Re: How to build a smaller emacs

[weber <hugows@gmail.com>]

On Sep 25, 9:10 am, weber <hug...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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

And I shall also mention that my best experience with emacs on windows
is with this package:

http://www.ourcomments.org/Emacs/EmacsW32.html

You'll get this EmacsClient working "out of the box". Then you just
need to associate files you want to edit with emacs to the
emacsclientw.exe program and it will be almost immediate.

And then, sooner or later, you'll also realize that you also don't
need explorer so much, because you got a bunch of modes to help you
quickly open your files from inside emacs (ido, recentf, anything,
ffap, etc)

bye
-weber