21–30 of 70 posts
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?
What answer to that question and in this situation would make any sense?
The appeal of Emacs is that I can, at any time, with only a few keystrokes, dig in to how it does something and then modify it. The self-documenting and customizable behavior is extremely pervasive. Emacs Lisp is not just there for extensions. Every single layer of the application--save for core primitives--is implemented in it. All of it can be inspected, modified, swapped out, wrapped, hooked into, and basically do anything you want. There's absolutely nothing else like it.
If you want an example of an actually lightweight modern desktop editor to take inspiration from, try zed.dev Zed is written in Rust, insanely fast, consumes virtually no resources, has an Emacs input mode (which I use exclusively) and despite not having the greatest support for Emacs LISP (only via limited third party extension, its singular flaw) has replaced emacs-ng as my daily driver.
I have actually tried Zed, and I completely agree with you—it is an outstanding product. Its speed and incredibly low memory footprint are truly impressive.
However, while it does feature an Emacs input mode, I found that the range of supported Emacs commands is still somewhat limited. Because of this restriction, I couldn't quite operate it with the same feel and depth as a dedicated Emacs environment.
That being said, Zed is definitely a masterpiece of modern desktop editors, and its architecture is highly inspiring!
If you want an example of an actually lightweight modern desktop editor to take inspiration from, try zed.dev Zed is written in Rust, insanely fast, consumes virtually no resources, has an Emacs input mode (which I use exclusively) and despite not having the greatest support for Emacs LISP (only via limited third party extension, its singular flaw) has replaced emacs-ng as my daily driver.
I don't mean to tear down your project at all. If you want to make an editor, I think that's great. I'm actually working on a text editor of my own. But I think that you've fundamentally misunderstood the appeal of Emacs. It has little to do with the key-bindings, or even any particular part of the user interface. Many people don't even use them. Doom, a very popular Emacs distribution, enables Vim-like bindings by d…
As a quick example "M-g" ("Esc" [pause] "g") has been bound to "goto-line" in my emacs startup file for at least 20 years, and is something I press without even really thinking about.
There are many default keys (such as C-x C-f for finding a file), but even core functionality gets rebound to suit my preferences.
What I need is an emacs with more lisp and less javascript. If you want a really lean emacs-like editor, there is always mg and microemacs. Edit: not trying to be a dick or a gatekeeper. This is HN, all ideas should be welcome including the one that dont make sense to some people. And always interesting to see contributions from Japan.
Lem[0] in ncurses mode might be your friend. Unfortunately the BDFL deprecated the SDL frontend seemingly due to the SDL3 breakages, but the web one uses webview + a homegrown system instead of electron and framework magic, so it's still fairly lightweight
its main proposition is that the whole thing is written in Common Lisp, so it retains the hackable model of traditional Emacses without retaining the legacy of GNU Emacs
Prepare yourself.
If you want an example of an actually lightweight modern desktop editor to take inspiration from, try zed.dev Zed is written in Rust, insanely fast, consumes virtually no resources, has an Emacs input mode (which I use exclusively) and despite not having the greatest support for Emacs LISP (only via limited third party extension, its singular flaw) has replaced emacs-ng as my daily driver.
I’ll never get why people hype up Zed. Sublime Text already has all the same perks—and beats Zed at the very things it claims to improve. Sure, it might not have every advanced feature, but for “vibe coders” who don’t need a full IDE and just want to skim or tweak generated code, Sublime Text is the better choice.
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?
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!