Just to be clear: you say by ‘dropping’ lisp you’re keeping it lightweight but it’s based on electron? So what does ‘lightweight’ mean in your opinion?
As you can see, elecxzy boots up almost as instantly as native Notepad.
To ensure the actual text editing remains just as snappy and responsive as Notepad despite running in a browser engine, elecxzy features several optimizations, including a custom Piece Table and a fully virtualized DOM/renderer.
So in this context, "lightweight" means "Notepad-level startup speed and typing latency, but with native CJK IME support and Emacs keybindings." I should have been clearer about this distinction in my wording!
How often do you start your editor? I start emacs once at booot and keep it running, using emacsclient to open additional files from the command line.
Look, I think that writing your own editor is useful because one learns a lot. And of course, it doesn't need to use Lisp or even be extendable at all. But it's not Emacs any longer if you remove the Lisp part.
To answer your question: I actually start my editor many times a day. I know the "start once and use emacsclient" workflow is the standard and most efficient way for Emacs users, but I personally tend to open and close editor windows frequently, just like using a simple notepad.
Regarding the Lisp part, I completely agree with you. As I mentioned in other threads, if you remove Lisp, it is absolutely not Emacs anymore.
I am not trying to build a true Emacs, nor am I trying to deny its great philosophy. I just deeply love the physical typing experience and muscle memory of Emacs keybindings. My goal was simply to extract that specific UX and package it into a standalone app that I could run immediately without any setup.
So you are right—it is just a personal project to recreate the typing feel I love, rather than an Emacs replacement!
I’m writing these comments in Japanese and using AI to translate them into English, as I’m not a native speaker. I want to make sure I can communicate my thoughts and technical details as accurately as possible to this community.
I apologize if the phrasing feels a bit "AI-like" sometimes, but the ideas and the project itself are 100% mine!
The motivation/justification from the author why they believe removing lisp but adding Electron somehow sums up to being "lightweight"?
Maybe the author thought of the UX/baggage/legacy or something else when they thought about "lightweight", rather than how much memory/cpu cycles something is using? Not sure, but maybe there is a more charitable reading of it out there.
Probably none. Still I’m curious what is the authors understanding. Whether he actually thinks it is a lightweight solution or whether that’s kind of advertising phrase, like ‘blazingly fast’
To give a clearer picture of what I mean by "lightweight," here is a quick startup comparison video I took a while ago: https://x.com/elecxzy/status/2022003439757336583
(Sorry for the Japanese text in the video!)
Left: VS Code
Middle: Windows Notepad
Right: elecxzy
As you can see, elecxzy boots up almost as instantly as native Notepad.
To ensure the actual text editing remains just as snappy and responsive as Notepad despite running in a browser engine, elecxzy features several optimizations, including a custom Piece Table and a fully virtualized DOM/renderer.
So in this context, "lightweight" means "Notepad-level startup speed and typing latency, but with native CJK IME support and Emacs keybindings." I should have been clearer about this distinction in my wording!