Cons of Aquamacs

I am using Emacs with Spacemacs right now on my Mac and it is mostly OK but there are certainly some issues when it comes to things like bad out-of-the-box macOS integration when it comes to things like file permissions, unimplemented tabs on macOS - although they work on Linux, some scrolling render refresh bugs, buggy window resizing, and the list goes, unfortunately, on... ;) Aquamacs apparently seems to have all this fixed and tailored for the Mac while giving you the option to customize things to perhaps even Spacemacs like experience - most of Spacemacs is really just packages setup to work nicely together. Also, Aquamacs people say that they even plan a separate Apple Silicon version (M1,M2) of Aquamacs (= better performance and longer battery) which is probably never gonna happen with the regular GNU Emacs. Or maybe I am wrong? BUT... maybe... there are some cons? And perhaps some are a dealbreaker preventing me to migrate from Emacs/Spacemacs to Aquamacs? For people who have used Aquamacs, what has been your experience? What are are pros and cons against a regular Emacs? Were there any dealbreakers? Also, how is it running Aquamacs and regular Emacs (with Spacemacs) on the same computer/user account? Will they play along nicely and don't mess things up, or they will be rewriting each others' configs all the time? **UPDATE:** I am using Evil mode, and also a leader SPC key so I basically don't use traditional Command bound Emacs keybindings. This seems to be a frequent "con" by people coming from vanilla Emacs when I try to find some cons of Aquamacs via Google - but in my case, that is not an issue. I am more worried about the compatibility of packages and code of Emacs Lisp scripts I will find on the Internet and whether it will run or not. Also, are there any weird hidden you-might-notice-them-only-after-a-few-months quirks that Aquamacs has when compared with vanilla Emacs?

The standard Emacs builds from https://emacsformacosx.com (and brew and macports) all have either universal binaries with Apple Silicon built-in or binaries specifically for Apple Silicon. So that's not unique to Aquamacs.

Aquamacs is ancient -- it's based on emacs 25.3 -- and not really actively developed, just maintained. Quite a few of the reasons for it to exist (e.g., Unicode support) have made it into mainline emacs. If you're looking for an emacs with Mac-specific customizations, Mitsuharu's port (aka. the "railwaycat" port) is the one to use. Although the standard emacs builds for OS X are also pretty good these days too.

I can recommend [emacs-plus](https://github.com/d12frosted/homebrew-emacs-plus), I use it to build emacs with xwidget support and native compilation and all of the mentioned points work just fine.

Aquamacs is an Emacs build from 2017 (25.3). A lot of progress has happened in the Emacs space in those 5 years. Native compilation being the one big feature I personally wouldn’t want to lose going back to something like Aquamacs. The author of the Ruby language maintains an Emacs Mac port that is packaged up in Homebrew by railwaycat, and that is a pretty solid Mac experience if emacs-plus isn’t your favorite. There’s nothing wrong with Aquamacs if that’s your preference, but I wouldn’t use it for a decked out Emacs config like Spacemacs where you’re expecting all the packages you use to support Emacs 25. That’s asking for incompatibility and slowness.

Seconded, emacs-plus works great. Also [the railwaycat emacs port](https://github.com/railwaycat/homebrew-emacsmacport) is pretty awesome and does some cool things like enabling ligatures natively.

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I'm using various Emacs build-from-source packages, but essentially Emacs Mac (railwaycat I gather) though I've also built form official sources.. I've never really had problems with the display or Mac integration, certainly no problem with file permissions etc. (I'm a developer, I live in Emacs and text files all day.) So.... thats weird, just saying :)

I would recommend building from source like this for MacOS nowadays: https://github.com/jimeh/build-emacs-for-macos Or grab a build from https://github.com/jimeh/emacs-builds

Well the file permissions thing was not only the usual allowing the app to access stuff in macOS settings app, but I had to do some stuff outside, which I haven't had to do on Linux. But one thing that is great about Mac is that I am absolutely not worring about the system crashing or bricking all of a sudden. And there is a time machine etc. So far, I haven't done any reinstall of my Macbook. On Linux? Everybody does their own thing, things get messy. Every tenth upgrade (sometimes less) did fuck up something - the package hell on Linux is one of its biggest problems - actually the thing that pushed me to the Apple side. It's not perfect but hell it is more stable. Like there is no comparison how stable and well tuned the system is - at least on the M1 chip.

Mitsuharu Yamamoto maintainer of Emacs-mac https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac/src/master/ Yukihiro Matsumoto, creator or Ruby is a different person altogether. ^(you can tell, because they have different names and bodies, families etc.)

FYI Railwaycat is not Mitsuharu Yamamoto (creator/maintainer of Emac-mac) TTBOMK Railwaycat only setup the homebrew tap/formulas for Emacs-mac.

https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac/src/master/README-mac

Tried it. Didn't really like it. It had weird issues for me plus it lags behind official versions a bit.

> "some weird issues" ... such as? I've used it for going on 10 years, no weird issues to speak of, just stable with better macos support. Edit: BTW upgrade fever is a bug not a feature.

It was unusable on older macbooks (~2015) with constant flickering and such. I occasionally use the same settings on older macbooks so it was something I cared about. As the disclaimer on the README itself says, emacs comes with cocoa support nowadays and it was good enough for me. I didn't have any need to try and figure out why I was having the issues and resolve them. Also I agree with you w.r.t. upgrading on the bleeding edge. It can be a feature. But I like playing around with the latest stuff. We're simply on the other side of these issues.

Thanks for the update. Appreciated. BTW just posting this... https://github.com/emacsfodder/emacs-theme-sakura