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Wow that's a wall of text proving pretty much nothing, other than that RMS is an out of touch goofball. As I and others have noted, actually using emacs on a M

Wow that's a wall of text proving pretty much nothing, other than that RMS is an out of touch goofball. As I and others have noted, actually using emacs on a Macintosh is dead easy. MacOS ships with an older terminal version, so you don't even have to download anything if you're fine with that distro. OTOH, multiple native build distributions exist and are a click away. I spend a good chunk of my day in a native build between text, scripting, and Orgmode, and, again, it's just not a problem. It's far easier, in fact, to use emacs on a Mac than on Windows precisely because MacOS is a unixy environment.

DonHopkins 1y ago
It only proves nothing if you didn't bother reading it (which you words "wall of text" imply) and didn't check any of the links proving what I said. Instead of dismissing everything by handwaving, please tell me which specific points I made that you disagree with, and what is your evidence? How long have you been using Emacs, yourself? If you just got started a few years ago, then that excuses your ignorance of history (but not your unwillingness to learn), but there is a LOT of well documented history about Emacs on the Mac, and all those links you didn't bother following prove it. You can't win an argument by being ignorant of history, claiming tl;dr, and refusing to look at the evidence. That's just conceding my points by default. Can you do any better than that?
- slowmovintarget 1y ago
  It feels like this changed roughly in the last five years. That's about how long I've been using Emacs on Mac. I'd mostly been using Sublime / Atom / Eclipse / Vim before that (and a long list of other IDEs and editors going back to Turbo Pascal 3.0 on IBM XTs). So perhaps I've not felt the same pain. I'm glad I can use Emacs at work (on Macs) and at home (on Linux). The funny thing is it's been easier to get Emacs up and running on Mac than on Linux. To get the latest stable Emacs I had to pull the source and build it myself (Ubuntu repos had old versions). On Mac it was just finding the right cask in Homebrew.
  - DonHopkins 1y ago
    >It feels like this changed roughly in the last five years. Hmm, that's about how long ago RMS got "canceled" and resigned from the FSF board (September 2019). Go figure!
- ubermonkey 1y ago
  The point is that you came in here with a pasted wall of text with a whole bunch of urls claiming emacs users on MacOS are somehow 3rd class citizens because ... of things from long ago, I guess. My point, Don, is that these long-ago issues are now irrelevant. Your position here runs utterly counter to the lived experience of Mac emacs users. I don't care what RMS did in 2005. It's not relevant to using emacs on a Mac in 2025. I don't even need to care about the history of emacs on the Mac, or whatever other ill-advised chicanery the FSF has committed on this or any other point (and, not to put too fine a point on it, but at 55 I've seen plenty of goofy own-goals from that crowd). What matters now is "gee, how easy is it for a Mac user to access and use emacs productively?" That answer, for at least the last 8 to 10 years (which is also the answer to your gatekeepy question), has been "very!" You open terminal and type "emacs," or you download a build that runs as a gui from any of several maintainers. You're done. It's about as simple as it is to run it on a Linux box (which I also do), and far simpler than getting it to behave under Windows (and I have those scars, too). So what was your point again?
  - tom_ 1y ago
    My thoughts too. I've never had any real problems running it on Windows myself, but it doesn't feel like Mac users are any worse off. I've been using Mac Emacs since about 2010, so perhaps I dodged some of the worst stuff, and it's always felt - for good or for ill - very much the same as using it on Windows or Linux/X-Windows, both of which I've been using since 2005 or so. I've always used the standard GNU version rather than any specific Mac port. Over the years I'll have done some mix of downloading prebuilt binaries, building it from source, or getting the MacPorts version. Perhaps I have missed out on some Fancy Extra Mac Stuff, the sort of thing that would come as standard with any project that took the platform seriously, but it's never really felt like a problem. And indeed, I figure if I'm happy enough with it running on X-Windows and on Windows, why wouldn't I be just as happy with exactly the same thing on macOS too? A consistent (or near enough) cross-platform experience is part of why I use Emacs anyway.
  - DonHopkins 1y ago
    My sweet summer child.

DonHopkins 1y ago

It only proves nothing if you didn't bother reading it (which you words "wall of text" imply) and didn't check any of the links proving what I said. Instead of dismissing everything by handwaving, please tell me which specific points I made that you disagree with, and what is your evidence? How long have you been using Emacs, yourself? If you just got started a few years ago, then that excuses your ignorance of history (but not your unwillingness to learn), but there is a LOT of well documented history about Emacs on the Mac, and all those links you didn't bother following prove it. You can't win an argument by being ignorant of history, claiming tl;dr, and refusing to look at the evidence. That's just conceding my points by default. Can you do any better than that?

slowmovintarget 1y ago
It feels like this changed roughly in the last five years. That's about how long I've been using Emacs on Mac. I'd mostly been using Sublime / Atom / Eclipse / Vim before that (and a long list of other IDEs and editors going back to Turbo Pascal 3.0 on IBM XTs). So perhaps I've not felt the same pain. I'm glad I can use Emacs at work (on Macs) and at home (on Linux). The funny thing is it's been easier to get Emacs up and running on Mac than on Linux. To get the latest stable Emacs I had to pull the source and build it myself (Ubuntu repos had old versions). On Mac it was just finding the right cask in Homebrew.
- DonHopkins 1y ago
  >It feels like this changed roughly in the last five years. Hmm, that's about how long ago RMS got "canceled" and resigned from the FSF board (September 2019). Go figure!
ubermonkey 1y ago
The point is that you came in here with a pasted wall of text with a whole bunch of urls claiming emacs users on MacOS are somehow 3rd class citizens because ... of things from long ago, I guess. My point, Don, is that these long-ago issues are now irrelevant. Your position here runs utterly counter to the lived experience of Mac emacs users. I don't care what RMS did in 2005. It's not relevant to using emacs on a Mac in 2025. I don't even need to care about the history of emacs on the Mac, or whatever other ill-advised chicanery the FSF has committed on this or any other point (and, not to put too fine a point on it, but at 55 I've seen plenty of goofy own-goals from that crowd). What matters now is "gee, how easy is it for a Mac user to access and use emacs productively?" That answer, for at least the last 8 to 10 years (which is also the answer to your gatekeepy question), has been "very!" You open terminal and type "emacs," or you download a build that runs as a gui from any of several maintainers. You're done. It's about as simple as it is to run it on a Linux box (which I also do), and far simpler than getting it to behave under Windows (and I have those scars, too). So what was your point again?
- tom_ 1y ago
  My thoughts too. I've never had any real problems running it on Windows myself, but it doesn't feel like Mac users are any worse off. I've been using Mac Emacs since about 2010, so perhaps I dodged some of the worst stuff, and it's always felt - for good or for ill - very much the same as using it on Windows or Linux/X-Windows, both of which I've been using since 2005 or so. I've always used the standard GNU version rather than any specific Mac port. Over the years I'll have done some mix of downloading prebuilt binaries, building it from source, or getting the MacPorts version. Perhaps I have missed out on some Fancy Extra Mac Stuff, the sort of thing that would come as standard with any project that took the platform seriously, but it's never really felt like a problem. And indeed, I figure if I'm happy enough with it running on X-Windows and on Windows, why wouldn't I be just as happy with exactly the same thing on macOS too? A consistent (or near enough) cross-platform experience is part of why I use Emacs anyway.
- DonHopkins 1y ago
  My sweet summer child.