Bill Clementson's Blog

Customizing Emacs for Mac OS X

Sunday, April 17, 2005

When I'm doing Lisp work, I live in Emacs (I've written previously about my Emacs setup for Mac OS X CL programming here and here). However, I use a lot of different software and I find it preferable to get my Emacs configuration to be as similar as possible to the key binding standards of the OS I'm using. For example, when I was using Win32 as my primary OS, I customized my Emacs configuration to use Win32 defaults for a lot of key and mouse operations (I published a version of my configuration on the CL Cookbook site). When I switched to Mac OS X, I initially stuck with my Win32 settings because that was what I was used to and I thought it would be easier to leave things alone until I decided what worked best for me under OS X. However, the more I used OS X, the more irritating the old Win32 bindings became for me. So, I've gradually adopted a more Mac OS X flavored set of key bindings. Some of these I've adapted from other people's .emacs file settings (see here), some of them just seemed "right" to me or were ideas I picked up along the way from others. So, for anyone who is in a similar situation and would like some ideas for their .emacs file, you might want to have a look at my .emacs file (which has both Win32 and Mac OS X configuration settings as well as a lot of Lisp-specific stuff).

If you're primarily interested in the Mac-specific stuff, the main things that I've done are

• Use the Mac "Option" key as "Meta" rather than the Mac "Command" key and use the Mac "Command" key for "Alt" functionality in Emacs. This allows me to leave existing Emacs "Meta" key mappings alone and to add some of the standard Mac command mappings to the "Command" key. That way, my Emacs "finger memory" can stay the same and my Mac "finger memory" can stay the same too!
• In dired, the "w" key will either open or execute the file that the cursor is on using the default action for that file type.

;; See if we're on MS Windows or Mac OS X
(defvar mswindows-p (string-match "windows" (symbol-name system-type)))
(defvar macosx-p (string-match "darwin" (symbol-name system-type)))

(require 'cua-base)
(cua-mode t)

(if macosx-p
    (progn
      ;; fix a mac-specific problem with ptys
      (setq process-connection-type nil)
      ;; repair bogus default directory
      (if (equal default-directory "/") (setq default-directory "~/"))         
      
      ;; Mac-style cut/copy/paste
      (setq mac-command-key-is-meta nil)
      (setq cua-enable-cua-keys nil)
      
      (global-set-key [(alt x)] 'cua-cut-region)
      (global-set-key [(alt c)] 'cua-copy)
      (global-set-key [(alt v)] 'cua-paste)
      (global-set-key [(alt a)] 'mark-whole-buffer)
      (global-set-key [(alt s)] 'save-buffer)
      (global-set-key [(alt S)] 'write-file)
      (global-set-key [(alt p)] 'ps-print-buffer)
      (global-set-key [(alt o)] 'find-file)
      (global-set-key [(alt q)] 'save-buffers-kill-emacs)
      (global-set-key [(alt w)] 'kill-buffer-and-window)
      (global-set-key [(alt z)] 'undo)
      (global-set-key [(alt f)] 'isearch-forward)
      (global-set-key [(alt g)] 'query-replace)
      (global-set-key [(alt l)] 'goto-line)
      (global-set-key [(alt m)] 'iconify-frame)
      (global-set-key [(alt n)] 'new-frame)
      (global-set-key [kp-delete] 'delete-char)
      (global-set-key [(control kp-home)] 'beginning-of-buffer)
      (global-set-key [(control kp-end)] 'end-of-buffer)
      
      ;; Mac Open/Execute from dired
      (define-key dired-mode-map "w"
	(function
	 (lambda ()
	   (interactive)
	   (shell-command (concat "/usr/bin/open " (dired-get-filename))))))))