Minimal functional Emacs

Minimal functional Emacs

[U'll Be King Of The Stars]

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

Re: Minimal functional Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: U'll Be King Of The Stars <ullbeking@andrewnesbit.org>
> Date: Thu, 4 Mar 2021 22:38:11 +0000
> 
> 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?

I'm not sure about the answer to that, because it sounds like what you
have in "emacs -Q -D" is that "minimal Emacs".  If that isn't so,
please tell why, and we could then take it from there.

Re: Minimal functional Emacs

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

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() U'll Be King Of The Stars <ullbeking@andrewnesbit.org>
() Thu, 4 Mar 2021 22:38:11 +0000

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

I'm not sure about state of the art Emacs, but IME porting GNU
Emacs 22 to VMS, i found temacs to be "useful enough" as a
"minimal function emacs".  (This was about twenty years ago.)

I suppose it all depends on what you consider minimal.

Between temacs and ‘emacs -Q’ lies loadup.el (and probably some
other stuff, nowadays).  You can probably find hours of fun :-D
shooting .el fish in the loadup.el barrel...

-- 
Thien-Thi Nguyen -----------------------------------------------
 (defun responsep (query)               ; (2021) Software Libero
   (pcase (context query)               ;       = Dissenso Etico
     (`(technical ,ml) (correctp ml))
     ...))                              748E A0E8 1CB8 A748 9BFA
--------------------------------------- 6CE4 6703 2224 4C80 7502


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emacs22 migration to VMS (was: Minimal functional Emacs)

[andrés ramírez]

Hi. Thien.

>>>>> "Thien-Thi" == Thien-Thi Nguyen <ttn@gnuvola.org> writes:


[...]

    Thien-Thi> I'm not sure about state of the art Emacs, but IME
    Thien-Thi> porting GNU Emacs 22 to VMS


Is there a link or article about this migration. It should have been
fun.

[...]

Best Regards
Andrés Ramírez

Re: emacs22 migration to VMS

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

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() andrés ramírez <rrandresf@gmail.com>
() Fri, 05 Mar 2021 13:46:43 +0000

   Is there a link or article about this migration. It should
   have been fun.

Last i checked, there was only the unmerged branch (search for
something w/ "vms" or "ttn").  There might be still be some
mention on EmacsWiki.

Gist: the porting job was a paid gig, and when funding ended, i
lost interest.  Too, i think there was an official dropping of
VMS as a porting target going on around that time.  (Hence the
"unmerged" status.)

IIRC, yes, it was moderately fun.  I didn't have a VMS box of my
own, so all development work (including testing w/ X) was done
cross-Atlantic on a real VAX/VMS cluster in Pennsylvania (USA).
(I was living in Italy at the time.)  DCL is kind of cool...

If someone were to organize a crowd-funding drive to merge that
branch (and maybe try porting something "this century" :-D), i'd
be happy to hack Emacs for money, again.  (You manage, i hack,
we both get paid.)  These days, post-Snowden, i would probably
require a local box, though, so keep in mind that's all part of
the "manage" side of things...  /me backs away nervously...

-- 
Thien-Thi Nguyen -----------------------------------------------
 (defun responsep (query)               ; (2021) Software Libero
   (pcase (context query)               ;       = Dissenso Etico
     (`(technical ,ml) (correctp ml))
     ...))                              748E A0E8 1CB8 A748 9BFA
--------------------------------------- 6CE4 6703 2224 4C80 7502


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Re: Minimal functional Emacs

[Stefan Monnier]

> I'm not sure about state of the art Emacs, but IME porting GNU
> Emacs 22 to VMS, i found temacs to be "useful enough" as a
> "minimal function emacs".  (This was about twenty years ago.)

I suspect that this is not the case any more because of how we have
slowly moved some code from C to ELisp.


        Stefan