zile: A lighter, cleaner emacs

I was wondering if I could get to the end of the alphabet without dipping again into the vi–emacs holy war. I guess not, since this is zile.

zile is a text editor of course, bearing the impress of the GNU project and blessed by the Arch Linux overlords with the explicit promise that this one is smaller and faster than the original emacs.

For my own part, it does feel a lot like full-blown emacs, or at least the little of emacs that I ever see. I thought I remembered a menu bar of some sort though, and it appears the default zile environment lacks that.

No matter. I am comfortable in the knowledge that this rendition of the emacs juggernaut has every bit the vigor of its progenitor, but none of the fat. 🙄

Which doesn’t really bother me, in any case. I’ll go out on a limb and say that it’s been a decade since emacs’ reported weight problem actually held anyone back from doing their job.

I feel somewhat qualified to make that statement, since it was roughly five years ago that I stripped everything down to a 100Mhz Pentium with 16Mb, and found that emacs was a little chubby. If I could get things done at 100Mhz on a 12-year-old machine and complain of a little drag, I doubt most modern computer users really notice the added burden of the full emacs suite.

But to each his own, and if it burns a hole in your conscience to know that there is a lighter, smoother version of emacs that will not monopolize your free RAM, by all means, install it. I salute you.