Icy-Repair8024 says he’s a new Emacs user who started using it believing that Emacs was a “lightweight” editor but upon discovering all its features now believes it’s bloated and wonders if he should give up on it. I have to admit that that’s the first time I’ve ever heard the claim that Emacs is a lightweight editor. You almost always hear the reverse. I suppose that compared to Electron-based editors you could argue that Emacs is comparatively lightweight but no one ever does.
It’s interesting to read the comments. Most of them
- Scoff at the idea that Emacs could be described as lightweight in any meaningful way, and
- Make the point that whatever bloat there is doesn’t matter because most features you don’t use aren’t loaded and don’t take up much space on the disk.
A bigger question, to my mind, is what, exactly, do we mean by bloated. Some of the comments make the point that Emacs is, in fact, more a Lisp Machine than an editor so of course it has a lot of features and the ability to easily add those features is one of its strengths. Its memory and disk storage footprints are modest by today’s standards so Emacs can’t reasonably be said to be a resource hog.
One of the commenters notes that Icy-Repair8024’s account history shows that he’s merely trolling. I don’t know if he is or not but if it was a troll, it didn’t work. There were no angry retorts or denunciations, just reasoned rebuttals that marshal the facts.
My takeaway is that of course Emacs isn’t lightweight in any way that matters and that we should stop obsessing about its so called bloat and instead embrace its many features whether or not we use any particular one.