Emacs standing alone on a Linux Kernel

Very interesting finger exercise. However, as the article briefly mentions: (too) many things won't work because GNU Emacs is using the GNU/Linux tools for doing things. At least I would not be happy. But it reminds us of the mighty [LISP machines of the 80s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine).

for the curious, kalman reti made a few videos about lisp machines a while back https://duckduckgo.com/?q=kalman+reti+lisp&t=ffab&iar=videos&iax=videos&ia=videos

I thought UML was superseded by Docker / Podman. I learned something new.

It looks like a quite old post. It uses Emacs 21. Which came out in 2001!

Ach, indeed. The [oldest version of the article I can find in the Internet Archive](https://web.archive.org/web/20041030060909/https://www.informatimago.com/linux/emacs-on-user-mode-linux.html) is from 2004.

It probably still works, though some details will look a bit different nowadays. It'd also be sensible to link emacs against dietlibc for better size - it's been a few years since I last did that, but I assume nowadays with the portable dumper things might be a lot less painful than back when I was using a dietlibc linked emacs as my main emacs.

> (too) many things won't work because GNU Emacs is using the GNU/Linux tools for doing things. This. People forget that Emacs is on the same level as a shell, a user-interface for interacting with the system, not the system itself.

Really interesting. I have a ln old little netbook that struggles with any modern software/DE, and I've been thinking about how to essentially turn it into an emacs-only machine for some focused writing. This seems a little /too/ barebones, but has inspired me to look into it again

I agree completely if you include non-Emacs user-space tools into the term "system". Things like imagemagick (might be a bad example because [Emacs replaced it in recent history](https://devclass.com/2020/08/11/dont-look-vi-users-emacs-27-1-waves-bye-to-imagemagick-adds-native-json-parsing-support/)), pdf libraries, miscellaneous presentations tools (like LaTeX/beamer or reveal), compression/uncompression tools, search tools (silver-searcher, ...), and so forth are an important part of my GNU Emacs experience.

From "eight megabytes and constantly swapping" to something you'd use on an old network because it is lightweight. ;-)

This keeps getting reposted, but I haven't seen anyone try this idea out since this got published in 2004

Is it possible to run exwm over this setup?

Doubt it, because you'd be running x11/wayland, which would need to be started before emacs.

Add busybox to the mix. I couldn't quite get GNU Emacs to compile for my kindle keyboard 3 (I am using quick emacs), but it is essentially busybox+emacs, and quite usable. If it were the full GNU emacs, and had a better keyboard, it'd probably be my main development machine.

Unfortunately, the link is dead as of now it seems...