esup VS marginalia

Probably the best way to figure out what's going on at startup time is ESUP (Emacs Start Up Profiler): https://github.com/jschaf/esup You could run it on the old config and the new. Although I suppose the processes may be different enough that there's nothing meaningful to compare.

I agree with you. For startup profiling, use-package-report and https://github.com/jschaf/esup can help too.

A very useful tool for achieving faster startup is esup (https://github.com/jschaf/esup) which times each code block that runs in the emacs startup.

Have you tried running M-x esup with https://github.com/jschaf/esup to see what is taking up the start-up time?

Are you on Emacs 28? Native-comp is enabled by default and it's Just Worked™ for me. Or are you on at least Emacs 27? Emacs 27 added native JSON parsing; stuff like lsp-mode works a lot better now.

(Personally running Emacs 29 built from source on an M1 Pro; everything is instant! Even on my old dumpy i5 machine, everything except startup was pretty snappy, with the exception of startup which took ~4 seconds.)

If it's startup you're concerned about, try the esup[1] package to figure out what's taking so long.

[1]: https://github.com/jschaf/esup

If you're really interested what happens on startup, you can play around with the startup profiler( https://github.com/jschaf/esup ) or similar packages that time the execution of your .emacs.

I used the Emacs Startup Profiler (ESUP) https://github.com/jschaf/esup which identified several culprits in my init files. Removing or deferring the loading of those packages took my startup time from ~15 seconds to about 2.5 seconds. (Still room for improvement!)

GitHub - jschaf/esup: ESUP - Emacs Start Up Profiler

Try out esup

Check out marginalia[1]. Whenever you press M-x, it will pop up a buffer showing all the commands (with most recent ones on top) along with their keybindings and a brief description of what they do.

Embark[2] is also cool. It will show all the possible commands relevant to where the cursor is at that moment. I bind it to C-c a.

[1] https://github.com/minad/marginalia

Then there is Marginalia which is IMO essential

marginalia. Informative annotations for minibuffer completion candidates, co-written with u/minad-emacs.

Wow, interesting that my response is getting down voted. It seems not enough that I give away my work for free. Nevertheless I appreciate support from the community, as other Emacs package developers. The support is actually helpful. To clarify, publishing my configuration would translate into quite a bit of work, requiring separation of private and public bits.

marginalia for extra info in the minibuffer

There seems to be some problem with straight not correctly installing or updating compat. See these issues on Marginalia and Embark where straight seems to not install Compat.

Note that I contribute to Emacs core itself from time to time but the process is discussion-heavy and thus time consuming. If you are familiar with the completing-read API, you may know the annotation-function of completion tables. The name already tells that this function just adds annotations to the completion candidates. The Marginalia package (written by /u/oantolin and me) provides such annotations. A similar function is the group-function, which groups candidates in subsets and adds titles above the subsets. I wrote the patch which added this feature to Emacs. It is now supported by default completion, Icomplete, Vertico and maybe other UIs. The initial implementation was done in the earlier Selectrum package, and a little later in Vertico.

At the end of the year, I am happy to announce the stable Vertico 1.0 and Marginalia 1.0 releases. Vertico is a minimalist, yet flexible and responsive vertical completion UI. Marginalia provides helpful annotations for many completion contexts. Both packages have been solid for a while but I rather let things mature slowly. These releases finally put the stamp "stable" on these two packages. I expect the other members of the package suite to follow soon after. Both packages have been updated recently to support the newest Emacs 29 features. They are compatible with Emacs 27, 28 and the upcoming 29.

I) I started out trying to implement this using marginalia, like the consult commands, but quickly concluded that this wasn't the way to go here... please correct me if I'm wrong and there is more from these packages I could make use of. I also try to make use of as much of the citar codebase as possible, but have found it difficult so far: a lot seems too specific for bibliographic entries.

I can't find anything that seems to discuss them in detail, but Marginalia is a package that applies them widely in completion. And here is a simple example for customized file completion.