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Comment by harrygeez | Hacker News Reader

Not to be rude but Electron apps' level of footprint has always been a compromise and should not be used to justify extraneous resource usage. Emacs must be able to run from the console and resource-constrained systems like AWS instances, where 5mb of RAM can make a difference.

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Remember when people joked that EMACS stood for "Eats Memory And CPU Superbly?"

And then each generation reinvents its state-of-the-art abstracted memory hog...

Edit: more jokes, from 1985: https://github.com/sbp/lemacs/blob/master/etc/emacs.names

Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping

Precisely relevant to the issue at hand:

Eight Megs Ain't Comfortable Stack

If 5mb of ram makes the difference wouldn't that be the time to try mg[1] or edit remotely using tramp? Certainly agree that Electron should not be used as a justification.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mg_(editor)

As of late I've been using `emacs --daemon=some-name` on instances. I attach with `emacs-client -s some-name -t` after I ssh in and detach with `C-x 5-0`. Sometimes I'll run multiple named emacs daemons. This has worked really well to keep persistent independent workspaces on remote instances. Tramp was always a headache and running emacs in screen tends to introduce terminal color and keybinding problems.

How does mg differ from Emacs proper?

It's a text editor, not a lisp environment that edits text.

I once had a decent amount of fun splicing it with Lua, before deciding that I don't actually care about text editors...

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Re...

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