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April 3, 2005
Aquamacs: An Emacs that finally feels more like an OS X application
Do you know Emacs? Yes, that geek-editor with the long complicated keyboard shortcuts, the strange ugly windows and the very useful colored text? The editor that can also manage your calendar, your e-mails and has a built-in automatic psychiatrist?
We've made Emacs more usable. It opens a new window for each file you load. It gives you a nice menu with the recent files. It uses all the standard shortcuts you're used to from other applications, and displays texts in a decent font by default.
As my friends would expect of me, this is meant for the prettiest operating system: Mac OS X.
The new Emacs is a distribution of a recent Emacs build from CVS, we call it the
Aquamacs Emacs distribution
It's a joined project with poet-programmer (!) Kevin Walzer. There is a more detailed description with download for users available. You can download the complete application there: ready to run! To install, just get it and move the automatically extracted Emacs application to, well, wherever - for example into your Applications folder!
What I did technically was theoretically pretty simple. I found, configured, installed, packaged a whole bunch of packages and code snippets from other people's .emacs (emacs configuration) files that contribute some functionality to make things really Mac-like. I did not modify the Emacs code itself - it's the Carbon Emacs compiled straight from CVS. A stand-alone package has been available for quite some time, but Kevin and I felt that it would be time to provide a complete binary build. So I would see this as a distribution of other people's and our code rather than our own invention.
At this point, I consider the quality of things pre-1.0, so I'm asking for people's feedback on the project. Does everything work as expected? If not, can you please figure out how to fix it and send me a patch? I'll include it in the next release.
If you would like to do it yourself, you can get the source code of the modifications right with the distribution (inside the Emacs.app package, in the site-lisp directory) and combine those with a CVS build. We're using one from 2005-03-29.
What's left to do? Lots. For starters, I think we'll need a good overhaul of the menu structure - stuff that doesn't work at this point shouldn't be there (as Edit/Text Properties, e.g.), because it's confusing otherwise. The 'exit Emacs' function should move to the 'Emacs' menu, and preferences should go there, too, theoretically. One of the other most problematic areas in any OS X build of Emacs is the behavior of the sliders (scrollbars).
Why does this come as a separate distribution? In other words, why didn't Kevin and I contribute to the main distribution? Well, several people have attempted to get the folks on the emacs-devel mailing list to make the Mac port more Mac-like, and to modernize the user interface in general. They had very little success. The consensus seems to be that compatibility across operating systems and consistency with former versions of Emacs is deemed much more important than adhering to modern UI standards. That's alright. But given that Emacs came to life almost 30 years ago, and the UI as it stands today started when graphical user interfaces were in their infancy, it is clear that new users will find Emacs hard to learn and inconsistent with all other applications.
Kevin and I welcome feedback and contributions. Check out the Aquamacs site for a description of the project and download information.
(Revised: Text properties vs. Options / Faces)
Posted by dr at April 3, 2005 10:48 AM
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Comments
Please change the icon. That horse/mule/whatever is darn ugly, and spoils the prettiest OS so much that I refuse to use this product because of it ;-)
Otherwise, a nice distribution. Forcing the new frame will disenfranchise existing Emacs users. I suggest making this easily configurable.
[I don't know how to switch this off without hacking your osxdefaults file]
Likewise, the popup completion window slows editing down considerably. That too should default off (default behaviour) and be configurable.
[You can switch this off by adding this to your .emacsrc:
(defconst special-display-regexps nil)
]
Otherwise, seems to work as advertised! Congrats.
Posted by: Jon Mountjoy at April 7, 2005 1:02 PM
Version .9 is a vast improvement on .8 - I had many problems getting even mainstream add-ons to work (vm, cedet, etc).
As a long-time Emacs user on Linux and Windows, I agree with Jon M. I HATE the default new frame behavior. Please provide an easy way to turn this off.
Thanks a lot for putting this together.
Posted by: J Donald at April 26, 2005 12:24 PM
thanks for your comment -
i'm not sure what you mean by those version numbers (do you refer to my OS X customization package?) but if you'd like to try out the latest beta,
http://web.media.mit.edu/~dreitter/Aquamacs%200.9.1%20beta-5.dmg
is the link. it provides a new option in the Options menu to turn off the open-new-frames behavior.
Posted by: David Reitter at April 26, 2005 2:30 PM
re version: doh. nevermind, me confused.
BTW - I also meant to say that I *like* the gnu icon. It's a hell of a lot nicer looking than the gnu.org's Stallman-as-hairy-water-buffalo artwork, or any other emacs icon I've seen, for that matter.
I'll check out the beta.
Posted by: J Donald at April 26, 2005 2:57 PM
It looks like Tiger breaks it... (as any other emacs-carbon I know). I didn't find Aquamacs until today, believe it or not, and now I can't play with it. The idea behind is great!
Recompiling it soon?
Posted by: JA at May 1, 2005 2:18 AM
Before I start fetching that 39Mb .dmg -- what Emacs version is this based off? Is it anything recent from the 21.x family (or maybe even 22.x one?) or a good-old 19/20?
Posted by: Andrei Popov at May 16, 2005 4:23 AM
Very recent (22.x).
Posted by: David Reitter at May 16, 2005 6:34 AM
Yep, I think that the program is gorgeous, but the icons remind me of Gnome (bad thing). I think that it would be a good idea to replace them by a more Aqua-ish equivalents.. Despite this, it's perfect!
Posted by: Alvaro at March 2, 2006 12:02 PM