med

Too heavy. MicroEmacs loads instantly. MicroEmacs is small and lightweight. I port it to whatever machine I'm using, and it works nicely in a remote tty window. It doesn't need a customization language, as I just change the source code. Recently, I added color syntax highlighting to it, and support for unicode characters. https://github.com/DigitalMars/med

Here's another one with a very small footprint: https://github.com/DigitalMars/med It's the one I use every day. The executable on Windows is a little over a meg. It also works on Linux and Mac.

This inspired me to: https://github.com/DigitalMars/med/commit/adcc084e2142723695...

I fixed my editor so that it recognizes URLs, and underlines them. Clicking on one brings up a browser on that site. I should have done that 20 years ago. No special syntax is required. It just works. I've since been adding URLs in comments all over my code, for references. It's marvelous. It could be extended to recognize filename.jpg and filename.mp3 to display or play those files, too. Again with no special syntax whatsoever. It just works. https://github.com/DigitalMars/med

I still use microEmacs, which floated around the intertoobs in the 1980s. Of course, I've modified it substantially over the years, most recently adding color syntax highlighting and Unicode. D version: https://github.com/DigitalMars/med C version: https://github.com/DigitalMars/me The "extension language" is it's so easy to just add some code and recompile it, there's no point in adding an extension language. I like microEmacs a lot because I can use it remotely over a tty interface.

Linus has his own port of the venerable MicroEmacs[1]. As does Walter Bright[2], by the way. qemacs is actually quite advanced, and even includes a basic HTML renderer (for the help). I was half joking that with quickjs, one now can make a reasonably modern web browser out of bellard-ware… [1]: https://github.com/torvalds/uemacs [2]: https://github.com/DigitalMars/med

Doing one yourself is fun. MicroEmacs drifted around NNTP in the 80s, and I snagged a copy and began modifying it to taste. I've been using it ever since. The latest version was ported to D: https://github.com/DigitalMars/med It's a very easy editor to understand and extend.

Another one is Microemacs (I use it nearly exclusively): C version: https://github.com/DigitalMars/me D version: https://github.com/DigitalMars/med The source is so simple, the "extension language" is just editing the code.

I started on the D front end in 1999. It was attached to the NorthwestC/Datalight/Zortech/Symantec/DigitalMars backend (for DMD), to gcc (for GDC) and to LLVM (for LDC). The backend was originally written for my C compiler, then my C++ compiler. The source code can be found here: https://github.com/DigitalMars/Compiler The editor I use is https://github.com/DigitalMars/med which is translated to D from the older C version https://github.com/DigitalMars/me I don't care for IDEs because they only work on one machine (I develop on several). ME works identically on all of them, and is easy to port. I keep thinking of transitioning to vim, but never get around to it. The text editor is not the gating factor to my productivity, anyway. Most of my coding sessions consist of simply staring at the code. What helps most is lots of windows open on a

I recently updated my editor (https://github.com/DigitalMars/med) to highlight in yellow all search matches on the screen. It works so damn well I am disgusted with myself for not thinking of this decades ago. It neatly finds the first use, etc. It also does a word search so `it` does not highlight when searching for `i`.

MicroEmacs, a free text editor from the 1980s, uses a double-linked list of lines. It is fast and memory compact, after all, it worked on a 64K DOS machine. https://github.com/DigitalMars/med

Here's one from the 1980s, which I still use and keep up to date: https://github.com/DigitalMars/me and translated to D: https://github.com/DigitalMars/med