Modern operating systems and memory allocation techniques make it hard to account for memory usage in a meaningful manner without a more in-depth investigation of program behavior. Quick stats from memory reporting tools aren't worth much in isolation unless those numbers significantly deviate from expectations.

I wonder how much of the base data structures that are always in memory are pointers, and if it'd be more fair to say it's really the equivalent of 3 mb virtual/1.5 mb resident (or even 1.5/.75 for 16 bit!)

Check jmacs from joe.

Oh that's nice, somehow I never thought to try Joe. It's 13MB VSZ and 7MB RSS megabytes in my little measurement. emacs-nox is 94/22.

"emacs -nw -q" can be pretty fast too.

Not light on resources compared to jmacs, but at least it loads faster.

There is also GNU zile.

Or Mg, which is even smaller.

The parent had issues with Unicode, which jmacs doesn't.

Does not support Unicode.