Tuesday 24 September 2024 Playing with Micro Emacs again ============================== Arond 2021 I decided to seriously learn to use Emacs, using the vanilla key bindings. Emacs is a real powerhouse, and at times it felt intimidating. To cope with that, I started to explore Micro Emacsen. OpenBSD supplies good documentation with mg, and I used this documentation to create a short list of commands to learn, including their key binding. I reordered that list to begin with the more important commands to learn, in order to get me started. Micro Emacsen ------------- Micro Emacsen are editors that mimic Emacs. They use the same key bindings as Emacs for the basic editing and movement commands. They differ from Emacs in being smaller, having less features and of course aren't build around Elisp but just build in C. The term "Micro Emmacs" doesn't come from the smaller set of features, but because of their small size, both on disc as in memory. Micro Emacsen typically start very fast. They require not much resources and are great for older and slower computer systems. During the last few years I played with several Micro Emacsen. * mg: Micro Emacs that comes with OpenBSD * ee: Micro Emacs that comes with FreeBSD * Jove: Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs * pe (puny emacs): Ancient version of MicroEmacs upgraded with 30 years of hacks * Ersatz-Emacs: Downloaded from http://rho.tuxfamily.org/museum/ From this list, I like pe most. Just like f.e., mg, it looks like Emacs, has quite some capabilities. Also I added some small personal extra's to the code. pe -- I still have my hacked and compiled version of pe on my FreeBSD laptop. This Micro Emacs even supports spell checking and UTF-8. See also my blogpost [1]. Unfortunately, Gitlab has decided to limit access to their repositories, but if you are able to clone from Gitlap, this is where I got the source code for it: https://gitlab.com/bloovis/micro-emacs.git I have become addicted to Emacs and org mode, and haven't fired pe up for quite some time, Just for fun, I decided to write a small phlog post for it. What you are reading now is written with pe. Editing with Micro Emacs ------------------------ Editing with a Micro Emacs is perfectly doable. The experience is close to editing in Emacs, but in monochrome and with less bells and whistles. Most Micro Emacsen, including pe, lack two functionalities that I really miss: * Lack of highlighting of the active region When selecting a region, there is no feedback on what you are selecting, you just have to trust that you have set the mark and point on the right places. * Only vertical window split If a Micro Emacs supports multiple windows, you can only do a vertical split, so two or more windows above each other. Personally I prefer to do a horizontal split, having the windows side-by-side. This is what I have always done in GNU Screen and Tmux, and now do in Emacs. Just like the posts written on the Palm TX, I am writing this phlog post in pe, using the org-mode notation for headers, and afterwards copy it into a new created Denote file. From there, I can use my normal phlog publishing process. Update 2024-09-25 ----------------- It turned out that another repository of pe can be found at: https://www.bloovis.com/cgit/microemacs/tree/ This repo is still active, there are commits from March 2024 there. [1]: https://box.matto.nl/microemacs-puny-emacs-a-tiny-but-powerful-micro-emacs.html Last edited: $Date: 2024/09/25 13:18:39 $