How can I put together a small bare bones "Emacs for scripting" package?

[Mathias Dahl <mathias.dahl@gmail.com>]

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Hi,

I am writing a lot of tools for my own use at work in Emacs. Sometimes I
like to share these tools with friends who are not using Emacs. I have
tried this a few times and I have ended up zipping my whole Emacs file
structure together with some scripts to start Emacs and do the stuff for
them.

This approach kind of works, but today I got thinking: how little could I
actually copy from my Emacs installation to have basic scripting working?
And with basic scripting I mean basic file handling (creating, checking
for, deleting), buffer handling and basic text manipulation stuff.

Obviously I would need emacs.exe. On my Windows installation it's around 9
MB. A bit on the big side for a scripting engine, still not bad by today's
standards.

But what would I need more, for Emacs to even start? If I knew the bare
minimum of what is needed to start, I think I would be able to add in any
additional features just by copying those Elisp files.

Any thoughts, comments or pointers to further reading?

Thanks!

/Mathias

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