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Minimal Emacs? (lemmy.blahaj.zone)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by moonsnotreal@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/emacs@lemmy.ml

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I have been using vim for forever and I have dabbled in using emacs throughout the years. Emacs with the evil mode bindings is very comfortable, and I prefer org-mode over markdown (at least for the type of notes I do).

The main thing that stops me from using emacs though is how bloated it is. I don't want the games, web browser, email client, etc. Is there a way to remove those features from a standard install or from source?

Edit: I guess I'll stick with vim for now. It looks like Neovim might be more what I'm looking for instead of Emacs

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[–] spauldo@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I should have clarified - the configure script is only for stuff built in to the C source code. It won't get rid of the games and whatnot, but remove support for things like sound, graphics formats, bignums, etc.

I suppose you could try deleting stuff out of /usr/share/emacs, but I wouldn't recommend it.

[–] moonsnotreal@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Huh. I'll try the fork that someone else suggested then.

[–] spauldo@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

If you're talking about Microemacs, it's not a fork. It's unrelated to GNU Emacs. The name Emacs has a long twisted history going back to PDP-10 machines so you'll find various text editors with "Emacs" in their name.

The only active fork of GNU Emacs I know of off the top of my head is Remacs, which is a project to replace the C code in Emacs with Rust. It's probably not what you're looking for.

Honestly, I think you're overestimating the impact of the "bloat" in Emacs. Emacs starts up with a very minimal set of features (compared to what is available) and doesn't really push any of that on you. If you turn off the menu bar (which I don't recommend), you'd have to search for it intentionally to find it.

Bear in mind that GNU Emacs is not a text editor. GNU Emacs has a text editor. It's a platform for Lisp applications. The text editor is just what you get by default when you don't ask for anything else.