Aquamacs to Carbon Emacs

I downloaded Carbon Emacs today, to consider it as a replacement for Aquamacs. It seems nice enough, and passes the sniff test.

My problem is that I have many hours of work invested in tweaking Aquamacs to behave the way I like. And I’m not just referring to Aquamacs settings, I have the usual collection of hacks and tweaks any longtime Emacs user accumulates. I’m loath to start from scratch.

If there were a way to use the same configuration for both emacsen, that would be ideal. Does anyone know if there’s any way to do that?

2008/08/04
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Discussion

Emacs being Emacs, the non-Aquamacs tweaks *shouldn’t* be a problem.

Unfortunately, depending on what Aquamacs-related tweaks you made, they may be about as compatible as XEmacs tweaks in Emacs. I switched from Aqua to Carbon a couple of years ago and had to drop all of the Aquamacs changes.

Two things about that, though.

At the time that I did it, I was new to Emacs, so it may be easier than what I was capable of.

It’s been so long now but, my vague recollection is that I was basically un-Aquafying Emacs.

Good luck!

Chris
2008/08/04

IIRC, Aquamacs reads ~/.emacs just like Carbon Emacs does.

Edward O'Connor
2008/08/04

Try just scrapping any customization that you did for Aquamacs and use your “usual collection of hacks and tweaks”.

I’ve been using emacs since 1990 but just switched to a mac earlier this year. I found that Carbon Emacs was a much more seamless transition for me. Aquamacs might be nice for people who are mac users first and later emacs users, but it’s not for me.

doug
2008/08/05

@doug Easier said than done. I admit that I switched to Aquamacs when I switched to OS X, but I’m no stranger to Emacsen.

Ian
2008/08/05

I cannot comment on Carbon Emacs. However, I highly prefer Emacs.app (http://emacs-app.sourceforge.net/) over Aquamacs. It’s built from a CVS snapshot of the mainline, so it is very compatible with the latest emacs available on most linux platforms. My instance reports itself as v23.0.60.1.

Nick Dimiduk
2008/08/05

@Nick, it looks promising, but it hasn’t been updated since November 2007, which
predates GNU Emacs 22.2. Are you building it from CVS?

Ian
2008/08/05

Like several of the above posters, I also found Carbon Emacs a better fit for someone who has used Emacs for a while, plus its default key bindings work out of the box with a German keyboard layout, while the Aquamacs ones don’t really. Most of my customisations ported straight between Aquamacs and Carbon Emacs and both are reading my .emacs files so that shouldn’t really be a problem.

Timo Geusch
2008/08/05

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