Emacs for Macs

[ewx]

Mac support for Emacs (or possibly the other way round) has been a bit of an issue for a while.

The shipped /usr/bin/emacs only runs in a terminal, lacking any kind of GUI support, which is OK for quick edits but rather inferior for extended work.

Compile your own Emacs with X11 support (or use someone else's, e.g. Fink) and that works, but then you're at the mercy of Apple's deranged X11, which gets on badly with Spaces and has very poor cut and paste integration with native applications.

For a while there's been Aquamacs, which bills itself as a Mac-friendly version of Emacs, but I never really got on all that well with it.

A particular problem is that if you type anything while a selection exists, the selection is replaced with what you type. This is Macish enough but if you created the selection using the keyboard rather than the mouse then you can't make the selection go away with the keyboard - you have to use the mouse. The result ends up being a lot of undoing, even after months of use.

It also doesn't tell you what size your window is when resizing and creates new windows (frames, in Emacs's own terminology) with a size matching the last one. So getting a window of a particular size can be rather fiddly.)

Recently fanf mentioned the NextSTEP port of Emacs (or OpenSTEP, if you prefer) which has now been merged into the trunk of Emacs. NextSTEP's direct descendant is of course OS X, so this is a Mac-native Emacs.

The source can be retrieved via CVS. It built an Emacs.app without any trouble. It act much more like my muscle-memory expects Emacs should (no more destructive and un-dismissable selections), but also has concessions to the local OS - for instance it supports native cut and paste using ⌘C, ⌘X, ⌘V etc. Window size behavior is more sane and usable too.

Complaints so far:

• Trying to save a buffer that doesn't already have a filename offers by default to save it somewhere in the guts of Emacs.app, which isn't very useful.
• Mac-native means of entering “special” characters don't seem to be available. C-X 8 RET works fine, with tab completion over Unicode character names, but making ⌥⌘T behave as normal would be nice.

These are pretty minor; overall it's a clear improvement over what came before. Perhaps Apple can be persuaded to included it in future releases (with a link from /usr/bin/emacs into the depths of the application bundle)?

Comments

[burkesworks.livejournal.com]

then you're at the mercy of Apple's deranged X11

You'll be aware that Apple's latest security update borks X11 completely?

[ewx.livejournal.com]

X11's working as well for me as it ever has and I don't see any pending updates. I already have the 10.5.7 update if that's what you mean.

[emperor]

I've been using a built-from-CVS Emacs.app for a while now, and it seems to mostly WFM. I think it offers me ~ by default, but maybe that's because I launch it from the command-line?

The latest update seems to make X11 run full-screen by default (or so my colleagues claim - I've yet to install it myself).

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Ah, in fact it doesn't default to a fixed location at all but rather it inherits its directory from the buffer you were standing in when you created the file-less buffer, and I was probably in C-h n (i.e. NEWS).

[fanf]

I think the politically correct name (in the context of Emacs) is GnuSTEP :-)

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I'm just following what the relevant README says... (http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/*checkout*/emacs/nextstep/README?revision=1.5&root=emacs)

[pne.livejournal.com]

if you created the selection using the keyboard rather than the mouse then you can't make the selection go away with the keyboard - you have to use the mouse.

How bizarre.

How does one create a selection with the keyboard on a Mac? And how does one make the selection go away in other apps? What happens when you do that in Aquamacs -- it extends the selection anyway?

I only know the Windows behaviour (Shift+arrow creates or extends a selection; unshifted arrow keys make it go away).

create a selection with the keyboard on a Mac

[ewx.livejournal.com]

In Aquamacs, the same as anything else descended from GNU Emacs, i.e. C-SPC and move the cursor around. In general on a Mac, no idea if you can.

Re: create a selection with the keyboard on a Mac

[pne.livejournal.com]

Would ESC (or ESC ESC ESC) work to cancel the selection?