A couple of months back, I released a port of GNU Emacs to Aqua, based on an old NeXT port. It can be found at http://emacs-on-aqua.sf.net.

I did not work much on it lately, because my home Mac is "dying" (several hardware glitches), and I'm waiting for the new Powerbooks to replace it. But, as imperfect as the port is, it certainly runs and does most of the basic stuff correctly. So please don't hesitate to package it and add it to your list.

One drawback (with Package installation) is that Emacs expects absolute pathes. So my build is configued for /Application, and will dies if started from another place. Also, I could not get the same Emacs to run "GUI" and "Terminal", so this one does only a Terminal version.

Regards,
Christophe

Emacs on Aqua

Christophe de Dinechin
First published June 20, 2001
Last update June 24, 2001

This port is based on previous NeXT and OpenStep ports contributed, in particular, by:

Carl Edman
Christian Limpach (chris@nice.ch)
Scott Bender (sbender@harmony-ds.com)

Please send bug reports and feature requests on the MacOS X version to: Christophe de Dinechin (descubes@earthlink.net)

• Most basic editing functionality appears to work:
• Keyboard editing, including function keys and modifiers
• Mouse editing and selection
• Syntax coloring
• Multiple windows (frames)
• Emacs menu (appears in the "Tools" menu)
• Scroll bars

WHAT IS KNOWN NOT TO WORK:

• The pre-built binary works only when placed in /Applications (thanks to Bill Bumgartner for reminding me that this was important to say...). Emacs expect its lisp code and other stuff to be at a fixed absolute path.
• Right-click and control-click (contextual menus)
• The arrows and page-zones on the scrollbars.
• Printing
• The Services menu
• Most non-Emacs entries in the menu (those not under "Tools")
• Some data may be lost in background processes (such as "grep" or "compile"). In general, this appears only for small amounts of data, typically for grep. This seems to be a problem with the read() system call returning 0 on a file descriptor although there is data... Might be a Darwin / OSX bug...
• Sometimes, Control-G will not interrupt something
• Resizing is slow and flaky
• In some unidentified case, Emacs goes out of memory and dies.I believe this is fixed...

WHAT NEEDS TO BE IMPROVED

• Excessive redrawing occurs from time to time (notable at startup)
• In some cases, inserting a line will cause screen garbage (multiple repeated lines)

MACOS X SPECIFIC FEATURES

Emacs for MacOSX tries to follow general Aqua guidelines and offers various MacOSX specific features, including:

• Large icon, thanks to the artists at http://www.gnu.org
• Windows transparency (try: "(set-background-color "ARGBE0C0DABE")").
• MacOSX-style menu (although most entries don't work yet)
• Drag and Drop (currently works only to a window, not to the Emacs icon)
• All support files are stored by default under /Applications/Emacs.app (rather than the more traditional /usr/local). However, Emacs will still be confused if you move Emacs.app to another place...

Enjoy! 
Christophe de Dinechin, June 20, 2001.