Emacs 29 Is Slow

11 Oct 2023

Table of Contents

  1. Situation
  2. Symptoms
  3. Solution

Situation

Last week I updated my Emacs installation on my macOS to the latest version 29.1. This resulted in a couple of issues I had to solve:

  1. My org-mode update was incompatible with version 29.1
  2. My Emacs became laggy

To start with teh first issue, I quickly became aware that org-mode shipped with the Emacsformac version was having issues. So I downgraded to a previous org-mode which solved the issue.

Issue number 2 was a more difficult issue.

Symptoms

When I upgraded to Emacs 29.1 using brew I noticed that my Emacs became slow. And slow in this case means that it was lagging. Not always, not every time, but enough to annoy me. When I wanted to mark a task DONE for example, this would take a lot of time. And then I really am talking about seconds (yes, multiple)!

This is off course really annoying, so I started the famous Google search. At first, the symptoms where vague and difficult to find. But after searching a while, Reddit gave me an hint on where to look. More people where having the issue.

Solution

After reading thru the comments on Reddit I was triggered by the comment to install a different version of Emacs.

So I started by uninstalling the version I had (https://emacsforosx.com/):

brew uninstall emacs

After that I installed Emacs-Plus (29.1) using homebrew:

brew tap d12frosted/emacs-plus
brew install emacs-plus --with-ctags --with-dbus --with-mailutils --with-imagemagick

Using the extra options to make it workable for me.

Behold, this solved my issue!