I love Emacs. It’s the editor I grew up with. I’ve been using it for over 30 years. I don’t think I could switch to another editor now if I wanted to. There’s even an excellent GUI port of it to MacOS called Aquamacs that I use all the time.
I come not to praise Emacs but not to bury it, either.
Emacs is, how can I say this gently… fucking huge. Some people joke about just skipping the operating system and booting directly into Emacs.
So of course, one of the first things that I do when I set up a new computer is install a version of Emacs on it.
I am putting together a Linux installation for a small low power, single board computer that I’m playing with. I’m installing Debian Linux on a compact flash card on the computer. And, yes, I want Emacs.
There are stripped down Emacs-clone alternatives but I naively went whole hog and did:
apt-get install emacs
to get proper GNU Emacs.
And what did it drag along with it? Granted I had only a minimal Debian install on the card already but I was a little surprised to find that in order to install Emacs, Debian also had to install:
gcrypt, Kerberos 5, Perl, LDAP, cpp, expat, libasound, XML
I can’t honestly say that I was surprised that it also installed X11; I knew that was coming whether I wanted and needed it or not.
Likely some of this was necessary in order to build tools that were used to help install Emacs; I don’t know and I don’t care enough to find out. It seems entirely conceivable to me that Emacs itself is linked against encryption libraries and authentication libraries, a sound library and tools for processing XML files.
I am glad that I’m using a 32GB flash card, because now I’m installing 327MB of Arduino support (Python! more X11! gcc! jdk! ogg vorbis!! (seriously?)). Who knows how big that would’ve been if I hadn’t already installed Emacs?
I was going to install gcc next but it looks like between Emacs and the Arduino install that’s already been taken care of.
ooh. whatcha doing with the arduino?
Sensors. I want to be able to throw around a few wireless thermometers on an XBee mesh network. Also, a sensor to let us know when the mailbox door has been opened (can’t see the mailbox from the house).
Oh, very cool.
Remember when Emacs took all of 7MB of virtual memory on the VAX? We thought it was a bloated pig then. It’s current using 277MB on my Linux machine. Of course I’m still running it.
Yeah, memory footprints today are nuts compared to what we thought was bad in the 80’s!