Presentation

Emacs Modified for macOS is a distribution of GNU Emacs 27.1 (released August 10, 2020) bundled with a few select packages for R developers and LaTeX users.

The additions to stock Emacs are the following:

ESS 18.10.2;

AUCTeX 12.2;

org 9.3.8;

Tabbar 2.2, a minor mode that displays a tab bar at the top of the Emacs window, similar to the idea of web browsers tabs;

markdown-mode.el 2.4;

exec-path-from-shell.el 1.12 to import the user’s environment at Emacs startup;

dictionaries for the Hunspell spell checker (optional; see below for details);

psvn.el r1573006, an interface for the version control system Subversion modified to include Andre Colomb’s and Koji Nakamaru’s combined patches to support Subversion 1.7;

default.el and site-start.el, configuration files to make everything work.

The distribution is based on the latest stable release of GNU Emacs compiled by David Caldwell and distributed on Emacs for Mac OS X.

Latest release

Version 27.1-1-modified-1 (Release notes)

System requirements

Mac OS X 10.4 or later.

Installation

Open the disk image and copy Emacs in the Applications folder or any other folder.

Spell checking and dictionaries

Spell checking inside Emacs on macOS requires an external checker. I recommend to install Hunspell using Homebrew.

The Hunspell installation does not include any dictionaries. Therefore, this distributions of Emacs ships with the following Libre Office dictionaries suitable for use with Hunspell: English (version 2020.08.01); French (version 5.7); German (version 2017.01.12); Spanish (version 2.5).

To make use of the dictionaries, copy the files in the Dictionaries directory of the disk image to ~/Library/Spelling . If needed, create a symbolic link named after your LANG environment variable to the corresponding dictionary and affix files. For example, if LANG is set to fr_CA.URF-8 , do from the command line

cd ~/Library/Spelling ln -s fr-classique.dic fr_CA.dic ln -s fr-classique.aff fr_CA.aff

Finally, add the following lines to your ~/.emacs file:

(setq-default ispell-program-name "/usr/local/bin/hunspell") (setq ispell-really-hunspell t)

Spell checking should now work with M-x ispell .

Additional packages

If you want to install additional Emacs packages (polymode comes to mind, here) through the MELPA repository, add the following lines to your .emacs configuration file:

(require 'package) (add-to-list 'package-archives '("melpa-stable" . "http://stable.melpa.org/packages/") t) (package-initialize)

Philosophy

This distribution of Emacs is based on the NeXTstep port part of the official sources of GNU Emacs. Other than the additions mentioned above and the minor configuration found in the site-start.el file, this is a stock distribution of Emacs. Users of Emacs on other platforms will appreciate the similar look and feel of the application.

Those looking for a more Mac-like version of Emacs may consider Aquamacs. I used Aquamacs myself for two years, but I got tired of disabling the newer “features” in each release of the application. For me Aquamacs insists too much on opening new frames and on playing with fonts. Moreover, ESS is not kept up to date on a regular basis.

For more information of the various options to run Emacs on macOS, see the Emacs wiki.

Also available

Emacs Modified for Windows. Same idea, with a user friendly installer.