I am confused: why Emacs keybindings in OS X?

I am confused: why Emacs keybindings in OS X?

[Alan]

Enigmas or Cruel Jokes?

I have avoided Apple and Microsoft operating systems for 20+ years; yet this year, I was required to use Apple and OSX for a new job, and decided to plunge in head first.  I was in for some revelations and some confusions.

1. Emacs is hardly found in any GNU/Linux distro, except if installed by oneself.  Yet, in OS X, it is there, ready to go.   ????  What is the history of this?

2. On OS X, Emacs keybindings (or what I call Emacs Keybindings) for navigation, at least, are ubiquitous.  (And the iMac keyboard is much more comfortable to type on that a similar laptop keyboard from a Thinkpad.)  Yet, Emacs on OS X, at least in my case, does not adhere to the same keybindings as closely is on Linux.  WTF?!

3. I have grown comfortable with much of what is happening on the OS X system.  Yet, I have found that for all the proprietary claims that I have lost data and (on and iphone) contacts have been randomly lost.  I think my position is going to be something like that I have read by Donald Knuth: I will only trust my family jewels to GNU/Linux.  So I have gone back to GNU/Linux.  

And, guess what?  The Emacs keybindings are not de rigeur on the GNU/Linux system!!!  


I am NOT comfortable with a few ethical/philosophical issues.  In particular, for example, CUPS works really, really well on OS X.  The boycott against Apple is off, but Apple is still not paying it forward.  I am more than uncomfortable with Apple's attempt to ensnare users in a consumer mode.  

Do the keybindings of Emacs, and of the desktop on OS X derive from a common ancestor, independently, or is something darker at work?

Alan

Re: I am confused: why Emacs keybindings in OS X?

[tomas]

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On Wed, Jan 27, 2016 at 12:34:04AM -0800, Alan wrote:
> Enigmas or Cruel Jokes?
> 
> 1. Emacs is hardly found in any GNU/Linux distro, except if installed by oneself.  Yet, in OS X, it is there, ready to go.   ????  What is the history of this?

Yes, but watch out. Unless things have changed since I last looked,
Gnu software installed by default on Apple (it's not only Emacs, but
also among many things, bash) tends to be somewhat... seasoned.

I had the impression that they stopped updating things whenever they
moved to GPLV3 (Steve Jobs's ghost or whatever?).

> I am NOT comfortable with a few ethical/philosophical issues [...]

Thanks for the "report".

regards
- -- tomás
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Re: I am confused: why Emacs keybindings in OS X?

[Christian Kruse]

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Hi,

<tomas@tuxteam.de> writes:

> I had the impression that they stopped updating things whenever they
> moved to GPLV3 (Steve Jobs's ghost or whatever?).

They even removed GPL software, e.g. Samba in OS X 10.7 Lion Server. At
some point in time they seem to have actively decided against GPL.

Best regards,
-- 
Christian Kruse
https://wwwtech.de/about

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Re: I am confused: why Emacs keybindings in OS X?

[tomas]

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On Wed, Jan 27, 2016 at 10:35:14AM +0100, Christian Kruse wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> <tomas@tuxteam.de> writes:
> 
> > I had the impression that they stopped updating things whenever they
> > moved to GPLV3 (Steve Jobs's ghost or whatever?).
> 
> They even removed GPL software, e.g. Samba in OS X 10.7 Lion Server. At
> some point in time they seem to have actively decided against GPL.

My hunch is that this has roots in old history (Steve Jobs, NeXT,
ObjectiveC and GCC). But hey, given Apple's strictly walled garden
mentality, it wouldn't be necessary to invoke that either.

For me, all of that is a reminder of how important the GPL actually is.

Regards
- -- t
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Re: I am confused: why Emacs keybindings in OS X?

[Robert Thorpe]

Alan <lngndvs@gmail.com> writes:

> 1. Emacs is hardly found in any GNU/Linux distro, except if installed
> by oneself.  Yet, in OS X, it is there, ready to go.  ????  What is
> the history of this?

In some ways this is because GNU/Linux distros target less powerful
machines.  People often complain about the size of the base install, so
many distro try to keep it small.  There also the complexity of the
directory structure, which is more important that bytes of hard disk
used in my view.

OS X gives you Emacs 22, which was the last version to use GPL 2.

> 2. On OS X, Emacs keybindings (or what I call Emacs Keybindings) for
> navigation, at least, are ubiquitous.  (And the iMac keyboard is much
> more comfortable to type on that a similar laptop keyboard from a
> Thinkpad.)  Yet, Emacs on OS X, at least in my case, does not adhere
> to the same keybindings as closely is on Linux.  WTF?!

I think that's mostly because of the readline library.  It defines
keybindings similar to Emacs in lots of situations.  In OS X which ones
were you thinking of?

Incidentally, some Emacs keybindings can also be enabled for Gnome
applications and for Firefox, you can read on the web about how to do
that.

BR,
Robert Thorpe

Re: I am confused: why Emacs keybindings in OS X?

[Random832]

Alan <lngndvs@gmail.com> writes:
> And, guess what?  The Emacs keybindings are not de rigeur on the
> GNU/Linux system!!!

I think it's that the GNU/Linux world, as an extension of the PC world,
moved to using ctrl as a general accelerator key. I remember on apps in
the 1990s and early 2000s using Motif, (e.g. the early versions of
Netscape) which used Meta as the general accelerator key, a subset of
the Emacs keybindings using control *were* supported within text edit
boxes.

In OSX, the general accelerator key is "command", so there is no
conflict with providing the Emacs bindings with control.

Re: I am confused: why Emacs keybindings in OS X?

[Random832]

Alan <lngndvs@gmail.com> writes:
> Do the keybindings of Emacs, and of the desktop on OS X derive from a
> common ancestor, independently, or is something darker at work?

"Emacs" existed as a concept before GNU Emacs, e.g. Gosling Emacs and
Montgomery Emacs... all ultimately derived in concept from RMS's TECO
Emacs. For a while, it was popular to integrate a subset of Emacs
keybindings in other systems (this is why they can be used in bash, for
instance, and as my other message mentioned Motif). I suspect OS X's
usage of it is a holdover of Nextstep doing this - there were certainly
no such keybindings in the pre-OSX mac environment as far as I can
remember.

I don't know what you mean by "something darker", though.