Emacs for Macs
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 ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) 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)?
Tags: emacs, geek, mac
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