![]() I've been unable to find in-application help files, and the man page bundled with it is minimal. It's by no means a GNU Emacs replacement, though, and if you wander too far in search of advanced features, you'll find out why it's only 1.2MB. But some little touches are refreshing: Tab completion happens in a buffer, you can run shell commands from the mini-buffer, and you have a good assortment of functions available. ![]() Zile acts a little more like GNU Emacs than µemacs or Jove, but it's still a minimal experience. Libpthread.so.0 => /lib64/libpthread.so.0 Libncurses.so.5 => /lib64/libncurses.so.5 You can exclude some library links by disabling features during configuration, but here are the defaults: $ ldd src/zile Of the lightweight emacsen I use, it's also the most complex. The binary produced in the end is 1.2MB, making this the heaviest of the lightweight emacsen I use, but compared to even GNU Emacs without X (which is 14MB on my system), it's relatively trivial. configureĬompiling it from source takes me a minute on one core or about 50 seconds on six cores (the configuration process is the long part). The build process for the example editor (supposedly called Zemacs, although the binary it renders is named zile) is the standard Autotools procedure: $. It's a great idea and probably very useful, but as I have no interest in making my own editor, I just use the example implementation that ships with its codebase as a pleasant, lightweight emacs. It's meant as a framework to enable people to quickly develop their own custom text editor without having to reinvent common data structures. GNU Zile claims to be a development kit for text editors. While not as liberal a policy as I typically prefer, it's a good-enough license for personal use just don't build a business around it. You're free to share, use, and modify µemacs, but you can't do anything commercial with it. The license for µemacs is custom to the project with a non-commercial condition. The help page for µemacs is very complete, so use M-x help to get familiar with what it has available. The search function is also a little different from what you may be used to: instead of C-s, it's M-s, which could make all the difference if your terminal emulator accepts Ctrl+S as a freeze command. There's no eval command, so you won't use µemacs for Lisp programming. For instance, there's no vertical buffer split, although there is a horizontal split. You can open files and edit them without ever realizing you're not in GNU Emacs. The keyboard shortcuts are just as you'd expect. Libtermcap.so.2 => /lib64/libtermcap.so.2 The resulting binary is independent enough to run on most Linux boxes: $ ldd em For instance, it's easy enough to send it to yourself by email or over Signal, and certainly small enough to keep handy on every thumb drive or SD card you own.īy default, Linus's version expects libcurses, but you can override this setting in the Makefile so that it uses libtermcap instead. Admittedly, that's not literally "micro" compared to the typical size of a GNU Emacs download (1 millionth of 70MB is 70 bytes, by my calculation), but it's respectably small. It takes me five seconds to compile µemacs at the slowest setting I can impose on my computer, and the resulting binary is a mere 493KB. ![]() One user who maintains a personal version of µemacs is a programmer named Linus Torvalds, and his copy is available from his website, (which also, incidentally, includes a small side project of his called Linux). MicroEmacs, also known as uemacs (as in the Greek letter µ, which denotes "micro" in scientific notation), was written by Dave Conroy, but there's a long list of users who have cloned it and modified it. If you're looking for a basic, fast, and efficient editor that isn't Vim, you'll likely be happy with any of these options. Quite the contrary, GNU Emacs is probably one of the largest.įortunately, GNU Emacs is so popular that other emacs implementations tend to mimic most of the GNU version's basic controls. GNU Emacs is the most famous emacsen (yes, the -en suffix is used to describe many emacs, as in the word "oxen"), but it's not the only one. For instance, if you often found yourself typing "teh" instead of "the," you could either go in and correct each one manually (no small feat when your editor can't even load the entire document into memory, as was often the case in the early 1980s), or you could invoke a macro to perform a quick swap of the "e" and "h."Įventually, these macros were bundled together into a package called editing macros, or EMACS for short. Before there was GNU Emacs, there were collections of batch process scripts (called macros) that could perform common tasks for a user. ![]() The term "emacs" is a somewhat generic term in the way that only open source produces, and a portmanteau. ![]()
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