Let me give it a try!

That seems less than optimal. What about (bound-and-true-p package-alist)? That will trigger if and only if package.el is loaded and initialized and at least one package was activated.

Of course, this only works after startup.

May I know why it is less than optimal? I'm not an expert on elisp

Sure, no problem. Your code will trigger just because package.el was loaded, even if it's not being used. My code avoids that problem, since package-alist remains at nil until at least one package is actually loaded by package.el.

Thank you @raxod502 for the explanation. I'll update this PR then

If you want to support straight.el, you could test for (and (boundp 'straight--profile-cache) (hash-table-p straight--profile-cache)) and then check (hash-table-size straight--profile-cache) to get the number of packages. That said, this is unsupported and there really ought to be a supported way to get information about installed packages from straight.el.

Thank you @raxod502 for your suggestions, I've applied them so we could provide a proper support not only for package.el but also straight.el. Does it look good now?

@romatthe could you also check if this works well for you ?

@JesusMtnez this doesn't seem to work either. What could be the problem?

I don't use this package, but evaluating that variable definition in my Emacs session does indeed give

"145 packages loaded in 0.8 seconds"

I don't use this package, but evaluating that variable definition in my Emacs session does indeed give

"145 packages loaded in 0.8 seconds"

You're right, I forgot to byte compile jaja it does work.