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GNU Emacs really didn't start until 1984, but I keep thinking it would be interesting to compare Emacs' resource usage to Zed (or Gram). Then I realize I can't be bothered to run either of those long enough to do it.

Compared to VSCode, Eight Meg And Constantly Swapping does sound ridiculously parsimonious in 2026.

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> it would be interesting to compare Emacs' resource usage to Zed (or Gram)

The core of GNU Emacs is written in C, and there are GNU-licensed Emacs variants which are entirely written in C. I really doubt anything like a new Zed/Gram fork would perform better than, say, QEmacs.

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