Speed issue with exec-path-from-shell-initialize

[jwintz]

Hello Steve,

First of all, many thanks for this excellent package. However, I realize that is slows down my startup time significantly. I have benchmarked using benchmark-init and here is what I've got.

On the top is the loading time per require call, on the bottom is the contents of the prolusion-eshell file that uses exec-path-from-shell-initialize. It is 6 times as long as loading my theme.

Is there any way I can speed it up ? Maybe with an autoload at least to defer its loading time when I open an eshell ?

Thanks !

[purcell]

Yep, no surprise -- it involves running external programs and gathering their input. That will always be slower than running quite a lot of elisp directly inside Emacs.

To speed it up, you can do 3 things:

• Streamline your shell startup files
• Don't call exec-path-from-shell-initialize and exec-path-from-shell-copy-env separately: instead, add CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH to exec-path-from-shell-variables and then just run exec-path-from-shell-initialize.
• Remove -i from exec-path-from-shell-arguments, if your shell startup files are correctly structured, ie. they do not set any variables in interactive-shell-only files like .bashrc or .zshrc.

[purcell]

(With your current config, there will be 4 shell commands run -- by following the latter 2 tips, you'll cut that down to 1.)

[jwintz]

Thanks Steve !