Best Emacs ports for Mac 2022

I am following up on [this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/lijn31/best_emacs_port_for_mac_early_2021_edition/) from a year ago and was curious what kind of Emacs to use on a Mac in early 2022. In the past, I used Aquamacs and the standard homebrew version of emacs but have stepped away from Emacs in the past 2 years for various reasons. I now want to give Org-mode another try and thus want to get back at using Emacs. Other than Ord-mode I would mostly use Emacs to write Markdown and LaTeX files and potentially some R. It appears Aquamacs is finally actively maintained again but there seem to be some advantages of sticking to a more "classic" Emacs port. Any recommendations are very much appreciated.

I don't think the answer has changed in the last year. Aquamacs is an awesome project but it is several years behind upstream and it's going to take them a while to get everything in order after merging. Notably it does not build for Apple Silicon at the moment. I prefer the Mitsuharu Mac Port, but the other builds are fine too. Emacs 28 with native comp has been merged into the Mac Port tree, so it's on the way.

The one you build yourself. https://github.com/mclear-tools/build-emacs-macos

Pretty sure most would say [https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac](https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac)

And via this brew cask: https://github.com/railwaycat/homebrew-emacsmacport Unless something has changed

I was using 27 from home brew but recently installed, https://emacsformacosx.com It’s great and gave me the speed up I felt it was lacking. Still slower than on Linux though I’ve noticed for certain things but that will be different for each user depending on what you do.

This is kind of two questions, depending on your circumstances. One question is: which version of “make emacs work well under macOS” should I use? There’s a default version that comes with emacs for many years, that also works with GNUStep, thanks called the “ns port”. There is also another version, more recent, that uses different low-level macOS toolkits/frameworks/primitives called the “mac port”. Both work well, and there are reasons to prefer both. For pure functionality on current macOS, I think the mac port has a few niceties that are missing from the ns port, and the cost of being a bit behind the bleeding edge — which brings us to the other question. The other question is: build your own latest and greatest, or use a stable package built by someone else? Emacs is a remarkably stable piece of software (seriously; I’ve been using it for more than 30 years, and there are lots of people who’ve been using it longer). The releases are relatively rare, every year or two on the new “fast” schedule, and are supported for a long while. On the other hand, the development head is also very usable — at least a couple decades of my own usage has been self-built from the most recent sources, and problems have been very, *very* rare. That means that you can try out new features much faster than the slow release schedule, if you want. For the mac, it’s not hard to go from “macOS with Xcode” to “using a self-built emacs”. If you’re interested, this is a fine way to live (I lived this way myself for almost a decade until my battleship 2011 mbp finally died during the era of the terrible butterfly keyboards). For the first question, if you wanted to build your own, just got clone the repo from savannah, or Mitsuharu’s mac port from bitbucket, and follow the instructions therein. You can also install pre-built binaries via homebrew or downloaded from the web. In these cases, I would recommend the railwaycat brew formula or emacsformacosx.com, respectively. Hope that helps!

I prefer [https://github.com/d12frosted/homebrew-emacs-plus](https://github.com/d12frosted/homebrew-emacs-plus) which works nicely with [https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs](https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs)