And yes. Complaining about 100mb nowadays is ridiculous. You probably have larger logfiles sitting somewhere in disk doing nothing right now, regardless of your OS.
And those log files can be easily wiped or rotated (i.e. compressed, which can greatly reduce their size), as they should. You do not do the same with your other files, do you?
As someone mentioned, Emacs is over 100 MB, so it does not have to be hypothetical. That said, I use emacs (and vim) interchangeably and I have nothing against it. I have LibreOffice, too, which is also a behemoth, but so is Haskell with its modules that I see getting updated regularly. In any case, I still prefer KISS and the fewer bloat as possible.
141MB: emacs-30.1-nodeps.zip
75MB: emacs-30.1-installer.exe (better compression? Contents seem similar)
27MB helix-25.07-x86_64-windows.zip
So there's still an Emacs distinction, it seems
(*not that these size differences matter in practice -- helix's "bulk" is all in compiled language grammars, each of which is not loaded unless you use the language.)
Alpine package sizes:
- helix 10.3MiB (+ 3 dependencies: musl, libgcc, sh)
- emacs 14.5MiB (+ 1 dependency: musl)
- neovim 18.7MiB (+ 9 dependencies musl, lua, tree-sitter, libint, libluv, unibilium, utf8proc, libuv, libluajit))
So it doesn't seem out of the ordinary for popular cli editors, if you're worried about smaller environments.
But regardless, if someone were to only ever installing Helix on their system, you might have a point. But you probably want to install many applications and if every applications starts wasting storage, you will soon run out of space.
But for desktop use, I think it's a good default to have everything "just work" out-of-the-box, because 110mb is nothing for typical developer machines.
Out of curiosity, what hardware are you picturing those people running it on?
I've run Helix on a Daylight computer, which has a deliberately underpowered CPU (MediaTek Helio G99) and it's incredibly fast/snappy. 110mb is still near-trivial on the 128GB storage.
If you're (validly) worried about bloated software, note that Alpine's helix package is 10.3MB, which is smaller than their Neovim or Emacs packages. Individual language files are small (python is ~500kb uncompressed), there are just hundreds of supported languages. But installed ones are not loaded unless you edit the language.
> It comes with no grammars installed and it's up to the user to install what they need ... and the grammars can be shared with other editors.