Page:Sacha Chua - Emacs Chat with Carsten Dominik.djvu/19

 That comes out of a profile. Because you never know. You just sit there, you wait for the thing, it takes 20 seconds to give you something, and you have no idea why. The Emacs profile works really well. Have you ever used it?

Sacha: Sometimes. After John and I talked–he talked about profiling his init file so he can start really streamlining it. I was like, "That's great." I don't actually restart Emacs that often, but it's great to be able to see the numbers right next to all the code. That is cool.

Carsten: That's actually interesting. I restart Emacs very often. In this way, I'm a bad Emacs citizen.

Sacha: No. He mentioned that he does that he can make sure that errors don't accumulate and that things… My problem is that sometimes I make a lot of Emacs changes and then I'm like, “Okay, time for –debug-init because I broke something.”

Carsten: Yes. Everybody says always, “Emacs is so stable and so good, so you should only start it once in the morning.” But I don't really mind. Two or three-second startup time is not a major problem, I think. I restart it to sort of get it out of the way. I also don't like to accumulate hundreds of buffers. Then it takes a bit more time to switch to another buffer or so. I restart it.

But also I think another reason is because I keep hacking at stuff. It's then good to restart to have a clean state, to know what's actually going on, that you're not delivering something with it or something. That can happen. If you change a file and then you load something. In particular, Org Mode, for example, is built into Emacs, but of course, there's also the development version, and you just have to be sure that you are loading the right file. There are all these issues with load path shadowing and so forth. So you have to be careful about that.

Sacha: Yes. I can imagine.

Carsten: Yes. Maybe I can ask you?

Sacha: Yes.

Carsten: Today I was looking for a program to change the size of the font in Emacs, just step-wise, like a little command to increase it.