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Comment by lilyball | Hacker News Reader

From the original article, Emacs had this feature, and then they removed it. That's crippling it. Deciding not to implement the feature in the first place, well, that's a reasonable decision given their desire for functionality to be cross-platform. But accepting it, then turning around and removing it later even though it was already implemented, that's just spite.

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Crippling sounds like the entire software is unusable. If they stopped MacOS users being able to type the letter 's' that would be crippling. This is just disabling one small feature.

If crippled is a broken spine, then this is preventing some people from wearing a funny badge until everyone can wear funny badges.

I don't know...from what I can tell it sounds like they removed the usage of Mac OS specific APIs from mainline::

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2016-01/msg00...

Doesn't sound like crippling to me.

> Deciding not to implement the feature in the first place, well, that's a reasonable decision given their desire for functionality to be cross-platform. But accepting it, then turning around and removing it later even though it was already implemented, that's just spite.

Well this ignores the challenge of maintaining an open source project.

> Well this ignores the challenge of maintaining an open source project.

Presumably Emacs is still using platform-specific APIs for the actual drawing of the text, yes? So properly supporting Mac font rendering should not adversely affect maintenance of Emacs in general, and similarly it should not be any more work to maintain the correct Mac font renderer as it is to maintain the incorrect Mac font renderer.

AFAIK vanilla GNU emacs uses NeXTStep APIs, which are also implemented by the GNUStep project[1]. So if/when X11 (and the many libraries that sit on top of it) learns how to do color emoji, then GNUStep can implement the Mac OS API, and emacs will support it.

The GNU position wrt. Mac support is that only the APIs that GNUStep also supports can be used. You may disagree with the principles underlying that choice, but it is a long-standing policy of the project. It was a mistake (according to this policy) for them to merge the emoji support, and when the mistake was pointed out they removed it. So it's a bit more nuanced than your comment makes out.

[1] http://www.gnustep.org/

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