Mastering Vim

Profiling startup

You can start Vim with a --startuptime <filename> flag, which will log every action Vim takes during startup into a file. For instance, here's how you write the startup log into startuptime.log:

$ vim --startuptime startuptime.log

You can launch gvim in a similar manner with gvim --startuptime startuptime.log. The commands are the same in the Linux command line and in Windows cmd.exe.

Quit Vim, and open startuptime.log. You'll be greeted with something like this (I replaced sections of the file with <...> to make it easier to read):

In the preceding screenshot, you can see a set of timestamps (most in three columns), ...