#Emacs vs aquamacs for mac os x
#Emacs vs aquamacs install
#Emacs vs aquamacs Patch
#Emacs vs aquamacs free
#Emacs vs aquamacs mac

The current maintainer of Aquamacs is Win Treese has been available for well over a decade and is used daily by thousands of academics, programmers, and authors.

Most of the development on Aquamacs since its beginning in 2004 was done by David Reitter, based on GNU Emacs by Richard Stallman and many others. Yet, it comes with all the ergonomics and extensibility you've come to expect from GNU Emacs.

#Emacs vs aquamacs mac

Aquamacs integrates with the Mac and offers the same comforts that any application on the Mac provides. Macintosh users have several choices of pre-built Emacs.Aquamacs is a user-friendly build of the powerful Emacs text editor.

Vincent Goulet’s Emacs Modified for macOS.

Do these versions differ in any signifcant ways?.

Can one obtain the functionality of the others by simply modifying the initialization file?.

Do these changes make their way back upstream?.

I am aware that Aquamacs is considered “unorthodox” as it has very Mac-like keybindings, but I am also interested in understanding the differences between the non-Aquamacs versions.

#Emacs vs aquamacs for mac os x

#Aquamacs latex for mac os x#Īnswer: Emacs for Mac OS XĮmacs for Mac OS X provides OS X binaries of GNUĮmacs proper. It’s roughly the same you’d get by compiling a GNU Emacs release tarball with. The site provides builds of stable releases and pretests, as well as nightly snapshots. All of these builds are self-contained, which lets you safely try pretests and snapshots. Note though, that these binaries lack support for some libraries, notably GNU TLS and ImageMagick. If you’d like to use these-the former is particularly important if you’d like to read your mail in Emacs-you need to get GNU Emacs from Homebrew. Emacs for OS X ModifiedĪccording to the website Emacs for OS X Modified is simply a standard build of GNU Emacs, based on the above, with some additional packages, and the necessary configuration to enable all of these packages. With the notable exception of ESS, all of these packages are available through Emacs’ package archives for installation in any Emacs.

#Emacs vs aquamacs install

For instance, you can install AUCTeX in GNU Emacs proper by simply typing M-x package-install RET auctex, and enabling it. The choice of packages suggests that it’s mostly targeted at statistician and researches, which would work through their data with R and ESS, and then publish a paper with Org or AUCTeX and LaTeX.įor other users, this distribution is probably of little value, since you’d need to install additional packages anyway, and might as well use GNU Emacs proper right away. This is the only distribution which you can create yourself in GNU Emacs proper by installing additional Emacs packages and adjusting your init.el accordingly. The other distributions are patched and forked variants of GNU Emacs.

#Emacs vs aquamacs Patch

Emacs Mac PortĮmacs Mac Port is a patch set for GNU Emacs proper for better OS X integration. Note that GNU Emacs itself has native OS X support as well, but lacks the OS X specific additions, which this patch set provides.

Core Text for text rendering, which improves text appearance and Unicode support.

This was merged into GNU Emacs proper, and is part of Emacs 24.4. GNU Emacs proper scrolls line-wise, which is very laggy and jumpy with trackpads. Emacs Mac Port uses pixel-based scrolling like other native OS X applications, which feels much smoother and is much more precise. It only affects trackpad scrolling, though, so if you don’t use the mouse, you won’t need it.

You can pinch to increase/decrease the text size. Again, if you don’t use the mouse, you won’t notice it, and it’s arguably just a fancy feature. You can send and receive Apple Events from Emacs Lisp. Three-finger tapping will search the word under cursor in Apple’s Dictionary application, like in other OS X applications. You can open a selected file in Finder from the context menu in the running Emacs.

Native SVG display using Webkit, rather than librsvg.

Webkit has better SVG support to my knowledge, but who views SVGs in Emacs? You’ll notice that most of these features are merely concerned with integration into OS X, and are not essential to using Emacs. Other than that, Emacs Mac Port is pretty much like a standard GNU Emacs.

#Emacs vs aquamacs free

Some of its features make their way back into GNU Emacs, but other will never be merged, since they are exclusive to OS X, and not available in the free alternative GNUStep, which goes against the politics of the FSF to not support proprietary operating systems over their free alternatives. Also, if I remember correctly, the author of this patchset has shown little interest to bring the features back upstream, probably for the former reason. AquamacsĪquamacs is a heavily patched fork of GNU Emacs.

Unlike all of the above, it’s not based on GNU Emacs, but has an independent source tree. It’s regularly synched with Emacs upstream, though, and closely follows Emacs releases. It inevitably lags behind GNU Emacs trunk, however.