Hacker News Reader

Comment by Faaak | Hacker News Reader

Looks nice, but having a 1.1MB webpage with 7 different fonts seems somewhat wrong to me... We should start thinking about mobile clients who have to pay these MB.

View on HN

If there's one product whose website can probably get away with not caring about mobile, it's a power-user text editor from the 1970s.

I run Emacs under termux on my Nexus 6P. Works great with exactly the same config I use on the desktop.

What keyboard do you use? Key combos are soooo slow on a touchscreen keyboard.

I have a Logitech k480 for my TV and Nexus 9. Works nicely with termux, Emacs and similar software.

An old HP Touchpad Bluetooth keyboard. It works fine though not having a meta key on the left is a bit of a pain.

But the site has a responsive layout clearly designed to look nice on mobile screens (with hamburger menu and everything :), so, at least on some level, they are caring about mobile.

BTW, the website looks really nice. Kudos!

Also looks nice on Emacs' built-in web wowser (M-x eww)

Yeah, if you can't handle a meg of downloads, are you sure you can handle the hundreds of megs of memory? :)

1980s :)

EMACS is from the 1970s, GNU Emacs 1980s...

I think they should start to consider mobile clients once those have a hyper key...

I'm all for lean sites but emacs' site is one of those where I just don't care. Emacs users are sitting in front of a workstation and if they don't have a proper internet connection, they just install it from their unix distribution's CD/DVD.

And it is also kind of adequate to have a bloated website... anyone remembers the joke to name a kernel "emacs" so that it says "LILO booting emacs..." at startup? ;)

Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping (back when 8 MB was a lot)

Or, more appropriate when explaining why it's not a good fit for touchscreens:

Esc Meta Alt Control Shift

They use Fira Sans and Fira Mono in a bunch of different weights.

Looking at the source for <http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/fira.css>, I can't help but wonder if mobile^W OS vendors could make the Web faster for their users if they'd just bundle every single popular free (beer and/or speech) font with their OSs and keep the fonts up-to-date.

Of course, you should be sending along far-future Expires and Cache-Control headers, but this'll still be slower than local() accessing fonts that're bundled with the OS when someone visits a new site.

Then the question: which fonts should they bundle!? etc...

they're working toward making it Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping

Yea, it's a bit heavy of a load.

I clicked the link, came back, and read this commend. Doesn't mean much, but it would have helped if the site was a tad smaller.

Given what people have observed about mean WWW page size ...

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9980228

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11548816

... what can be said now about the relative sizes of GNU emacs and its own WWW page? (-:

For those who might not realise it, the distribution is 600kb(!) in fonts, 400k in images, 100k in other stuff

Do most plans not have unlimited data in America?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com