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Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Question about Aquamacs

I'll toss this out here first...

How do people use Aquamacs? i.e. there is no command line invocation?

e.g. byte compiling a number of .el files in batch is done how? From
what I can see the most reasonable solution seems to be to maintain a
standard gnu emacs version compatible with Aquamacs to use as a batch
tool.

Really?

Thanks
Signed -- somewhat amazed at the state of emacs on macosx even windows
is almost better than

10 comments:

David Budworth said...

it works from the command line

I actually invoke it from as script I stick in my path called: "eemacs"
#!/bin/bash
emacsclient -a /Applications/Aquamacs\ Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Aquamacs\ Emacs "$@"

this will either launch aquamacs with whatever I had on the command line. or it will open the files on the command line in an already running instance of aquamacs.

for that script to work you need
(server-start)
somewhere in your .emacs file.

or you can just run /Applications/Aquamacs\ Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Aquamacs\ Emacs "$@"

to run new instances of emacs every time.

no idea on compiling the .el files.

hope that helps

hober said...

You can invoke Aquamacs from the command line, though doing so is somewhat unpleasant. /Applications/Aquamacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Aquamacs -nw should do the trick (untested, of course).

Duncan said...

You could use dired to batch-compile files, or you could do it one-by-one using M-x byte-compile-file.

Bill Clementson said...

I do something similar to what David Budworth described although I also use emacs in screen. My setup is described on my blog:
http://bc.tech.coop/blog/071001.html

In short, yes you can evoke either a windowed or terminal emacs from a command line and yes you can use it for batch jobs.

Juri said...

I never got the point of Aquamacs, it was just too weird with all those windows. I use Emacs.app and it works fine.

Anonymous said...

Emacs.app has been folded into the main emacs repository. It's a touch crashy on me since it got integrated, but otherwise provides a much nicer (and more pure emacs) version than Aquamacs, IMHO

Bill Clementson said...

Juri: The "point" of Aquamacs is described on the "About" page: http://aquamacs.org/about.shtml. It is meant to provide an implementation of Emacs that integrates nicely with the Mac UI and user interface conventions. However, many Emacs users who have come to the Mac from other platforms (myself included) also like using it. It has very nice font support and nice integration with Mac OS X (see the features pages for other differences from base Emacs:
http://aquamacs.org/features.shtml and http://aquamacs.org/feature-matrix.shtml). There is a single customization group in Aquamacs called "Aquamacs is more than Emacs". If you want to use Aquamacs but you don't like some of the customizations it does, you can turn them off in that group. Some people, of course, will find it easier (or preferable) to use the standard distribution (or CVS); however, if there are just a few things you don't like about Aquamacs (such as the multiple frames), then it's pretty easy to disable them.

Patrick Logan said...

'The "point" of Aquamacs is described on the "About" page'

Yeah, I like the l&f, well, after turning off "show buffers in new frames" -- gads!

I was puzzled by the abandonment of the conventional emacs command line api however. Seems both the aqua-ishness and the batch-ishness could be supported.

Thanks all.

Bill Clementson said...

Patrick: "I was puzzled by the abandonment of the conventional emacs command line api however. Seems both the aqua-ishness and the batch-ishness could be supported."

I don't understand what batch functionality is not supported by Aquamacs. Does the following not work for you:
/Applications/Aquamacs\ Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Aquamacs\ Emacs -nw -batch -f batch-byte-compile myfile.el

Patrick Logan said...

'Does the following not work for you:
/Applications/Aquamacs\ Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Aquamacs\ Emacs -nw -batch -f batch-byte-compile myfile.el'

Em. Yeah, Bill -- that's exactly what I was looking for. Somehow overlooked that executable.

Thanks

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Portland, Oregon, United States
I'm usually writing from my favorite location on the planet, the pacific northwest of the u.s. I write for myself only and unless otherwise specified my posts here should not be taken as representing an official position of my employer. Contact me at my gee mail account, username patrickdlogan.