Emacs 29 Is Slow
11 Oct 2023
Table of Contents
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:
- My org-mode update was incompatible with version 29.1
- 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!