On Dec 19, 2011, at 2:29 PM, Carsten Mattner wrote:
> 
> For the record, how does Aquamacs compare?
> Is it a fork not trying to re-integrate with way more changes than is
> healty and acceptable while keeping emacs emacs and not mutating
> it into TextEdit.app with elisp support?

Aquamacs is a customization port of GNU Emacs. There is a decent back-and-forth dialog between the two, largely because the main aquamacs developer is a frequent contributor to this list.

I personally have some hope that once themes and packages are more solidly implemented in GNU emacs, Aquamacs can stop maintaining its own emacs code-base in favor of distributing GNU emacs with aquamacs packages pre-installed and configured.

Aquamacs is pretty strongly focused on the gui experience in macosx, so I don't know if it would be very useful to you and your minimalist desires, but it's certainly worth checking out if you have some free time.

*Chad