================== THE ESSENCE CHALLENGE ========================== The code in this tarball began as Chris Baird's elegant reduction of MicroEMACS 3.6. It is unbelievably small and has the bulk of the original's essential functionality. I have cleaned up the compile so that it has no warnings or errors using gcc 4.5.3 on my Slackware 13.37 box. I added this readme bit. And I renamed the binary in the Makefile to "esnc" (essence). Here is the challenge. If you can reduce the size of the binary by making the code even more minimalistic (which means more elegant, not more obfuscated) and keep an absolutely clean compile, I will republish esnc to a new version with you in the credits. You can add features only if you do not increase the size of the binary. End challenge. This idea will only appeal to a certain class of people and I know I will enjoy meeting you. Evsiz (evsiz@this-voice.org) Wed 28, Dec 2011, 09:55:23 NOTE: For essence's key-bindings, load /usr/local/share/esnc/ERSATZ.keys after "make install" has been run. ========================= ESSENCE CREDITS ============================= Current Release: Essence 1.0 - 36468 bytes Evsiz 28 Dec 2011 essence 1.0 36468 bytes Chris Baird 14 Sep 2000 ersatz emacs Dan Lawrence, et al. 1993 MicroEMACS 3.6 ==================== Chris Baird's Original README ===================== This tar file contains the source to a microemacs-derived text editor that I have been personally hacking on for over a decade. Originally this was MicroEMACS 3.6 as released to mod.sources and the Public Domain by Daniel Lawrence in 1986, and was itself based on the work of Steve Wilhite and George Jones to MicroEMACS 2.0 (then also public domain) by Dave Conroy. I would like to reiterate Lawrence's thanks to them for writing such nice, well structured and documented code. "Ersatz-Emacs", as I call it today, is the above text editor throughly cleansed of routines and features that I personally never use. It is also an editor MINIX-creator Andy Tanenbaum could describe as "fitting inside a student's brain" (namely, mine). This source code should compile cleanly on any "modern" UN*X system with a termcap/curses library. This release has been tested with NetBSD and various Linux systems, although in the past when it was still mostly MicroEMACS, proto-Ersatz-Emacs was an editor of choice on SunOS, Solaris, Xenix, Minix/i386, and AIX. Supporting these and similar systems should not be difficult. I encourage people to personalise this very simple editor to their own requirements. Please send any useful bug reports and fixes back to me, but I'm not really interested in incorporating new features unless it simplifies the program further. Feel free to do a code-fork and distribute your own perfect text editor. The title "Ersatz" comes from the category Richard Stallman uses in MIT AI Memo 519a to describe those editors that are a surface-deep imitation (key bindings) of "real" ITS Emacs. If you are familiar with any Emacs-variant editor, you should have few problems with Ersatz. All source code of this program is in the Public Domain. I am a rabid Stallmanite weenie, but it would be improper to publish this under a different licence than it was given to me with. -- Chris Baird,, <cjb@brushtail.apana.org.au>