terse editor

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

On Fri, Feb 11, 2005 at 10:18:31PM -0500, David Hummel wrote:
> The memory footprint of GNU emacs is quite a bit higher than vim.  This
> is for a 16229 byte file I was just editing:
> 
> $ ps aux | head -1; ps aux | egrep 'emacs|vim'
> USER       PID %CPU %MEM   VSZ  RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
> hummel    4088  0.0  0.2  5224 2640 pts/1    S+   22:12   0:00 vim hybselect.cgi
> hummel    4103  0.4  0.7 11532 7384 pts/2    S    22:12   0:00 emacs -bg black -fg green hybselect.cgi

vi is small enough that a not-that-reduced version can fit in a small
embedded box.  But on "real" computers emacs is looking small these
days.  The original question compared them both to Eclipse.  That got
me wondering so I typed "emerge eclipse", and when it got the eclipse
itself it warned that my 3/4 GB laptop didn't have as much memory as
recommended to compile it.  And running it at a minimal state it has
15 instances of java running, each taking up plenty of RAM.  I have to
make my "top" window as tall as my screen to see my memory sorted two
instances of emacs.  My various menu bar applets all seem to take up
far more memory than emacs with its own X window.

Yes, emacs uses more RAM than does vi, but in many cases circa 2005
both get lost in the noise.

-kb