Response to Aquamacs gripes

David Reitter replied to my post griping about Aquamacs.

Re 1.3: these are Emacs limitations; we’re working on them.

Perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea to put out a press release for a major feature if there are serious known limitations. It’s a cool feature, but it’s not release quality.

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…

I take issue with the characterization that using command as meta is “unwise.” I am, after all, using the mechanism you yourself put in place (M-x customize-variable RET mac-command-modifier RET), which contains no mention of it being “unwise” or otherwise problematic. But I grant that this is more of a problem with my setup. I learned early on that Meta is the key to the left of space, whatever the label on it happens to be, and I find that much more palatable then stretching for the smaller Option/Alt key.

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.

Emacs is a lisp interpreter. I don’t want to use CL, I want to write, tweak, and eval Emacs lisp in a buffer. This may be my inner curmudgeon at work; lisp-mode used to do this, but perhaps that has changed to 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).

I sent a near-identical list of issues directly to David. I’m unable to participate in the Aquamacs mailing lists (including aquamacs-bugs) because any email is bounced due to my email domain lacking a “postmaster” address. I have no control over how my email is run, so this isn’t something I can fix. David said that “bugs should be non-restrictive… I’m looking into it.” Thus far, it has not been changed.

2008/08/15
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Previously On Atomized:
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Discussion

> This may be my inner curmudgeon at work; lisp-mode used to do this, but perhaps that has changed to emacs-lisp-mode.

lisp-mode has never been for emacs lisp editing. That C-x C-e worked to evaluate emacs lisp forms in such a mode was a side-effect of emacs not hooking into a lisp interpreter (and hence the local mode not shadowing the global `eval-last-sexp’ binding). Slime does this latter and thus C-x C-e tries to evaluate the form in a common lisp sub-process. If that hasn’t been set up, then you get a “not connected” error.
Lawrence

Lawrence Mitchell
2008/08/15

And a followup. The find-file issue appears to be a feature. If you want to access a completely new path if the current working directory is a tramp path, you need to prefix it with // so:

/ssh:remotehost:~/.emacs///tmp/foo

finds the file /tmp/foo on localhost. Whereas

/ssh:remotehost:~/.emacs//tmp/foo

finds the file /tmp/foo on remotehost.

Lawrence Mitchell
2008/08/15

@Lawrence, Lame as that is, it would be fine if it, you know, worked. If I use two slashes, I get an error: “Not a tramp file name: /tmp”. Furthermore, the feature where I can open an absolute path on the remote host doesn’t work; If I’m looking at a remote file and I enter “/tmp”, I get the same error. Tramp tries to open “/ssh:user@host:/default/directory//tmp” rather than “/ssh:user@host:/tmp”

And how would you enter a path such as “~/foo.txt”?

Ian
2008/08/15

Well, not sure. WFM in GNU Emacs 23.0.60.1 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, X toolkit, Xaw3d scroll bars) of 2008-07-24. So maybe there is something aquamacs-specific going on.

~/foo.txt should be enterable as:

/ssh:remotehost:.emacs///~/foo.txt

I think.

Lawrence Mitchell
2008/08/15

@Lawrence Yeah, definitely does not work in Aquamacs 1.4 or better.

Ian
2008/08/15

you can change option and command on the keyboard config in system preferences… so all your apps would have it changed not only aquamacs… if thats really what you want.

Leonardo Santagada
2008/11/06

It’s not. I want ⌘ to work normally in OS X apps, and be Meta in Emacs.

Ian
2008/11/11

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