Anybody ever use MicorEMACS

[littleman]

Did you like it? I am not an emacs user but I'm looking for a compact emacs for a system with limited space.

[Mohamed_E]

Never used microemacs itself, but used GNOME (Gnone is NOt MicroEmacs) as part of an email package we put together. It has most of the editing functionality of emacs, minus much of the extensibility. I found it fully adequate for editing, but then I never was a hard core emacs fan.

[dingman]

Never heard of it. I've used Jed and The (The Hessling Editor) for the purpose on my 486/25 with 6mb RAM and 132mb HD space, minus swap space. Currently that system runs Jed.

Do you have a URL for MicroEmacs? I'd be interested in trying it out.

[littleman]

[jasspa.com...]
[jasspa.com...]

While you are at it, can you test ride NanoEmacs? It is on the same download page. I am considerring incorperating it into my pet project.

Small foot print MicroEmacs may be run with no configuration files. This component may be built from the standard source. Use these binaries as is to give you Emacs on a box via a floppy with no configuration files.

It's all GPL.

[dingman]

fun toy ... still trying to decide if I like it better than Jed or not. If I decide I do, I may just use this as an excuse to learn to make .debs.

One thing that bothers me a bit is that compiling spews all sorts of errors about how this or that function is deprecated. "the use of `mktemp' is dangerous, better use `mkstemp'" bothers me a bit, too.

Also worthy of note, you do need to make sure that those *emf files are in a location where MicroEmacs will look for them - it's pretty close to unusable otherwise.

[littleman]

>>*emf files are in a location where MicroEmacs will look for them - it's pretty close to unusable otherwise.

That's why I was curious about NanoEmacs, it's suppose to be usable in a drop-in situation.

[dingman]

It seems to require at least one (ne.emf), and a lot of the bindings and such seem to be defined in them. Interestingly, even nanoemacs supports an X interface, but nanoemacs never shows the menubar. At least, it hasn't for me yet. I'm not done fiddling. It's not a necessary feature for someone who already knows Emacs fairly well, since pretty much everything I try works so I don't need the menus much, but one of the things that sold me on Emacs early on was the shallow learning curve (compared to vi) enabled by that menu. I'm also trying to convince the program to let me spell-check something - if it can do that without depending on aspell or ispell, then it might be a good replacement for Jed on my laptop.

[littleman]

Thanks for checking it out for me.

[littleman]

I just found Zile [zile.sourceforge.net], it is truly small when compared to EMACS.

From the apt-cache:

Zile is another Emacs-clone. Zile is a customizable,
self-documenting real-time display editor. Zile was written to
be as similar as possible to Emacs; every Emacs user should feel
at home with Zile.

Zile features: [zile.sourceforge.net]

*Small but fast and powerful.
It is very useful for small footprint installations (like on floppy disk) or quick editing sessions.
*8-bit clean.
Zile can operate with binary files.
*Looks like Emacs.
Most Zile key sequences and function names are identical to Emacs ones.
*Multi buffer editing w/multi level undo.
Zile can open an infinite number of files and can record an infinite sequence of undo operations.
*Multi window.
Zile can display multiple windows on the screen.
*Killing, yanking and registers.
The typical killing, yanking and register features of Emacs are available under Zile.
*Minibuffer completion.
Zile can complete the user written text. This is very useful for M-x commands and for selecting
files.
*Colors.
Zile makes use of the color capatibilities of the terminal if available.
*Source highlighting (``C'', ``C++'', and shell scripts).
Zile can highlight ``C'', ``C++'' source files and shell scripts for better reading.
*Auto fill (word wrap).
Zile automatically breaks the lines when they become too wide (if the Auto Fill Mode is enabled).

So EMACS users with a minute, could you tell me what you think? Dingman, if you have time? :-)

[dingman]

OK, I'm really late. Zile I've actually used before, and rather liked it. It's even already packaged for Debian, so 'apt-get install zile' works :) I haven't used it as my main editor for any extended period of time, because I discovered that I preferred Jed by a hair last time I was outfitting a low-resource machine as my primary system. I did like it, though, and the difference in my preference was a small enough thing that it might well ahve been a difference in how the defaults were set up by teh package maintainers or something simillarly small.

[littleman]

Thanks Dingman. Zile is quite a bit smaller than Jed
jed -> Size: 96214
jed-common -> Size: 535772
zile -> 97048
It's good to know that Zile is a worthy option for limited space. I'll probably end up adding it to my pet project.