Re: Lightweight, C-only implementation of Emacs

[Ergus via "Emacs development discussions." <emacs-devel@gnu.org>]

Sorry for necrobumping this thread, but after some time I have
discovered Qemacs and tried for a while (a week).

https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/qemacs

I need to say that it is a more functional C-only alternative to emacs
because unlike zile:

- Does not depend of gnulib, gc, or external non-standard libraries or
  emacs itself. (zile needs emacs to run the tests)
- Not even a complex autotools file is needed. (gnulib integration is
  very hard and for some reason they don't support anything else than
  autotools... which sometimes is too complex for small projects and
  limits integration with other tools like CMake and enforces the use
  and knowledge of autotools/autoconf and so on)
- It have syntax-highlight for some of the common languages like
  C/Rust/swift/perl and others.
- It has search candidates highlight.
- It seems to be very modular to implement modules and languages modes
  (In C of course).
- It has some simple support for org-mode
- Allows vertical splits not only horizontal.
- It has gui and tui interfaces (with -nw as usual, zile does not have
- gui version)
- Multiplatform support (win32 included, and specialization for some
  terminals like xterm and so on.)
- Provides and API to create plugins in C without recompiling the
  editor, as it loads .so files.
- No garbage collection is needed.
- Line numbers functionality supported.
- utf-8 support and bidirectional editing.

I should say that I added some primitive support for linum, colors, fill
 column-indicator and mouse interaction to zile in my personal fork on
 github... but couldn't ever commit it as I never got a reply to join to
 the project. So I freely added some non-gnu changes like migrate it to
 CMake But if anyone is interested:

https://github.com/Ergus/Zile

Limitations:

- No lisp machine at all (configuration is in a file with a C-like
  syntax) which from some points of view is not a limitation. (
  performance, no gc, no C-to-lisp code api needed, no
  byte-compiler/lisp interpreter to maintain)
- Extensibility is more complex as it requires compiling the plugin.
- Have had only 2 contributors in it's history, which is good because
  all the code is very organized and standard. So there is not community
  there. (but actually is the same with Zile)
- Still developed with CVS, I asket to move it to git... but who knows
  if I even get a reply.
- It is in savannah but it is a nongnu project.
- The documentation is very simple... maybe too short.

Hope this helps.

On Wed, Aug 21, 2019 at 03:58:27PM -0700, chad wrote:
>Linus Torvalds supposedly uses a version of mg (formerly Micro GNU Emacs)
>that is maintained along with the Linux kernel:
>
>  https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/editors/uemacs/uemacs.git
>
>Hope that helps,
>~Chad
>
>On Sat, Aug 17, 2019 at 6:27 PM Jeffrey Walton <noloader@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi Everyone,
>>
>> I'm trying to find a lightweight C-only implementation of Emacs for
>> Linux. I need it for situations like this:
>> https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/9682 .
>>
>> Searching is pretty much useless due to irrelevant results. I found
>> Zile at https://www.gnu.org/software/software.html#allgnupkgs , but it
>> fails to build (it configures OK).
>>
>> I understand I will probably loose some functionality due to decoupling
>> Lisp.
>>
>> Does anyone have a list of Emacs replacements?
>>
>> Thanks in advance.
>>
>> Jeff
>>
>>