Emacs @lemmy.ml moonsnotreal @lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 yr. ago

Minimal Emacs?

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

13 comments

I tried Emacs six times before liking it. The time it stuck was when I was editing some code in a language where the include/import statements almost matched the directory structure in the filesystem, but didn't. So, in Vim, I could cursor over an include statement, type gf... and not quite be able to instantly open up the included file. The way gf worked was that it was written in C as part of Vim, and to tell it where to look was a matter of configuration. But I needed a bit of code instead, to make up a couple of places in the filesystem to look on the fly, when I wanted to find-file-at-point (the Emacs term for Vim's gf functionality). Not only was find-file-at-point written in Elisp, but it already had a place where you could hook some custom code in, and documentation about how to do it. The documentation was available inside the editor (as you might expect from using Vim's :help), but it also had a link straight to the Elisp source. I was able to try out my function, change, and try again without restarting Emacs, and debug it step-by-step using edebug.

Anyway - have fun with Neovim. I hear it's spiffy. :)
The majority of those features are written as elisp libraries. They're only loaded if you use them. Unless you're concerned with disk space (why? Disk space is cheap), they aren't the source of your bloat.

The features that are built-in can be changed via the configure script, assuming you don't mind compiling Emacs.

If Emacs feels sluggish, then you're probably loading unnecessary things in your init.el. Or you're on Windows and your virus scanner is fighting with it (that happens to me on my work laptop with Trend Micro).

Edit: org-mode is fairly large and can take a bit to load the first time. Could that be what you're experiencing?
- It's not a problem of emacs being slow, I just really dislike the clutter. Thanks for letting me know about the config script!
  
  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.
- Edit: org-mode is fairly large and can take a bit to load the first time.
  
  If you use native compilation, even org-mode flies.
  
  Assuming you're on UNIX and have relatively new hardware, sure. On my Haswell-based Xeon setup at home (built in 2014, runs a Debian variant) you get a second or two delay. On my Xeon-based Dell work laptop (bought in 2018, runs Windows with WSL1), it's about the same. Both use native compilation.
  
  org-mode is a beast.
- @spauldo @moonsnotreal what do you say to load everything from dotemacs ? :D
  
  I load most things I use in my init.el. I'm not worried about startup times because I rarely restart Emacs.
Jasspa microemacs? No unicode support though AFAIK and no real development anymore...
- Does microemacs even support org?
  
  Ha, probably not. It has a macro language (not lisp, but Turing complete AFAIK) with language bindings, syntax highlighting & customizable indentation... to be honest I never got into emacs, so I don't even really know what org mode is :).

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