Re: How to build a smaller emacs

[weber <hugows@gmail.com>]

On Sep 25, 6:33 am, litchie <licha...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sep 25, 5:10 pm, Jason Rumney <jasonrum...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On 25 Sep, 10:00, litchie <licha...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > Hi, All
>
> > > I want to build a smaller emacs, I mean the executable emacs.exe.
> > > Currently it is around 27M..
>
> > > I hope to reduce it to a smaller size so as to hope it can start
> > > faster.
>
> > Are you sure that it is the Emacs executable that is loading slowly,
> > and not things loaded from your .emacs? How quickly does emacs start
> > when you start it as "emacs -Q" from the command line?
>
> Yes, it is fast now, since my .emacs is almost empty, not loading any
> other packages.
> However, I would be very glad if it can be as fast as notepad :)
> I searched the web, but no result. Looks that people do not care about
> this problem.

I had that concern when I was a beginner using emacs too.
That happens because you're used to close your editor after you make
some modifications to a file.
That is not how most emacs users use emacs. Instead you keep it
running for as long as your machine is on, and you can use a 'server'
to open files from Explorer (i presume you're using windows, since you
mentioned notepad)

Maybe you will gain some insight from this:

http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/EmacsClient

"EmacsClient allows one to open a file for editing in an already
running Emacs. Because it doesn't start a new Emacs instance at each
invocation, you can setup EmacsClient as the default editor ..."

Alternatively, I recently found a cool piece of software called qemacs
that is a "quick emacs", but it probably doesn't extend with lisp, so
you would be missing most of the cool functionality.

Hope this could help,
weber