Over at the Emacs subreddit, emacff wants to know how he can eliminate Emacs “bloat”. It’s a harmless question and if it’s purpose was trolling, it largely failed as emacff received reasonable answers to his question. Still, it’s annoying. We see this sort of question all the time. Someone is in a tizzy because Emacs includes the doctor or tetris commands or something else the complainer doesn’t see the point of.
There are two answers to these complaints. The general answer is that Emacs is best thought of as a modern day Lisp Machine so of course it has functions not related to editing just as the original Lisp Machines did. The editor is just one function of many.
The specific answers is that these functions—and, indeed, many others—use virtually no resources except for a tiny bit of disk space. That’s because many Emacs functions aren’t loaded until they’re called so the only resources they’re using is the disk space that holds their code. On a modern computer that’s literally in the noise as far as disk space is concerned.
Emacs users are famous for spending a huge number of cycles fiddling with their editor configuration and I suppose worrying about removing unwanted functionality is another example of that. Except users tweak their configuration to improve their workflow. Eliminating tetris from your Emacs build doesn’t improve anything. It just wastes your time. To my mind, it’s like complaining about some application your OS provides but that you don’t use. Sure, you can get rid of it. Until the next OS update. Similarly with Emacs. All you’re doing is introducing a reoccurring task to be performed every time you update your editor.
It is, of course, possible to do what emacff wants but it’s a lot of work and requires technical skill that many users—especially those who ask questions like this—are unlikely to have.