Re: Emacs on OS X development

[chad <yandros@gmail.com>]

On Jul 12, 2012, at 5:23 PM, John Wiegley wrote:

>>>>>> Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:
> 
>>> back to nsport. The difference is that noticeable. We have been hoping the
>>> nsport get better. It seems 3 years have passed.
> 
>> Waiting ain't gonna fix it, indeed.
> 
> Stefan, I want to bring up again the possibility of switching the Mac port
> over to Yamamoto's code.  Is there any reason not to?  I just tried the ns
> port again, and within minutes couldn't tolerate it:
> 
> 1. The colors are washed out, compared to Mac-Port.
> 
> 2. The leading on Courier is all wrong.  Example: The pixels from the top of
>    capital letters run into the mode-line.  I need to set line-spacing to 3
>    just to make text look decent.
> 
> 3. If I switch to *scratch* and turn on flyspell, I can out-type Emacs very
>    easily, the lag is that bad.

I use the ns port on macosx 10.7.4 every day, compiled from bazaar
every few days, and have never seen any of these problems. I've been
doing this for years, with the current bzr head and OS release, without
trouble. I write a lot more english prose than code these days, maybe 
that's the difference?

> Why are we sticking with the ns port again, when Yamamoto has been so active
> in keeping the Mac-Port patch maintained?


There hasn't been a viable mac-port for emacs-24 until very recently
(it was announced 31 days ago today). The previous mac port lacked
lexbind and bidi, for example.

As near as I can tell, something about various people's set-up,
hardware, and/or usage patterns makes either the mac port or the ns
port really painful (it really does go both ways). Since many of us
aren't feeling your pain, and do feel different pain when we try your
preferred approach, it shouldn't be too surprising that there's been
little motion.

It looks like the future-support questions are probably not an issue
anymore, so I've been meaning to try out the 24.1-based mac port, but
I don't really want to revert from bzr if I can help it. It would be
nice if there were an easy way to try to mac port with the current
bazaar sources, if if you're looking for some way to spur along the
process.

Hope that helps,
*Chad