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Comment by Kjeldahl | Hacker News Reader

If you're on OSX and want a good Emacs, go to https://github.com/railwaycat/emacs-mac-port and read the installation instructions under the Homebrew section. It follows the official Emacs repo pretty closely, but has useful OSX additions (smooth scrolling, gesture support [font size e.g] and more).

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That git repo claims to be retired.

I get my emacs from here http://emacsformacosx.com

You misunderstand.

The repo you're referring to is Railwaycat's mirror of Yamamoto Mitsuharu's codebase. (which previously was only available via ftp and tarballs.)

Yamamoto has recently migrated to git and hosts a repo at Chiba U, the address is: http://www.math.s.chiba-u.ac.jp/~mituharu/emacs-mac.git

HOWEVER. Railwaycat does still maintain the Homebrew tap and formula for installing Emacs Mac Port

Here: https://github.com/railwaycat/homebrew-emacsmacport

A simple install via:

   brew tap railwaycat/emacsmacport
   brew update
   brew install emacs-mac

And you have a far superior Emacs for OSX than that built by emacsformacosx.com.

Once built, you can (without any problems) move the Emacs.app into your /Applications/ folder.

Don't do yourself a disservice, install Emacs Mac Port now.

So what is the benefit compared to the emacs port 'emacs'?

I found a full listing here: https://github.com/railwaycat/emacs-mac-port/blob/master/REA...

Thanks! Most of it was meh, but some sounds really good. The homebrew version provides hdr gfx but not all of this.

It's easy to misunderstand because it's not clear at all what is and isn't mirrored.

I'm on OS X, but I just installed GNU Emacs from source and run it in a terminal window. Never really understood GUI versions of Emacs -- they seem to defeat the purpose of Emacs.

Oddly, I find the opposite to be true, although I can't really think of a good way to justify why.

I have a GUI emacs-server running that I can open buffers from via emacsclient for "serious editing", but I often end up using vim for quick edits rather than bother with emacs[client] and context-switching.

I imagine it might be different if I could get used to running my shells from inside emacs with eshell or ansi-term, but have never had any success getting them to work right and be usable.

Actually, one reason for preferring the GUI does stand out - quite a bit more freedom in key-bindings, especiallly with ns-cmd-modifier and friends, and some C- bindings that are otherwise impractical in console mode (at least to my knowledge)

Since around 1999, my development workflow has been an IRC client, Emacs and various shells running inside a screen session. So it's not really context-switching for me -- Emacs is always live and running in there, so when I need to write or edit something, I just use it.

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