#EMACS FOR MAC OS X XTERM INSTALL#
#EMACS FOR MAC OS X XTERM PORTABLE#
#EMACS FOR MAC OS X XTERM CODE#

> Features that drastically change behavior are enabled/disabled with preprocessor flags.

Unless there is an actual problem with the legacy platform support, then it should be left in for the people that do use the 'dead' OS. > Vim tries to be compatible with every OS, including dead ones such as BeOS, VMS, and Amiga.

It's mostly a giant case/switch style #ifdef wrapper around a list of platforms and features. This is a low-level function that is supposed to handle different platforms, so this is the function where platform-specific #ifdefs should be collected. > This function is over 400 lines and contains over 40 #ifdefs.

#EMACS FOR MAC OS X XTERM PORTABLE#

It's a little messy, but it's reasonable for legacy portable code.

#EMACS FOR MAC OS X XTERM CODE#

> 400 lines of code to wait for keyboard input. And running Emacs under X has the disadvantage that Emacs ends up looking quite different typographically than native OS X apps do. None of the other ports you mention have ever flickered in my experience. To use the option key as your meta key, (setq mac-option-modifier 'meta). So for example if you're on a Macbook, but you are used to the key on the bottom left's being a control key, you would add (setq mac-function-modifier 'control) to your. Just to make sure everyone reading this can follow along: you are probably suggesting using Emacs on the X windowing system on OS X (which would of course require XQuartz to be running).Īnd by 'problematic keybindings' you probably mean how most graphical Emacs packages on OS X use the Command modifier key to set the meta bit.īut Mitsuhara Emacs (or emacs-mac as you refer to it) lets you assign any 'Emacs modifier bit' (control, meta, alt, hyper or super) to any of OS X's modifier keys (namely, control, option, command or fn) except for the shift key. If you're using Emacs on OSX, you should be running Yamamoto's port. It has had flicker-free double-buffering for years, smooth (pixel-based) scrolling with inertia, integrated AppleScript bridge, integrated Apple event support, HiDPI, ligatures, graphics/SVG/animations through ImageKit, proper C-g handling, dictionary service support, proper fullscreen, and I could go on and on and on. On the other hand, the Yamamoto Mitsuharu port is rock-solid, functionality is not removed cause Stallman said so, is actively worked on (Yamamoto was the old Carbon Emacs maintainer and knows what he's doing) and uses the latest OSX APIs. It was disappointing to see them following through with these removals. To make matters worse, Stallman has demanded that _useful features be removed_ from the OSX branch, because _Linux doesn't have equivalent APIs_.

The end result is that the official OSX Emacs is perpetually buggy (check emacs-devel, it breaks all the time) and lacks a lot of useful features that are available through new OSX APIs.

The OSX support in the mainline Emacs repo (which and aquamacs use) is a third class citizen, since very few people work on it and Stallman is always quick to remind the rest that Linux (sorry GNU/Linux) remains the priority rather than those pesky non-free OSes. This issue is aleady solved in Yamamoto Mitsuharu's Emacs OSX port ( ) which if you use Emacs on OSX is what you should be running (rather than the 'official' OSX branch). If you use Emacs from another source that compiles it on 10.11 (such as from ), then it links against an older framework that doesn't have the assert, and it'll work 'fine'.Ĭonsidering the fractal accumulation of 'clever hacks' that make Emacs work on modern GUI systems, I'm curious to see how this issue will be resolved, because I doubt it's something so simple where Emacs has proper separation of GUI vs non-GUI threads, as QED by the article )

#EMACS FOR MAC OS X XTERM INSTALL#

This bug only manifests if you compile Emacs on 10.12 (so if you install the 'emacs-app' in MacPorts, for example), because then it'll link against the asserting framework. The crux of it is that macOS became more strict about what you were doing in GUI- vs non-GUI-threads, and now asserts if you fetch GUI events (I think?) in not the main thread, because of the risk of memory corruption. Related to the topic of 'Emacs is a terminal program with lots of clever hacks to run in a GUI', I recently encountered a big problem on macOS 10.12 'Sierra', which I found reported at

Emacs for mac os x xterm