Does anyone here have experience running Emacs on the new MacBooks? Is the authors experience the norm? My life is an Emacs right now, so this would be a blocker for me to upgrade.
https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/10152
gccemacs isn't available natively yet and probably won't be until later this year, but Emacs running on M1 is very snappy and faster in my experience than a nativecomp build running on an Intel machine.
There are two major versions of Emacs on Mac. There's the "NextStep" version, which is part of the official emacs repository, and the "Mac" version, which is separately maintained.
* emacsformacosx.com runs in x86 emulation mode, but flickers when using lsp mode --> this is the version the author used, and I didn't find it to work well. It's the NextStep version.
* Mitsuharu Yamamoto's maintains the Mac port and has M1 patches in the "work" branch but not in the master branch. I use the work branch and am very happy with it. Compilation instructions: https://amitp.blogspot.com/2020/11/building-emacs-27-on-appl...
* in homebrew the emacs and emacs-plus packages both work on arm m1, but I haven't tried these as I prefer the Mac port over the NextStep version.
* homebrew "railwaycat" emacs is based on the Mac port, and it looks like it has m1 patches, but I haven't tried it either.
* The gccemacs branch was tricky to get working even on my x86 mac, and I haven't tried it on the M1 macbook. It requires libgccjit which is in x86 homebrew but not in arm homebrew (gcc is not yet available). The M1 feels so fast that I've not felt the need to use gccemacs.
TL;DR: Emacs is not a blocker, but the widely used version from emacsformacosx.com doesn't work as well as the Mac Port [https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac/src/work/README-mac]