what is the most minimal emacs possible?

From the docs, it seems that when building emacs, one obtains an executable called temacs which then loads the elisp libraries that give us a functioning editor. I imagine this temacs binary is just an elisp interpreter. Is there a way to interact with temacs like one does with the sbcl repl and manually load the elisp libraries to see how emacs bootstraps in real time?

in the 1980s there were some very small emacs programs, even one that fully conformed with gnu and ran msdos generic. see simtel and pcsig archives. i wish someone ported them to java and android

Yes, you can just run `temacs` and you can watch it processing `loadup.el`. I think the most minimal you can get is `temacs --no-loadup -Q`. > I imagine this temacs binary is just an elisp interpreter. It's the compiled C code, so it includes *everything* written in C.

Good question! I'd also love to know.

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So its like an elisp interpreter on steroids?

My first encounter with the word "Emacs" was Micro Emacs on the Amiga. It came with later versions of the OS.

All else equal, it sounds no faster than full Emacs -- it's the same C code.

Doesn't really answer your question about temacs but OpenBSD's `mg` is pretty minimal.

Indeed. `emacs` is `temacs` plus the dump of whatever lisp libraries were loaded by `loadup.el` (which nowadays tends to reside in a separate portable-dump file, but that *should* be so fast to load as to make no practical difference, even in the unusual situation where you didn't need anything from it).

No lisp tho