Comment by __david__ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by __david__ | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

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.

... [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.

Thanks for this.

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

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