Michael Albinus writes:

> I would also agree to favor inotify when available.

Let's give that a try, then.  I installed the attached patch as master commit 
200c2b10faf298bf65e8b6dbd0cb9ef00b2f95d6.

> On OS X (better: on systems which have defined HAVE_NS), we should
> disable gfilenotify, because the Glib main loop won't be used (ns_select
> is used rather than xg_select).

configure.ac was trying to do that, but there was a typo.  Should also be fixed 
in the attached patch.