I have been using vim for forever and I have dabbled in using emacs throughout the years. Emacs with the evil mode bindings is very comfortable, and I prefer org-mode over markdown (at least for the type of notes I do).
The main thing that stops me from using emacs though is how bloated it is. I don’t want the games, web browser, email client, etc. Is there a way to remove those features from a standard install or from source?
Edit: I guess I’ll stick with vim for now. It looks like Neovim might be more what I’m looking for instead of Emacs
Huh. I’ll try the fork that someone else suggested then.
If you’re talking about Microemacs, it’s not a fork. It’s unrelated to GNU Emacs. The name Emacs has a long twisted history going back to PDP-10 machines so you’ll find various text editors with “Emacs” in their name.
The only active fork of GNU Emacs I know of off the top of my head is Remacs, which is a project to replace the C code in Emacs with Rust. It’s probably not what you’re looking for.
Honestly, I think you’re overestimating the impact of the “bloat” in Emacs. Emacs starts up with a very minimal set of features (compared to what is available) and doesn’t really push any of that on you. If you turn off the menu bar (which I don’t recommend), you’d have to search for it intentionally to find it.
Bear in mind that GNU Emacs is not a text editor. GNU Emacs has a text editor. It’s a platform for Lisp applications. The text editor is just what you get by default when you don’t ask for anything else.