[mlry]

Long forgotten the times back in the days during the Great Editor Wars when Emacs was shunned as an acronym for "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping". The youth of today ...

[usef-]

Emacs binary download page pointed me to Windows, but for comparison:

141MB: emacs-30.1-nodeps.zip

75MB: emacs-30.1-installer.exe (better compression? Contents seem similar)

27MB helix-25.07-x86_64-windows.zip

So there's still an Emacs distinction, it seems

(*not that these size differences matter in practice -- helix's "bulk" is all in compiled language grammars, each of which is not loaded unless you use the language.)

[usef-]

(replying to myself)

Alpine package sizes:

- helix 10.3MiB (+ 3 dependencies: musl, libgcc, sh)

- emacs 14.5MiB (+ 1 dependency: musl)

- neovim 18.7MiB (+ 9 dependencies musl, lua, tree-sitter, libint, libluv, unibilium, utf8proc, libuv, libluajit))

So it doesn't seem out of the ordinary for popular cli editors, if you're worried about smaller environments.

[johnisgood]

I am old enough to remember that. :D