Comment by ineedasername

If it’s about wanting to understand your end to end workflow and you don’t mind it being “except for babel” then you could run emacs as a headless daemon and pass through to babel with emacsclient.

It’s a bit inelegant, and lacks the complete purity of “just 2,000 lines of code”. But the sentiment is already drawing lines based on arbitrary gradations in levels of abstraction. So if it improves your workflow to switch away from the rest of emacs’ baroque cathedral of unused functionality, and you want the simplicity of your bespoke engine, just make a handful of those 2,000 lines a wrapper around some i/o through to babel.

After all, it’s turtles all the way down on this sort of thing, at least until you’re staring at circuit diagrams of thinking, “huh, wonder if I can build it all with multi-, no, half adders..”. Further than that and you’ll probably need to learn some advanced metallurgy.