I've never worked on a project like Emacs, and haven't worked on much C at all. But even starting with the Spring Lisp Game Jam when I got into Fennel and Lua, the idea has been more appealing. Maybe in an odd twist TIC-80, the fantasy console, was a motivator to go further into the metal? I'm not sure I buy that C is close to the metal business in the first place. But whatever. The obvious first step was to clone and build Emacs. The instructions in the repo were very good and everything went smoothly.

I figured it would take a while on my x220, but I wasn't really prepared for the two hour (!) build. I'm hoping future builds, barring major changes to the repo, won't take as long. On the other hand, I have been thinking about upgrading to something with more horsepower. It's annoying to think about when so much modern hardware isn't inspiring.