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Comment by na85 | Hacker News Reader

I similarly encourage any Mac users who are serious about emacs to use Mitsuharu Yamamoto's fork, which adds several usability improvements that RMS refuses to endorse and is just generally a better experience on Mac. Mainline GNU Emacs feels clunky and obsolete by comparison.

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Also, if you're worried about the occasional regression, you can archive an installer package of the OS X .app (--with-ns) version each time you build by adding something along the lines of

    version="$(date +%Y.%m.%d.%H.%M.%S)"
    packagedir="$HOME/Unreliable/Packages"

    pkgbuild \
      --identifier at.jasomill.pkg.org.gnu.Emacs \
      --version "$version" \
      --install-location /Applications \
      --component nextstep/Emacs.app \
      "$packagedir/Emacs-$version.pkg"

to your build script; add

    sudo installer -package "$packagedir/Emacs-$version.pkg" -target /

if you also want to install. The resulting package is also a handy way to push the updated version to multiple Macs.

Note, however, that I've reverted to a previous version maybe twice in the past 5+ years of weekly builds (from the GNU master branch), and even in these cases, the regression didn't affect core editing functionality (last one I remember, editing over ssh via tramp was failing in certain circumstances [that I never got around to working out in detail]).

What are the improvements?

Here is the repo: https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac

Skimming the readme, I see that it's almost entirely mac specific and mostly UX. I can't say they are completely useless but nothing really vital, except the features inherited from Carbon, which seem useful (I really like the concept of AppleScript, i.e. all programs responding to a single programming interface; I guess DBus is supposed to do sth. similar on FreeDesktop, no?).

If anyone else is confused, "sth" is an abbreviation for "something" that was popularised in some countries by dictionaries for non-native English speakers. It's common in continental Europe and the Middle East but obscure in English-speaking countries; "smth", and "sthg" are other common abbreviations that also came from bilingual dictionaries.

Wow, interesting. FWIW, English is my L2 indeed, but I picked that "sth" up from the Internet, and thought that it was some sort of internet slang abbreviation. Thanks for the TIL!

It bothers me a tiny bit that 'sth' is a thing, because it seems so unnecessary to me (outside of perhaps T9 style texting?). I imagine it generates more confusion than it saves effort, considering the word's relative (in)frequency.

But I am also fascinated that this a apparently a thing :).

Once there was an Desktop-Environment called KDE 3. It has this Interprocess-Communication called dcop. Around that time there were serious attempts made to reach a similar level like AppleScript. There even were plans to recreate the Wokflow(?)-App from MacOS. But then KDE4 came, DBUS replaced dcop and things became a complicated mess. Today DBUS is still used, but the spirit to externally automate your apps seems to mostly gone, and remaining abilitys are just a shadow of past promises.

> DBUS replaced dcop and things became a complicated mess

That's what happens when one makes compromise with Gnome people. It's too late to undo the damage, but we can learn a valuable lesson.

that RMS refuses to endorse

What's his rationale?

NIH?

That Mac-only features would promote (the closed source) Mac OS X, if I remember correctly.

Mostly because they'd add a feature on a non-free platform (macOS) that is otherwise missing from a free platform. Notably, color emoji have worked fine forever on macOS, and were then _intentionally broken_ (when I say broken I mean the UI blocked for about ten seconds and then finally either displays a placeholder or something similarly less featureful). The reason for this is because Linux font rendering can't get color emoji right.

Instead of blocking these features, won’t it be better to go fix he free platform? What he is doing only promotes mediocre free software to propagate that will only make user switch to other non-free alternatives - Vsnet and sublime are taking away many emacs users.

RMS isn't the god of all free software. A GNOME desktop is composed of hundreds of bits of software, and it encompasses many unrelated individuals, at least three big orgs (GNOME, GNU, FreeDesktop/SytemD people), and carries a baggage of decades of history. You can't say, in such a situation, unlike what Apple and Microsoft do to their users many times, that the new way is this and everybody has to just eat it up.

WRT users switching, let them do. One thing I'd really fear would be Emacs becoming just another attention whore of a piece of software. Not only, but also, options and competition are very nice things to have. VSCode is not that interesting to me, but I really like Sublime Text; I can easily suggest it to anybody instead of Emacs if they are not into the idea of using a highly- and live-customisable and very composable environment and want sth. that just works.

That Emacs should not give an advantage to non-free operating systems.

Now, because Emacs is free software, this doesn't prevent anyone such as Yamamoto to go and modify Emacs. Rms doesn't want his officially-sanctioned version to have Mac-only improvements, but he also defends the GPL which allows other people to do so. Rms isn't going to go and tell Yamamoto to take down his fork or anything (but he probably will tell macOS users at every opportunity that they are working with an abusive OS).

It might be abusive in the sense that it's nonfree but at least it's functional.

Year of the Linux desktop jokes aside, I've just lately got sick of how broken Linux is on most laptops, even ThinkPads which are supposed to be the gold standard.

My ThinkPad never had working suspend resume, for example, which is just basic stuff that Linux can't seem to get right.

I'm not 24 and childfree any more. I don't have time to fiddle with acpi or systemd.

Still the only way to run Linux on your laptop and remain sane is to run it full-screen inside VirtualBox on OSX or Windows.

I have been trying to do this for nearly 20 years now...

I've used two Thinkpads. I'm currently on an X1 5th gen running Debian stable and it's the most blissful computer experience I've ever had. Everything works, the damn thing is fast, 12 hours of battery life and it's so light. I don't understand this magic but I'm glad it's there.

Previously I was on an x250 also on Debian stable which also worked flawlessly until I dropped it hard. It was just a little heavier and a little slower than my current X1.

On the topic of Macs being stable; I've seen my coworkers experience a lot of grief during the past few months with some macOS updates.

I'm not saying that the experience is in general better with one setup or another, just that mine has been good. I'm sure your experiences are valid too.

FWIW my wife and I have been running Debian on X-series Thinkpads for years with no problems except for having trouble some printers and with the occasional WiFi hotspot. Linux on the desktop Just Works in our experience.

I have to run Windows 10 on a system for work and I have to say the Linux install and setup experience is way nicer.

Couldn't one way out of the impasse be to enhance GNUstep to implement the macOS APIs/features which Yamamoto's fork uses? RMS doesn't want to add features only supported on proprietary platforms, but so long as one free software platform supports the same feature, that should answer RMS' objection.

Yes, this is more or less what rms wants to happen: that GNU gets the benefits of macOS. Then when both OSes can use those colourful emojis, he will accept the code into Emacs.

One of the examples RMS gave where this happened (in GCC) relates directly to OS X history, viz.,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13224864

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