Stay away from Aquamacs. It is for all intents and purposes, Emacs, but with all the useful stuff watered down in an attempt to make it fit in better with Mac OS.
My config is here: http://github.com/wfarr/dotfiles/
Ask HN: Emacs users on OS X, what's your setup?
61–66 of 66 posts
Re: Ask HN: Emacs users on OS X, what's your setup?
#62I've been using Emacs for 20 years, and fully converted my desktops to Mac last year. I like Aquamacs OK with option->meta and caps lock -> control like you have. With that setup, it's a bit of a twist to get my pinky finger onto meta, but it's tolerable on my Microsoft Natural keyboard. The biggest nuisance is that I can't figure out how to bind function keys. I liked having F2 = goto-line (rather M-g g) and F3 = co…
Aquamacs has a solid fullscreen environment, and you gotta love the mac's text rendering.
First thing I did was swap to option = alt, command = meta.
Next was load up CEDET, and enable all the excessive display helpers. I'll eventually pear them down, but for now it's nice. Specifically, the header bar shows the current function/method body I'm in, and there's an overline over every signature.
Really nice to parse through large source files, especially when they're full of long definitions. Hey, no judging.
Re: Ask HN: Emacs users on OS X, what's your setup?
#63There are small differencies between my Emacs setup for Mac OS X & for Linux.
You can find my configuration at http://xtalk.msk.su/~ott/common/emacs/_emacs.html, and macosx-specific configurations at http://xtalk.msk.su/~ott/common/emacs/rc/emacs-rc-local-flas...
Re: Ask HN: Emacs users on OS X, what's your setup?
#64I use Carbon Emacs because Cocoa Emacs has a black square in the center of the frame for the visual bell. Also, there's no visual separator between windows when you have your scroll bar/fringes turned off. Aquamacs is too exotic.
I used to get that up until a few weeks ago too. Try recompiling from the latest head, it's fixed for me.
Re: Ask HN: Emacs users on OS X, what's your setup?
#65I use CVS builds of GNU Emacs, they work great. Just check the source out from CVS and './configure --with-ns; make install' will produce an Emacs.app for you to drag to Applications.
The only problems I have is a bug where if you resize your window at least once, it will cause annoying flashes during redraw (but I almost never resize my emacs window, so that's not an issue) and that I would like more integration with the OS.
On the latter front, I already started calling NS services from Emacs (ns-service-Things-add-item-as-Note). This is very cool. What I'd like is more of an ability to customize what Emacs does when it is called to open a file.
I remap Caps Lock to Ctrl.
Re: Ask HN: Emacs users on OS X, what's your setup?
#66I use Emacs on Windows, Mac and Linux, so I generally like the normal Emacs keybindings on everything. That way, it's equally alien/consistent on all platforms, and I just start 'thinking in Emacs'. I use Carbon Emacs on the Mac.
I keep my .emacs and a tree of elisp files (things like ecb, magit, slime, etc.) in my git repository, which I update and sync across the machines I use: this gives me a great deal of consistency across platforms.
One alteration I make on all platforms is to remap the caps lock key as a second control key: caps lock is useless, and the number of times you have to reach for control in Emacs makes it worthwhile making it easy.