MicroEMACS "puny emacs", a tiny but powerful Micro Emacs

MicroEMACS "puny emacs", a tiny but powerful Micro Emacs
========================================================

Last edited: $Date: 2021/09/11 08:24:30 $

> Ancient version of MicroEmacs upgraded with 30 years of hacks

MicroEMACS
----------

MicroEMACS is based on the Conroy's version 30 of February
1986, distributed to USENET mod.sources. Since then it has
undergone a fair number of bug fixes and performance
improvements, and a few minor enhancements.

It is a lot smaller than other Micro Emacses, including those
based on Conroy's November 1985 release.

Mark Alexander has done some fantastic work and added several
features over the years, including support for etags, cscope,
ispell, Rails, undo, UTF-8, regular expression search and
replace, and extensions written in Ruby.

The current version can be found at
https://gitlab.com/bloovis/micro-emacs and is available under
the GPL open source license.

Micro Emacses in general
------------------------

Micro Emacses are all small, lightweight, editors that have
keybindings that resemble those of Emacs, sometimes called
"ErsatzEmacs". Not all keybindings are necessary equivalent
with those of Emacs, and not all the functions of Emacs will
be available in the Micro Emacses.

Some of the better known Micro Emacses are mg and Jove.

installation on FreeBSD
-----------------------

The main development is focussed on Linux, but it is easy to
compile it on FreeBSD. This builds a non-debug version without
Ruby support.

The build process creates a binary executable called "pe",
which, according to the documentation, was chosen to avoid
confusion with other versions of MicroEMACS, and could be read
as "puny emacs".

This is how you build it on FreeBSD 13.0:

git clone https://gitlab.com/bloovis/micro-emacs.git
cd micro-emacs
mkdir obj
cd obj
../configure
gmake

After compiling:

ldd pe
pe:
libncursesw.so.9 => /lib/libncursesw.so.9 (0x80065b000)
libc.so.7 => /lib/libc.so.7 (0x8006cf000)

Tiny !
------

The size of pe, after stripping, is: 113K.

This is on my FreeBSD box, after compiling as described above.

In comparison, mg on the same FreeBSD box is: 192K.

Manual
------

MicroEMACS doesn't come with a traditional man-page, but the
git repository contains a very nice PDF that is extensive (36
pages). It states that it is intended as a reference manual
for users already familiar with EMACS. But it offers enough
information to get the novice user started.

Some features
-------------

Mark Alexander has done great work, and among other
enhancements added support for spell check and for UTF-8 to
MicroEMACS.

You need to have --besides aspell-- the aspell-ispell package
installed to get this working.

Get MicroEMACS
--------------

Go to https://gitlab.com/bloovis/micro-emacs

Have fun!