Ask HN: Emacs users on OS X, what's your setup?

#1

Post by shutter » Wed, Feb 04, 2009, 3:42 PM UTC

I'm slowly getting up to speed with Emacs, switching from TextMate. There are a lot of ways to use emacs on Mac, from Aquamacs to Carbon Emacs to the Cocoa port of GNU Emacs. I've dabbled in each a little bit.

I'm most interested to hear your thoughts on keybinding (and which Emacs distribution you use). I like the thought of keeping Mac shortcuts consistent a-la Aquamacs (having CMD-Q still bound to exit, etc), but it seems like the Option key is too poorly-placed to be a useful Meta key.

(I've bound Caps-lock to Ctrl.) It seems like binding CMD->Meta and CTRL as Control would provide the best placement ergonomically, but obviously you then lose the standard Mac keybindings when in Emacs.

What does your Emacs setup look like?

Re: Ask HN: Emacs users on OS X, what's your setup?

#2

Post by how_gauche » Wed, Feb 04, 2009, 3:59 PM UTC

I'm an old hand in Emacs and new to the Macintosh, so I use Cocoa Emacs.app because it's closest to the "standard" distribution, and override the Mac keybindings. I avoid using the mouse (those things are very bad for the wrists), so my .emacs turns the toolbar, menubar, and scrollbars off -- just a plain white screen.

I use a 25" widescreen LCD, and I like to jack up the font size until I get about 200 characters across; this lets me hold two 100x47 buffers side by side, which is how I prefer to work. Most of my interaction with the computer (besides web) goes through Emacs -- eshell, gnus, bbdb, calendar/diary, planner, etc.

Re: Ask HN: Emacs users on OS X, what's your setup?

#3

Post by larrywright » Wed, Feb 04, 2009, 4:11 PM UTC

Here's mine: http://github.com/larrywright/emacs/

It's mostly stuff borrowed from other people, but it gives you a good starting point with Ruby/Rails support, Twitter integration, snippets, etc. I use it at home and work (Mac and Windows respectively), and it works well for me.

Re: Ask HN: Emacs users on OS X, what's your setup?

#4

Post by fendale » Wed, Feb 04, 2009, 4:12 PM UTC

I just have Aquamacs with all the default bindings. Then I installed ECB and all the rails goodies, of which I use very few actually! Flymake is the most useful as it highlights syntax errors without even compiling.

Re: Ask HN: Emacs users on OS X, what's your setup?

#5

Post by larrywright » Wed, Feb 04, 2009, 4:15 PM UTC

larrywright wrote: post #3

Here's mine: http://github.com/larrywright/emacs/ It's mostly stuff borrowed from other people, but it gives you a good starting point with Ruby/Rails support, Twitter integration, snippets, etc. I use it at home and work (Mac and Windows respectively), and it works well for me.

I just realized I only partially answered the question.

I use the standard emacs keybindings, rather than the more os-specific ones, since that way it's the same regardless of which platform I use. I use Linux, Windows, and OS X on a regular basis, so keeping things uniform works best for me.

On Windows I use Emacs Win32 of course, and on OS X I use Cocoa Emacs rather than Aquamacs. I played with Aquamacs briefly but it's focus on making Emacs an OS X app doesn't really mesh well with my needs.

Re: Ask HN: Emacs users on OS X, what's your setup?

#6

Post by rickd » Wed, Feb 04, 2009, 4:16 PM UTC

I use emacs in a terminal window for probably 75% of my editing, and textmate for the other 25- I have Aquamacs but couldn't get into the flow with it for some reason. I keep all the default keys for ctrl/etc, and it does help a bit that they newest macs have changed the enter key that used to be to the right of spacebar to alt.

While it's not really emacs, I generally do most of my development in Eclipse- but I change the keybindings to Emacs mode (window\preferences\general\keys). Makes eclipse almost nice to use.

Re: Ask HN: Emacs users on OS X, what's your setup?

#7

Post by travisjeffery » Wed, Feb 04, 2009, 4:16 PM UTC

I'm using the Cocoa Emacs.app cause it's most like the old Emacs, no new keybindings like Aquamacs has.

Re: Ask HN: Emacs users on OS X, what's your setup?

#8

Post by malkia » Wed, Feb 04, 2009, 4:19 PM UTC

I'm emacs newbie, and I do use Aquamacs, with separately downloaded SLIME, and custom .emacs (borrowed from many people - mainly from comp.lang.lisp)

Re: Ask HN: Emacs users on OS X, what's your setup?

#9

Post by humanzee » Wed, Feb 04, 2009, 4:26 PM UTC

Carbon Emacs : http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/unix_open_source/carbo...

+ Emacs Starter Kit: http://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit/tree/master

+ yasnippet: http://code.google.com/p/yasnippet/

+ paredit: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ParEdit

+ Clojure mode: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Clojure_Programming/Getting_Sta...

+ Re-mapped Ctrl to Caps. Carbon Emacs defaults Meta to the Command key, which I kept.

Re: Ask HN: Emacs users on OS X, what's your setup?

#10

Post by spydez » Wed, Feb 04, 2009, 4:26 PM UTC

I use Cocoa Emacs.app. The only major keybinding change I've done so far (in 2 or 3 months of using Emacs on OS X) is Caps->Ctrl. Getting to alt/option is a thumb-contortion, so I'll probably try out Cmd->Meta soon. Only thing holding me back is the convenience of Cmd+C/X/V.

Cocoa Emacs /does/ have Mac shortcuts on by default. Not sure if they're all there, but save, cut, copy, and paste are certainly bound to the proper OS X shortcut.

As for Aquamacs, I tried it first, but had major issues trying to get it to accept my .emacs. It tries to save a ton of crap to custom-set-variables, including things I set via setq to keep my .emacs file logically laid out. It also tried to save my entire color-theme to custom-set-faces, which is an idiotic thing to do; the color-theme takes up 1111 lines in a nice elisp file off on it's own - why try to stuff it in custom-set-faces?

Anyways, just a warning - you may have issues if you try to give Aquamacs a largish .emacs file you've built up over the years on other systems. But that's probably not a problem for you since you're coming from TextMate.

I use the same .emacs at work (WinXP) as I do at home on my Mac and Linux machines, and Cocoa Emacs played well with it with minute adjustments, so I went with it.