[Slightly OT] Small GNU Emacs lookalike, UTF-8-able

[Slightly OT] Small GNU Emacs lookalike, UTF-8-able

[Leonardo Boiko]

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Hi.  I'm happy with GNU Emacs, it does internationalization affairs just
fine.  However, I want to edit texts in my old laptop, with only 24MiB
of RAM, and Emacs is unusable.  Even being the only application running,
and even with all minor modes disabled, it still swaps like crazy.

Thus I'm looking for a small-footprint Emacs clone.  My requirements are:

- Unicode and UTF-8 support, including CJK and Latin characters.
- As similar to Emacs as possible, with the same main keybindings.
- Either it's possible to run it in a Unicode terminal emulator
   (rxvt-unicode), or it's a X app accepting XIM input methods.
- Doesn't need its own input method system (I can use scim or uim).
- Doesn't need to have fancy programming modes.

I tried vimacs (breaks on utf), jed (couldn't setup utf), mined (too
weird), and e3 (cursor positioning code breaks on wide characters).
Another option would be optimizing Emacs for low memory consumption, if
that's possible. Suggestions?
-- 
Leonardo Boiko

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Re: [Slightly OT] Small GNU Emacs lookalike, UTF-8-able

[David Kastrup]

Leonardo Boiko <leoboiko@conectiva.com.br> writes:

> Hi.  I'm happy with GNU Emacs, it does internationalization affairs
> just fine.  However, I want to edit texts in my old laptop, with
> only 24MiB of RAM, and Emacs is unusable.  Even being the only
> application running, and even with all minor modes disabled, it
> still swaps like crazy.
>
> Thus I'm looking for a small-footprint Emacs clone.  My requirements
> are:
>
> - Unicode and UTF-8 support, including CJK and Latin characters.
> - As similar to Emacs as possible, with the same main keybindings.
> - Either it's possible to run it in a Unicode terminal emulator
>    (rxvt-unicode), or it's a X app accepting XIM input methods.
> - Doesn't need its own input method system (I can use scim or uim).
> - Doesn't need to have fancy programming modes.
>
> I tried vimacs (breaks on utf), jed (couldn't setup utf), mined (too
> weird), and e3 (cursor positioning code breaks on wide characters).
> Another option would be optimizing Emacs for low memory consumption, if
> that's possible. Suggestions?

Emacs is not really that terrible concerning memory consumptions.  I
suspect your window system to be involved with your problems here.
You should aim for a lean window manager like icewm and see whether
this allows you to run a straightforward Emacs.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum

Re: [Slightly OT] Small GNU Emacs lookalike, UTF-8-able

[Leonardo Boiko]

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David Kastrup wrote:
> Emacs is not really that terrible concerning memory consumptions.  I
> suspect your window system to be involved with your problems here.
> You should aim for a lean window manager like icewm and see whether
> this allows you to run a straightforward Emacs.

I was running ratpoison, the One True WM, which is very small.  Just for
the record I also tried simply Emacs, without a WM.  Not good.

I'm running Emacs CVS for better Unicode support.  Other possible causes 
of memory consumption are the use of Japanese fonts, old X 3 (it's the 
only one that runs with my video card), a hardware problem, and some 
weird behavior of NetBSD.  I suspect Emacs (blasphemy!).

Is someone else running CVS GNU Emacs in a system with 24MiB or less of
RAM?
-- 
Leonardo Boiko

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Re: [Slightly OT] Small GNU Emacs lookalike, UTF-8-able

[David Hansen]

On Mon, 14 Feb 2005 16:56:27 -0400 Leonardo Boiko wrote:

> Thus I'm looking for a small-footprint Emacs clone.

There's a dietlibc statically linked emacs (AFAIK linux only):

http://wftp.tu-chemnitz.de/pub/linux/dietlinux/42/emacs-21.3

Some link (couldn't find it now...) point's to a xemacs binary
too.  But I never used one of them (apart from starting emacs
once).

I'm using qemacs for quick editing task.  It claims to support
Unicode but it only supports HTML and C "font-locking" and
indentation.

David

Re: [Slightly OT] Small GNU Emacs lookalike, UTF-8-able

[David Hansen]

On Mon, 14 Feb 2005 23:27:30 +0100 David Hansen wrote:

> Some link (couldn't find it now...) point's to a xemacs binary
> too.  But I never used one of them (apart from starting emacs
> once).

Forgot to say from where:

http://www.lart.info/~bwachter/projects/dietlinux/

David

Re: [Slightly OT] Small GNU Emacs lookalike, UTF-8-able

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

Leonardo Boiko <leoboiko@conectiva.com.br> writes:

> I suspect Emacs (blasphemy!).

if you are building/running from cvs you can
try commenting out some of the files listed in
loadup.el.  run top(1) or similar before and
after the change to see if it made a difference.

thi

Re: [Slightly OT] Small GNU Emacs lookalike, UTF-8-able

[Oliver Scholz]

Leonardo Boiko <leoboiko@conectiva.com.br> writes:

> Hi.  I'm happy with GNU Emacs, it does internationalization affairs just
> fine.  However, I want to edit texts in my old laptop, with only 24MiB
> of RAM, and Emacs is unusable.  Even being the only application running,
> and even with all minor modes disabled, it still swaps like crazy.
>
> Thus I'm looking for a small-footprint Emacs clone.  My requirements are:
>
> - Unicode and UTF-8 support, including CJK and Latin characters.
> - As similar to Emacs as possible, with the same main keybindings.
> - Either it's possible to run it in a Unicode terminal emulator
>    (rxvt-unicode), or it's a X app accepting XIM input methods.
> - Doesn't need its own input method system (I can use scim or uim).
> - Doesn't need to have fancy programming modes.

You could have a look at qemacs.

http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemacs/

I have never tried it though, but it seems that it could be what you
want. (Ouch! I really hope that those boxes in the screenshots are
made with UCS characters.)

Is it impossible to use CJK characters on a tty (i.e. without X)?

    Oliver
-- 
27 Pluviôse an 213 de la Révolution
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité!

Re: [Slightly OT] Small GNU Emacs lookalike, UTF-8-able

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2005 17:45:05 -0400
> From: Leonardo Boiko <leoboiko@conectiva.com.br>
> 
> I'm running Emacs CVS for better Unicode support.  Other possible causes 
> of memory consumption are the use of Japanese fonts, old X 3 (it's the 
> only one that runs with my video card), a hardware problem, and some 
> weird behavior of NetBSD.  I suspect Emacs (blasphemy!).
> 
> Is someone else running CVS GNU Emacs in a system with 24MiB or less of
> RAM?

Could we perhaps move from suspicion and guesses to some quantitative
analysis?  Like, for example, what is the memory footprint of Emacs
on your machine when it starts paging?

I used to run Emacs on a 16-MB machine (no longer have that now), and
I don't recollect anything similar to the disaster you describe.

Re: [Slightly OT] Small GNU Emacs lookalike, UTF-8-able

[Stefan Monnier]

> Hi.  I'm happy with GNU Emacs, it does internationalization affairs just
> fine.  However, I want to edit texts in my old laptop, with only 24MiB
> of RAM, and Emacs is unusable.  Even being the only application running,
> and even with all minor modes disabled, it still swaps like crazy.

What's the process's size?
Which minor modes did you turn off?
What are the sizes of the files you're editing?
Are you running it under X11 or in a terminal emulator?


        Stefan

Re: [Slightly OT] Small GNU Emacs lookalike, UTF-8-able

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 15.02.2005 um 01:05 schrieb Oliver Scholz:

> Is it impossible to use CJK characters on a tty (i.e. without X)?

Yes, modern xterm and Apple's Terminal.app do so.

--
Greetings

   Pete

There's no place like ~
                           (UNIX Guru)

Re: [Slightly OT] Small GNU Emacs lookalike, UTF-8-able

[Oliver Scholz]

Peter Dyballa <Peter_Dyballa@Web.DE> writes:

> Am 15.02.2005 um 01:05 schrieb Oliver Scholz:
>
>> Is it impossible to use CJK characters on a tty (i.e. without X)?
>
> Yes, modern xterm and Apple's Terminal.app do so.
[...]

I am aware of that, I rather meant terminals without X (or another
GUI), i.e. tty like in "linux tty". I asked this because if the OP
does not have much memory, it might be a good idea to get rid of X at
all, if possible. I once had Emacs 20 on a i486 Laptop with 8 MB Ram
and it was fine on the console, but X and Emacs (and Emacs/W3, now
that I mention it ...) was a bit too much to feel comfortable.

    Oliver
-- 
28 Pluviôse an 213 de la Révolution
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité!

Re: [Slightly OT] Small GNU Emacs lookalike, UTF-8-able

[Leonardo Boiko]

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Many moons later...

I did run top to try to understand what's up with my emacs.  I came to
the conclusion that what makes it grow is exactly the thing I want to
use this old notebook for; that is, Japanese and Asian text processing
with Unicode.  The top results are online[1].

Later I'll try anthy instead of quail-japanese, but my guess is that it
won't help too much.  So I found an old EDO module in our equivalent to
Ebay to increase my laptop's memory.   70MiB should be more than enough
for shikigami to edit Japanese text files.

As for QEmacs, I couldn't even compile it  :)

References:
[1] http://leoboiko.8x.com.br/misc/emacs-top
--
Leonardo Boiko

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