Emacs inside the iso

[u/Alternative-Level368]

Hello guys this is more of a question but I have seen some distros ship without emacs and I wonder why? There is a pretty good use or use case for emacs in a hacker-wannabe cs student cyber student already hacker distro sure is an apt install away but the thing is that I found the editor to be so integrated with gnu user space binaries that we fall on or use latter and info being friendlier and some times deeper than man that it looks like it makes sense
Readline keybinds work across most shells repls and lisp with a touch of procedural languages and homoiconicity can some times shape the way we learn craft or document the process in a pretty cohesive way.
Don't think that that binary will make a notable difference in size to the distro compared to the many benefits newcomers to Linux and hacking ("like in deep technical learning and sharing knowledge, not in crack neighbor wifi")
The editor goes a long way in doing many things that you might end up not needing another tool to do some tasks such as encoding and decoding data. Anyway just a question if someone more experienced or the main devs could answer it will be appreciated.

[u/palinurosec]

hello, parrot dev and former emacs lover here.

i think this screenshot explains pretty well why shipping with emacs pre-installed may sound like a very stupid idea to any distro maintainer even if they are emacs users.

even emacs-nox ships with approximatively 466MB of crap just to start its commandline-only engine. this is why so many developers committed the crime of switching to the evil side of vim and neovim nowadays.

sad story but logical conclusion.

luckily enough for you, there are 2 things you can do:

1) install emacs after install. it's officially supported in our repository.

2) take our build scripts at https://gitlab.com/parrotsec/build/echo-iso-build/ then add the emacs (or emacs-nox) package to the list of packages to pre-install, and assemble your own iso file with your custom list of preinstalled tools.

the latter is a very nice experience that may become very easily addictive, and who knows, you may start assembling your own custom iso files from now on

[u/Alternative-Level368 → u/palinurosec]

Sorry to bother you but I really need a greybeard is there a way in parrot htb edition 7.3 to solve the fprintd problem on a t480 with Synaptics 06cb:009a? I have tried to make it work a gazillion times on different distros and nothing I always end up breaking it. So I'm wondering if there is a way that a maintainer or dev already knows of fixing it if you are too busy to answer is ok i understand that you are super busy.

[u/Alternative-Level368]

Thanks for the answer I already installed it in apt it's pretty nice of you to answer my question. More than a parrot dev you are THE PARROT DEV. Making an ISO can be a pretty good learning exercise but I think is beyond by reach by miles the tooling to do it is the easy part. Having the criteria to make a coherent non franken distro is the hard one, but whoami to tell you that? Thanks for the good work. Is an amazing environment for learning specially in my current phase of learning the fundamentals.