[jjrh]

The core issue is there isn't a 'emacs.tiny' package that contains a small subset of emacs features.

This makes it difficult to install emacs on a resource constrainted environment like a embedded system, and hard to justify installing on a server. (Yes we can use tramp but it's not always a option)

It's a real shame and why I still need to know vi and vim.

[globular-toast]

Most emacs users I know retain a modicum of vi/vim knowledge for those situations where emacs isn't available. It's more because of the ubiquity of vi/vim, though. There are mini versions of emacs available like MicroEmacs and mg, the latter being more compatible with GNU Emacs.

[teddyh]

Debian and derivatives (like Ubuntu) have the “emacs-nox” package, which should qualify for your needs, I think?

[LanternLight83]

It's a step in the right direction, but the issue is that there's so much that can't be removed from Emacs with build flags, eg. `lisp/play/`. Even setting the `-games` USE flag in Gentoo only removes cross-user score sharing[1], because (although less likely with games) you never know what modules might depend on within the standard distribution. Emacs is a big ball of stuff that no one's been willing to tease apart, even when it comes to modules that are probably not going to be loaded at runtime.

1: https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/tree/app-editors/e...

[User23]

One option is uEmacs (or one of its many forks such as mg). It’s tiny.