[melling]

"sans scripting"

The Lisp scripting is the entire point of Emacs. Who cares about the keybindings. I don't really see the point. Can't you just compile emacs? I remember 25 years ago when people thought emacs was too big, and small emacs clones were popular, but in 2015 no one cares, right?

Rather than solving these easier useless problems, why doesn't someone solve the harder problem of making a better emacs clone with a high-performance Emacs Lisp clone. Then Emacs could be used to replace Visual Studio, Xcode, etc. Emacs is an editor construction kit:

http://ergoemacs.org/features.html

https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs

[jlarocco]

I was thinking the same thing.

I mean, I can run full GNU Emacs on my Raspberry Pi. What's the point of a "micro emacs" missing all the good parts?

[__david__]

You cannot, however, install full blown Emacs on your Netgear router running OpenWRT. Mg is heaven sent in cases like that. Tiny linux machines still exist (Raspberry Pi is not tiny, resource-wise).

[melling]

Emacs should be able to run on 16MB machines without X linked.

http://superuser.com/questions/313105/ram-requirements-of-em...

A dozen Emacs "clones" already exist for even lower memory machines:

https://www.gnu.org/software/zile/

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Jove

Anyway, like I mentioned, wouldn't time be better spent creating a high-performance clone rather than a partially functional tiny clone?

[__david__]

> Emacs should be able to run on 16MB machines without X linked.

My point exactly. These little routers have just a few megs of RAM. Emacs also has ~70MB of (compressed!) elisp files. On a machine with single digit MBs of flash, that's just not workable.

And! Even if you do have 70MB of disk and 16MB of RAM available, Emacs isn't necessarily performant. Emacs was dog slow when I had a $5/month prgmr vm, but Mg was blazing fast.

> A dozen Emacs "clones" already exist for even lower memory machines

Mg isn't new, in case that is what you are thinking (it's at least 10 years old).

I tried a bunch of tiny emacs clones a few years ago and Mg was the absolute best. All the rest had weird gratuitous differences or were missing obvious important keys (one of them didn't have M-d). Mg isn't complete (obviously) but it has a surprising number of plain editing keystrokes built in and functions perfectly for editing conf files or crontabs or other small remote tasks.

> Anyway, like I mentioned, wouldn't time be better spent creating a high-performance clone rather than a partially functional tiny clone?

Whose time? And what do you mean by high-performance clone?

Edit: I see, I missed your (way) above comment. To re-answer: Those tasks are orthogonal. Nifty higher level editing junk is certainly a good idea, and people are working on it. I don't see why it would need to be an Emacs clone though, why not just make Emacs itself better? That's the whole point of it in the first place.

[vidarh]

> Mg isn't new, in case that is what you are thinking (it's at least 10 years old).

Mg is based on MicroEmacs, as far as I know, which makes it roughly 30 years old.

[technomancy]

Zile is a fauxmacs that's only twice as big as Mg but also provides scripting.

[aaronem]

Why would you want to install _any_ editor on a router? If you can ssh into it, you can use Tramp to edit files on it in your full-sized Emacs session, and save what must be scarce storage space on the router besides.

[Arnt]

Back in the day I used ange-ftp for such things. My emacs lived where I did and transferred the files hither and thither.

That said, I do use jove every single day...