I don't mean to tear down your project at all. If you want to make an editor, I think that's great. I'm actually working on a text editor of my own. But I think that you've fundamentally misunderstood the appeal of Emacs. It has little to do with the key-bindings, or even any particular part of the user interface. Many people don't even use them. Doom, a very popular Emacs distribution, enables Vim-like bindings by default. It's an old joke that Emacs is a great operating system in need of a good text editor.
The appeal of Emacs is that I can, at any time, with only a few keystrokes, dig in to how it does something and then modify it. The self-documenting and customizable behavior is extremely pervasive. Emacs Lisp is not just there for extensions. Every single layer of the application--save for core primitives--is implemented in it. All of it can be inspected, modified, swapped out, wrapped, hooked into, and basically do anything you want. There's absolutely nothing else like it.
Thank you for the incredibly insightful comment. I completely agree with your definition of Emacs, and I have the utmost respect for its true nature as a fully programmable Lisp environment. You are absolutely right—that infinite extensibility is what makes Emacs unparalleled.
When I call my project "Emacs-like," I certainly don't mean to deny or replace that beautiful philosophy. I am simply a software engineer who deeply loves the UI, UX, and keybindings that Emacs pioneered.
My goal was just to recreate that specific physical experience as a standalone application. I truly love the sensation of operating an editor entirely by muscle memory and pure reflex—allowing the words in my head to flow seamlessly onto the screen without consciously thinking about the tool itself. I just wanted to package that exact typing experience into a zero-setup app.
By the way, I am very curious about the project you mentioned! What kind of text editor are you working on? I would love to hear about it.
> But I think that you've fundamentally misunderstood the appeal of Emacs. It has little to do with the key-bindings, or even any particular part of the user interface.
You mean the default keybindings for readline and macos? I think you're greatly overestimating the extent to which you can speak for other emacs users. I love the default keybindings and never even thought to change them, and I very much understand being leery of the lisp runtime. The modal editing of vim, doom etc always struck me as pointless typing and too much like issuing commands rather than making typing an extension of your fingers.
This isn't for me (electron—blah; I have microemacs etc), but I 100% get it.
I have to agree, if only because when I hear "the emacs keybindings" I wonder, does that mean the defaults that nobody uses, or the ones I've carried around for 20+ years?
As a quick example "M-g" ("Esc" [pause] "g") has been bound to "goto-line" in my emacs startup file for at least 20 years, and is something I press without even really thinking about.
There are many default keys (such as C-x C-f for finding a file), but even core functionality gets rebound to suit my preferences.
Just to be clear: you say by ‘dropping’ lisp you’re keeping it lightweight but it’s based on electron? So what does ‘lightweight’ mean in your opinion?
As you can see, elecxzy boots up almost as instantly as native Notepad.
To ensure the actual text editing remains just as snappy and responsive as Notepad despite running in a browser engine, elecxzy features several optimizations, including a custom Piece Table and a fully virtualized DOM/renderer.
So in this context, "lightweight" means "Notepad-level startup speed and typing latency, but with native CJK IME support and Emacs keybindings." I should have been clearer about this distinction in my wording!
How often do you start your editor? I start emacs once at booot and keep it running, using emacsclient to open additional files from the command line.
Look, I think that writing your own editor is useful because one learns a lot. And of course, it doesn't need to use Lisp or even be extendable at all. But it's not Emacs any longer if you remove the Lisp part.
The motivation/justification from the author why they believe removing lisp but adding Electron somehow sums up to being "lightweight"?
Maybe the author thought of the UX/baggage/legacy or something else when they thought about "lightweight", rather than how much memory/cpu cycles something is using? Not sure, but maybe there is a more charitable reading of it out there.
Probably none. Still I’m curious what is the authors understanding. Whether he actually thinks it is a lightweight solution or whether that’s kind of advertising phrase, like ‘blazingly fast’
Many, many years ago I was a dedicated Emacs user.
My recollection is that there was a very lightweight binary that would launch a single window utilising an existing Emacs process that (of course) you usually alrwady had running, to show a dedicated window for editing a single file - which is Notepad's raison d'etre. So as a Notepad replacement I can't really see a place in the world for something like this.
I am not in any way competent to comment on CJK issues in Emacs as I can't do any of those languages. I can appreciate the desire to address those.
To answer OP's question, I doubt there is much demand for a knobbled Emacs like this, but on the other hand, I think you should do open source software primarily for yourself because doing it for others' sake will grind you down. But if what really pleases you is to make an impact for a lot of other people, directing your energies into solving CJK issues in Emacs itself would be a lot more impactful (though I am sure a lot more challenging too).
lisp-free emacs to me is like tomato-free ketchup? I mean, the main reason to use an editor with such arcane keybindings is the way you can live-edit the running editor?
So for me personally there's no demand. But still, if it scratches your personal itch, there are most probably others who would like that itch scratched. It might also because I rarely have to use windows these days and in linux there's not much 'setup' in using normal lispy emacs.
Also, for me , electron based editors have too much input latency.
You might be right! For those who love Emacs for its Lisp environment, this editor is probably not useful at all.
I just made this for people like me, who instinctively press C-f instead of the right arrow key, but just want to start typing immediately without any setup.
As for the input latency, it might indeed be slower than native editors like Notepad. However, by using a custom Piece Table and virtual rendering, I personally don't feel the delay on a modern PC, and I am very satisfied with the responsiveness for my daily use.
If you want an example of an actually lightweight modern desktop editor to take inspiration from, try zed.dev
Zed is written in Rust, insanely fast, consumes virtually no resources, has an Emacs input mode (which I use exclusively) and despite not having the greatest support for Emacs LISP (only via limited third party extension, its singular flaw) has replaced emacs-ng as my daily driver.
I have actually tried Zed, and I completely agree with you—it is an outstanding product. Its speed and incredibly low memory footprint are truly impressive.
However, while it does feature an Emacs input mode, I found that the range of supported Emacs commands is still somewhat limited. Because of this restriction, I couldn't quite operate it with the same feel and depth as a dedicated Emacs environment.
That being said, Zed is definitely a masterpiece of modern desktop editors, and its architecture is highly inspiring!
I’ll never get why people hype up Zed. Sublime Text already has all the same perks—and beats Zed at the very things it claims to improve. Sure, it might not have every advanced feature, but for “vibe coders” who don’t need a full IDE and just want to skim or tweak generated code, Sublime Text is the better choice.
Someone already mentioned the hoarderware issue, which is big for me, so I'll give my other concern.
Years ago on Twitter I believe it was lcamtuf that asked "Would you pipe a text file into less?" and Dan Kaminsky (RIP) replied -- "Not now that you asked if I would, no." The obvious implication is that people largely didn't think of simple text parsing utilities as places of concern for security issues, but that is not really in line with reality. I work with crypto and it seriously matters if I got owned in that I can lose amounts of money entrusted to me that I could never hope to recover or repay. I believe it is a basic fiduciary duty to use as much code as possible written in safer languages. Sublime Text is a massive C++ app and I can't look at the code. I am going to preferentially treat the Rust app as better. There's plenty of CVEs in editors. If I could I would replace every binary written in an unsafe language on every machine I ever use.
My editor touches every bit of infrastructure I have. I use it every day to change the behavior of production machines. I have no choice to treat my editor as trusted. So it needs to be trustworthy to the maximum degree possible.
What I need is an emacs with more lisp and less javascript.
If you want a really lean emacs-like editor, there is always mg and microemacs.
Edit: not trying to be a dick or a gatekeeper. This is HN, all ideas should be welcome including the one that dont make sense to some people. And always interesting to see contributions from Japan.
To answer the "Why Electron and JS?" question from the thread: honestly, it didn't start as a strict technical decision. It started purely out of my curiosity as a software engineer.
I use VS Code at work, and I just wanted to see what its underlying technology (Electron) was like to build with. Once I started playing with it, I realized it was a remarkably solid and flexible platform. That inspired me to try building something I had always wanted: a zero-setup, lightweight Emacs-like editor.
As a happy side-effect, using web technologies allowed me to use the Japanese IME without any stress, just like Windows Notepad. Unlike Windows Emacs, which sometimes requires special configurations, I was able to make it work just by running elecxzy.exe.
So while it lacks the beautiful Lisp ecosystem of true Emacs (like Lem), it started as a fun technical exploration that eventually became my daily driver!
> What I need is an emacs with more lisp and less javascript
Lem[0] in ncurses mode might be your friend. Unfortunately the BDFL deprecated the SDL frontend seemingly due to the SDL3 breakages, but the web one uses webview + a homegrown system instead of electron and framework magic, so it's still fairly lightweight
its main proposition is that the whole thing is written in Common Lisp, so it retains the hackable model of traditional Emacses without retaining the legacy of GNU Emacs
Light weight has become a marketing term that targets software developers who have gotten sick of bloat and want their software to run fast and take less resources. It used to mean a trade-off between feature rich and speed. It's been so over-used now that i automatically ignore it unless there's demonstrated reason(s) for it being called light weight.
Thank you for the welcome! Yes, it is exactly related to the Windows Emacs IME issues. Emacs is a product I deeply respect, but configuring it to handle Japanese input smoothly on Windows has always been a challenge for me.
There were two main pain points I desperately wanted to solve for my daily workflow:
1. Prefix keys being swallowed by the IME:
In Windows Emacs, if your IME is ON and you try to split the window using C-x 2, the 2 (or full-width ２) gets captured by the IME. The command fails, meaning you constantly have to toggle the IME OFF just to run basic window or buffer commands.
In elecxzy, I implemented fine-grained control: when the editor enters a "prefix state" (like after pressing C-x or C-c), it actively prevents the IME from capturing the next keystroke. This allows you to smoothly execute commands like C-x 2 or C-x b even while the IME is left ON.
2. IME User Experience (Positioning and Fonts):
In Windows Emacs, unless you apply specific patches or complex configurations, the IME candidate window often fails to appear right next to the text you are typing. Furthermore, the font used during IME composition often differs from the editor's main font. These details really hurt the overall typing UX.
By using Electron, elecxzy places an invisible <textarea> exactly at the virtual cursor's pixel position. This lets the browser engine handle the IME natively. The candidate window always tracks the cursor perfectly and the composition text seamlessly matches the editor's styling, without requiring any special configuration from the user—it works smoothly just by running elecxzy.exe.
Eliminating these small, daily frictions was my biggest motivation for building this!
With respect, you should learn Lisp - it will allow you to turn Emacs into whatever you want. In my opinion just keeping the Emacs keybindings but dropping all the other advantages of Emacs is missing the point entirely, and using Electron instead is just - as the saying goes - "adding insult to injury".
Thank you for your candid feedback. I completely agree with your point—the true power of Emacs lies in its Lisp environment and infinite customizability.
If my goal was to build a true successor or alternative to Emacs, dropping Lisp and using Electron would indeed be a completely wrong approach.
However, my goal was much simpler and narrower. I wanted a zero-setup, standalone notepad that natively supports Emacs' complex prefix keybindings (like C-x 2 to split windows or C-x b to switch buffers) right out of the box. While simple keys like C-n or C-f can be easily configured in most modern editors, perfectly replicating the sequence and feel of prefix keys usually requires installing plugins and writing complex configurations.
Additionally, as I mentioned in another thread, using web technologies allowed me to solve the Japanese IME cursor tracking issues on Windows natively.
So you are absolutely right: this project misses the core philosophy of what makes Emacs great. But for my specific daily need—a lightweight notepad with built-in Emacs muscle memory—it perfectly scratches my own itch.
I was going to ask. I'm not big on Emacs, but ripping out Lisp isn't that removing the part that makes Emacs Emacs? Like, they removed the important part.
The appeal of Emacs is that I can, at any time, with only a few keystrokes, dig in to how it does something and then modify it. The self-documenting and customizable behavior is extremely pervasive. Emacs Lisp is not just there for extensions. Every single layer of the application--save for core primitives--is implemented in it. All of it can be inspected, modified, swapped out, wrapped, hooked into, and basically do anything you want. There's absolutely nothing else like it.
When I call my project "Emacs-like," I certainly don't mean to deny or replace that beautiful philosophy. I am simply a software engineer who deeply loves the UI, UX, and keybindings that Emacs pioneered.
My goal was just to recreate that specific physical experience as a standalone application. I truly love the sensation of operating an editor entirely by muscle memory and pure reflex—allowing the words in my head to flow seamlessly onto the screen without consciously thinking about the tool itself. I just wanted to package that exact typing experience into a zero-setup app.
By the way, I am very curious about the project you mentioned! What kind of text editor are you working on? I would love to hear about it.
You mean the default keybindings for readline and macos? I think you're greatly overestimating the extent to which you can speak for other emacs users. I love the default keybindings and never even thought to change them, and I very much understand being leery of the lisp runtime. The modal editing of vim, doom etc always struck me as pointless typing and too much like issuing commands rather than making typing an extension of your fingers.
This isn't for me (electron—blah; I have microemacs etc), but I 100% get it.
As a quick example "M-g" ("Esc" [pause] "g") has been bound to "goto-line" in my emacs startup file for at least 20 years, and is something I press without even really thinking about.
There are many default keys (such as C-x C-f for finding a file), but even core functionality gets rebound to suit my preferences.
To give a clearer picture of what I mean by "lightweight," here is a quick startup comparison video I took a while ago: https://x.com/elecxzy/status/2022003439757336583
(Sorry for the Japanese text in the video!)
Left: VS Code
Middle: Windows Notepad
Right: elecxzy
As you can see, elecxzy boots up almost as instantly as native Notepad.
To ensure the actual text editing remains just as snappy and responsive as Notepad despite running in a browser engine, elecxzy features several optimizations, including a custom Piece Table and a fully virtualized DOM/renderer.
So in this context, "lightweight" means "Notepad-level startup speed and typing latency, but with native CJK IME support and Emacs keybindings." I should have been clearer about this distinction in my wording!
Look, I think that writing your own editor is useful because one learns a lot. And of course, it doesn't need to use Lisp or even be extendable at all. But it's not Emacs any longer if you remove the Lisp part.
Maybe the author thought of the UX/baggage/legacy or something else when they thought about "lightweight", rather than how much memory/cpu cycles something is using? Not sure, but maybe there is a more charitable reading of it out there.
My recollection is that there was a very lightweight binary that would launch a single window utilising an existing Emacs process that (of course) you usually alrwady had running, to show a dedicated window for editing a single file - which is Notepad's raison d'etre. So as a Notepad replacement I can't really see a place in the world for something like this.
I am not in any way competent to comment on CJK issues in Emacs as I can't do any of those languages. I can appreciate the desire to address those.
To answer OP's question, I doubt there is much demand for a knobbled Emacs like this, but on the other hand, I think you should do open source software primarily for yourself because doing it for others' sake will grind you down. But if what really pleases you is to make an impact for a lot of other people, directing your energies into solving CJK issues in Emacs itself would be a lot more impactful (though I am sure a lot more challenging too).
So for me personally there's no demand. But still, if it scratches your personal itch, there are most probably others who would like that itch scratched. It might also because I rarely have to use windows these days and in linux there's not much 'setup' in using normal lispy emacs.
Also, for me , electron based editors have too much input latency.
I just made this for people like me, who instinctively press C-f instead of the right arrow key, but just want to start typing immediately without any setup.
As for the input latency, it might indeed be slower than native editors like Notepad. However, by using a custom Piece Table and virtual rendering, I personally don't feel the delay on a modern PC, and I am very satisfied with the responsiveness for my daily use.
Zed is written in Rust, insanely fast, consumes virtually no resources, has an Emacs input mode (which I use exclusively) and despite not having the greatest support for Emacs LISP (only via limited third party extension, its singular flaw) has replaced emacs-ng as my daily driver.
I have actually tried Zed, and I completely agree with you—it is an outstanding product. Its speed and incredibly low memory footprint are truly impressive.
However, while it does feature an Emacs input mode, I found that the range of supported Emacs commands is still somewhat limited. Because of this restriction, I couldn't quite operate it with the same feel and depth as a dedicated Emacs environment.
That being said, Zed is definitely a masterpiece of modern desktop editors, and its architecture is highly inspiring!
Years ago on Twitter I believe it was lcamtuf that asked "Would you pipe a text file into less?" and Dan Kaminsky (RIP) replied -- "Not now that you asked if I would, no." The obvious implication is that people largely didn't think of simple text parsing utilities as places of concern for security issues, but that is not really in line with reality. I work with crypto and it seriously matters if I got owned in that I can lose amounts of money entrusted to me that I could never hope to recover or repay. I believe it is a basic fiduciary duty to use as much code as possible written in safer languages. Sublime Text is a massive C++ app and I can't look at the code. I am going to preferentially treat the Rust app as better. There's plenty of CVEs in editors. If I could I would replace every binary written in an unsafe language on every machine I ever use.
My editor touches every bit of infrastructure I have. I use it every day to change the behavior of production machines. I have no choice to treat my editor as trusted. So it needs to be trustworthy to the maximum degree possible.
If you want a really lean emacs-like editor, there is always mg and microemacs.
Edit: not trying to be a dick or a gatekeeper. This is HN, all ideas should be welcome including the one that dont make sense to some people. And always interesting to see contributions from Japan.
To answer the "Why Electron and JS?" question from the thread: honestly, it didn't start as a strict technical decision. It started purely out of my curiosity as a software engineer.
I use VS Code at work, and I just wanted to see what its underlying technology (Electron) was like to build with. Once I started playing with it, I realized it was a remarkably solid and flexible platform. That inspired me to try building something I had always wanted: a zero-setup, lightweight Emacs-like editor.
As a happy side-effect, using web technologies allowed me to use the Japanese IME without any stress, just like Windows Notepad. Unlike Windows Emacs, which sometimes requires special configurations, I was able to make it work just by running elecxzy.exe.
So while it lacks the beautiful Lisp ecosystem of true Emacs (like Lem), it started as a fun technical exploration that eventually became my daily driver!
Lem[0] in ncurses mode might be your friend. Unfortunately the BDFL deprecated the SDL frontend seemingly due to the SDL3 breakages, but the web one uses webview + a homegrown system instead of electron and framework magic, so it's still fairly lightweight
its main proposition is that the whole thing is written in Common Lisp, so it retains the hackable model of traditional Emacses without retaining the legacy of GNU Emacs
[0] https://lem-project.github.io/
- Lightweight x Electron
Contradictions. Writing ones own editor is a bit of a rite of passage though. So, on that front, Congratulations!
Oh well.
Pick one. You can't claim to have both of those in the same editor.
As an aside. What were the CJK IME issues you resolved? Was it related to win32 emacs IME issues?
There were two main pain points I desperately wanted to solve for my daily workflow:
1. Prefix keys being swallowed by the IME: In Windows Emacs, if your IME is ON and you try to split the window using C-x 2, the 2 (or full-width ２) gets captured by the IME. The command fails, meaning you constantly have to toggle the IME OFF just to run basic window or buffer commands. In elecxzy, I implemented fine-grained control: when the editor enters a "prefix state" (like after pressing C-x or C-c), it actively prevents the IME from capturing the next keystroke. This allows you to smoothly execute commands like C-x 2 or C-x b even while the IME is left ON.
2. IME User Experience (Positioning and Fonts): In Windows Emacs, unless you apply specific patches or complex configurations, the IME candidate window often fails to appear right next to the text you are typing. Furthermore, the font used during IME composition often differs from the editor's main font. These details really hurt the overall typing UX. By using Electron, elecxzy places an invisible <textarea> exactly at the virtual cursor's pixel position. This lets the browser engine handle the IME natively. The candidate window always tracks the cursor perfectly and the composition text seamlessly matches the editor's styling, without requiring any special configuration from the user—it works smoothly just by running elecxzy.exe.
Eliminating these small, daily frictions was my biggest motivation for building this!
Good luck on your project!
Prepare yourself.
If my goal was to build a true successor or alternative to Emacs, dropping Lisp and using Electron would indeed be a completely wrong approach.
However, my goal was much simpler and narrower. I wanted a zero-setup, standalone notepad that natively supports Emacs' complex prefix keybindings (like C-x 2 to split windows or C-x b to switch buffers) right out of the box. While simple keys like C-n or C-f can be easily configured in most modern editors, perfectly replicating the sequence and feel of prefix keys usually requires installing plugins and writing complex configurations.
Additionally, as I mentioned in another thread, using web technologies allowed me to solve the Japanese IME cursor tracking issues on Windows natively.
So you are absolutely right: this project misses the core philosophy of what makes Emacs great. But for my specific daily need—a lightweight notepad with built-in Emacs muscle memory—it perfectly scratches my own itch.