>>24
That isn't hyperbole. If anything, it's an understatement.
The emacs package for my distro (Arch Linux, X11 not installed) would total 149 megabytes upon installation, including the following 32 other packages as dependencies: atk, cairo, compositeproto, damageproto, fixesproto, gnutls, gtk2, hicolor-icon-theme, inputproto, libcroco, libcups, libdatrie, libgsf, librsvg, libtasn1, libthai, libxcomposite, libxcursor, libxdamage, libxfixes, libxi, libxinerama, libxml2, libxpm, libxrandr, libxt, pango, pixman, randrproto, shared-mime-info, xcb-util, and xineramaproto.
On the other hand, vim would consume 29 megabytes after installation and doesn't need any extra dependencies that I don't already have. Note that this is a fairly minimal system, although I do have a few image libraries (libpng, libjpeg, etc.) installed in order to view images on the framebuffer. Emacs (and not vim!) also depends on all of those and more, so 149 megabytes is
still a conservative value.
Of course, this is comparing two different applications, and it'd be fairer to look at
gvim rather than vim alone, and also to compare a version of emacs that doesn't require x11 packages, so let's do that...
emacs-nox lists alsa-lib as a dependency (wtf), but is otherwise clean; after installation it'd be 80 megabytes. So vim is still the clear winner.
gvim would pull in 30 other packages totaling 94 megabytes. STILL slimmer than the full emacs installation. (For the sake of completeness, those packages are: atk, cairo, compositeproto, damageproto, desktop-file-utils, fixesproto, gnutls, gtk2, inputproto, libcups, libdatrie, libtasn1, libthai, libxcomposite, libxcursor, libxdamage, libxfixes, libxi, libxinerama, libxml2, libxrandr, libxt, pango, pixman, randrproto, shared-mime-info, vim, xcb-util, xineramaproto)
Conclusion: emacs is bigger and fatter than vim, no matter what way you look at it; and citing a size of 100 megabytes for a text editor isn't far off the mark.