Mg: an Emacs-like editor in 160 kb

http://homepage.boetes.org/software/mg/

by snoopybbt • 11 years ago

105 81 11 years ago

homepage.boetes.org

Very neat, I really wanted something like this

typedweb• 11 years ago

Standard text editor in OpenBSD. As an emacs user for 20+ years, mg feels good and not lacking like the other tiny emacs clones.

Swizec• 11 years ago

But does it have Tetris?

gonzo• 11 years ago

Does it run FTP to read/write remote files?

jasonm233• 11 years ago

I'd be happier if it just had Zap to Char.

mixedmath• 11 years ago

It is no wonder that Richard Stallman asked them to change their name away from MicroGnuEmacs, especially when mg is not under GPL.

NelsonMinar• 11 years ago

I use mg all the time. It only takes half a second to launch and lets me use the emacs keyboard muscle memory I built up over 20 years. Happily I'm able to use a modern editor for most real editing.

beagle32• 11 years ago

Related: Fabrice Bellard[0]'s QEmacs. http://bellard.org/qemacs/ - a 160KB executable provides a mostly complete Emacs experience (sans scripting .. sort of like Mg), but does include syntax coloring, unicode, and watching video inside the editor. A 60KB stripped down version has a feature set comparable to Mg as far as I can tell.

[0] of FFMPEG, QEMU, BPG, TCC, JSLINUX and more fame.

PuercoPop• 11 years ago

a mostly complete Emacs experience (sans scripting ...),

That is mostly not like not Emacs? Or did Zwei and other emacsen had the same key bindings as emacs and gnu's readline?

melling2• 11 years ago

"sans scripting"

The Lisp scripting is the entire point of Emacs. Who cares about the keybindings. I don't really see the point. Can't you just compile emacs? I remember 25 years ago when people thought emacs was too big, and small emacs clones were popular, but in 2015 no one cares, right?

Rather than solving these easier useless problems, why doesn't someone solve the harder problem of making a better emacs clone with a high-performance Emacs Lisp clone. Then Emacs could be used to replace Visual Studio, Xcode, etc. Emacs is an editor construction kit:

http://ergoemacs.org/features.html

https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs

gnuvince3• 11 years ago

As an Emacs guy, I really like mg(1). The one missing feature is Unicode support.

stsp• 11 years ago

Patches welcome. The first step would be iconv in OpenBSD base (there are existing BSD-licensed implementations to start from). Then have mg make use of it. http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=134581162518146&w=2 (Edit: Or try adding a pure UTF-8 mode)

gnuvince3• 11 years ago

Lacking the time at the moment, but I've been meaning to hone my C skills and Hacking on OpenBSD seems like the best idea. Hopefully, I can finish this M.Sc. soon :)

tjradcliffe• 11 years ago

I'm an mg guy who uses Emacs when he has to. Unlike Emacs, mg is an editor. I don't know what tool-class Emacs properly falls into, but as many people here have pointed out, it's closer to a general-purpose scriptable environment than an editor. Editing is a side-effect of the other capabilities, very nearly. I know at least one person who uses Emacs as their shell.

For those of us who just want a clean, fast, light-weight editor, mg is great. It's what Emacs would have been had it been an editor, instead of something else.

reality_czech• 11 years ago

"I just want an editor" is the vi philosophy, and has been since olden times. Emacs users tend to write a lot of emacs modes and lisp macros, whereas vi users generally use external programs or the shell.

The thing is, vi is much better at being "just an editor" than emacs is. The key bindings for vi are highly ergonomic and let you keep your fingers on the home row almost all the time. With emacs, you're playing "twister" with your fingers, often pressing 3 or 4 keys simultaneously just do to some simple task like quitting or indenting a paragaph. vi also supports things like deleting to the end of the line, going to the end of the file, or even appending to the end of a line with a single keypress.

If you're using something with emacs key bindings but no emacs-like extensibility, you're really getting the worst of both worlds. You really should just be using vi. And you will find a lot of people with your philsophy who use it, and it is installed on nearly every system out there.

beagle32• 11 years ago

Check out Fabrice Bellard's QEmacs. Has unicode, at least.

jhallenworld2• 11 years ago

Try jmacs (part of JOE). It supports Unicode.

film422• 11 years ago

I use emacs for most of my daily development, but always rely on nano or vi in the terminal due to emacs startup time. I'm going to give mg a shot this week!

Dewie• 11 years ago

You could also run Emacs as a server.

film422• 11 years ago

I've actually looked into this, but it seemed like far too much overhead to simply open, edit and save a file; especially remotely.

jasonm233• 11 years ago

1. Tramp.

2. Emacs daemon - as many suggest, why would you ever quit emacs?

But if you do find you shut Emacs down...

3. Slimmed down alternative init eg. https://github.com/ocodo/.emacs.d/blob/master/emacsq & https://github.com/ocodo/.emacs.d/blob/master/emacsq.el (note this init could be even slimmer, but the start time is about 2.5 seconds, which is fast enough, and I get a very well configured environment)

Or just ...

4. emacs -Q - no init.

One of these are going to solve your issue, without having to interrupt your emacs flow.

You could also look at your init for bottlenecks and have a secondary script. Which you can optionally run when you want those features. Keep the real init minimal.

There's many strategies.

Scarbutt• 11 years ago

Is this toó big for busybox?

jasonm233• 11 years ago

It should be ok for a busybox.

jpmattia• 11 years ago

off topic but related: Has anyone had any luck getting emacs to run on an ipad+keyboard, with sensible key-bindings (including a mapping for meta)?

theophrastus• 11 years ago

For some curious reason all my browser right-click download efforts on that webpage resulted in a wrong-sized corrupted file. Yet good old curl does the job just fine:

    curl -O http://homepage.boetes.org/software/mg/mg-20150316.tar.gz

And I can't remember when the last time i've had a program compile with just 'make' and no messing about. It's quite impressive. Thank you!

philsnow3• 11 years ago

Since it is written completely in C, there is currently _no language in which extensions can be written_; however, keys can be rebound and certain parameters can be changed in startup files.

mg seems almost, but not quite, entirely unlike emacs.

the thing that makes emacs emacs is not the keybindings or the so-called "modeless" editing (which is a misinterpretation by vim folks, emacs is way more modeful than vim), but the built-in scriptability / extensibility.

SamReidHughes4• 11 years ago

Not when I'm on some tiny VM or computer and want something nicer than Nano that has something remotely close to Emacs keybindings. Then it's the keybindings, not the scriptability. I just want a reasonable editor.

aaronem4• 11 years ago

Learn about Tramp, and for tasks complex enough to need a proper editor, you can edit those files in the same Emacs session you use for everything else. That's what I do with my RPi, for example -- it can pipe edits over an ssh session, so anything with an SSH server is eligible. (Revisiting this comment, it occurs to me to add that all my editing on my main machine is done this way. I play a game or two sometimes, so it runs Windows, but I run Emacs in a Linux VM and edit, in full X11-powered, keyboard-unfettered splendor, via transparent SSH authentication with the Windows host.)

Peaker• 11 years ago

It's a bit funny, the most unreasonable thing about emacs are its default key bindings...

Some of the most frequent operations, like switching between buffers or windows takes 3 key strokes!

eloisant• 11 years ago

Or use VIM keybindings on Emacs, so you still benefit from all the extension and scriptability but when you're on a tiny VM you can comfortably use VIM.

__david__5• 11 years ago

You are missing the point of Mg—it's not to replace Emacs as your development powerhouse, but to give you little binary that acts a lot like Emacs but runs in some tiny vm or embedded device somewhere.

You can also cross compile it (which you cannot do to Emacs).

philsnow3• 11 years ago

It sounds exactly like all the various attempts people have made over the years to make a vim-alike textarea editor in javascript. They always forget block select mode, or don't implement bookmarks quite right, or something, which ends up in frustration if you're used to using your editor of choice as more than a Notepad.exe-alike.

sebastianavina3• 11 years ago

    crontab -e 
    Select an editor: 4. /usr/bin/mg

there it is, that's why sometimes we need this program.

retr0h• 11 years ago

shouldn't your config management system be doing this ;P

debaserab2• 11 years ago

I'm lost; why wouldn't vim be suitable in this case?

vidarh4• 11 years ago

A lot of us only cares about the very basics, and pick emacs (or variations) only because when the choice between editor families that are "always" available it stands between vi/vim and emacs.

Microemacs and derivatives like MG or uemacs dates back to the mid 80's, and has been ported to pretty much any platform and OS you can think of (first time I came across one of them was on the Amiga in the late 80's), so they're practical if you want the same experience "everywhere", including places too limited to bog down with a full emacs, and when you don't want that experience to be vim.

boomlinde• 11 years ago

In what sense is Emacs (or emacs-likes) "always" available? In most operating systems it is something will have to be installed explicitly, while I haven't seen a unix-like without a vi-clone or nano in a while. Hopefully the lack of emacs-likes can be addressed with something like mg, but so far I don't see it a lot in the wild.

I believe that Workbench 2+ for the Amiga came bundled with MicroEMACS, though!

agumonkey• 11 years ago

Which begs the following question: what is the smallest programmable editor ?

A Forth REPL ?

jhallenworld2• 11 years ago

How does it compare with Jmacs (part of JOE)?

BTW, anyone have a copy of Gosling's emacs? I know it went closed source, but I doubt it matters at this point.

aaronem4• 11 years ago

Easier just to learn enough of vi to get around. I mean, if I need a more familiar editor, I'm just going. to visit the file remotely via Tramp, and for simple stuff like quick config edits on remote machines, quicker just to use vi or sed or a Perl one-liner.

__david__5• 11 years ago

I really like Mg. I tried a bunch of mini-emacsen at one point and Mg was the only one that had a decent set of Emacs key-bindings and didn't have weird gratuitous differences. It's so small that it launches instantaneously, even on tiny, slow computers.

Animats• 11 years ago

This has been done before, most notably as JOVE, Jonathan's Own Version of EMACS for the PDP-11. JOVE was written by Jonathan Payne while in high school, around 1980. That had to fit in a 16-bit machine, with 128KB of RAM available to the program.

vidarh4• 11 years ago

Mg's lineage is almost as old, coming out of MicroEMACS, first published in 1985. The first version of MicroGNUEmacs, now Mg, was published in 1986.

robobro• 11 years ago

My .mg file -

global-set-key "\^h" delete-backward-char

global-set-key "\e[1~" beginning-of-line

global-set-key "\e[4~" end-of-line

set-default-mode fill

set-fill-column 72

Been using it for quite some time and really dig it.

minikomi• 11 years ago

Would be even smaller without all the weird quotes in theo.c

    "Stop slacking you lazy bum!",
    "slacker slacker lazy bum bum bum slacker!",
    "I could search... but I'm a lazy bum ;)",
    "sshutup sshithead, ssharpsshooting susshi sshplats ssharking assholes.",
    "Lazy bums slacking on your asses."

etc!

mykhal• 11 years ago

i you're lonely, just M-x theo ^M ^M ^M ...

davidw• 11 years ago

I would suggest 'jed' as a small alternative to Emacs. Its keybindings are mostly the same, and it's extensible.

http://www.jedsoft.org/jed/

I happily used it on my first Linux computer, which only had 4 megs of ram.

iso8859-1• 11 years ago

how does this compare to torvalds emacs? https://git.kernel.org/cgit/editors/uemacs/uemacs.git

oskarth• 11 years ago

Did it ever occur to people that less can be more in terms of features? There might be a reason why people like Torvalds (Linux and de Raadt (OpenBSD, OpenSSH) specifically don't use the stock Emacs.

Here are some other data points: Hickey (Clojure) uses the stock Acqumacs with zero customization and Graham (creator of HN and the first real web app) uses plain vi to edit Lisp.

If you want to use a text editor to get work done, sane defaults and an editor that gets out of the way is king.

josteink• 11 years ago

Did it ever occur to people that less can be more in terms of features?

It can be, but it doesn't have to be. Sometimes more is more.

As for your examples...

Here are some other data points: ... Graham (creator of HN and the first real web app) uses plain vi to edit Lisp.

And you can tell the great amount of effort that makes him put into this very fine website, can't you?

This is probably the worst website I frequently visit in terms of features, design, technical basis and mobile readability. It sucks in all respects except community.

If this is the pinnacle of websites which vi can get us, please move everyone everywhere to anything else, notepad included. I've created better websites than this in Notepad (during my early university years), and that's not a joke.

mhax• 11 years ago

At 160k it's not really in the true spirit of Emacs. ducks

RexRollman• 11 years ago

Cleanng up software older than me: http://blog.anthrobsd.net/043.html

wirrbel• 11 years ago

really interesting how this tiny, old editor provokes so much "just use emacs" "just use vim" comments. kind of missing the point

ehmuidifici• 11 years ago

Also it's still available for Archlinux (via AUR)

https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/i686/mg/

auxym• 11 years ago

Community repo is a different thing from AUR

lispm2• 11 years ago

FYI: the list of Emacs implementations:

http://www.finseth.com/emacs.html

snoopybbt• 11 years ago

Hey, OP's point on the topic:

I like GNU Emacs, and I run GNU Emacs most of the time.

I _do_ know how to use vi/vim and I'm quite pragmatic on the matter.

When I am doing server configurations, by the way, vi/vim start up way, way more quickly than GNU Emacs.

This is good, but as I use emacs most of the time, I end up in mixing keyboard shortcuts.

Thus, on my system, $EDITOR is /usr/bin/mg and /usr/bin/vi (vi, not vim) is a symlink to /usr/bin/mg.

So I get emacs keybindings and a fast-starting editor.

If i __do__ need syntax highlighting or anything, i run vim (not a symmlink) or the full GNU Emacs.

Put simply.

Mg: an Emacs-like editor in 160 kb

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