[gkafkg8y8]

I've loved and used Emacs for ~20 years, but if Emacs were to become slow, then if I were to have a replacement editor that could do the following (w/no X or window manager) without additional config in Linux, I'd use it instead:

  arrow keys to move
  add and delete text anywhere
  paste from terminal buffer
  ctrl-s -> search (and continue to find next match)
  ctrl-v -> down
  ctrl-esc -> up
  ctrl-k -> kill line
  ctrl-x ctrl-s -> save
  ctrl-x ctrl-c -> quit
  ctrl-a -> goto beginning of line
  ctrl-e -> goto end of line

I don't even use selection anymore, because I can just use the terminal window copy/paste.

[stevekemp]

Antirez, of redis fame, wrote a minimal editor in C which got a lot of love here on hacker news a while back:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12065217

I took that release and added Lua scripting support to it, which also seemed reasonably popular:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12137698

It pretty much meets your requirements, and was a fun project. But it did make me realize that writing editors is sometimes harder than you'd think.

[gkafkg8y8]

Kilo's supported commands are[1]:

  CTRL-S: Save
  CTRL-Q: Quit
  CTRL-F: Find string in file (ESC to exit search, arrows to navigate)

It's available in a lot of well-used distros: https://pkgs.org/search/kilo but doesn't look like it's in Arch, etc.

Kilua looks cool also as it has more similar keybindings to Emacs[2]:

  Ctrl-x Ctrl-o Open a new file in the current buffer.
  Ctrl-x Ctrl-s Save the current file.
  Ctrl-x Ctrl-c Quit.
  
  Ctrl-x c      Create a new buffer
  Ctrl-x n      Move to the next buffer.
  Ctrl-x p      Move to the previous buffer.
  Ctrl-x b      Select buffer from a list
  
  M-x           Evaluate lua at the prompt.
  Ctrl-r:       Regular expression search.

but the goal would be to have that available in a package manager in a default install, so that after logging into any server where I'm a sudoer, I could:

  sudo apt-get install some_package
  sudo yum -y install some_package
  pacman -S some_package
  ...

[1]: https://github.com/antirez/kilo [2]: https://github.com/skx/kilua

[da4c30ff]

If that's all you need, maybe μEmacs[1] could do it?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroEMACS

[pawadu]

Don't forget mg. It seems to be more used than uemacs these days, possibly thanks to the openbsd project:

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mg_(editor)

[gkafkg8y8]

It's also available in deb/rpm/pkg:

https://pkgs.org/download/mg

Note: pkgs.org list is not all-inclusive; there are more Linux distros in which it's included.

[gkafkg8y8]

Looks like it's in a few Slackware repos but I'm having trouble finding it in deb/yum/Arch pkg:

https://pkgs.org/search/uemacs

JASSPA version (the package is jasspa, but searching on microemacs just to show results more thoroughly):

https://pkgs.org/search/microemacs