Apps :: Zile



I agree, emacs is really powerful--after much user customization. When switching from system to system, you either have to:
A.) Transfer your Emacs customization files (macros, et al.) or
B.) Be proficient enough with the vanilla install to get some work done. Plus with all of the add-ons that most emacs users accumlate over time (see above post) emacs more closely resembles an operating system than a mere text editor.

Conversly, vi is:
A.) Ready to go out of the box---makes more sense for a liveCD distribution, no need to carry around a USB key full of emacs customizations.
B.) Fast--Vi was programmed to be usable over a 300 baud modem connection!  
c.) Small--Compared to the bloat that is emacs, vi is the hands-down winner for a stripped down OS.

Quote
"The people doing Emacs were sitting in labs at MIT with what were essentially fibre-channel links to the host, in contemporary terms. They were working on a PDP-10, which was a huge machine by comparison, with infinitely fast screens."  --Bill Joy, Linux Magazine 1999
Zile is not bloated, it is about 88k, smaller than nano and nvi.
I may be dating myself here, but I've used emacs over a 300 baud modem connection.  Nothing compares to watching those letters scroll by at a rate slower than your ability to read them.  It's kinda like watching those scrolling ticker messages on a billboard at a street corner in New York City.

Actually, I far more often used emacs from a 1200 baud modem connection or from a 9600 baud serial VT220 console.  In addition to doing simple word proccessing, I used it for e-mail and for Usenet news reading (the World Wide Web as it is today did not exist yet so I did not use it to browse the web), and my CS friends used it as a C language development environment.  Emacs works, but the key point is that the emacs configuration files were stored on a central UNIX server and the users were logging in remotely via a terminal emulator.

DSL is a read-only liveCD UNIX-like OS and the individual user would need to store his/her configuration files somewhere, like a hard drive, a network share, a flash drive or on the CD-R itself.

If I recall correctly, the user-specific config files weren't very large considering that they were plain text and our user accounts had a small quota ( < 1.0 MB) and they were nowhere near taking up a large portion of that quota.

I'm more interested in knowing the size of the application itself.  If it's a few megs then my preference is to deep-six it.  If it's only a few hundred KB then the cost-benefit ratio is a little closer to 1 : 1 and we shouldn't automatically dump it.  Instead, it depends on the usefulness of the replacement application.
Cbagger01, you must have missed my last post, Zile is rather small.

original here.