Current Aquamacs gripes

It seems like Aquamacs has been going downhill lately. I’ve been running 1.4 since it came out, and recently upgraded to 1.5RC1. They’re both quite buggy.

  1. 1.4 introduced tabs via modification of tabbar.el. This is something I’ve desired for some time, but the implementation is lacking.
    1. If you close the only buffer in a frame, the frame closes. This is a change from 1.3 and below, which would switch you back to the last buffer you were visiting. I end up closing frames much more than I’d like to.
    2. It’s hard to manage which tabs show up in which frames. Any time you switch to a buffer, a tab gets created in that frame. There is no simple way to remove the tab from the frame at that point. You must kill the buffer, or delete the frame.
    3. Many modes break the tab bar. ERC and psvn are two common ones.
    4. Lack of standard bindings. Aquamacs is supposed to be like OS X, but they didn’t use the standard ⌘{ and ⌘} keys. Many modes already use these, so they don’t work consistently.
    5. It breaks find-alternate-file (C-x C-v). When you call it, the file opens, but it’s buffer is hidden. You have to switch back to it, negating the speed improvement you get from that binding in the first place. It’s particularly irritating when you use to correct the load of a wrong file. E.g. if you have: Foo.php and Foo/Bar.php, try to load Foo.php, but accidentally open a dired of Foo/.

    Yeah, I’m ready to give up on tabs.

  2. Paths with spaces in them break dirtrack. For example, if you change to ~/Library/Preferences/Aquamacs Emacs/, dirtrack won’t follow you there.
  3. When you hit M-x lisp-mode RET Aquamacs uses slime-mode, which doesn’t work right. Maybe it needs to be set up? I don’t know, but I do know that I can’t use C-x C-e to eval expressions; it just gives me a “Not connected” error.
  4. find-file is broken with Tramp paths. Normally, if you start typing a new top-level path, (e.g. anything starting with / or ~), the existing path in the minibuffer gets grayed out, and ignored when you hit RET. But if you’re looking at a Tramp path, this breaks. It’s been broken since 1.4, and doesn’t seem to be getting fixed.
2008/08/04
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Discussion

I’ve had better luck with CarbonEmacs for now, being a pre-Mac Emacs user – see http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/CarbonEmacsPackage

The just-recently-merged NextStep support in Emacs CVS isn’t working so well for me yet.

cos
2008/08/04

Re 1.3: these are Emacs limitations; we’re working on them. Re 1.4: Other modes do NOT use Command-{/} because Command (mapped to A- in Aquamacs) is not a traditional Emacs modifier key. If you do something unwise like mapping it manually to Meta, then of course you’re on your own…
Re 3: You need a Lisp interpreter installed if you want to use common lisp. The correct way to run Emacs Lisp stuff is M-x lisp-interaction-mode or M-x emacs-lisp-mode.
Re 4: Have you reported the bug? It won’t get fixed if it isn’t reported, and this is a problem in GNU Emacs (and not just Aquamacs specifically).

David Reitter
2008/08/14

[...] Reitter replied to my post griping about Aquamacs. Re 1.3: these are Emacs limitations; we’re working on [...]

Atomized » Blog Archive » Response to Aquamacs gripes
2008/08/15

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