Back in July, I made a few updates to my xmlunicode package. One of the changes I made was to delay loading the XML Unicode database until the first time it was needed.

That shaves a couple of seconds off startup, but just moves the delay to the first time you attempt to use xmlunicode-character-insert. (Only the first time, I hasten to add, the data structure is cached after that.)

A few days later, I must have restarted Emacs for some reason and the first time I hit C-t u everything just sort of stopped. Not for a long time, but long enough for me to wonder what the heck was going on before the character list popped up.

I realized I should have put in a “loading” message so that the delay wasn’t mysterious.

I’ve done that now in version 1.25. And updated to version 14.0.0d13 of the Unicode character list.