Friday, January 18, 2008

Emacs on a shoestring


I have been an Emacs lover/ user nearly since I have beginning to use Linux, I have always loved it, but, there was something that sometimes worried me about it, since I have used Linux and derivatives on some really sh*ty boxes, and that is the size and the amount of resources that it consumes.

A typical Emacs (no-x) packages these days goes for something like 1.5 to 3 MB in size, depending on the Linux distribution; the plain vanilla 'emacs' package also installs some other libraries needed to run emacs on a X Window environment, and it is even bigger, and the beast also require CPU to start.
That's why I have spent some time searching for smaller alternatives, that offer the familiar key-bindings but on a smaller package, with a far more feeble memory foot print.

Zile, IMHO, it is the winner by far. It has all the things that you can expect from the "real thing", but the final executable (at least on PPC Os X) is less than 500 KB in size.
It has all the features that you might find on Emacs, even customization via a DOT file, called 'zile', even the region selection has color support, something that the plain vanilla Emacs didn't had up until the 20th release (for the CLI at least)
There are even Zile ports for Os X, zile version 2.2.29 for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and Zile 2.2.32

The other options that I have tested, Ersatz Emacs & Microemacs Clone, are very good too, but I prefer Zile, which offers exactly what I want on a really small envelope.
Besides, I have compiled Zile without any issue on Thor.

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