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SamuelAdams

For the absolute lightweight, there is vi, eMacs, nano, etc.

For a UI I’ve been using VSCode. It is quite quick when you disable all extensions and most settings.

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> absolute lightweight

> eMacs

I love Emacs, but I don't see how a Lisp platform with a web browser, a Tetris implementation, and 4 terminal emulators (shell, term, ansi-term, eshell) can be considered 'lightweight'.

Ha, fair. Lightweight in this context is relative to Notepad or any modern Windows application.

Notepad.exe used to be <200kB. Emacs is tens of megabytes

Notepad was just a wrapper around some default win32 controls. Judging alone by exe size is not right, although probably a “statically linked” notepad would still be smaller than emacs

It is right by definition. Link emacs to those controls, shed some statically linked weight, and it will also become lighter!

To be fair you can say that of anything with a scripting engine, you could have all that in vim or stripped down emacs

Anything with a scripting engine isn't lightweight compared to (classic) Notepad!

(Also, a lot of that stuff comes bundled with Emacs out-of-the-box, further disqualifying it. Having a scripting engine is one thing, but having a scripting engine along with the whole rest of the jet is something else entirely!)

As the old saying goes, "emacs is an operating system lacking only a decent text editor".

Not so. Evil mode is a great text editor.

vi and emacs are absolutely not lightweight, let alone "absolutely lightweight".

If by vi you mean vim, then I agree, real vi is rather lite.

As someone famous said, "everything is relative" :) Compared to the new applications that have been coming out, Emacs and vim are a paragon of lightness.

I agree with you that vi is lighter than vim. I’ve seen more than a few instances of an OS just aliasing vi to vim.

On that note, why are the keybindings for vi on a “modern” Ubuntu different from fedoras? I remember having to mess with ^H in a vimrc or something to that effect to mimic the behavior I was expecting.

Sounds like the terminal (not vi) you're using has different defaults; backspace and delete are the two common keys that vary.

That makes a lot of sense. I'll do some research on different terminal behaviors. Thanks!

Vim is heavier, but vi is not at all "lite".

I do not know what you are saying. On NetBSD I see this with vi and vim editing the same file

      VSZ   RSS MAXRSS COMMAND
    13240  2896   2896 /usr/bin/vi x.txt
    45412 15212  15212 /usr/pkg/bin/vim x.txt

I'm sorry but you cannot use VS Code and lightweight in the same sentence.

Maybe joe, jed, or uEmacs.

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