Lightweight Emacs (or "GTK+ minimal)

Lightweight Emacs (or "GTK+ minimal)

[Pierre Neidhardt]

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Hi Guix!

I'm working on reducing some package closures.
Looking at Emacs, it drags:

- llvm
- mesa
- guile
- cups / ghostscript / hplip
- wayland

Turns out that it seems to be all because of GTK+ (to be confirmed).

1. Does anyone have a recipe for Emacs without GTK+ (that can also
   display pictures)?

2. Can we make a GTK+-minimal?
   At first glance, we could strip some 300 MiB from the the 700 MiB
   GTK+ closure size.
   Also I wonder why guile is in there.

Thoughts?

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/

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Lightweight Emacs (or "GTK+ minimal)

[Leo Prikler]

Hello, Pierre

> Also I wonder why guile is in there.
According to guix graph, guile is pulled by gnutls.

> 1. Does anyone have a recipe for Emacs without GTK+ (that can also
>    display pictures)?
Not directly, but you could try building it with motif (package
lesstif) or Lucid/Athena (requires at least libxaw, not sure if all
dependencies for that are packaged).

> 2. Can we make a GTK+-minimal?
>    At first glance, we could strip some 300 MiB from the the 700 MiB
>    GTK+ closure size.
What features of GTK+ would this minimal variant include/exclude
respectively?

Regards,
Leo

Re: Lightweight Emacs (or "GTK+ minimal)

[philippe.brochard]

Leo Prikler <leo.prikler@student.tugraz.at> writes:

> Hello, Pierre
>
Hi,

>> Also I wonder why guile is in there.
> According to guix graph, guile is pulled by gnutls.
>
>> 1. Does anyone have a recipe for Emacs without GTK+ (that can also
>>    display pictures)?
> Not directly, but you could try building it with motif (package
> lesstif) or Lucid/Athena (requires at least libxaw, not sure if all
> dependencies for that are packaged).
>
I managed to build Emacs with Lucid with the following definition:

---8<-----------------------------------------------------------------------
(define-module (gnu packages emacs-lucid)
  #:use-module ((guix licenses) #:prefix license:)
  #:use-module (guix packages)
  #:use-module (guix download)
  #:use-module (guix git-download)
  #:use-module (guix build-system gnu)
  #:use-module (guix build-system glib-or-gtk)
  #:use-module (gnu packages)
  #:use-module (gnu packages acl)
  #:use-module (gnu packages autotools)
  #:use-module (gnu packages base)
  #:use-module (gnu packages compression)
  #:use-module (gnu packages fontutils)
  #:use-module (gnu packages fribidi)
  #:use-module (gnu packages gd)
  #:use-module (gnu packages gettext)
  #:use-module (gnu packages glib)
  #:use-module (gnu packages gnome) ; for librsvg
  #:use-module (gnu packages gtk)
  #:use-module (gnu packages guile)
  #:use-module (gnu packages image)
  #:use-module (gnu packages imagemagick)
  #:use-module (gnu packages linux) ; alsa-lib
  #:use-module (gnu packages ncurses)
  #:use-module (gnu packages pkg-config)
  #:use-module (gnu packages texinfo)
  #:use-module (gnu packages tls)
  #:use-module (gnu packages webkit)
  #:use-module (gnu packages xml)
  #:use-module (gnu packages xorg)
  #:use-module (guix utils)
  #:use-module (srfi srfi-1)
  #:use-module (gnu packages emacs))

(define-public emacs-lucid
  (package
    (inherit emacs)
    (name "emacs-lucid")
    (synopsis "The extensible, customizable, self-documenting text
editor (with lucid support)")
    (build-system gnu-build-system)
    (arguments
     (substitute-keyword-arguments (package-arguments emacs)
       ((#:configure-flags flags ''())
        `(cons "--with-x-toolkit=lucid" ,flags))))
    (inputs
     `(("libxaw" ,libxaw)
	   ,@(package-inputs emacs)))))

emacs-lucid
---8<-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Surely need more work to be polished.

Best regards,

Philippe

Re: Lightweight Emacs (or "GTK+ minimal)

[Pierre Neidhardt]

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Thanks for sharing!

emacs-lucid closure size is 783.7 MiB.
emacs is 1181.3 MiB.

The difference really shines when building EXWM against emacs-lucid: it
makes for a much lighter Guix System.

Most Emacs packages don't have "emacs" in their closure.
So if we add emacs-lucid, one of the few extra packages we would have to
add beside it would be emacs-lucid-exwm (or emacs-exwm-lucid).

Thoughts?

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/

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Re: Lightweight Emacs (or "GTK+ minimal)

[Pierre Neidhardt]

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We could also make emacs-lucid the default compiler for Emacs packages:
GTK is never needed there as far as I know.

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/

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Re: Lightweight Emacs (or "GTK+ minimal)

[zimoun]

Hi Pierre,

On Mon, 8 Jun 2020 at 19:54, Pierre Neidhardt <mail@ambrevar.xyz> wrote:
>
> We could also make emacs-lucid the default compiler for Emacs packages:
> GTK is never needed there as far as I know.

AFAIK, 'emacs-mininal' is used by the Emacs build system.  And I do
not think this minimal package comes with GTK+ support; even not any X
support, I guess.

BTW, here [1] you can find a patch to change the byte-compiler on-the-fly.

[1] http://issues.guix.gnu.org/41732#7

Cheers,
simon

Re: Lightweight Emacs (or "GTK+ minimal)

[Pierre Neidhardt]

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Oh, didn't know that, indeed, that even much better than emacs-lucid!

That said, the question still stands to have an full-fledged Emacs /
EXWM without GTK.

> BTW, here [1] you can find a patch to change the byte-compiler on-the-fly.
>
> [1] http://issues.guix.gnu.org/41732#7

This is a great idea!  Emacs package are fast enough to compile after all.

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/

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