Re: Emacs for Mac OS X - questions

[Xah Lee <xahlee@gmail.com>]

On Jun 26, 9:40 am, Marc Tfardy <b...@cyk.cyk> wrote:
> Andrea Crotti schrieb:
>
>  > On 25 Giu, 20:27, Marc Tfardy <b...@cyk.cyk> wrote:
>
>  >>    - is the look & feel approximately like GNU Emacs?
>  >>
>  > Almost, I returned to the carbon version
>  >http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/unix_open_source/carbonemacspac...
>  > which I think is more similar
>
> Yes, but as I already wrote in other post, carbon support will be
> shortly cutted.

i think that's just a naming issue. Carbon Emacs is named that because
it was one one of the earliest popular emacs port on the mac, at the
time Cocoa is just budding under OS X and Aqua is buzzword pretty.
(this is early 2000s)

AquaMac Emacs didn't come or didn't become popular until few years
later.

Although the name is Carbon Emacs, indicating it is based on Apple's
Carbon API (which is older technology, replaced by Cocoa API).
However, as of today, Carbon Emacs uses whatever is in latest GNU
emacs as base, so does AquaEmacs. (and in this year or last, FSF's
emacs cvs has deprecated (or removed) the Carbon based emacs code) As
far as which of the Carbon Emacs and AquaEmacs are more based on
Carbon API or Cocoa API, i suppose they are pretty much equal.

In a nutshell, if you are used to traditional user interface of emacs,
stick with Carbon. Because with Aqua, you have to do a lot to
customize it. It certainly can be done. Note that AquaMac also
launches Apple's proprietary help system as its help file. All in all
is very annoying. AquaMac tries to make emacs's interface stick with
100% Apple's GUI Guidelines. This means, it acts like every other Mac
app, which is in conflict with emacs ways, some good emacs ways.

I support AquaMac Emacs because it spread idea that many emacs user
interface is long overdue for a overhaul, and AquaMac is widely
successful for that, esp among academic LaTeX users, who can't be
bothered to spend months or years to study emacs's esoteric ways.

If you really want Cocoa API based emacs, i heard NeXT/OpenStep Emacs
(aka “Emacs.app”) is it. However, in my experiences of trying it about
once a year in the past 3 years, it still have several major issues
that i cann't adopt. (it has major problems with unicode, and can't
interpret keybindings on the numeric keypad)

btw, as you are switching from Windows to Mac, i'm switching from 19
years of Mac experience with 10 years of unix sys admin, to Windows
today. (following is a writeup. Some tutorial on tech details of win
sys admin or tech are still work in progress.)

• Switching from Mac/Unix To PC/Windows
  http://xahlee.org/mswin/switch_to_windows.html

  Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄