Re: installing or compiling GNU emacs on Mac Catalina (fink for the moment)

[Doug Davis]

Uwe Brauer <oub@mat.ucm.es> writes:

> I know on the list are some Mac Users, so any comments on these issues.

I'll give a brief rundown of my macOS GNU Emacs experience.

>     1. Aquamacs (but this is based on GNU 25 and I am not sure what else
>        it uses).

It's been a number of years since I've tried using Aquamacs. As you
mentioned it's based on GNU Emacs 25 and hasn't moved much lately, but I
think a new maintainer may have taken over recently (I'm not sure);
perhaps development will pick up.

>     2. https://emacsformacosx.com/ (haven't tried it out) it is 27.1-1
>        which is pretty good.

My first GNU Emacs experience on a Mac was with emacsformacosx.com and
it worked fine, but I know it currently has some issues around not being
a notarized binary (recent Apple security thing). It's also wrapped by a
ruby script that gave some folks headaches at some point (I may be
misremembering this issue). I'm not familiar with using it over the last
couple of years.

>     3. Try the one shipped with fink (that fails at the moment),
>        macports (next candidate) or homebrew (I am sceptical about that
>        one since it does not rely on sudo)

I've never used fink. The binary shipped with Homebrew (by the `emacs`
formula) is solid; but it's not compiled with a window system. There are
other Homebrew taps that make building Emacs easy; like
https://github.com/d12frosted/homebrew-emacs-plus
and
https://github.com/railwaycat/homebrew-emacsmacport
which uses the `mac' window system port.

>     4. Compile the latest master. This I want to do besides having an
>        official GNU emacs.

This is what I use (and have been for quite some time). I use Homebrew
to get the dependencies (i.e. gnutls and jansson) and build from scratch
(in the emacs repo):

./autogen.sh
./configure --with-modules
make
make install

Then I copy ./nextstep/Emacs.app to /Applications

I won't endorse one of the methods as "the best way" or "correct way" -
just say that I've found building from the latest commit in emacs.git
(every week or so, with help from Homebrew to get some dependencies) to
be a satisfactory GNU Emacs experience on macOS.