TIL Speed up Magit on MacOS

@greg waitwait, THAT'S IT?

that's so simple! aaa

@archenoth try and see. YMMV but it was drastic on my Mac.

@greg so, turns out there's an little extra detail in here! mac already has a git binary at /usr/bin/git!

but if you `brew install git`, and then set the magit git path to the brew version explicitly--it seems like the *newer version* brew pulls in is where the real speed gain happens!

but yeah! that speedup is drastic, damn

@archenoth yeah and I figure exec-path-from-shell slows it down trying to find it

@greg hm! maybe!

for me, it looked like if i didn't specify that custom variable directly, magit would actually totally bypass exec-path-from-shell, though!

(since the default value for that variable was "/usr/bin/git", which does exist, meaning it didn't need to hunt on $PATH)

tl;dr - magit seems to prioritize explicitly using any version that lives in /usr/bin/, even if $PATH would resolve elsewhere

@greg i'm learning things! ahaha

(also, i just noticed you have fedi comments as blog comments! that kinda rules! :kirby_happy:)

@archenoth me too! Always learning. thanks. I wrote that code this week. I have to hook up a cron on cloudflare to grab the latest comments. And also need to make it threaded.

@greg oh yeah! threading is tricky! (i wrote a simple client-side version of this earlier for my blog too, and haven't done that part either! ahah)

though, user icons are pretty easy to implement if you wanted to build something easier before doing that! since the uri just lives in account.avatar

(like this! https://github.com/Archenoth/archenoth.com/blob/bb2d41712ad205cc75e1152aed3cbe4467801c5d/js/mastoComments.js#L21-L23)

custom emoji can also be directly pulled out of comments and replaced with image tags using global regex too! (like this! https://github.com/Archenoth/archenoth.com/blob/bb2d41712ad205cc75e1152aed3cbe4467801c5d/js/masto.js#L114-L129)

@greg but also, the fact you can do something like this *at all* feels so nice!

i love the fediverse, aaa

@archenoth agreed!!!

@archenoth cool I’ll check this out. Thanks! I’m already grabbing avatars at this point. I just need to look a little deeper at the json response for deeper replies.

@archenoth good find and great info! There is a verbose setting for magit to output everything to messages to find bottlenecks but I didn’t have to go that far.

@greg @archenoth fwiw, exec-path-from-shell shouldn't slow anything down. It runs once at startup and sets exec-path. Only if you had thousands of non-git-containing directories in your path might that get slow. So the speed difference is almost certainly down to the specific git found. If anything, exec-path-from-shell should help Emacs find the homebrew git you'd typically be using in a terminal.

@sanityinc @archenoth yes, i worded that poorly Steve. `/usr/bin/git` (Apple Git) vs homebrew git which is my preferred version is the problem. Not exec-path-from-shell.

@greg @archenoth now I'm wondering which version my Emacs picks up. Probably the nix one...

@sanityinc @archenoth magit-version tells me `Magit v4.1.2-3-g1c30bb1f, Transient 0.7.9, Git 2.50.1, Emacs 30.2, darwin` which i know by 2.50.1 that is my homebrew version. the Apple version is 2.39.5

@greg @archenoth For me, the bigger question would be why the homebrew version isn't earlier in your $PATH / exec-path. You shouldn't normally have to go around setting vars to point at specific executables.

@sanityinc excellent question and I’m going to find the answer this weekend

@greg don't know if this would work more robustly across systems (are there still Intel Macs in use out there? 😆 ) but I added this in my straight.el-based startup in (use-package magit :config ....

;; adapted from https://gregnewman.io/blog/speed-up-magit-on-macos/
(let ((git (executable-find "git")))
(when git (setq magit-git-executable git)))

@idcrook actually @xenodium used a similar pattern. Did you see performance boost? I still have an Intel Mac but it hasn’t been booted in many months. lol

https://indieweb.social/@xenodium/114793849088519458

@greg @idcrook I also needed “brew install git” since I was using git from system which is likely quite old. If using executable-find, check the resulting path (and exec-path).