Bye Bye Emojis: Emacs Hates MacOS

FSF policy is that GNU software should not have features that will only work on non-free operating systems. The decision to remove multicolor glyph support was made on that basis.

The FSF don't want to make their software better on non-free operating systems which, given their goals, doesn't seem particularly unreasonable to me.

Emojify[0] provides all the emoji support I seem to need on both Ubuntu and macOS. It uses non-proprietary emojis though. If that's unacceptable, it can take arbitrary directories for emojis[1].

I must say, Emacs still runs better on macOS than Xcode does on Linux.

[0]: https://github.com/iqbalansari/emacs-emojify

[1]: https://github.com/iqbalansari/emacs-emojify/issues/19

This kind of thing is exactly why I will always support and use Mitsuharu Yamamoto's macOS Emacs port (https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac), which has been consistently rock solid and committed to implementing nice to haves on macOS that this sort of political bullshit holds back on official development.

Homebrew tap here: https://github.com/railwaycat/homebrew-emacsmacport

As one of GNU's flagship products, why shouldn't Emacs remind users that it is not in agreement with Apple's treatment of its users? GNU has an agenda, just like Apple does. Intel cripples icc for non-Intel CPUs, making it emit pessimised assembler. Apple makes sure that its hardware only works with other Apple products and that macOS can only be legally virtualised on Apple hardware. Everyone has an agenda.

The difference is that GNU is a lot smaller and has a lot less power and resources than Apple and Intel. So much that it is relatively easy and, in fact, explicitly allowed by the GPL, for someone like Yamamoto to come along and decide that, by golly, Emacs will have unique macOS-only features and Apple deserves to have more money to do whatever it wants to its users because its users enjoy Apple's treatment, smelly GNU/Beards be damned. This is a lot easier than fixing icc for AMD CPUs or putting headphone jacks into iPhones 7.

> We are not welcome, and never will be.

You are welcome. You are very welcome. Apple is not. You should not identify yourself with Apple's operating system.

If the goal is to encourage people to use GNU software and potentially even migrate to a full GNU system, I find this policy counterintuitive. It comes off as needless and antagonistic and it pushes me further away from GNU and towards free software that's not so tangled up in rigid philosophies, or worse, proprietary software.