Reran my unofficial test; some of the editors consumed a bit more virtual memory than they did the first time around, but were still pretty frugal.
You will definitely be surprised: levee held #1 smallest by a good margin:
- levee: 2936, 2) ed 5436, 3) mg 5944, 4) nano 7732, 5) jmacs/joe 10,244, 6) xjed 22,152
So ed was NOT 1/10 of the others, plus though it’s simple, levee is much easier to look at several lines of text without having to repeatedly specify a line or group of lines to even examine. If you prefer Emacs-like key bindings, though it consumes a bit more than levee, mg does great @ 5944, about ~1700-1800 less than nano.
So when functionality is taken into account, if you want a very light, yet functional editor, levee and mg are great choices, and nano is pretty good too, especially when it’s easy to rebind keys in nano. However, ALL of these editors are quite light and efficient, so whatever people prefer, we’re talking about a difference of 20,000 bytes from the smallest to the “largest” image size for these fast, simple editors! Pretty good when a LOT of the big ones start running at a couple hundred MB (or more)!