Most of you know that I really, really love Emacs but it wouldn’t occur to me to describe it as “light weight.” For most of its life, a major complaint about Emacs was that it was so heavy weight. Who can forget the retronym Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping? Back when it was coined, 8 megabytes was a lot of memory so the joke is more damning than it may seem to our modern ears.
Therefore, I was a bit surprised when I saw this tweet
Apps using significant energy: Visual Studio Code. JavaScript! Back to #Emacs. Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping – but so lightweight.
— Stefan Arentz ☕️ (@satefan) July 2, 2016
Emacs? Light weight? I just smiled and moved on. Later, though, I came across this reddit post that once again described Emacs as light weight.
I’ve been using Emacs or Vim for a long time and don’t have any experience with the newer editors and IDEs but seeing Emacs described as light weight makes me wonder what their performance is like. One thing for sure, it makes me glad I’m an Emacs user, whether or not it’s light weight.