I have the benefit of working in an organization that provides quite a bit of autonomy, but even still the life of a programming inside of a fortune 500 company means I'm going to be editing text files on machines for which I can't install software. Sometimes, that means my editor choices are limited to nano and vim, and I prefer emacs. Typically, I just want an editor that responds to my muscle memory without thinking too hard. So, a simple editor that feels like emacs (maybe with a dired mode and a shell) is good enough. Bonus: it's best if I can just wget the editor and use it. Enter QEmacs !
Download the latest version from the website. Extract it somewhere. use ./configure --disable-x11 --disable-xv --disable-html --disable-png Run make . Now you'll have a binary called qe. Read the docs here .If you have any trouble building, here's my 272k binary . Let me know if it works for you.