Hi,
I am writing a lot of tools for my own use at work in Emacs. Sometimes I like to share these tools with friends who are not using Emacs. I have tried this a few times and I have ended up zipping my whole Emacs file structure together with some scripts to start Emacs and do the stuff for them.
This approach kind of works, but today I got thinking: how little could I actually copy from my Emacs installation to have basic scripting working? And with basic scripting I mean basic file handling (creating, checking for, deleting), buffer handling and basic text manipulation stuff.
Obviously I would need emacs.exe. On my Windows installation it's around 9 MB. A bit on the big side for a scripting engine, still not bad by today's standards.
But what would I need more, for Emacs to even start? If I knew the bare minimum of what is needed to start, I think I would be able to add in any additional features just by copying those Elisp files.
Any thoughts, comments or pointers to further reading?
Thanks!
/Mathias