Some of us would say it is a Lisp programming environment, with influences from Lisp Machines (Zmacs), having a text editor as sample application.
replyIt's kind of striking how that joke post about ed (from 1991) presented Emacs as extremely resource-wasteful
replyhttps://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html
but I guess trends elsewhere were so keen on adding abstractions that now Emacs is an efficient, parsimonious choice by comparison.
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replyI would, uh, not describe modern emacs as "parsimonious"
replyGNU Emacs really didn't start until 1984, but I keep thinking it would be interesting to compare Emacs' resource usage to Zed (or Gram). Then I realize I can't be bothered to run either of those long enough to do it.
replyCompared to VSCode, Eight Meg And Constantly Swapping does sound ridiculously parsimonious in 2026.
> it would be interesting to compare Emacs' resource usage to Zed (or Gram)
replyThe core of GNU Emacs is written in C, and there are GNU-licensed Emacs variants which are entirely written in C. I really doubt anything like a new Zed/Gram fork would perform better than, say, QEmacs.
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