> Emacs should be able to run on 16MB machines without X linked.

My point exactly. These little routers have just a few megs of RAM. Emacs also has ~70MB of (compressed!) elisp files. On a machine with single digit MBs of flash, that's just not workable.

And! Even if you do have 70MB of disk and 16MB of RAM available, Emacs isn't necessarily performant. Emacs was dog slow when I had a $5/month prgmr vm, but Mg was blazing fast.

> A dozen Emacs "clones" already exist for even lower memory machines

Mg isn't new, in case that is what you are thinking (it's at least 10 years old).

I tried a bunch of tiny emacs clones a few years ago and Mg was the absolute best. All the rest had weird gratuitous differences or were missing obvious important keys (one of them didn't have M-d). Mg isn't complete (obviously) but it has a surprising number of plain editing keystrokes built in and functions perfectly for editing conf files or crontabs or other small remote tasks.

> Anyway, like I mentioned, wouldn't time be better spent creating a high-performance clone rather than a partially functional tiny clone?

Whose time? And what do you mean by high-performance clone?

Edit: I see, I missed your (way) above comment. To re-answer: Those tasks are orthogonal. Nifty higher level editing junk is certainly a good idea, and people are working on it. I don't see why it would need to be an Emacs clone though, why not just make Emacs itself better? That's the whole point of it in the first place.

> Mg isn't new, in case that is what you are thinking (it's at least 10 years old).

Mg is based on MicroEmacs, as far as I know, which makes it roughly 30 years old.