Well, that's what the Neovim project is all about...stripping Vim down and removing the bloat and old technical debt. Have you tried Neovim? It sounds like it would be perfect for someone with those concerns.

vim itself isn't a "small tool", but its command-driven nature and plugin ecosystem is very much in the spirit of composing small tools to get things done. Emacs, imo, is even more so.

It still starts a thousand times faster than any IDE.

Additionally, it still uses less resources. VS Code consumes at least 1 GB of memory for just a simple project. I am not even mentioning other IDEs

In what way is it bloated? IIRC, the executable is less than 2MB, and without plugins it uses about that much memory too.

You forgot vim-runtime that is another 35mb and hard dependency on Debian.

But I was rather saying that if a program has 600 pages dense manual (vimbook) it is certainly far from Unix philosophy of small utility doing one thing.

Damn, it has built in file explorer and remote editor (netrw).

You can install vim-tiny on Debian, which I believe doesn't install the runtime files.

Size is not really a good indication of "bloat" IMO. There are 683 syntax highlight files, 7.8M in total, but you don't load most of that and it's just "idle" bytes on disk. Same for indent files, ftplugins, etc.

You could also save ~5M by not shipping translations, but is that "bloat"?

It's useful these things are shipped, and in the scenarios where you care about 35M of diskspace you probably don't want a full Vim anyway (and you can use vim-tiny).

I wasn't speaking about binary size, it was the answer to message that vim is 2mb binary. Bloat is that vim, even without scripting, is huge, and, at the same time, a lot of standard things are suprisingly missing. Even author of neovim felt that

It strikes me that that’s roughly 0.05% of the RAM on my desktop.

GP mixed up vim with emacs.