I used to use a light editor for quick edits, jed, but now I use Emacs too. It turns out that Emacs in text mode without a full configuration (so: "emacs -Q -nw

I used to use a light editor for quick edits, jed, but now I use Emacs too. It turns out that Emacs in text mode without a full configuration (so: "emacs -Q -nw") starts nearly instantly on a few years old laptop, so I just aliased jed to this command. It's about ~110ms for start+exit, good enough for me. And all of Emacs is there, even my init if needed.