Elfeed-org fails to populate elfeed-feeds variable when (use-package elfeed-org :defer t)

[stottm]

There are a lot of people instructing newbies to defer loading of all packages. That is bad advice. I have discovered an issue described below that could be considered user configuration error. This is not a bug. However, this behavior should be documented in the README at least. Add a recommended use-package configuration for elfeed & elfeed-org.

While you can defer load elfeed itself, if you attempt to also defer load elfeed-org, it will not populate the variable elfeed-feeds with the org file listing of feeds which means elfeed cannot update the feeds as it cannot see the feeds.

Turning off deferral on elfeed-org resulted in increased start times but resolved the problem with elfeed not updating feeds. Re-examining use-package docs and reviewing Prot's recent use-package video, I've come up with a solution.

Utilizing the following works for me (I am no expert) and reduced startup time for elfeed-org from 0.42 to 0.01 (YMMV) as measured by use-package-report and resulted in an overall reduced startup time of approximately a tenth of a second (every little bit counts towards the total).

(use-package elfeed
	:defer t
	:bind
	("C-c e" . elfeed))

(use-package elfeed-org
	:after (elfeed)
	:config
	(elfeed-org)
	(setq rmh-elfeed-org-files (list "~/.config/emacs/elfeed.org")))

You can enable use-package statistics in your init.el so you can benchmark load times of packages.

(setq use-package-compute-statistics t) ;; Review metrics M-x use-package-report

You can also enable printing the Emacs load time at every startup.

;; Reset variables, and new startup message
(add-hook 'emacs-startup-hook
	(lambda ()
	;; Reset the file handler list
	(setq file-name-handler-alist pure-file-name-handler-alist)
	;; Reset garbage collection
	(setq gc-cons-threshold 2000000)
	;; Startup time message
	(message (format "Emacs ready in %.5f seconds with %d garbage collections."
	 	   (float-time (time-subtract after-init-time before-init-time))
		   gcs-done))))