Yet we have entire editors that do far less that require a entire web browser and take 100+ Meg's of ram to run.
Edit: gigabytes of ram.
That's overkill too.
"There are two kinds of overkill: the sort of overkill that lets you write Gameboy emulators, or Enterprise overkill; the sort of overkill that’s only bloat. I have no patience for useless things."
Who said that?
username223
"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
In the Emacs case, Stallman just made that explicit, implementing Lisp from the start.
Quite a lot of things we do on the computer involves manipulating text.