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Emacs for OSX

emacsformacosx.com

34 pointsfogus22 comments

Probably the first site I've seen that uses SVG as the entire page, and it's really neat. The whole thing scales beautifully no matter what size the browser is.

I did not notice that before, thanks for pointing that out!

Yes, except poor job hiding the default no-svg-support message (hint: with Safari 4, Zoom out).

doesn't respond to apple-+ or shift-apple-+ so can't make text larger....not a problem in this case but, could have been.

Pity Chrome doesn't seem to handle link-hovering right.

Very nice, though - it looks like it's finally time to get serious about SVG.

This appears to have been corrected in either the site or Chrome itself since I last looked.

For those who use this: how does this stack up against

http://aquamacs.org/

and

http://homepage.mac.com/zenitani/emacs-e.html

It sounds like it's closer to the one I've been using which (at least as I have it configured) is more of a native emacs and less of a native mac app.

The builds on emacsformacosx.com are literally taken from CVS (or the ftp.gnu.org release directory) and compiled up with no extra patches, packages or anything. I did take the resulting binary and make a fancy looking .dmg for it to live in but the actual application itself is completely stock.

I specifically made these builds because Aquamacs annoyed me. Think of them as sort of the anti-Aquamacs. Aquamacs tries to force Emacs into being a well behaved Mac application where, for instance, every buffer is a separate window (which is really annoying when you have multiple hundreds of buffers open). I'm sure there are Mac people out there that will love this and think that it is cool and maybe even The Right Thing. I wanted an Emacs for Emacs people that happened live on OS X and not an Emacs for Mac people.

The Carbon Emacs Package you linked to is more of a batteries included type of distro that aims to add a bunch of extra packages to the stock emacs. I haven't used it lately but it's worth noting that the recently released Emacs 23.1 doesn't have a Carbon port in the main source repo any more. It got replaced with the Cocoa/GnuStep port.

A more important question for me:

How is this different from building Emacs out of MacPorts? I interact with Emacs solely through a terminal window, and so don't need or want a GUI version.

My Mac OS X comes with emacs and vim already if you're using the terminal. I thought they all did.

Yes, but it usually lags a bit behind the current versions (as all operating-system packages do). So I end up building a more recent one from MacPorts anyway.

There are 2 ways it is different:

1) It is a self contained .app file and generally goes in your /Applications folder which means you have to go out of your way to get it to launch from the terminal by simply typing "emacs". I put this little sh script in my path somewhere:

    #!/bin/sh
    /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs "$@"

2) Since it isn't a text only Emacs, launching it from the command line still creates a bouncy Emacs icon on your dock and gives it its own window and menu bar. "emacs -nw", as usual, takes you straight to text mode without leaving the terminal.

It got replaced with the Cocoa/GnuStep port.

Maybe this is a good place to ask: any idea how to make the Cocoa 23.1 port behave like the 22.x Carbon port for dragging files from Finder windows into Emacs?

Under 22.x, that would open a new buffer in the most-recently-used frame containing the file. Under 23.1, dragging to an Emacs frame pastes the contents of the dragged file into the open buffer. (Also annoyingly, dragging to Emacs' dock icon opens a new frame on the same Space as the most-recently-used frame, but luckily (setq ns-pop-up-frames nil) fixes that.)

Maybe this is a good place to ask: any idea how to make the Cocoa 23.1 port behave like the 22.x Carbon port for dragging files from Finder windows into Emacs?

Not exactly, but if you drag it to the dock icon instead of the window then it will open the file in a new frame which is closer to what you want.

Thanks for this.

Is there a way to make the window open at the center of the screen?

... [in aquamacs] every buffer is a separate window

Not true at all. In Aquamacs the only way to get a new window is ⌘-N, same as any Mac app. C-x C-f puts the newly loaded file into the current window, same as any Emacs.

I've been using aquamacs for some time now, and I think I'll be switching to plain old emacs because of this page. Is this really just a vanilla build of emacs with no customization? It seems to be much more well-behaved than the last time I tried out the regular emacs (which I think was version 22).

I notice this version ignores any value I give (set-frame-height (selected-frame) ...), however, it's better than running in a Terminal and I could never get Aquamacs to work with my .emacs (just hangs).

That's a lot of fancy. I wish I just new what the flags were, as it doesn't build on Snow Leopard for me.

Doesn't build for me either right now (NativeRect array problem in nsterm.m), but I'm guessing it doesn't for him either since there hasn't been a build for 2 days.

I've always build mine with:

    ./configure --with-ns
    make -j 4 bootstrap

(I only rebuild every few months or so, so a bootstrap is safer)

Yes, my script got the NativeRect error tonight. Last night I was offline reconstructing my disk after I botched some code in a home made gpt partitioning tool (it made a full recovery--phew).

I think I'm going to have to figure out how to build with -m32 so that it works on versions before 10.6. I haven't looked into it but I suspect you can "lipo" the 32 and the 64 bit executables together like you can with PowerPC and Intel and so that might be an option too.

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