that there is basically much no
>> difference between starting a new Emacs and returning to a
>> pre-existing Emacs session.
>
> There will always be a difference, no matter how fast and memory-rich
> our computers will be, as long as ending a session makes certain
> things go away, like history variables, buffers that don't visit
> files, etc.

Obviously there's a tradeoff.  For instance, for my usage patterns,
the advantages you mention are offset by the fact that:

  (1) Finding the old Emacs window, selecting it, and opening the file
      there interrupts my train of thought.  On a cluttered desktop,
      this can take about a second or more.  (I don't use emacsclient
      for various other reasons.)

  (2) I sometimes find accumulated Emacs session variables annoying
      rather than useful, e.g. a buffer list containing files from two
      completely unrelated projects I am concurrently working on.

  (3) Since Emacs is single-threaded, checking mail in Emacs
      interrupts all other work taking place in that instance of
      Emacs, so I must have more than one Emacs open anyway.

  (4) My current Emacs session tends to become buggy if I am in the
      process of hacking Emacs, and I don't want those bugs to affect
      other tasks I do with Emacs.