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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

This assumes brew works on your machine. It doesn’t on older Macs.

As noted on the GNU emacs site[0], you can download prebuilt binaries here[1], if you really can’t be bothered with ‘make install’. Homebrew is hardly necessary (for most things.)

[0]: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/download.html

[1]: https://emacsformacosx.com/

At least for me, homebrew emacs isn’t that useful. It is terminal-only.

There are taps that build GUI Emacs via homebrew, that's what I use. In particular, I use this one: https://github.com/d12frosted/homebrew-emacs-plus

I think it was a "removing from future versions of macOS" situation, not removing from existing installs. If your mac is old enough to not have homebrew, it's probably too old to install Catalina due to the fact that they stopped supporting devices without Metal support.

Also, feel free to replace `brew install emacs` with the macports equivalent and the point still stands.

Well sure, there are alternatives. I was commenting on the casual assumption that everyone has brew. Brew has worse support for older Macs than a lot of other software.

And you can compile emacs from trunk or master or main or whatever from the GitHub mirror pretty easily.

Tigerbrew has a python2 formula available back to 10.4: https://github.com/mistydemeo/tigerbrew/blob/master/Library/...

MacPorts works on OS X 10.4 Tiger and above. :)

Are there any machines that support newer versions of the OS that don’t support Homebrew?

Surely you can cobble together a toolchain circa your old Mac and build from source?

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