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I understand what the Aquamacs people are doing, but I think it's a big mistake. What makes Emacs so useful is not adherence to platform standards, but that it
by jfb 15y ago
I understand what the Aquamacs people are doing, but I think it's a big mistake. What makes Emacs so useful is not adherence to platform standards, but that it is a Lisp runtime with a lot of highly specialized text manipulation primitives that people have been hacking on for years.
It's an autarky wherever it runs, so let it be. I'm as big a proponent of the Macengeist (or whatever you want to call the ineffable quality that makes a good Macintosh application) as anyone I know, but Emacs is it's own world. Best to use straightforward Emacs 23 or 24 as a portal into that world, rather than trying to shoehorn alien concepts into it.
Now, building it on OS X can be a PITA -- not that it's not fully supported, but some stuff could be in better locations than the hated /usr/local. But that's an argument against myself that I'd prefer not to have at this exact moment.
- pivo 15y agoYou don't have to build emacs to get a modern version without all the Aquamacs hoo-ha. I've been using the build at http://emacsformacosx.com/ http://emacsformacosx.com/ ever since carbon emacs was discontinued. It's a nice, no surprises build.
- jfb 15y agoNo, I was more referring to how you have to override a bunch of environment variables in the build and do some edits to Makefile.in to prevent irritating warnings about non-existent directories when you build it yourself. There's nothing wrong at all about http://emacsformacosx.com http://emacsformacosx.com.
- gcv 15y agoBuilding GNU Emacs 23 on OS X is trivial. ./configure --with-ns && make && make install This builds an Emacs.app, which you can then drag into /Applications. Nothing goes into /usr/local.
- jfb 15y agoStart it up from the terminal -nw and it complains about a non-existent libexec directory under the source directory. EDIT: They may well have fixed this recently. I'll rebuild and see.
- jfb 15y agoOK, so here's the evidence of the argument with myself. http://homonculus.net/blog/2011/10/02/how-i-build-emacs-now http://homonculus.net/blog/2011/10/02/how-i-build-emacs-now You might find this useful; you might find it laughable. On my i7 15" MBP it's about ten minutes start to finish, so I usually build first thing in the morning while I'm brewing my coffee.