Emacs Script Pitfalls (2014)

lunaryorn.com

28 points·brudgers··10 comments

I've come across this before and it's pretty much correct: using Emacs Lisp as a scripting language can give a huge 'bang for the buck' when automating some existing Emacs feature/application.

For any other task? Definitely avoid ELisp and go for a more 'mainstream' language.

(In fact, I'm currently writing some ELisp scripts to automate ProofGeneral; reading HN while the test suite runs ;) )

I stopped reading at '"real" Emacs is typically installed via Homebrew at /usr/local/bin/emacs'.

Err, to be fair the context was that OS X usually has a very outdated version of Emacs. (Don't have a Mac so dunno for sure if that's still the case or if the article is out of date.)

On Yosemite 10.10.3, the emacs version is 22.1.1.

So it's really ancient: 22.1 was released in 2007.

I've installed through homebrew and the version says

GNU Emacs 24.5.1 (x86_64-apple-darwin14.3.0, NS apple-appkit-1347.57) of 2015-04-13 on mymachine

That's the emacs that comes with the BSD OS.

You can download and install 24.5-1 at http://emacsformacosx.com/ without having to use homebrew.

Yes the version @ http://emacsformacosx.com/ is much better.

Why?

What is the difference between that and brew install emacs --cocoa?

Gotta throw in a pitch for the Japanese Cocoa-native Emacs port: https://github.com/railwaycat/emacs-mac-port

Running this with Spacemacs is... well, surprisingly pleasant. Unicode, pixel level scrolling, image support that isn't totally broken, it's...nice.

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