Aquamacs 2.0 Released | Hacker News Reader

Aquamacs 2.0 Released

aquamacs.org

47 pointstalison12 comments

Roughly 5 years ago I was an Emacs user. I remember I got my first job out of college at a Windows development shop, and I tried to use Emacs for the first couple of weeks, before I had to give in and use Visual Studio like everyone else around me. Being able to actually compile the project from the Project file was kind of a must-have =)

Nowadays I can't really think of a good use for Emacs. I use XCode for C++, Textmate for Python (and some old PHP and Java), MacTex for writing articles...

But man I'd love to use Emacs again and whip out some Elisp!

Perhaps it's tabbar-mode but for some reason I find Aquamacs to be crazy-slow when compared to the vanilla Emacs.app. I realise there's a lot of extras that are included in Aquamacs but the difference is just insane. It's a shame though because I love the default setup (after I've turned off all of their modifier key changes).

This has been my experience too. I'm downloading now to see if performance has improved.

Same here. It has consistently gotten slower since the 0.9+ days. My simple test involves loading up Slime, opening a Lisp source file of moderate size and holding down C-n. The recent releases of Aquamacs consistently spikes at 25-50% CPU usage on my MBP. The lag is noticeable while editing.

I just installed it and I installed the Mac 23.2 build a few days ago. Aquamacs is nice because just about everything (e.g., latext support) is bundled in. The plain 23.2 build starts faster and seems lighter. I alias 'Emacs' to start the new 23.2 plain app, 'aquamacs' to start Aquamacs, and can run the default emacs install with 'emacs'. Nice to have all three depending on what I am working on.

Based on GNU Emacs 23.2 if anyone is curious.

Folks, if you'd like to try out a 64-bit, Intel-only optimized build of Aquamacs 2.0, please e-mail me at david.reitter@gmail. At least on my system this build is noticeably faster.

I love Aquamacs, but man... FOSS projects sure have a hell of a time with good (visual) design.

Good job

I spent a while today trying to decide what I like better, Cocoa Emacs or Aquamacs, and I eventually decided upon Aquamacs.

I found that Cocoa Emacs is faster to setup and get running, but once you have Aquamacs behaving the way you want it the extra features really are worth it. For me, tab support and the ability to re-open windows & frames from the last session seals the deal.

One oddity that I struggled at first with was how to get it to load ~/.emacs.d/init.el. I eventually solved this by loading it from: ~/Library/Preferences/Aquamacs Emacs/Preferences.el

the thing that made me switch from aquamacs to cocoa emacs was that cocoa emacs acts more like the emacs on other platforms (ubuntu, bsd, windows). I liked aquamacs though, if I used exclusively osx I'd probably use aquamacs.

IMO, the best free text editor for the mac is jEdit.

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