Aquamacs
You can download Aquamacs here.
I told how weird do seem Emacs key bindings on MacOS (in fact they look odd everywhere outside Emacs). Some of them are pretty standard, readline supports them by default (and so most command line applications do) and Cocoa controls also do (that is to say they work in any text editor.).
I'm talking about ctrl-a, ctrl-e, etc.
But you are never going to convince a Mac user he has to ctrl-x ctrl-s to save or ctrl-x ctrl-c to quit.
So Aquamacs uses standard Apple bindings. Command-C, Command-S, Command-Q. This way the command-key is not free. And meta has to be mapped on alt.
So if you have a not english keyboard, you may not be able to type square brackets, for example. And braces.
In fact I found out the flaw was in the user (me) who did not read the wiki. Meta, Apple/Command, Option keys are fully configurable.
In my opinion if you are going to use Emacs, you expect to find Emacs key bindings. The more logical choice is to use Command for meta, and leave alt as alt, to enter braces (and on american keyboards accents.).
Still you may want (and it is my choice) to allow Command-key to be used for mac key shortcuts, but you want to pass option/alt to the OS (so that you can use [] and other characters). You do this with
(setq mac-pass-option-to-system t).
Should you have troubles with copying and pasting text from outside into Emacs or vice-versa, try to use
(setq x-select-enable-clipboard t)In fact you can find lot of informations in the wiki: Emacs wiki.
The nice thing was that you are able to use standard MacOS open and close dialogs, that is really nice.
But there is something even more beautiful features:
- Frames are mapped to windows: when you open a file, you open it in a new window, and you can manage windows with Expose. Probably a hardcore Emacs user is not going to like this (but probably he will prefer some other more standard version).
- Fonts: fonts are nice. It uses MacOS fonts and locales and unicode characters appear to be handled correctly (not sure for full unicode, for european >7bit characters, it works).
- You also have transparencies. It's just a little nifty feature.
- Cut and paste works as you expected, so does deleting a text selection. This is probably one of the single features users that are not used to Emacs are going to hate, even if it makes perfectly sense in the Emacs way of working.
- Last but not least, you can associate files with Emacs, so you can use it as a standard MacOS text editor to open files double clicking in the finder.
I'm really impressed by this project: in fact it's enought Emacs you want get too confused if you are used to Emacs, but it's also enought Mac you can use it along your other Mac applications, without having to rethink basic commands (if you don't want to).
Right at the moment it is in my opinion the best Emacs version for the MacOS out there.
Aquamacs + Texniscope
Auctex is beautifully integrated with Emacs. In fact it is the more user-friendly and more complete latex editing environment I've ever used.
And don't forget to read this, if you want to make it even more user-friendly.
In short:
- Copied txs-search.el in my ~/.elisp directory (which is loaded inside Emacs with (add-to-list 'load-path "~/.elisp")
- Loaded txs-search.el in Emacs adding in .emacs(require 'txs-search)
- Added shortcut with (add-hook 'tex-mode-hook (lambda () (local-set-key "\C-c\C-j" 'txs-jump-to-line))). This does not work, I have to call directly Meta-X txs-jump-to-line. I also tried different keybindings, with no success.
- Changed editor line inside Texniscope, and cancelled useless option for alternative editor (read this in the tutorial I linked above)
- Compiled dvis with -src-specials option: everything works as expected (except that I'm not able to enable source specials with pdf, I'll have to take a look at it)
In the end I have to thank David Reitter for the tutorial for Emacs/Texniscope, which I suppose is taken from a mail/post he did.
Directories and frames
This is a short tip from the wiki (and most of the notes here will come from the wiki)
After some time, I found quite annoying the way Aquamacs manages frames and windows when I use it as a filemanager (which is something Emacs is really good at) -- in fact this ain't a problem, since I rarely use it that way and I can quickly change behavior with a menu toggle --.
If you would like it to behave like "traditional Emacs" you may want to read this tip
Since I was speaking about dired mode, I add it here: another tip. With this you can open files using mac os open command.
