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Mg: an Emacs-like editor in 160 kb

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Re: Mg: an Emacs-like editor in 160 kb

#21
post #17
post #9

As an Emacs guy, I really like mg(1). The one missing feature is Unicode support.

Patches welcome. The first step would be iconv in OpenBSD base (there are existing BSD-licensed implementations to start from). Then have mg make use of it. http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=134581162518146&w=2 (Edit: Or try adding a pure UTF-8 mode)

Lacking the time at the moment, but I've been meaning to hone my C skills and Hacking on OpenBSD seems like the best idea. Hopefully, I can finish this M.Sc. soon :)

Re: Mg: an Emacs-like editor in 160 kb

#22
post #8

Related: Fabrice Bellard[0]'s QEmacs. http://bellard.org/qemacs/ - a 160KB executable provides a mostly complete Emacs experience (sans scripting .. sort of like Mg), but does include syntax coloring, unicode, and watching video inside the editor. A 60KB stripped down version has a feature set comparable to Mg as far as I can tell. [0] of FFMPEG, QEMU, BPG, TCC, JSLINUX and more fame.

> a mostly complete Emacs experience (sans scripting ...),

That is mostly not like not Emacs? Or did Zwei and other emacsen had the same key bindings as emacs and gnu's readline?

Re: Mg: an Emacs-like editor in 160 kb

#23
post #10

I use emacs for most of my daily development, but always rely on nano or vi in the terminal due to emacs startup time. I'm going to give mg a shot this week!

1. Tramp.

2. Emacs daemon - as many suggest, why would you ever quit emacs?

But if you do find you shut Emacs down...

3. Slimmed down alternative init eg. https://github.com/ocodo/.emacs.d/blob/master/emacsq & https://github.com/ocodo/.emacs.d/blob/master/emacsq.el (note this init could be even slimmer, but the start time is about 2.5 seconds, which is fast enough, and I get a very well configured environment)

Or just ...

4. emacs -Q - no init.

One of these are going to solve your issue, without having to interrupt your emacs flow.

You could also look at your init for bottlenecks and have a secondary script. Which you can optionally run when you want those features. Keep the real init minimal.

There's many strategies.

Re: Mg: an Emacs-like editor in 160 kb

#27
post #8

Related: Fabrice Bellard[0]'s QEmacs. http://bellard.org/qemacs/ - a 160KB executable provides a mostly complete Emacs experience (sans scripting .. sort of like Mg), but does include syntax coloring, unicode, and watching video inside the editor. A 60KB stripped down version has a feature set comparable to Mg as far as I can tell. [0] of FFMPEG, QEMU, BPG, TCC, JSLINUX and more fame.

> a mostly complete Emacs experience (sans scripting ...), That is mostly not like not Emacs? Or did Zwei and other emacsen had the same key bindings as emacs and gnu's readline?

"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

Re: Mg: an Emacs-like editor in 160 kb

#28
post #9

As an Emacs guy, I really like mg(1). The one missing feature is Unicode support.

I'm an mg guy who uses Emacs when he has to. Unlike Emacs, mg is an editor. I don't know what tool-class Emacs properly falls into, but as many people here have pointed out, it's closer to a general-purpose scriptable environment than an editor. Editing is a side-effect of the other capabilities, very nearly. I know at least one person who uses Emacs as their shell.

For those of us who just want a clean, fast, light-weight editor, mg is great. It's what Emacs would have been had it been an editor, instead of something else.

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