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Ask HN: Emacs on macOS Ventura on Apple Silicon

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What is your go-to emacs for MacOS on apple silicon?

I'm aware of the wiki https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsForMacOS

Just wondering what people choose. I grew up on emacs on Sun workstations. Want to get back to it. IDEs are driving me nuts.

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> Want to get back to it. IDEs are driving me nuts.

This. I get a great experience without even using LSP which itself can be finicky.

1. ripgrep. Regex searches are the universal "do-everything" tool. If you really master them and integrate them into your workflow you will not want for much else. They can even supplant the need for auto completion to a certain degree. When you pop open the definition you searched for in a new window that's analogous to a completion popup. Then just M-/ for dumb completion to assist with the manual typing.

2. ctags. Old school. But it works. They can work across weird file types with languages embedded in them, etc. citre-mode has some nice "candy" features built on ctags like a "peek" overlay popup.

3. snippets. Create a set of hand crafted snipppets for each language you use. Code flows out of your fingers at the speed of thought. Yasnippet does what I need and allows embedding of lisp code into the snippet for some really really advanced expansions. Although simple expansions are all that's needed 99% of the time.

4. debugging. Take time to master a debugger like GDB. Or add debug(msg) statements through your code. Many languages will have a mechanism for the debug statements to be compiled out of a production build.

5. profit. Your laptop will never sound like an airplane take off the runway. The M1 may never be noisy but it will still reap the increased battery time.

I use Homebrew’s emacs

    brew install emacs

or when I want a GUI, I use the Cask version from https://emacsforosx.com

    brew install --cask emacs

The https://emacsforosx.com maintainer goes to great lengths to compile many of the optional dependencies, like image formats, and to support older versions of MacOS.

https://github.com/d12frosted/homebrew-emacs-plus

ditto.

I think the build from d12frosted on homebrew do not have the new native comp feature enabled. Not sure if that's a limitation of running on the M1. But on the M1, Emacs is fast and snappy regardless.

I think it's disabled by default. To enable:

brew install emacs-plus@28 --with-native-comp

Works fine with doom emacs on an M1

I use emacs-plus installed from homebrew. I also create an alias to the actual App in /Applications so that it is picked up by Spotlight. :)

same here, it’s been pretty stable and trouble free for me

The Emacs package from Nix. It’s the only macOS build of Emacs I used that was fully featured, provided in binary form, distributed from a reputable source, and not broken. I initially used Homebrew Emacs, but it removed GUI support a while back. I then briefly tried the emacsformacosx build, the one Homebrew Cask points to, but I stopped using that too because it’s not compiled with the full set of dependencies and isn’t supported by DoomEmacs [1]. I then moved to emacs-plus, but that too had issues like the lack of binary packages and unreliable updates. I finally settled on Nix and it hasn’t given me problems since.

The current situation personally came off as a surprise considering the popularity of Emacs.

[1]: https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs/blob/085b5563fc73daf5...

I recently just built it from source to get ahead of time compiling for ELisp. A little bit of effort, but after 1 long build, now it starts quickly and runs fast.

update: tried this build script and seems good

https://github.com/jimeh/build-emacs-for-macos

NetBSD's pkgsrc will let you compile any of a number of different emacs versions easily.

I haven't tested it on the M1 machine, but from experience, pkgin/pkgsrc did work pretty well with my 2015 Macbook Pro. I should give it a whirl on the M1.

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