Re: Emacs's popularity

[Richard Riley]

"Lennart Borgman" <lennart.borgman@gmail.com> writes:

> On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 12:40 AM, Richard Riley <rileyrgdev@gmail.com> wrote:
>> "Lennart Borgman" <lennart.borgman@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 11:28 PM, Richard Riley <rileyrgdev@gmail.com> 
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>>>> But Vim is not only installed; it's really used a lot. In Debian Vim has
>>>>>> always been a bit more popular than Emacs but in the first half of 2007
>>>>>> Vim really got popular (around Vim 7.1 and Debian 4.0 release). This
>>>>>> "used actively" graph compares vim-common, emacs21-bin-common and
>>>>>> emacs22-bin-common packages:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>    http://preview.tinyurl.com/5thmmx
>>>>>
>>>>> That is a bit strange since the vi emulator Viper in Emacs is now so good.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Not strange at all Lennart, Why would someone run the Emacs OS to run
>>>> emulated vim  when they can run the real thing in 100th of the
>>>> footprint?
>>>
>>> Exactly why do you think the footprint matter?
>>
>> Are you serious?
>
> Well, yes. I did not even mention that you greatly exaggerated the
> footprint differences.

Perception and reality are two different things. People assume Emacs is heavy.

>
>> Memory usage, start speed, response, and all thinks linked.
>
> I actually do not think those are the problem. A barebone Emacs starts
> up very fast.

It does. And if you use emacs -daemon and emacsclient -c almost
immediately :-;

>
> But start up time may still be a trouble when doing small editing. Of

Not really, small editing can be done with emacs -Q ...

> course if you know about Emacs client/server that is not a problem in
> most cases (though someone gave an example with su that would not work
> in this case).

A strange set up IMO. I'm still not sure why emacs can not be configured
to check for a daemon/server. Having to use emacsclient to connect seems
rather long winded but I'm sure there is a good reason for it.

>
>> And with the boom in netbooks and OSen on USB sticks, emacs finds itself
>> more and more pushed into that "heavy dinosaur" category. I'm not saying
>> I *agree* with it, just those are my observations.
>
> I checked my Emacs+EmacsW32 directory tree. It is about 160 MB. I am
> planning to buy a netbook with about 160 GB disk. And hopefully 2 GB
> memory.

Sounds nice. Which model? I'm looking for one too. But it'll be a Linux
one for sure.