Re: Emacs on MAC OS X 10.3

[Steven Tamm <steventamm@mac.com>]

>> However, it's not really Aqua emacs - it's Carbon emacs.
> I thought that Aqua is the whole GUI system and/or look-and-feel and
> Carbon and Cocoa are the APIs?

There is a project called emacs-on-aqua that is based on the NeXTStep 
port.  There's a webpage for it here: 
http://emacs-on-aqua.sourceforge.net/   I think this is what is leading 
to the confusion.  That project was misnamed, and the webpage and the 
CVS tree do not appear to have been updated in over a year.

As far as terms, Quartz is the windowing/compositing system 
(technically the window manager); Aqua is the GUI (a marketing term); 
Carbon and Cocoa are APIs to write Aqua apps.

>> I'd actually like to add an experimental set of Aqua stubs, although
>> given that the Carbon code is quite stable now and also works on
>> MacOS 9, I don't think it's time to switch to Aqua yet.
>
> I think that there once was a NextSTEP port of Emacs, right?  But I
> guess very little of that code is still usefull today for a recent
> Emacs version.

When I first had OSX, I started using that "emacs on aqua" port, but 
found it easier to add my required functionality directly to the main 
trunk by migrating the event model from the legacy model to the Carbon 
model.

IMHO, there is little benefit that would be derived from switching from 
Carbon to Cocoa, but there really isn't a need to choose, since use of 
Carbon and Cocoa (i.e. ObjC) can be intermixed.   There is very little 
functionality that Cocoa exposes that Carbon doesn't, and that's mostly 
confined to the pasteboard.    However, the image APIs in Cocoa are a 
lot easier to use than the similar APIs in Carbon; so the big missing 
hole (mac/README) in the port might be easier to write in Cocoa.

-Steven