Nilesh D Kapadia

There are a couple of different options for Emacs on OS X. OS X comes with the text-mode version of Emacs (22.1.1 in Leopard). If you use the text-mode version frequently through Terminal.app, be sure to enable Terminal.app's "Use option as meta key." However, if you spend a lot of time in Emacs you'll probably want to use one of the GUI versions. There are a couple of options:

Aquamacs - An "Aqua-native" fork of Emacs that makes it work more like a Mac application. For example, it supports many of the typical Mac keyboard shortcuts and has tabs. From my brief usage of this, it looked very nice, but since I also use Linux and Windows (as well as text-mode Emacs on the Mac), I want my Emacs experience to be fairly consistent across all platforms.

Carbon Emacs - A Carbon port of Emacs (currently version 22). This is what I would have used if I couldn't get the Cocoa build to work.

GTK Emacs - This is available from Fink (currently version 22), but like all GTK apps built through Fink, uses X11. Using X11 apps on OS X is rather inconvenient, so I didn't bother trying this.

Emacs.app - A Cocoa port of Emacs. This code has been recently integrated into GNU Emacs for the upcoming version 23, but you have to build from the CVS source for that, which is what I chose to do.

The page for Emacs.app contains instructions for how to build from GNU Emacs CVS, but I'll describe the process here:

1. From the command line execute the following command to get the current CVS version:

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/sources/emacs co emacs

2. Inside of the root of the emacs folder, run the following command:

./configure --with-ns

3. After that process is complete it will ask you to run the following command to build Emacs.app:

make install

4. Emacs.app will be located in the "nextstep" folder. Copy Emacs.app to your Applications folder.