David Leppik
Aug 9, 2017 · 1 min read

Depends on what you’re doing with all the rest of those GB. I’ve got a 16GB Mac and I regularly bump into virtual memory. IntelliJ is a memory hog, but I wouldn’t do Java development without it. BBEdit is “only” 50 megs, so I can use that. But for little things where I’m already in the command line, it’s quicker to bring up vim than to switch to another window. That plus the fact that I frequently have to edit things on a remote server.

I remember when Emacs stood for “Eight Megs All Constantly Swapped.” This was in the 1990s when a typical workstation had only four megs of RAM.