5 ms·

Does anyone know of a small Emacs distribution? I would like to get into Emacs, but its hard to justify 114 MB: https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/emacs-26

Does anyone know of a small Emacs distribution? I would like to get into Emacs, but its hard to justify 114 MB: https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/emacs-26 https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/emacs-26 Versus Vim 18 MB: https://github.com/vim/vim-win32-installer/releases https://github.com/vim/vim-win32-installer/releases

barrkel 6y ago
Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC is about 150,000 MB. I have a little bit of difficulty justifying that on my SSD main drive. 114 MB for what is effectively an IDE for the long tail of programming languages is very easy to justify.
throwqqq 6y ago
That's 0.005 usd of hard drives. There is literally no one in the world who could notice the difference.
dmd 6y ago
Justify in terms of what, exactly? At current disk prices, 114 megabytes costs less than a third of a US penny. Even at minimum wage, you'd make that in under a second.
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  This is a tangent, but I wish storage was that simple. Too many devices come with non-expandable storage and don't have very big options to start with, even if you're willing to pay well above the normal rate.
- svnpenn 6y ago
  surely someone of your pedigree can understand, not everything is about money. Why should I use something 6 times larger? Without a benefit thats just software bloat from where I sit. and GNU is known for this, from glibc on up.
  - anamexis 6y ago
    I think the key question is, what is it about?
  - andai 6y ago
    Recently went through some GNU and BSD source code and the difference in file size was quite dramatic. GNU's really doing its own thing :)
  - ramraj07 6y ago
    Unless you are actually running out of space, why is that even a criteria? Unless two programs are exactly feature-paired, why would you even think about how much storage they take up? The only explanation is that your work has made you think about space taken by programs for legitimate reasons and you are unable to think outside that mindset - when the cheapest phones ship with 50-100x more space than that, when a single minute of video from a regular persons phone could take up this much space, when the regular user consumes 10x that bandwidth every day in the internet? Who cares if it's 100 MB?
komali2 6y ago
I don't know of a "small" Emacs distribution. You can have Vim in Emacs with Evil Mode. IMO Emacs bindings are terrible no matter what and modal editing saved my career from an early death by wrist injury. But on top of Vim bindings you also get an entire, programmable IDE. I guess it's kinda big but like, so are most IDEs? But you can get many features at a lighter weight than other ones. Like yea if literally the only thing you wanna do is edit plain text and maybe at most have syntax highlighting, use plain old vim with some .vimrc setup. If you're finding yourself installing plugins to make vim be more like an IDE, at that point, just install an IDE, and no IDE handles vim bindings better than Emacs imo (and this is from extensive testing), so, there, use Emacs.
- ngcc_hk 6y ago
  May give this a try? https://develop.spacemacs.org/layers/+spacemacs/spacemacs-evil/README.html https://develop.spacemacs.org/layers/+spacemacs/spacemacs-ev...
  - komali2 6y ago
    I use this now. It "just works" ™©® Check out the develop branch though. Last I checked master was waaaay behind.
- clojureyoureyes 6y ago
  > and modal editing saved my career from an early death by wrist injury The fun thing is I stopped experiencing wrist pain after I switched from Vim to Emacs (with ±native bindings), partly because I moved Ctrl to Caps almost instantly, partly because I stopped using a lot 3rd party apps (e.g. XMPP/IRC clients) which required mouse.
  - komali2 6y ago
    Oh interesting - the Ctrl caps change was something I picked up when first playing with emacs (before I knew any vim) and it was a game changer for me, even though I was just using mostly native vscode bindings at that time. I used to think even if I didn't end up switching to emacs, it'd always at least have given me that.
gopiandcode 6y ago
Good point, although it's also hard to justify Vim's 18MB vs Ed's 52K. Look's like Vim is just too bloated for the modern minimalism focused user.

barrkel 6y ago

Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC is about 150,000 MB. I have a little bit of difficulty justifying that on my SSD main drive. 114 MB for what is effectively an IDE for the long tail of programming languages is very easy to justify.

throwqqq 6y ago

That's 0.005 usd of hard drives. There is literally no one in the world who could notice the difference.

dmd 6y ago

Justify in terms of what, exactly? At current disk prices, 114 megabytes costs less than a third of a US penny. Even at minimum wage, you'd make that in under a second.

Dylan16807 6y ago
This is a tangent, but I wish storage was that simple. Too many devices come with non-expandable storage and don't have very big options to start with, even if you're willing to pay well above the normal rate.
svnpenn 6y ago
surely someone of your pedigree can understand, not everything is about money. Why should I use something 6 times larger? Without a benefit thats just software bloat from where I sit. and GNU is known for this, from glibc on up.
- anamexis 6y ago
  I think the key question is, what is it about?
- andai 6y ago
  Recently went through some GNU and BSD source code and the difference in file size was quite dramatic. GNU's really doing its own thing :)
- ramraj07 6y ago
  Unless you are actually running out of space, why is that even a criteria? Unless two programs are exactly feature-paired, why would you even think about how much storage they take up? The only explanation is that your work has made you think about space taken by programs for legitimate reasons and you are unable to think outside that mindset - when the cheapest phones ship with 50-100x more space than that, when a single minute of video from a regular persons phone could take up this much space, when the regular user consumes 10x that bandwidth every day in the internet? Who cares if it's 100 MB?

komali2 6y ago

I don't know of a "small" Emacs distribution. You can have Vim in Emacs with Evil Mode. IMO Emacs bindings are terrible no matter what and modal editing saved my career from an early death by wrist injury. But on top of Vim bindings you also get an entire, programmable IDE. I guess it's kinda big but like, so are most IDEs? But you can get many features at a lighter weight than other ones. Like yea if literally the only thing you wanna do is edit plain text and maybe at most have syntax highlighting, use plain old vim with some .vimrc setup. If you're finding yourself installing plugins to make vim be more like an IDE, at that point, just install an IDE, and no IDE handles vim bindings better than Emacs imo (and this is from extensive testing), so, there, use Emacs.

ngcc_hk 6y ago
May give this a try? https://develop.spacemacs.org/layers/+spacemacs/spacemacs-evil/README.html https://develop.spacemacs.org/layers/+spacemacs/spacemacs-ev...
- komali2 6y ago
  I use this now. It "just works" ™©® Check out the develop branch though. Last I checked master was waaaay behind.
clojureyoureyes 6y ago
> and modal editing saved my career from an early death by wrist injury The fun thing is I stopped experiencing wrist pain after I switched from Vim to Emacs (with ±native bindings), partly because I moved Ctrl to Caps almost instantly, partly because I stopped using a lot 3rd party apps (e.g. XMPP/IRC clients) which required mouse.
- komali2 6y ago
  Oh interesting - the Ctrl caps change was something I picked up when first playing with emacs (before I knew any vim) and it was a game changer for me, even though I was just using mostly native vscode bindings at that time. I used to think even if I didn't end up switching to emacs, it'd always at least have given me that.

gopiandcode 6y ago

Good point, although it's also hard to justify Vim's 18MB vs Ed's 52K. Look's like Vim is just too bloated for the modern minimalism focused user.