Re: Emacs 26.1 on Windows is HUGE

[Óscar Fuentes]

Björn Lindqvist <bjourne@gmail.com> writes:

> I thought it was time to update my version of Emacs on Windows. So I
> download emacs-26.1-x86_64-no-deps.zip package from
> http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/emacs-26/. It is a whopping 109
> mb and consumes 407 mb of space uncompressed. The emacs.exe file
> itself is 121 mb. In comparison the emacs 24.5 installation consumes
> 160 mb and emacs.exe itself 8 mb.
>
> I posit that there is something wrong with the way Emacs is packaged
> for Windows. Perhaps there is a more lightweight distribution?

Most likely the executables include debug information. It uses disk
space but no RAM.

On addition to that, one thing that makes little for this distribution
is to include emacs.exe and emacs-26.1.exe, which are identical.

BTW, 26.2 was just released, although the binary pretests on

https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/pretest/windows/emacs-26/

have the same size.

You can use `strip.exe' (from binutils) to remove the debug information.

You can use M-x report-emacs-bug to suggest removing debug info prior to
packaging and/or not including redundant executables as emacs-26.1.exe.