Title: Moving to Emacs for OS X Modified

Date: 2013-04-06 13:02:34

Tags: Cocoa , Color , Emacs , Highlighting , Modified , OSX , Theme

As a 2 years' Carbon Emacs for Mac user, I believe the carbon version was the best among all the branches of Emacs for Mac OS. My criterion was very simple:

• good Chinese font renderin

• easy AucTeX setu

• behaves like a traditional Emac

• easy to migrate

Carbon Emacs just meets all my criterions.  It is wrapped like common Mac applications. It has built-in AucTeX support, and support good Chinese font rendering just by few of mouse strokes. It behaves like a traditional Emacs, coming with ordinary .emacs support. So I can easily migrate all my stuffs and settings from my old Linux laptop. I don’t need to compile anything, it just works. In this sense, I prefer Carbon Emacs more than Aquamacs, although the latter one is pretty decent, and Mac friendly.

However, Carbon Emacs are not updated since 2010. It is based on Emacs 22. But now we are in the age of Emacs 24. That is the only drawback from my point of view.

Yesterday, I found Emacs for OS X Modified which is given by Vincent Goulet. After some simple tests, I thought it might be my next generation of Emacs platform. The best thing for the modified version is it is based on Emacs 24 and Cocoa, that hits the sweet spot. It makes the usual fonts rendering as sharp as other native Mac apps. It meets almost all my criterions,  except for the Chinese font rendering. But it is not that bad because the Chinese font rendering works, with default Song font, just looks that fancy though.

Moreover, this modified version uses a cute gnu icon, which is a bonus!

So I’ll do more test in the future, but I was pretty satisfied with this branches of Emacs!