Building Emacs CVS from source on OS X

For awhile I had been using Aquamacs, but recently realized that I was fighting too hard against the customizations that Aquamacs brings to the table. It's a great package, but I'm not interested in (most of) the enhancements.

So I switched to "Emacs.app" aka Carbon Emacs Package which has been working quite well for me. But a few folks at work have been running a CVS build of Emacs 23 and that gave me ideas...

  1. Pull down the CVS emacs tree:
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/sources/emacs co emacs
2. Run configure and make like this: 
cd emacs
./configure --with-ns --without-x
make install
3. The "install" is local only. When it completes, you should have a new Emacs.app directory in emacs/nextstep/Emacs.app. You can copy that to /Applications and you should be off and running.
  1. After you start Emacs.app, there is an OS X style preference pane under the main Emacs menu where you can configure the splat/open-apple/apple/command key to be Emacs meta.

This seems to be working for me, although a strange black square appears in the center of the Emacs frame when I hit ctrl-g. Is that supposed to be there? Hrm...

UPDATE The black square appearing on C-g is someone's interpretation of a "visible bell". To make it go away, simply add the following to your init file:

(setq visible-bell nil)

archived on 2009-01-08 in

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