Re: Willing to Contribute to Emacs NS-Port Development

[chad <yandros@gmail.com>]

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On Tue, Aug 6, 2024 at 10:54 PM Charles Choi <kickingvegas@gmail.com> wrote:

> Okay, so my impression was the Mitsuharu fork being not that distant from
> core is arguably wrong. That said, would appreciate any backstory on the
> Cocoa/NS port which I'd be interested to hear.
>

The two ports use different underlying OS-level graphics technologies, one
known originally as "Carbon" and another as Cocoa (which is based on the
NextSTEP code/concepts, and uses "ns" all over the place because of same.
Apple has changed their official (and, separately, practical) stance on
which toolkits are supported over time. GNU Emacs includes the ns port,
which also works with the free implementation OpenStep (although somewhat
roughly, if I recall correctly).  The details of what Apple
supports/promotes and when they support/promote it are fairly arcane, and
probably aren't that interesting except to software historians. (It has
somewhat to do with the history/development of iOS.) If you're interested
in details, I'll suggest starting here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_(API)

In practice, both toolkits "work" at the moment. The Carbon port has an
active (fork) maintainer, and (obviously) does not support the libre
OpenStep toolkit. The ns port is maintained on a best-effort basis in the
mainline, but has been operating on what I'll call "less than but hopefully
rounds up to one" maintainer for a few years now, and _does_ support the
libre OpenStep.

I myself have been off of macOS for a few years, since which Apple has made
it variously more annoying but not yet (quite?) impractical to use freely
developed software under macOS, but it seems that it's still relatively
easy to get a functional emacs on Apple's quite-good hardware and
mostly-workable OS, either by building it yourself, or using something like
homebrew or emacsformacos.com.

If one wanted to improve the situation for GNU Emacs under macOS, as other
people have mentioned, there is currently a lack of people with time,
interest, access, and expertise with the software underlying the ns port.
Eli has already suggested how to look into the issues from the emacs side.

I hope this helps,
~Chad

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