Homage to Free Software: please include Emacs by default

Feedback Feature Request
1

Remarkably, Apple’s Unix-derived, yet proprietary operating systems include Emacs by default; however, I have yet to encounter a GNU/Linux distribution which included Emacs by default. Granted, the version of Emacs in MacOS is out of date; but it’s available out of the box for anyone who wants to use it.

It would be very cool for Arch and or Manjaro to be the first to do so. An Homage to roots.

2

emacs is quite a bulky package for a distro to install by default, especially if it is for no real reason other than nostalgia:

pamac info emacs | grep -F 'Installed Size'
Installed Size        : 276.3 MB

Even the compressed package in Manjaro’s repos is ~70MB:

emacs-30.1-5-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst       01-May-2025 07:01      74629905

That’s a fairly hefty download every system update, especially for Manjaro users on slow connections or with capped download limits.

Compare the installed size to:

pamac info nano | grep -F 'Installed Size'
Installed Size        : 2.7 MB

or

pamac info vim | grep -F 'Installed Size'
Installed Size        : 5.2 MB
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3

Will not implement. GNU Nano is included by default on most distros. Users of course are free to install whatever program they prefer.

Closing before anyone gets any ideas about the Vim vs. Emacs flame war.

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