https://opensource.com/article/17/1/jove-lightweight-alterna...
Think I might actually use it when I need to make a quick edit to something in the terminal, instead of `nano` or `emacs -nw`
Which counts as small now that nano has ballooned to ~400KB?
For comparison, Turbo Pascal packed an entire x86 IDE into ~40KB.[1]
If this is still true in the latest versions, I find it pretty amazing that something like this has been maintained all the way until 2023.
But the real question is: Can it run evil mode?!
Now, if I have to use an emacs-like editor I'd go with Jed. Somehow it seems much less daunting and much more friendly than the real thing.
I am currently using Fedora mostly because of this.
jed starts very fast and has much lower memory usage, so it is well suited for quick edits of configuration files and scripts and other workflows, where you start your editor in your shell, instead of the other way around.
emacs (through packages) can be turned into a custom IDE for a lot of languages, but takes more disk space and uses more RAM.
later, I ran memacs on my amiga locally, which was a better experience, had most of what I used, and seemed to work well - that was my introduction to writing code that would run on unix, locally (dcc).
enter a world of unix and x11, real life emacs, and xemacs became my thing (xemacs mostly, later), but jove was still useful: lighter weight on my sparc, seemed to just work, but I'll be darned if I didn't return back to emacs.
now, don't use emacs, when connected to a *nix box I drop back to vi (happy if vim is present), but since the advent of modern ide's that don't suck, I haven't opened emacs. I still miss zippy, Eliza, and the Hanoi towers though.
https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ErsatzEmacs
ErsatzEmacs
A ‘nonextensible imitation’ of a supposed implementation of an Emacs; by authoritative definition in RichardStallman’s 1981 publication, ‘EMACS: the extensible, customizable self-documenting display editor’, such a product is a contradiction in terms, a literal absurdity.
“Many other editors imitate the EMACS command set and display updating philosophy without providing extensibility. Despite that deficiency, and despite the greatly reduced set of features that results from it, these can be useful editors, though not as useful as an extensible one. For a computer with a small address space or lacking virtual memory, this is probably the best that can be done.
“The proliferation of such superficial facsimiles of EMACS has an unfortunate confusing effect: their users, knowing that they are using an imitation of EMACS, and never having seen EMACS itself, are led to believe that they are enjoying all the advantages of EMACS. Since any real-time display editor is a tremendous improvement over what they probably had before, they believe this readily. To prevent such confusion, we urge everyone to refer to a nonextensible imitation of EMACS as an ‘Ersatz EMACS’.“
– Richard M. Stallman. EmacsTheExtensibleCustomizableSelfDocumentingDisplayEditor. MIT AI Memo 519a, 26 March 1981.
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html
(I don't have a dog in this fight, but I do have a cat named Emacs, and have known RMS and used and programmed and developed display drivers and user interfaces for Emacs for a long long time.)
Nelson Spins Pip While Emacs Watches
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRaD5zH3Qdg
HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Authoring with UniPress Emacs on NeWS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26113192
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28419139
>I worked at UniPress on the Emacs display driver for the NeWS window system (the PostScript based window system that James Gosling also wrote), with Mike "Emacs Hacker Boss" Gallaher, who was charge of Emacs development at UniPress. One day during the 80's Mike and I were wandering around an East coast science fiction convention, and ran into RMS, who's a regular fixture at such events.
>Mike said: "Hello, Richard. I heard a rumor that your house burned down. That's terrible! Is it true?"
>RMS replied right back: "Yes, it did. But where you work, you probably heard about it in advance."
>Everybody laughed. It was a joke! Nobody's feelings were hurt. He's a funny guy, quick on his feet!
As government jobs go, there was a period of multiple weeks with veeery little to do for me. I would have really liked to kill the time with some programming, but of course, the computers had no compilers or anything like that installed, like I said, it was not an IT position. I'm not much of a Windows person myself, but a google search informed me that MS had its own version of JavaScript called jscript.
So after some playing around with it, I convinced myself that it should be possible to build an Emacs clone in jscript, and set out to do so. I wanted it to be fully compatible to Emacs Lisp with the goal that I could eventually install genuine Emacs modes.
Suddenly, my job was fun! As a testament to government jobs, I was working on this almost fulltime for a couple of weeks, and no-one noticed. And I got pretty far, but eventually, I did actually get more tasks to work on from my boss and development stalled. But I think that were probably the best few weeks during my whole time in that job (I quit not too soon after).
Also, some of the HPC platforms had terrible performance with autoconf and similar because they were terrible at fork/exec latency. Rather than doing copy-on-write virtual memory and fine grained time-slicing, like a typical workstation, they seemed to be doing stop-and-swap of whole processes or something. Something that took minutes on a typical workstation could take hours on the HPC service node.
Anyway, home sick with a fever, I got the weird impulse to figure ways to avoid forking subprocesses from the shell. A common one was invoking `expr` for arithmetic, so I started writing my own arithmetic library in pure Bourne shell.
It was decades ago, so I can't recite the actual code. But I remember that I tried a couple versions. My fever broke before I got around to multiplication and division, but I assumed I would just use naive iteration on top of addition/subtraction.
The first version was direct ASCII-encoded decimal operators that exploded the input strings into sequences of digits and iterated them using a case statement encoding the 10x10 sum and carry results. It used function call arg list to iterate the digits and reverse them, so it could then process sum digits from least to most significant.
Since I was processing operand strings from least to most significant digit, it was actually an arbitrary precision operator. I mapped the empty string operands as implicitly zero padded.
After that, I think I experimented with larger bases instead of decimal. E.g. split the string into groups of 2 or 3 decimal digits and encode 100x100 or 1000x1000 lookup tables. If I remember correctly, t wasn't very practical, as the larger case statements didn't really perform well.
Is it the usage of a Lisp? The idiosyncratic keybinds? The "everything-is-a-buffer" paradigm?
JOVE is by definition not an Emacs clone, it's just an Erzatz Emacs, a "nonextensible imitation".
Please see my other post with the "authoritative definition" of Emacs and the RMS quotes explaining the difference:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44632654
https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ErsatzEmacs
>A ‘nonextensible imitation’ of a supposed implementation of an Emacs; by authoritative definition in RichardStallman’s 1981 publication, ‘EMACS: the extensible, customizable self-documenting display editor’, such a product is a contradiction in terms, a literal absurdity.
And what about Jed's editor?
ww520•6mo ago
jeanlucas•6mo ago
jerrysievert•6mo ago
around 1998, I was working at a regional ISP, my main workstation was a sparc 5, but I had picked up a conversion box from ps-2 to sparc so I could use a Microsoft natural keyboard. emacs was still considered "eight megs and constantly swapping", but I had 96mb of memory in my sparc, and was able to run it.
Microsoft paid a visit to our isp, trying to make a deal, saw no windows anywhere but were excited to see my Microsoft keyboard. they asked about my computer, I told them I was running solaris on a sparc, and they were excited to ask me if I had run internet explorer, that they had just released for solaris. I looked at them horrified, and said, "I only have 96mb of ram in this, I can't run internet explorer!" - but I was able to run multiple windows of emacs, many terminals, a window manager, and netscape (just not the web server, because we ran apache)
mhandley•6mo ago
saltcured•6mo ago
On reflection, it probably explains why I've used Emacs for my whole career but never really got into any of the elisp customization or other advanced features. I still base my work in the shell (and filesystem) and launch ephemeral Emacs processes rather than living in it as some folks do. I never got interested in IDE functions like controlling compilers nor debuggers from within Emacs.
I never even wanted Emacs to split a terminal window into smaller "screens". I learned the key combo to abort that, much like I learned only enough vi to kill off an unintended launch. But, I do get a lot of mileage out of the XEmacs "frames", i.e. independent X windows all fronting the same set of editing buffers. But I also have terminal windows alongside that to do all the other things from the shell that some people prefer to do from inside the editor...
herewulf•6mo ago