What is Reddit's opinion of Aquamacs Emacs?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Are you developing on Mac OS? I'm just curious because the bundled version of Emacs is the very vanilla command line version. There are much better options:

• Emacs for OS X: http://emacsformacosx.com/
• Aquamacs: http://aquamacs.org/

Aquamacs is great for people unfamiliar with Emacs as it adds a lot more functionality to provide a version of Emacs that behaves like a standard Mac Application.

(If you aren't using OS X, then ignore this, it was the use of Clozure CL that made me curious.)

This must be a joke article. It has a section called "most tweakable" and doesn't even have Aquamacs (the Mac OS X native port of emacs) in the list.

I just can't imagine the reaction of someone who uses Atom or Brackets and thnks "this is the most tweakable editor I've ever had, it's not possible to be more tweakable" being introduced to emacs, the sandbox environment for programmers who like to write text editors and sometimes edit text.

If by any chance you use a Mac, do yourself a favor and go grab Aquamacs. You can use it on a Mac with all of your normal shortcut keys (Command-S to save, etc) right out the gate, and just learn the other stuff as necessary.

Plus it comes with a bunch of extra bells and whistles already installed/enabled. Which actually annoys me at times because I prefer some alternatives (such as html-mode vs. html-helper-mode), but oh well. :)

I'm using the macOS Catalina, and version 26.3 of Emacs for Mac OS X. I also tried Emacs Modified for macOS and Aquamacs but got the same error.

You're on MacOS, and that has Aquamacs, which is really slick and never glitches, at least for me.

(It's a wrapper, not a fork - under the hood, it's running almost vanilla GNU Emacs 25.3.50.1).

I've used it for most of a decade with good results - give it a try!

Well, my background is german ... I've never lived for real in an english speaking country, just visited USA 3 times and the UK perhaps 10 times.

As a german (especially a northern one, which are even more direct) I often can't bend my mind to the english way of non-agreeing. But ... the whole setup of your initial question and then your opposition to people that wrote about a setup you don't deem "worthy" created a very non-english impression to me. Would have someone asked me from which country you originated, I'd never would have guessed that.

> I can definitely see ... but not something like DOOM Emacs

Well, you're not an instance that can judge about other people's taste. People are entitled to their own taste, even if we don't share this taste. It's not that his taste infringes one of your own freedoms!

> jammed down your throat

No, they aren't. No open source program can ever "jam something down your throat". You can easily walk away. You can even throw your computer in the thrash bin, there exists live outside of IT.

I never understand why people willingly create a non-free environment for themselves. Simply be constantly assuming (falsely) that they aren't free. In the end, Aquamacs is open source, so you can change any aspect of it. So the mere thinking that this "shoves something down your throad" is mathematically false thinking. FOSS was created to never have this attribute.

If your configuration isn't too complex or unique, you might want to try Aquamacs which attempts to give Emacs a more Mac-ish look and feel by, e.g., providing better support for the command key. This can mitigate the muscle memory issue if you and Aquamacs get along alright.

Aquamacs is fantastic, and supports LaTeX out of the box. It satisfies your second desideratum too: it's an emacs, so it will work with anything you throw at it. I switched from TeXShop a few years back for the better syntax highlighting, and never looked back.

> On Windows that is hard to do because not every piece of software gets checked by Microsoft before users can install it.

It doesn't on a Mac either, and prior to 2012, software distribution on OS X worked exactly the same way it does on Windows now, and not all software gets signed. For example, MacVim doesn't distribute a signed application yet:

solace:Applications jfischer$ codesign -dvvv MacVim.app MacVim.app: code object is not signed at all

I can still run it, I just had to bypass Gatekeeper once for it to work. (e.g. Right click and select Open, instead of double-clicking)

Aquamacs is signed:

solace:Applications jfischer$ codesign -dvvv Aquamacs.app/ Executable=/Applications/Aquamacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Aquamacs Identifier=org.gnu.Aquamacs Format=bundle with Mach-O thin (x86_64) CodeDirectory v=20200 size=73980 flags=0x0(none) hashes=3692+3 location=embedded Hash type=sha1 size=20 CDHash=6a3434cfa4512202c310ec5ad1f2d4f97ca75ac8 Signature size=8524 Authority=Developer ID Application: David Reitter (4YEZ374VAY) Authority=Developer ID Certification Authority Authority=Apple Root CA Timestamp=Nov 7, 2014, 8:05:24 AM Info.plist entries=21 TeamIdentifier=4YEZ374VAY Sealed Resources version=2 rules=12 files=9618 Internal requirements count=1 size=176

If an application is signed, I can be reasonably sure it's safe. If it's not signed, I'm still free to make the choice to use it myself.

Applications I build myself never throw up a Gatekeeper warning: I guess they reason that if you built it yourself, you know what you're doing.

> Doing the same thing on all Windows desktop is almost impossible, because the way how Windows ecosystem works in comparison to Mac.

It's possible to change that, if Microsoft provides the tools.

I'll let the manual explain:

> Org is a mode for keeping notes, maintaining TODO lists, and doing project planning with a fast and effective plain-text system.

That is, it's a mode for the Emacs text editor (slash operating system) that makes it easy to do outlines and tables. And as a bonus, the files are just plain text files so if you find yourself wanting to start a file, or edit a file, on a machine without Emacs, you can just do it in any text editor. I guess you're on a mac, so if you want to check it out you probably want Aquamacs. Learning Emacs can be a bit of an investment, but on the other hand it's been around for 40 years, and will may well be there for you for the next 40 as well.

Pushing whitespace around my files sounds boring.

If I ever get those urges I think I'll get a bonsai tree.

May I suggest Aquamacs? It doesn't seem completely out of place, and is fairly gentle to beginners.

>I definitely agree that there needs to be a friendly Lisp IDE for beginner to intermediate developers.

There have been attempts at making emacs easier, like: emacs-starter-ket. There is also Aquamacs for the Mac