Having found the manual for pmate text editor I'm more in love with it than ever. Its insanely compact. About half its commands are written in macros of its basic commands. It doesnt do regexps for example but your search command can contain commands to match variable things. And things stored elsewhere as variables. Ok granted a lot of this is aesthetics. But there is this phenom i keep coming across, in "early" development stages (Unix, cpm): for a given program, a large amount of succinct functionality, often invoking 'elegance', is found in shockingly small programs. The pmate program is under 22,000 bytes, so under approx 15,000 instructions (guesswork). The manual describing the program is 100 pages, many times the size of the program. Theres got to be something to this phenomenon. Ita obvious that much of program size growth is in dealing with error detection and handling, and theres a deminishing-returns rhing there. Also true is that many crucially useful programs are very large. Im not exclaiming a consistent observation. But i think a close look at this would be very interesting.