> though the minimalist in me always whined that "an editor" should not weigh 100+ megabytes

Heh. At work many in our department installed a (voluntary) tool that logs the apps we have in memory, and how much RAM they consume.[1]

My manager came to me and said "Your Emacs is taking 8GB of RAM?!"

Guess we should call it EGACS now.[2]

I had an LLM do some debug and it turned out my copy of Emacs is a bit buggy in MacOS. Every time I open a new frame, and then close it, it doesn't release a lot of GUI related stuff. Over several weeks, this leak adds up. I open new frames multiple times a day.

And of course, I got the LLM to make a package I can load in Emacs that cleans it all up without needing to quit.

After cleanup, it's taking "only" 1.5 GB of RAM.

[1] Company is dramatically reducing the amount of RAM on new laptops, so we want to gather data to show it's too little RAM.

[2] For those who don't get it, a common joke decades ago was that Emacs stood for Eight Megabytes and Constantly Swapping. Back when 8MB RAM was huge.