#Emacs for mac os x install#

emacs has only a minimal amount of OS-based conditionals in it. I tend to run Emacs across a myriad of platforms (Linux, OSX, Windows, FreeBSD to just list a few) and having a “stock” Emacs experience on all of these platforms means that my. It probably is - after all, I could’ve just remapped the key combination in my. Thanks, Davide!Īnd yes, it might come across as silly to rebuilding the editor just to get my preferred key combination back. He just upgraded it to Emacs 26.2, so this morning I rebuild my Emacs on OSX again and ended up where I wanted to be, with the latest version of Emacs, keyword expansion as I expected it to work, and a working GUI. Malcolm Purvis had been kind enough to point out in a comment to my original homebrew Emacs post that Davide Restivo had created a brew tap that brings the necessary –with-cocoa build option back. Instead of expanding keywords, I kept opening menus. Unfortunately, with Meta mapped to the Apple Command key, Shift-Meta-7 is a menu shortcut. My muscle memory says that I use Shift-Meta-7 (aka Meta-/ ) for keyword expansion as I use a German keyboard layout most of the time. It had have one niggling problem for me, though.

I did end up installing the homebrew Emacs for Mac tap which restored the GUI functionality. That’s a pretty serious restriction for me as I usually end up with multiple frames across my desktop.

#Emacs for mac os x install#

And running Emacs under X has the disadvantage that Emacs ends up looking quite different typographically than native OS X apps do.In a previous post I mentioned that I upgraded my homebrew install of Emacs after Emacs 26.2 was released, and noticed that I had lost its GUI functionality. None of the other ports you mention have ever flickered in my experience. To use the option key as your meta key, (setq mac-option-modifier 'meta). So for example if you're on a Macbook, but you are used to the key on the bottom left's being a control key, you would add (setq mac-function-modifier 'control) to your. Just to make sure everyone reading this can follow along: you are probably suggesting using Emacs on the X windowing system on OS X (which would of course require XQuartz to be running).Īnd by 'problematic keybindings' you probably mean how most graphical Emacs packages on OS X use the Command modifier key to set the meta bit.īut Mitsuhara Emacs (or emacs-mac as you refer to it) lets you assign any 'Emacs modifier bit' (control, meta, alt, hyper or super) to any of OS X's modifier keys (namely, control, option, command or fn) except for the shift key. If you're using Emacs on OSX, you should be running Yamamoto's port.

It a nice icon, select the original Emacs.app press I click the Menu clean, and has an important effect on sort order later. It has had flicker-free double-buffering for years, smooth (pixel-based) scrolling with inertia, integrated AppleScript bridge, integrated Apple event support, HiDPI, ligatures, graphics/SVG/animations through ImageKit, proper C-g handling, dictionary service support, proper fullscreen, and I could go on and on and on. Open up System Preferences > Users & Groups > Login Items and now Icon in the top-left press C select on your new Emacs Server.appundle press I click the icon in the top-left press V.

On the other hand, the Yamamoto Mitsuharu port is rock-solid, functionality is not removed cause Stallman said so, is actively worked on (Yamamoto was the old Carbon Emacs maintainer and knows what he's doing) and uses the latest OSX APIs. It was disappointing to see them following through with these removals. To make matters worse, Stallman has demanded that _useful features be removed_ from the OSX branch, because _Linux doesn't have equivalent APIs_.

The end result is that the official OSX Emacs is perpetually buggy (check emacs-devel, it breaks all the time) and lacks a lot of useful features that are available through new OSX APIs. The OSX support in the mainline Emacs repo (which and aquamacs use) is a third class citizen, since very few people work on it and Stallman is always quick to remind the rest that Linux (sorry GNU/Linux) remains the priority rather than those pesky non-free OSes. This issue is aleady solved in Yamamoto Mitsuharu's Emacs OSX port ( ) which if you use Emacs on OSX is what you should be running (rather than the 'official' OSX branch).