Minimal functional Emacs

[U'll Be King Of The Stars <ullbeking@andrewnesbit.org>]

Hello all!

Please skip to "My question..." below the "====" line if you're not
interested in personal or background context.

I have been following this list on and off for more than twenty years.
Text editors interest me very much.

My "rite of passage" projects when I was a much younger and
inexperienced developer was to analyze the source code of different
editors and to write my own text editors.  Of course all roads led me
back to Emacs ;-)

I read the C core and the Elisp layer on top of this many times.
Personally I believe it's a masterpiece of software engineering.  Not
only this, but I learned a lot about how I would write requirements and
specifications for text editors[*].

Sources for this education include the GNU Emacs source code, reading
mailing lists and Usenet groups, Craig Finseth's book, and reading about
other Emacs editors, including their source code where available, e.g.,
Edwin and Hemlock.

======================================================================

My question...

I want to perform an experiment on text editor requirements and
specifications.  The first part would be to create a minimal working
editor based on GNU Emacs.  It would include the C core, the Elisp layer
(implementation of the Elisp manual), and few modes.  It would include
Fundamental mode and not many else, expect for those that support the
core specifications.

Has anybody done this before?

If "yes", please could you provide a link?

If the answer is "unknown", then I guess there is no secret except to
understand the Emacs build process and modify this.  Is this the right
direction?  This is documented well, e.g., in the Elisp manual.

After I've achieved this, I expect that the next stages will become
easier to tease out.  [*]Part of this involves documenting the
requirements and specifications I mentioned above.

Hints or tips would be greatly appreciated.  Thank you!!

Kind regards,

Andrew