I use the lightweight emacs alternative 'zile' a lot, I have it installed on both my desktop machines (alongside emacs) and also on some tiny machines like Open

I use the lightweight emacs alternative 'zile' a lot, I have it installed on both my desktop machines (alongside emacs) and also on some tiny machines like OpenWRT routers where I don't want an emacs install. It loads totally instantly whereas my emacs configuration is ~0.5s, so if I'm really just jumping into a file for something very simple and then out again, I use that. One step up in complexity is to alias something as 'emacs -nw' (emacs start in console mode.) Which is almost as quick (depending on your startup files), but you've got all your nice custom .emacs configuration there. Then, there's the fact you can run emacs in server mode and then your emacs editor windows are just connecting back to a server process and not loading up anything at all. Finally, there's the fact that a true emacs user would already be interacting with their shell in emacs shell-mode, so they wouldn't need to load anything at all. Zen moment