Re: Emacs for Mac OS X - questions

[Ian Eure <ian@digg.com>]

On Jun 25, 2009, at 11:27 AM, Marc Tfardy wrote:

> I plan to switch from windows to intel mac and Aquamacs and I don't  
> want
> use windows under mac - neither in virtual machine nor as dual boot.
> Emacs is one of my main application so it is very important for me  
> that
> all things are working as usual. Here my questions:
>
As other people have mentioned, you probably shouldn't use Aquamacs,  
as it's geared towards users who are comfortable with Mac apps, rather  
than Emacs.

Your options for Emacs on OS X break down into the Emacs 22-based and  
23-based. All GUI Emacs 22-based distributions use the Carbon port.  
Carbon will continue to exist in Snow Leopard, but it won't be usable  
by 64-bit apps. Carbon-based Emacsen should continue to work just fine  
with 10.6.

The Carbon port was removed from Emacs for version 23, and it was  
replaced with a Cocoa port. All 23-based GUI Emacsen use the Cocoa port.

22-based Emacsen:

  - Stock Emacs. OS X ships with Emacs 22.1.1, text-only.

  - Aquamacs, which most people have covered. http://aquamacs.org

  - Carbon Emacs. This is a distribution of Emacs 22 compiled with the  
Carbon window-system, and some added packages.

  - Emacs 22 from MacPorts. Newer than the version which ships with OS  
X, text-only.

23-based Emacsen:

  - Emacs-app from MacPorts. The CVS snapshot is five months out of  
date, and the non-CVS build is version "23.0.0_NS-9.0rc3." I have no  
idea what that means, since it doesn't resemble any of the pretest  
versions of Emacs 23 released so far.

  - Compile your own from CVS. It's very straightforward.

  - Run my nightly builds. Vanilla CVS, with minor patching as  
necessary to get stuff to work. I run them, and they work fine for me. http://atomized.org/wp-content/cocoa-emacs-nightly/


>  - what GNU Emacs features do not working in Aquamacs? In "Appendix
>    F - Emacs and Mac OS" is written:
>
>    "Emacs built on Mac OS X supports most of its major features except
>     display support of PostScript images. The following features of
>     Emacs are not supported on Mac OS Classic: unexec (`dump-emacs'),
>     asynchronous subprocesses (`start-process'), and networking
>     (`open-network-stream'). As a result, packages such as Gnus, GUD,
>     and Comint do not work. Synchronous subprocesses (`call-process')
>     are supported on non-Carbon build, but specially-crafted external
>     programs are needed. Since external programs to handle commands
>     such as `print-buffer' and `diff' are not available on Mac OS
>     Classic, they are not supported. Non-Carbon build on Mac OS  
> Classic
>     does not support some features such as file dialogs, drag-and- 
> drop,
>     and Unicode menus."
>
>     Is it still true for Aquamacs?
>
I believe this was only applicable for Emacs running on Mac OS 9 and  
less. I've never had any problem with these features with any Emacs  
running on Mac OS X.

  - Ian